Is Sports Activism Dead?
A new book shows athletes didn’t used to be strangers to social justice, but today’s athletes seem totally unaware of it.
By Andy Kroll
October 3, 2008
Heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali makes a point during a news conference in Atlanta, Ga. in 1970. (AP Photo/FILE)Before this summer’s Beijing Olympic Games, American superstar—and corporate posterboy—Michael Phelps recieved praise from people ranging from Chinese President Hu Jintao to the leaders of the International Olympic Committee. The message was clear: Sports and politics do not mix. Phelps and other athletes have yet to discover the work of Dave Zirin, one of the sharpest sportswriters in the trade who has made a career out of peeling back the slick, corporate-sponsored facade of sports and exposing the political currents that flow underneath. In his characteristically forthright style, he argued in the book that “[w]e can pretend sports isn’t political just as well as we can pretend there is no such thing as gravity if we fall out of an airplane.”
Zirin’s latest book, A People’s History of Sports in the United States, illustrates how, beginning with the Native Americans’ early lacrosse matches and ending with the multi-billion-dollar sporting industries of the present, sports have, for better or worse, continually influenced the direction of this country. But more than offering an illuminating and necessary historical account, A People’s History of Sports is a present-day condemnation of 21st-century professional sports and their athletes. By describing how past athletes used their elevated positions as cultural icons and public figures to combat injustices like racism, sexism, and homophobia, Zirin reveals the endemic ignorance and indifference seen in an overwhelming majority of today’s pampered, overpaid, narcissistic professional athletes.
This apathy belies a rich history of athletes using sports as a catalyst for political activism. An early example was the women’s suffrage movement of the mid- and late-19th century, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. What—literally—helped mobilize the growing movement for women’s voting rights was the explosion in popularity of bicycle riding, an early form of physical activity in which women could participate. “Many a woman is riding to suffrage on a bicycle,” Cady Stanton once remarked. And Zirin makes the critical connection when he writes that “Stanton and Anthony recognized that women’s right to physical play was essential and inextricable from citizenship rights.”
Following the passage of the 19th Amendment, Americans began to turn their attention to the rampant racial discrimination afflicting the United States. One way in which this terrible malady manifested itself was professional baseball’s color line, which kept black baseball players out of the major leagues. It wasn’t until April 15, 1947, when a 28-year-old black rookie named Jackie Robinson made his first appearance for the Brooklyn Dodgers, that the color line was broken. Although the civil rights movement was, at the time, in its infancy, Robinson’s appearance signaled an early, encouraging victory in the struggle against racism.
Robinson was a military veteran and as politically conscious as a ballplayer could be in the 1940s. He remained an unrelenting force advocating for equal rights for the remainder of his life. It wasn’t only Robinson, however, who helped to break the color line. A decade before Robinson donned a Dodgers uniform, sportswriter Lester “Red” Rodney was using his groundbreaking, politically charged sports page in the Communist Party’s Daily Worker as a forum to discuss issues of race, gender and class in sports. The first serious campaign calling for the integration of Major League Baseball, Zirin explains, appeared in the sports pages of Rodney’s Worker. And not only did Rodney call for an end to the color line, he went one step further by “taking the fight to integrate baseball off the sports page and turning it into an activist campaign.”
Breaking the color line was a small but nonetheless important victory in the early stages of what would become the largest political uprising in American history: the civil rights movement. And in the struggle of Carmichael, King, and Malcolm X, the intersections of sports and politics are clearest and most prevalent. No other period in U.S. history featured as many prominent athletes or iconic moments, and not surprisingly the sports and athletes of the civil rights movement form the centerpiece of Zirin’s book.
The driving force of political thought in the sports world at the time was the brash, opinionated, fast-talking champion of the boxing world, Muhammad Ali. Formerly known by what he called a “slave” name, Cassius Clay, Ali knew how best to stir up controversy and, in the process, made equally many enemies as friends. He allied with black militant Malcolm X, joined Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam and loudly criticized the United States’ war in Vietnam. He became such a visible and contentious figure that his boxing matches, Zirin writes, “became incredible political dramas of the black revolution versus the people who opposed it.”
