Dave Zirin sort of snuck up on me: a few months back a cousin advised me to read Welcome to the Terrordome, and I read that and What’s My Name, Fool? back to back, only to find out that Zirin’s next book, A People’s History of Sports in the United States, was coming in September from The New Press (and I should quit this, I admit, but there really should be an olympics for publishers, and if there were the New Press would come away with a decent stash of golds: they publish just all sorts of awesome, and even if they didn’t, they’d forever be magical for publishing so much John Leonard). I went from not knowing anything about Dave Zirin in late July to it now being just barely September and I’ve read most of his books. Now, in fairness: yeah, I’m a bit obsessive about reading as much as I can of an author I like. But, more importantly: once you start with Zirin, you’ll really not want to go back; once you start, it’s hard to quit reading.
The first writer I ever totally adored was Michael Ventura, who’s been writing for the Austin Chronicle for something like fifteen years, and who before that wrote for the LA Weekly, and who has written a few novels, a few books of poems, a few collections of essays. The guy’s an absolute monster: his frighteningly clear vision and his absolute fearlessness to call out obvious bullshit made him then a revelatory voice for me (those same traits, by the way, continue to make him a necessary and hopelessly under-attended-to voice in the wilderness). Zirin writes about sports, to some degree, like Ventura writes about politics/’culture’: you can just imagine Zirin, after reading basically any slanted (or even relatively unslanted) sports story, saying “Now wait a second…” and looking around for more depth and complexity than what’s presented
The 20th century’s seen plenty of examples of sports and politics going toe-to-toe: Tommie Smith and John Carlos with their black-gloved fists raised at the ‘68 Olympics; Muhammad Ali’s name change and religious conversion; Jackie Robinson. The hard part about examples like that is that they may feel a bit dusty and removed: surely, we think, times have changed, right? The black-athlete wall’s been broken through, ditto women-athletes. Times have changed, right? The athletes we look up to and track obsessively don’t need to fight as much anymore, right?
Maybe the most vital service Dave Zirin provides is a resounding answer to our own internal questions. Good God no, Zirin shouts through his books: the battles are still being fought. How about Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, a Denver Nuggets guard whose house was burned to the ground five years after he took heat for looking down and closing his eyes during the national anthem (reason: supporting the flag was in “contradiction with his Muslim beliefs”)? How about Pat Tillman’s death by ‘friendly fire,’ which death’s true nature was covered up and lied about before the truth finally came out? How about Tillman himself being used as a prop for a republican administration desperate for clear-cut heroes, even though Tillman had huge questions and misgivings and outright doubts about the war in which he was a pawn? If you think the Jena 6 or Don Imus aren’t brought up either, you have no idea how thorough Zirin is.
What’s amazing, when you finish Zirin’s book, isn’t just how great it is (though there’s that, and let’s say it here, too: his writing’s fresh and clear and it’s got the endless zip of the best sports-writing, which I can’t even imagine how hard it is to keep at such a high level through an almost-300 page book), but how freaky it is that this stuff gets missed regularly. Yes, there are books about all the big sports/politics confrontations—Ali, Robinson, Joe Louis, Jack Johnson, Jesse Owens, etc—but here’s the real thing: Zirin’s writing in real time. Dude’s got a stethoscope in his ears, one hand on the pulse, the other hand writing. If you like sports, you need this book; if you like politics, you need this book. If, for some reason, you think you’re outside the bounds of either of those two categories, you’re simply wrong.
