E-mail a friendDavid Zirin
airdate September 22, 2008
David Zirin has made a career of addressing sports issues that are overlooked by corporate sports media. He writes the weekly online column, "The Edge of Sports," and is host of XM Radio's Edge of Sports Radio. His work has appeared in The Progressive and the Philadelphia Weekly, and he's a regular op-ed writer for the Los Angeles Times. Zirin's books include Welcome to the Terrordome and A People's History of Sports in the United States, which examines the crossroads of sports and politics.
Sportswriter tells how boxer Muhammad Ali navigated the intersection of sports and politics in the '60s and how today's athletes measure up. (3:08)
Full interview. (10:39)
David Zirin
Tavis: David Zirin has been called one of the best young sports writers in America today who writes for a number of publications, including "Slam" magazine, "The Nation," and "The Los Angeles Times." His critically acclaimed new book is called "A People's History of Sports in the United States." There you see that iconic cover, featuring the one and only, the greatest of all time, Muhammad Ali. How difficult, Dave, to settle on - and I ask this question, I - we're working on a book right now, a book of African American legends across everything, across all areas of human endeavor.
And if I - I am so over these meetings that we've had over - and it's important stuff to do, of course, but meeting after meeting after meeting, trying to figure out who actually gets the cover. And in sport, how difficult was it to settle on Ali?
David Zirin: Without question, the easiest decision in the whole book was to put Ali on the cover.
Tavis: That's funny. (Laughs)
Zirin: It was so easy, and I'll tell you why: Because the book is about the collision of sports and politics, and when you talk about Muhammad Ali, to me, you're talking about the man who belongs on the Mt. Rushmore of that sports and politics connection. At a time when boxing was the number one sport, really, in terms of popularity in the United States, the heavyweight champion of the world had one foot in the anti-war movement and one foot in the Black freedom struggle. And so because of that, you just can't get any better than Ali.
Tavis: And what's the irony for you - I know what it is for me, but it's not my conversation, it's yours - what's the irony for you of how Ali becomes the greatest of all time, the most popular athlete, and at one point, and maybe still now the most famous person all over the world. The irony of how his being willing, with courage and conviction and commitment to stand his ground, is so different than athletes today.
Zirin: Yeah. There are a lot of ironies when it comes to Ali. To me, there's a tremendous irony, frankly, in the way that he's been embraced by society now in the 21st century. It says something, I think, very damning about this country that Ali has been embraced now that he's lost the power of speech. That's something that really weighs on my mind a lot of the time.
Because to me, Muhammad Ali was a voice of resistance and I think we miss that voice very much. He's become like a walking postage stamp, the way people like Paul Robeson, Malcolm X have become postage stamps as well. But to me, the thing about Muhammad Ali is that he represents a tradition that I want today's rebel athletes to embrace, because I feel like what we're starting to see right now, for the first time since the 1970s, is the beginning of a bubbling of athletes trying to use their hyper-exalted, brought to you by Nike platform to say something about the world in which they live.
And I want them to see Ali as part of that tradition so they realize that they're standing on the shoulders of a true giant.
Tavis: My friend, and you know him well, of course, Bob Costas, has made this point any number of times. Bob's made the point that when Ali opened his mouth back in the day, he actually had something to say. He was a rebel with a cause. Now you just have rebels who don't necessarily have a cause, but they're using, to your point, their platform, their popularity, to sound off about something, but what are they really saying?
Is it fair to even compare whoever you refer to as a rebel athlete today to a Muhammad Ali? Is that comparison even fair?
Zirin: Well first of all, the thing about Ali, what he had which today's athletes don't have are the 1960s themselves. You had one of the greatest eras of resistance and revolt in the history of this country, and that's what shaped Muhammad Ali and what made him brilliant was then he shaped the era as well. If it wasn't for the '60s being the '60s, Muhammad Ali would have been Cassius Clay, a young man who was remembered for bringing the showmanship of professional wrestling into boxing.
Like if you had asked Cassius Clay who his hero was in 1960, he would have said Gorgeous George Wagner, professional wrestler. You ask him a couple of years later, he would have said Malcolm X. A couple of years after that, he would have said Elijah Muhammad.
So you're talking about someone who underwent a rapid social transformation, so the absence of an era of protest certainly shapes the ceiling by which professional athletes become rebel athletes.
Tavis: I'm wrestling with that in my head, Dave, because I agree with you and yet I disagree. I believe that the times shape the athlete, but I also believe that the athlete shapes the times. And what I mean to suggest by that is that Ali had the '60s, but there were a whole lot of Negros in the '60s who didn't have nothing to say. Ali chose to - again, with courage and conviction and commitment - to speak out about the inequities of his day, to stand in his own truth.
