What if George W. Bush were transported back to a different time in America, one in which a young Mohammed Ali might be asked to comment on something he said about hurricane Katrina or the war in Iraq? What would the Champ make of him if he had the same abilities for satire now that he demonstrated during his early days of resisting stereotypes and rejecting the Vietnam War?

What if no major sports figure had to check a political conscience at the door of the arena but could instead say exactly what is on their minds about the pressure to use steroids? The impact of big money on the games they love? The restrictions imposed on them as the public face of a high pressure corporate world? -Dave Zirin is our guest this time on Talk Nation Radio to show us how much richer and bolder American sports casting could be.

Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour discussion about politics, human rights and the environment. I’m Dori Smith

Dave Zirin is our guest today. He’s a sports and political writer and author of (Counterpunch story) What’s My Name Fool, Sports and resistance in the United States Zirin is a sports commentator on WBAI Wake Up Call Air America, and XM Radio’s On the Real

In a November 11, 2005 piece called, The Champ Meets the Chump Dave Zirin describes a meeting between George Bush and Mohammed Ali at the White House. He says quote: “The Champ had one last rope-a-dope up his sleeve. As a playful Bush moved in front of Ali he apparently thought it would be cute to put up his fists in a boxing stance. –Ali leaned back and made a circular motion around his temple as if the President must be crazy to want to tangle with him even now. –This moment recalled the Ali who was never so beloved, so cuddly, so harmless,” Dave Zirin writes. “This was a fleeting glimpse of the Ali who was once able to say things that would have made John Ashcroft demand a federally funded exorcism.”

In our December 7th interview just prior to a talk he was giving at Southern Connecticut State University. I asked him to talk about George Bush’s recent meeting with Mohammed Ali.

Dave Zirin: I mean that was recent column I wrote called, “The Champ meets the Chump,” which was not a title that I coined actually but one that I embrace, because I mean there was something terribly surreal about seeing Mohammed Ali receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush. I mean for so many of us Mohammed Ali is this symbol of resistance both against war and against racism and also a voice of resistance for Islamic rights and for Muslims, which is something that he spent the last quarter century of his life even in diminished state working for. So to see him receive a medal from George W. Bush, I mean, this was quite stark and shocking. I mean when I was seeing it the one thing I was thinking was that those two men (who were roughly the same age) have in common is that they both avoided service in Vietnam. Although one of them of course did it with you know costing him millions of dollars, and frankly risked his life and freedom to do it, and the other just sort of found a nice little cozy corner in the Texas National Guard.

Dori Smith: President Bush was recently embroiled in a scandal involving the use of steroids by a baseball player?

Dave Zirin: Oh, I wish he was embroiled in a scandal around that. I think he should have been embroiled in a scandal. Frankly I thought he skated way too Scott free on this one. I think what you are referring to is Rafael Palmiero?

Dori Smith: Yes.

Dave Zirin: He was on the fast track to the Hall of Fame in major league baseball. Palmiero being one of only, it’s an amazing statistic, but one of only four players in history to have 500 home runs and 3,000 hits. Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Eddie Murray, being the others. And Palmiero was just coasting to that kind of baseball immortality. But then in front of the Congress he delivered one of those, “I’ve never had sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky” kind of lines where he said, “I’ve never used steroids ever,” you know and basically challenged anyone to say otherwise. And then it was revealed he tested positive for some of the hardest stuff on the block. Something called Stanizol.

And Palmiero has been very good friends for about 15 years with George W. Bush, dating back to when Bush was really the owner of the Texas Rangers, I mean his official title was General Partner. And there were tons of Texas billionaires behind him, but that’s how he was referred to more generally as the owner of the Rangers. And Bush at first defended Rafael Palmiero, saying that he thought it was, a kind of must be mistake of some kind or another, but it really wasn’t, and then Bush’s support for his friend dried up very quickly.

Now, the reason why I say that Bush skated on this some what is that I find it very sort of troubling that the main fulcrum, the epicenter if you will, of steroids in major league baseball, it all seems to date back to these Texas Rangers teams in the early 1990s, which Bush was in charge of. If you are thinking about people like Jose Conseco, Rafael Palmiero, and then other players to whom those rumors just cling to like barnacles on a boat. People like Evan Pudge Rodriguez and Juan Gonzalez, I mean they are all around this team. I mean it’s not just this team, and it’s not just about Bush but neither Bush nor any owner in Major League Baseball was called out in front of Congress to speak about steroid use. It was really only players and people peripheral to the game. And I think Bush deserves to be under the hot lights answering questions about what he did or didn’t know for the Rangers. I mean one player who I will protect his anonymity, said to me, “when it comes to steroids in baseball distribution is a team issue but punishment is an individual issue.”