No one demonstrated more powerfully the staggering influence athletes could wield than Ali. His refusal to fight in Vietnam—a decision that cost him the peak years of his boxing career—“was a major boost to the anti-war movement,” wrote author Mike Marqusee. And Ali was even more inspirational to black Americans. “One of the reasons the civil rights movement went forward was that black people overcame their fear,” Bryant Gumbel once said. “And I honestly believe for many people that came from watching Muhammad Ali. He simply refused to be afraid. And being that way he gave other people courage.”
Not that sports have always been used to fight oppression and war. As Zirin points out, sports’ most prominent spokesman at the birth of the 20th century was Teddy Roosevelt, an imperialistic president who connected a well-trained, athletic citizenry back to his first love: a nation perpetually prepared for war. Several decades later, on the eve of World War I, Woodrow Wilson, like Roosevelt, saw sports as the ideal training ground for the battlefield. “Not until World War I,” write authors Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Jay Goldstein, “were athletic training and competition systematically adopted for troop morale, hygiene, and physical readiness for war.”
According to Zirin, the 1980s were equally significant as the 1960s and ‘70s—but for all the wrong reasons. With the emergence of ESPN, its gang of incessant bloviators and the spread of American sports and their superstars throughout the world, money poured into professional sports and into the pockets of athletes, owners, and investors. Marquee college athletes, upon turning professional and signing lucrative contracts and sponsorship deals, were made multimillionaires overnight. But with this newfound wealth came the realization that they had that much more to lose if they spoke out.
So instead they shut up and tuned out. Anti-intellectualism became the status quo. And this pleased the sponsors and investors: With so much money at stake, no shoe company, men’s clothing line, or car manufacturer wanted its brand associated with an athlete who might offend consumers and hurt profits. (Had he competed in this new market-driven sports world, Muhammad Ali probably couldn’t have landed a gig peddling Mentos.) Of the NBA’s newly minted superstars, Zirin writes that they “had more economic clout and cultural capital than any athletes, particular African American athletes, in history. But instead of using this platform to pick up the torch from the athletes of yesteryear, narcissism became the obsession of choice.”
And since the ‘80s, the money, TV time, and narcissism have only increased. Most professional athletes could care less—that is, if they even know at all—that their sponsors’ shoes and jerseys are made in squalid conditions in third world countries. (His Airness Michael Jordan sure didn’t.) Few and far between are athletes who openly speak their mind—though the few that do, like the NBA’s Etan Thomas or former Olympic speedskater Joey Cheek, offer a glimmer of hope that the socially conscious athlete isn’t extinct.
The recent Beijing Olympics further illustrated this descent into obliviousness. The most visible American heading into the Games, Michael Phelps, had not a word regarding China’s lack of human rights and complicity in the Darfur genocide; yet he found plenty of time to talk up his sponsor Speedo’s new space-age swimsuit. Even worse was Miami Heat and USA Basketball star Dwayne Wade. On the eve of the Games, Wade said of China’s human rights problems: “I’m not even into it that much … I really don’t know what’s going on over there.”
When ignorance prevails among elite athletes, sports can’t be catalyst for political debate. Many of the most important movements from the past, those described in A People’s History of Sports, immeasurably benefitted from politically active athletes, coaches, owners, and sportswriters and wouldn’t have been as effective without them. Had there been no Muhammad Ali, it’s doubtful whether the civil rights movement would’ve coalesced and grown in power and influence to the same extent.
In 2008, it’s economic injustice and inequality that pose the gravest threats to those of all races and ethnicities. The richest 1 percent of Americans own about a third of the United States’ total wealth. And as this plutocratic corporate class accumulates more wealth, the middle class disappears and those in poverty grow in number and in desperation. Unlike their underpaid predecessors, many of today’s professional athletes belong to that wealthy class—they’re now part of the problem. Thus these athletes have a greater obligation to help lessen the chasm. And should just a few of our sporting superstars—a Tiger Woods or a Jeff Gordon, an Abby Wambach, or a Lebron James—follow the example set by superstars before them, the political flame that burned inside Ali, Robinson, Navratilova, and so many others might help reignite social causes once again.
Andy Kroll is a senior at the University of Michigan and a former editorial intern at The Nation. He can be reached at andykroll@gmail.com.
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Sports activism is not dead when it comes to lesbian and gay athletes. Read the blog “It takes a team” and you will understand.
www.ittakesateam.blo…
— Carol Anne - Oct 6, 08:56 AM - #great review!
— Bonnie Sugiyama - Oct 9, 03:49 PM - #