Sports and Resistance in the USA

By Elana Berkowitz, Campus Progress. Posted October 5, 2005.

In 1960, at the tender age of 18, Cassius Clay tossed his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River. He had just been denied service at a restaurant in Louisville when he tried to order a hamburger only weeks after winning boxing gold in Athens.

The rest of the story has become a classic, as Clay, now Muhammad Ali, goes on to win 56 of 61 fights with 37 knockouts and, along the way, becomes an iconic political figure that defined an era of racial struggle.

Now, in a time of sometimes crass hyper-commercialization, we've found a sports writer unwilling to ignore the issues of race and class that have always been inextricably tied up with sports. Dave Zirin, author of "What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States," is a sports fan with a political conscience who won't let us forget the intersections between his twin passions as he explores sports unions, anti-war athletes, the controversially-named Redskins, Jackie Robinson and desegregation with wit and an inexhaustible stockpile of knowledge.

Dave sat down with Campus Progress to talk about the Canadian progressive politics of NBA star Steve Nash, building stadiums on the public dime, athletes becoming "thingified" and being a fan.

You've described the NCAA as a "sweatshop for indentured servitude." Why are you so concerned about college athletes getting paid?

I know it's so controversial right now - "oh you can't pay college athletes, you'd ruin their amateur status" and all the rest of it. Fifty years ago all college athletes received a stipend, so this is not some kind of new radical idea. I went to a Division III college and I had a good friend who was up at the crack of dawn every day and would come home every day and collapse in a heap just to be on a Division III swim team. If you're good enough to play a college sport you're contributing to the life and culture of that particular campus and therefore deserve to be treated like anyone who's doing any kind of work study, and should get some kind of a stipend. When it comes to revenue-producing sports like baseball, basketball, football -- where the college actively profits off of what you do -- I think you're entitled to a piece of that. Anything other than that is, frankly, rank extortion of the worst sort.

By not paying college athletes, do you feel there are certain portions of the population that are disproportionately affected?

Absolutely, without question. Working class African-Americans, Latinos, and communities of color disproportionately make up the ranks of these teams. If you look at any school, the percentages in terms of racial diversity of the sports team versus the campus as a whole are stacked in opposite directions. Growing up in NYC in the '80s, I thought that Georgetown University was a predominantly black college from watching basketball because their coach was African-American and almost the whole team was African-American. When I found out what Georgetown actually was my jaw hit the floor.

Still, on a lot of big sports school campuses, athletes get other perks thrown their way, particularly when they are being recruited. Over the last few years we've seen a number of news stories about athletes being recruited and treated like kings, plied with promises of easy academics, sexual bait and so on.

I think that's a very important thing you're raising. That is a reality today. The competition and profits for big-time college sports is so intense and the athletes can't be paid for it. Colleges can't compete with each other by paying the players, so it's all under-the-table stuff -- payments, women, drugs, whatever. It's sort of a moral sewer. I'm not trying to talk like Pat Robertson here, but when I hear that the University of Colorado had a special slush fund that involved escort services and a liquor store I just think, "That's disgusting. Why does something like that exist?" The answer is because there can't be an honest and fair exchange of labor.

How would you respond to those who point out that college athletes are being paid to some extent with free ride athletic scholarships?

I would remind you that people said in slave days: "they're getting room and shelter." It's completely apples and oranges. Yeah, they're contributing to the economic wellbeing of the school. But they are revenue producers for the school of the first order, and many of them are doing a hell of a lot more to fill the coffers of the school than a typical tenured professor, for example.

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