Dori Smith: A kind of complicated question for you Dave Zirin about sports and politics.

Dave Zirin: Sure.

Dori Smith: Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has said vital decisions about post war Iraq were made by a secretive little known cabal Now is a cabal similar to a huddle in sports, and might we say now that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and various contractors who are profiting from the war in Iraq are in a huddle, and if so, are they listening to the rantings of some kind of lunatic coach or what?

Dave Zirin: Hmmm. Interesting formulation. I mean I would say the difference between a huddle and a cabal is that at least a huddle is out in the open. I mean that’s one of the great things about a huddle is that it’s people exchanging secrets but they are doing it on a field in front of 60,000 people. I think what Bush, Cheney, and Rice, et al, what they represent is more like meeting in the bowels of the stadium and making all kinds of policy away from any kind of accountability and any kind of outside eyes or influence. So I’m not sure who the lunatic coach would be in this situation because it seems like the lunacy, there’s more than enough of it to go around.

Dori Smith: It’s hard to understand though why they keep insisting on the same “go, fight, win team” affectation isn’t it?

Dave Zirin: Yeah, it’s not dissimilar to some of Nixon’s rantings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I mean they get put in this position where even if withdrawal makes the most sense. Even if withdrawal is so incredibly logical that even people like former generals are saying on television that the U.S. Army presence is actually part of the problem at this point, that it feeds the insurgency, and that it prevents Iraqis from standing up and taking over their own country.

Actually the presence of the U.S. Military, and opposition to the military, frankly, is the only thing that seems to be united Shiite and Sunni in Iraq despite overwhelming evidence of that. I think the number one thing that the Bush Administration and their cronies in both parties frankly, including one of your great senators here in Connecticut, I think one of the things that they are worried about is this idea that to withdraw makes America look weak. That was very similar to a lot of the logic around Vietnam is that at one point it became for years, it was like, well there’s no reason for us to be here but if we withdraw how does that make us look in the eyes of the rest of the world, you know it’s just that any kind of logic other than the logic of generals.

Dori Smith: And it’s an emotional argument too isn’t it that we are no good unless we are the top winners in sports or at war and empire building.

Dave Zirin: I hear what you are saying, and I mean there is no question, and this goes back a hundred years here that the politics of sports and the politics of war have many times walked hand in hand. Dwight Eisenhower once said famously that sports are perfect for preparing young men for war. But, we are all aware of the deeply militaristic language that pervades sports; you know a quarterback is called a “field general” he throws “bullet passes” and “bombs”. That idea of being in the trenches is of course a military term, it’s used to describe the line of scrimmage in a football game. But I would make the case and I make the case in my book that I don’t think sports inherently produces war like emotions. I think sports can produce incredibly positive emotions, can produce incredibly positive results when it comes to human character, but I think it’s, pardon the expression, but I think it’s been largely hijacked by forces that believe that war should be a substitute for national policy and what they are doing is in effect destroying sports by using it as such a repellant political vehicle. –Which is why I celebrate athletes who oppose the war.

Dori Smith: Tell us about Hollywood and how films are made that show this kind of emotional, demanding need to win or else you are a failure. I’m thinking of the film about the U.S. hockey team for instance.

Dave Zirin: Miracle.

Dori Smith: Yeah, and how these films effect people. What do you think that the effect is overall of films like that and, you know, I know you are going to be writing a People’s History of Sports. Are you going to be talking about any of this in that book?

Dave Zirin: Well I mean that’s a good question. I mean I haven’t thought about that, I’m a big fan of film, particularly sports films, and I think you are right about films like Miracle. I saw Miracle and I thought it was simplistic jingoism at its most effective. Which is why I actually really like sports films that are far more ambiguous that see the beauty of sports but also see sport’s place in the broader scheme of things; I really love the films of Ron Shelton, particularly Bull Durham and White Men Can’t Jump. The great thing about those films is like, in Bull Durham there is no climactic game at all, you know? And in White Men Can’t Jump Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes, they win their big final basketball game, but by playing in the game Woody Harrelson loses his girlfriend Rosy Perez and at the end he realizes this sort of conclusion that sometimes when you win you lose and sometimes when you lose you win. And I really like the ambiguity of that. And of course my favorite sports film, which I think is an incredibly radical transgress-ant brilliant film called, eight men out, which is about the 1919 Chicago Black Socks scandal when the White Socks threw the World Series, which goes through some of the greed and corruption that can just ensnare sports.