There's no shortage of issues today, from AIDS to global warming to racism - we can run the list. I don't have to put a gun to these athletes' head to make them do this, do I?
Zirin: No, but that's why I was saying you're starting to see some athletes begin to speak out about the world.
Tavis: Like who?
Zirin: Okay, here's an example. I'm from Washington, D.C. Etan Thomas, who is the center for the Washington Wizards, he has spoken - I've seen him speak at anti-war rallies of 20, 30,000 people and at poetry slams of 10 and 20 people, speaking about the death penalty, about the war, about a whole host of issues.
But it's not just Etan Thomas. There's a remarkable growing list of athletes who've said things they disagree with about the war - everybody from Steve Nash, point guard for the Phoenix Suns, to a member of the world of the ultimate fighting championship, a guy named Jeff Monson - Jeff "The Snowman" Monson.
He comes out to the Octagon to John Lennon's "Imagine" and hands out anti-war pamphlets to people in the crowd when he gets in the ring. And on his back he even has all these anti-war and progressive tattoos all over his back. It helps when you have a 72-inch back - that helps you (laughter) to be able to have some fun artwork back there.
But it is there. It's starting to bubble. And rather than criticize it for what it's not - and you're right, it's not 1968 - I want to recognize that we've come a long way from the 1990s when you had folks like Michael Jordan refuse to take stances and saying, "Well, Republicans buy sneakers, too."
But as far as great athletes today, one of the problems is that young athletes, young superstars, they become professionalized and isolated at such an early age. Basically, they're starting to recruit kids when they're in the fetus, for goodness' sake. And when you have somebody who's been identified - like, say, a LeBron James - as a potential superstar when they're seven, eight, nine years old, there are a whole set of intellectual muscles that just don't get developed as they get older.
But let's take LeBron as an example, because he said something in an interview which I found very interesting, which shows the potential. He said that he had two goals in his life. One was to be a global icon like Muhammad Ali, and the other was to be the richest athlete in the history of the world.
Now to me, that provides an opening to have a real dialogue with LeBron, with people around LeBron, to say well, let's talk about history for a second. Let's talk about why Ali is beloved throughout the world. It's not because of his bank account, but because of what he sacrificed.
Tavis: I accept that, because my concern with LeBron, who I love, is that you can't start at the end. Ali didn't do what he did because he wanted to be beloved around the world. There was no guarantee, when he told the U.S., the United States of America, "I am not going to Vietnam to fight." There was no guarantee that he'd end up being the kind of iconic figure he became. That was five years of not fighting.
Zirin: Yeah, that was not a way to become a global brand.
Tavis: Exactly. (Laughter)
Zirin: To say, "I'm not going to Vietnam."
Tavis: All right, so we talked about Ali and a number of other athletes in a contemporary sense. Who would be, since the book is called "A People's History of Sports in the United States," not "Black sports in the United States," who would be the White equivalent closest to Ali in sport?
Zirin: Well, the White equivalent of Muhammad Ali in sports - that's a terrific question.
Tavis: Where your book is concerned.
Zirin: Oh, okay.
Tavis: At this intersection of politics and sport.
Zirin: Right. I'll have to go with a White female and say Billie Jean King.
Tavis: Okay, that's what I want to get to.
Zirin: Yeah. Because with Billie Jean King, you have somebody who was the founder of the first-ever women's tennis union, she was a person - of course she's best known for the Bobby Riggs battle of the sexes match in the early 1970s at the Houston Astrodome, which is still one of the most-watched television programs in history.
But what I like about Billie Jean King was that she's somebody who actually took it to the streets.
Tavis: What is the lesson for everyday people who read the book, everyday people who buy the book? Because most of us are never going to be iconic sports figures, but I assume there's a lesson you want us to take from their lives.
Zirin: Yes, absolutely. I want people to take the lesson that sports and politics do not exist in different worlds, and we shouldn't accept that. We're taught that just like you have ESPN over here and C-Span over there, that sports and politics are just in different universes. But people have to know that whether you're a sports fan or not, sports really does affect our lives, whether we're talking about publicly funded billion-dollar stadiums or whether we're talking about the values that are taught to our kids or whether we're talking about a society that has an obesity epidemic precisely because we are either a spectator or a player.
And there's this sharp divide that has not always existed in this country. And I think if we know our history, then we're able to challenge sports to change, and I think that would be to the betterment of all of us.
Tavis: Just a taste of why Dave Zirin is now regarded as one of the best young sports writers in the country. His new book is called "A People's History of Sports in the United States." Dave, congrats - nice to have you on.
Zirin: Oh, my privilege, thank you.
Tavis: Good to see you.
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