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  • Play Fair.
    26 September 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    Is there any other way that New Orleans could have spent $130,000,000 rather than on a football stadium?Just wondering.

  • Baseball Begins to Listen to Sweatshop Foes
    15 July 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    by Dave Zirin & Derek Tyner
    Major League Baseball’s All-Star game is supposed to be a breezy exhibition of the sport’s brightest stars. It’s also a place for baseball’s corporate patrons to be wined, dined and reassured about the current state of the game.
    But at this year’s All-Star game in Pittsburgh, the party was crashed by a bull-headed group of about seventy activists determined to change the way the corporate game is played. The Pittsburgh Anti-Sweatshop Community Alliance (…)

  • Zidane and the ‘war on terror’
    15 July 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    4 comments

    By Gabriele Zamparini
    “The France legend, playing in his final match before retirement, was dismissed in extra-time for chestbutting Italy’s Marco Materazzi” the Guardian reported.
    “Zinédine Zidane’s despicable, unfathomable act of violence” (1) has been unanimously blamed as a “stupid reaction”, a “disgrace”. “How sad that he should save the most shameful episode for the final page of his story” wrote the BBC. (2)
    Yes, but why? Why did the 34 year old experienced football player who (…)

  • Ricky Williams Dreams of Canada
    28 May 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    5 comments

    by Dave Zirin
    Most football fans in the United States think about the Canadian Football League about as often as George W. Bush ponders atheism. Even Canadians don’t fret excessively about the CFL. In the Maple Leaf pantheon of sports, the CFL ranks somewhere below hockey, curling and flicking Celine Dion CDs for distance. But NFL executives are very aware of the world of Canadian Football. It is viewed, warily, like an outlaw brother-in-law crashing on your couch; something to resent and, (…)

  • GEORGE MASON V. THE JELLYFISH
    28 March 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    The George Mason Patriots have stunned the world of college basketball by advancing to the Final Four NCAA basketball men’s basketball championship semifinals.... Who was George Mason ? He is frequently known in the history books as the "Father of the Bill of Rights", the first ten ammendments of the United States Constitution ..... Those ammendments specifically enumerated those inviolable rights guarenteed each citizen of this Republic .... Owing to the efforts of those two crude (…)

  • IF THIS IS JOURNALISM....
    18 March 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    The Italian daily La Repubblica in its Monday March 13 edition has dedicated an entire page to a bit of news that simply does not exist. In substance-the article is not available online-the usual Omero Ciai’s fanciful pen holds that since an exodus of biblical proportions of Cuban baseball players toward the US is now in progress, the perfidious Fidel Castro would like to extirpate baseball from Cuba and substitute it with cricket.
    Omero Ciai goes on for an entire pagelet with his little (…)

  • Super Bowl City on the Brink
    5 February 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    23 comments

    Seahawks vs. Steelers in Detroit will display football’s best teams and America’s worst social malaise: the glaring disparity in wealth.
    By Dave Zirin
    "A celebration of concentrated wealth." That’s what Washington Post sportswriter Tony Kornheiser called the National Football League’s two-week long pre-Super Bowl party binge. Every Super Bowl Sunday, corporate executives and politicians exchange besotted, sodden backslaps, amidst an atmosphere that would shame Jack Abramoff. Only this (…)

  • The Xs and O’s of social change
    24 January 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    By Dave Zirin, Dave Zirin is the author of "What’s My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States" and a columnist for Slam magazine.
    THE NEW Disney film "Glory Road" tells the story of a basketball game that put sports in the middle of the civil rights movement. But it also recalls a time when the ordinary actions of coaches could unwittingly transcend sports and make a mark on history.
    Key to the legacies of the two Hall of Fame coaches at the heart of "Glory Road" is how (…)

  • The Bray of Pigs
    24 December 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    Instead of honoring the diversity that has changed baseball forever, Bush played vendetta politics with Cuba’s national baseball team.
    By Dave Zirin
    This March’s "World Series of Baseball" was supposed to celebrate the explosion of diversity that has forever altered the Major Leagues. Teams from the Dominican Republic, Japan, Puerto Rico, and the little seen but highly regarded Cuban national team were going to play the United States in an unprecedented contest to redefine the slogan (…)

  • The Silencing of Carlos Delgado
    11 December 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    by DAVE ZIRIN
    Sometimes sports mirrors politics with such morbid accuracy you don’t know whether to laugh, cry or hide in the basement. Just as the Bush Administration shows its commitment to democracy by operating secret offshore gulags and buying favorable news coverage in Iraq, the New York Mets have made it clear to new player Carlos Delgado that freedom of speech stops once the blue and orange uniform—their brand—is affixed to his body.
    For the last two years, Delgado chose to (…)