Dori Smith: Well I can see that there is a possibility anyway that this might be in your book.

Dave Zirin: (laughs) Yeah, I’m into it, what can I tell you, and I love the Rocky movies, which is a disturbing contradiction in my own character.

Dori Smith: (laughs) I will admit to you too that I’ve seen a lot of sports films, I do watch them, and I don’t know why. I mean it sort of draws you in this dynamic of these individuals who are trying so hard you know working so hard.

Dave Zirin: Right. No and it lends itself very well to a filmic structure which is this idea where you have a protagonist, opposition, and then oppositions that must be overcome for that protagonist to succeed. I mean and that is the essence of what sports is and the thing about sports is that you could see a game that rivals the greatest drama, that’s Shakespearean in its epic scope. But then you could also see games which are incredibly boring. I mean look at the World Series last year in 2004 when you had this epic gut wrenching series between the Red Socks and the Yankees coming down from three to nothing. When it was done people had to be hospitalized for goodness sakes, and take some Thorazine, it was so intense. And then the Red Socks make it to the World Series against the Cardinals and it was the biggest yawn you’ve ever seen. A four game sweep in almost ho hum fashion. And that’s I think one of the great things about sports. Like if the 2004 World Series had been a movie you know that the Cardinal series would have been seven games also and it would have come down to the last play with Nomar –Nomar Garciaparra– limping off the bench, coming out of no where to be in a Red Socks uniform and getting the game winning hit! I’ve got to just give props to one other tremendous transgress-ant sports film, and that’s the original Longest Yard. I mean assume some of your listeners probably saw the repellant Adam Sandler version that came out last year. But the original version with Bert Reynolds is one of the most brilliant anti-establishment films I’ve ever seen. And so anybody who says that football is inherently reactionary see this movie and it shows you how football can be a force for social change inside a prison.

Dori Smith: You know I saw that original of the Longest Yard and what strikes me as interesting that you should say that is they had a kind of irreverence about them, these actors, as they played these sports people, stars, and the irreverence extended to the owners and also to some extent to the fans. Just talk about the way that players view the whole industry and the fans.

Dave Zirin: I’ll tell you I mean first of all in the Longest Yard I think what you were sensing there is that most of them weren’t actors. They were either football players of even prisoners, who they hired, you see that in the film, there’s a total irreverence to how they are supposed to act in given situations. But as far as the relationship between players and fans I think what you have seen over the last 25 years is just this terrible trend in sports; athletes become deeply corporatized and that has frankly mirrored some of the great schisms in this country with regards to seeing this profound alienation exist between the overwhelming majority of athletes, who tend to come from very poor or working class backgrounds, tend to be people of color, and the fans in the seats who because of the price of tickets tend to be middle class people with some money but at the same time people who resent the fact that they are watching people who make twenty times as much money as they do. And I think that’s one of the things that led to that fight in Auburn Hills last year between Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson of the Indiana Pacers and the fans of the suburbs of Detroit. And a lot of players I talk to, you know they speak about frankly resenting a lot of the fans and the fans approach to them. And the innocence there really is gone.

This is one of, you know a lot of people say the innocence is gone if it ever existed, but I know when I hear my Dad’s stories about growing up in Brooklyn and actually seeing members of the Brooklyn Dodgers walk down the street, I mean that is gone. And Mohammed Ali who use to walk around Harlem hanging out with people. And he was once asked if he ever feared getting attacked and if he needed body guards and Ali said, “Hey the day I need to seek protection from my own people is the day I call it quits.” –You know those days are gone.

Dori Smith: He did say many many remarkable things didn’t he? Tell us a few more of the things that this poetic person said.

Dave Zirin: Sure. I mean the thing about Ali is that his story is the story of the 1960s in many respects but set to poetry and set to a beat that seems to really reside in his own head. And what was brilliant about him was his ability to let other people in on the rhyme and on the reason. His hero growing up was actually a white professional wrestler named Gorgeous George, famous for his sense of showmanship. And when he was Cacius Clay and he was 18-years-old and he won the Olympic Gold Medal in Rome that year, he came back to the States and he said: “To make America the Greatest is my goal so I beat a Russian and I beat a Pole and for the USA I won the medal of gold, and the Greeks said you are better than the Cacius of old.”

Everybody just loved it. And he was obviously very patriotic at that time but as he really faced the racism in the streets of his home town of Louisville, he became very angry about what he saw and he never stopped syncopating his speech, but he said things like; “You keep after me how long, I’ll always sing this song, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”
Dori Smith: Why do you think it is that people have this image that sports heroes must be sort of apolitical but at the same time patriotic? It’s a different interpretation of patriotism isn’t it I mean it’s sort of patriotism without the love?

Dave Zirin: Yeah, it’s basically shut your mouth and know your place is what athletes are more often than not told is you know you are making all this money so you had better support the flag, support the troops, show your patriotism but don’t be political. But of course, I think you are absolutely right to say that, that’s what you hear, you know don’t be political but in sports when they say don’t be political they are not talking about Curt Shilling campaigning for George W. Bush. They are talking about people expressing the politics of resistance and actually using their platform to speak out for social change.

One player said to me that the quickest way to win ESPN’s “just shut up” award is to actually have something to say. That’s actually an award that they give on their radio program.

Dori Smith: “The just shut up” award? I didn’t know that.

Dave Zirin: Yes it’s for any athlete you says something that they feel is stupid and so people can vote in on line and they have the top five candidates for that week. You know sometimes it’s ridiculous things that people say but it’s inevitably political comments, when athletes say man I’m sick of xy and z or I wish the U.S. would stop doing this. They say look at these guys who does he think he is, just shut up. But then in the same breath they always complain about athletes being from the same sort of corporate cookie cutter mold. So it’s an interesting contradiction there.

Dori Smith: It is. And one other thing it calls to mind too is this whole issue of well maybe Christians and lions? Because there’s this affectation of the idea that these sports stars are owned by the people who can either do this thumbs up or thumbs down kind of thing.

Dave Zirin: No that’s another tension at work, you know, that sense of ownership that people feel. I think frankly sports radio has a great deal to do with that but I think it breeds an almost, it’s almost a pass time to love teams but hate the players who play for those teams. It becomes highly personalized in a way that I think is largely unhealthy because you know even back in the day when Jackie Robinson was receiving death threats as the first African American player in baseball. When he would go on the road he would have the capacity to earn people’s respect. Because people would see one how incredibly talented he was, but also the dignity with which he carried himself. I mean he really changed people’s perceptions who had never seen black person play baseball before. And if Jackie Robinson was around today I mean I shutter to think what would have occurred, you know with the mind set of today’s sports fan which I think would have been to really despise him just because he was a Brooklyn Dodger more than the fact that he had black skin.

Dori Smith: Talk about race in sports. I remember a time when unfortunate things were said about black players on the air by newscasters who just didn’t get it, I mean they were sort of looking at players as meat and talking accordingly.

Dave Zirin: Sure, unfortunately there is still so much casual racism in sports radio. Today it’s directed more at Latino players than black players, I mean to do that against a black player is to invite a backlash at this point, but a famous sports radio guy named Larry Krueger out in the Bay area earlier this year he called the San Francisco Giants a team of brain dead Caribbeans and likened their manager, Felipe Alou, to the guy on the Cream of Wheat box, a kind of Uncle Rathsmus figure. And what was so brilliant about what happened then was Felipe Alou stood up and he quit the radio station, where he had a show, and said, this is racism, and racism is the tool of the devil, that’s how he put it, and he said my voice will not go out over the same air waves as this person.

Dori Smith: Wow.

Dave Zirin: And what was so interesting about that though was that if Alou hadn’t said anything I don’t think anybody would have even noticed to be honest with you. I mean because I think we are still kind of callused against that kind of language.

Dori Smith: Is it that we are callused, that the American people are callused in some way, or is it more a product of what the media shows us?

Dave Zirin: I mean I think there’s a relationship between those two things. I think the fault of course does lie with the media, just that Filipe Alou put the onus of it on Larry Krueger and on the station KNBR but I think it’s like, particularly on sports radio where things go 95 mph at a rapid fire pace, it was that at some point you keep hearing this stuff and hearing this stuff it becomes background noise, it becomes white noise, and you laugh at it and you end up just sort of absorbing it without taking a step back and saying wait a minute. You know I would never put up with a co-worker of mine saying that, you know, somebody at my dinner table saying that, why do I have to put up with this guy saying that?

Dori Smith: Let me ask you about women in sports. UConn’s women’s team really were a break through for women in sports in general.

Dave Zirin: Definitely.

Dori Smith: But I’m curious to see what people will do now that they are not winning every single game? Are they still going to stay at the top of the rung in terms of the media coverage and in terms of people embracing them in the state and in the nation?

Dave Zirin: Well that’s a terrific question and I look forward to seeing what the answer to that will be because what’s happening here at UConn I mean, is really tremendous to actually produce this generation of players. I mean everybody from Sue Bird to Diana Taurasi, to everybody in between, just an incredible group, Shea Ralph, Rebecca Lobo, Swin Cash, that’s who I was trying to think of, what we’re going to have see is how deep that support is, and I hope it’s more intense than just well if they’re good I’ll go to the games and if they are not I won’t. Because you know to have that kind of public success actually has an effect even on public policy. There’s a debate in the Supreme Court and in the Oval Office about overturning Title IV which guarantees the funding for men’s and women’s sports, something which has an incredibly positive influence on the lives of millions of women in this country and men as well who get to actually see their sisters, wives, and daughters have the chance to excel and express themselves physically in the world of sports which really should be a right not a privilege.

And UConn for so many is a symbol of like the children of Title IV, people who grew up never knowing what it was like to say oh there’s boys teams but not girl’s teams, deal with it. And you know that can have incredibly important representations. And one of the things I write about in my book, What’s My Name Fool, that I think always surprises people is that the number one watched basketball game in the history of ESPN is not, you know the Knicks versus the Bulls, or anything like that, it was actually a women’s game, it was the Volunteers against UConn’s Lady Huskies a couple of years ago in the NCAA finals. You know one of the two or three most successful teams in men’s basketball and a legendary team in women’s basketball, and I think it’s like a national experiment to see if these two entities can really co-exist.

Dori Smith: One thing that I did notice on the AP wire this morning is that the Dogers, this is the Los Angeles team, has a new coach, former Red Socks manager Grady Little.

Dave Zirin: Oh my.

Dori Smith: Do you think that might help this beleaguered team?

Dave Zirin: Um no. I mean I think Grady Little is going to be in over his head a little bit there with the Dodgers. I mean the Dodgers are a horribly put together team. They make the Red Socks look like Swiss Family Robinson. I mean just a lot of players who hate each other, and that really is what defines the Dodgers is they have this former General Manager who they hired a year ago as one of those wonder kids? Who does what they call the “money ball” kind of organizing which is you don’t really care about personalities, players, gut instincts, any of those old ephemeral things, what you do is you look at numbers and statistics and you form your team the way you form a corporate spread sheet. And so what he happened to do is put together a team of people who hated each other, and by the end of the year they were getting in fights in the locker room with because he had no regard for character and how that would play into sports. And that’s really what Grady Little has been handed at this point and I think all Red Socks fans who think that Grady got a bit of a raw deal in terms of how he was run out of town here should take a minute to pity poor Grady because I think he is headed for a rough year.

Dori Smith: How did you come to be a sportscaster and a progressive news writer?

Dave Zirin: For me it was just growing up a sports fan. Really weaned on it from day one and like I said before about my Dad being a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, I mean those were the stories that I was put to bed with were stories about sports. But then like around the time of the first Gulf War I really started to look critically at sports. Particularly after going to a game where they had the mascot in like an Arab outfit beat up by the other mascot while the Jumbotron got everybody to chant, USA, USA, and this was just supposed to be hilarious you know and I walked out of there thinking that sports were part of the problem not part of the solution, that they were just sort of this vessel or vehicle for just the worst kind of backward ideas. But then I started learning about the history of atheletes who resisted that who stood up for change, and I wanted to not throw out the baby with the bath water so to speak you know. Sports can be and have the capacity to be this kind of beautiful thing and there is no reason why we should be ashamed of being sports fans just because of how they can be used.

Dori Smith: Well Dave Zirin thanks so much for joining us on Talk Nation Radio.

Dave Zirin: Oh my privilege, thank you so much.

Dori Smith: Sports writer and political writer Dave Zirin has been chronicling the history of atheletes who have stood up to war and racism. In a December 13th response to California’s carrying out of the death penalty against Stan Tookie Williams Zirin says quote: “This is Schwarzenagger’s mission accomplished moment for his right wing pro death base but his mission will fail.”

You can read Dave Zirin’s commentary on line at Edge of Sports dot com and find his book, What’s My Name Fool at fine bookstores and Haymarket books, and look for his upcoming People’s History of Sports which will be published by Free Press.

For Talk Nation Radio I’m Dori Smith. This program was produced in the studios of WHUS Storrs click to listen live every Wed. at 5 PM.