SL Interview
Dave Zirin on Sports: Two Things at Once
by Nicholas Reading
In a sports’ world that is too often reduced to top 10 lists, highlight gifs, fantasy leagues and box scores, Dave Zirin approaches athletics as what it is and has always been, a lens through which we can view both society’s successes and failures. I spoke with Dave on the Friday before the Super Bowl, discussing his love and in-depth knowledge of sports, what drives him as a writer, and of course, the NFL (see who he liked to win the big game) complete with thoughts on Cam, Peyton, and CTE. When Zirin plays, he plays for keeps. We also touched on the political nature of athletics here and abroad, TMZ, a fitting slogan for the Olympics, and what’s looming on the sports horizon.
Zirin is the sports editor for The Nation and he writes a weekly column called the Edge of Sports. A frequent contributor to ESPN, CNN, NBC, and FOX, Zirin, in my opinion, is one of the most important sports journalists today.
Nicholas Reading: You’re a bit of a rare breed. What brought you to the intersection of sports and politics as a journalist? Was there a defining moment?
Dave Zirin: Oh, my God, that’s really kind of you. What brought me to sports writing was a lifelong love of sports. I grew up playing sports, I grew up memorizing everything about sports, and it’s something that has always meant everything to me. It’s been an essential part of my life. When I got into politics, one of the things that was interesting to me was that all of the things I thought I knew about sports were all of sudden under a different kind of lens – just some of the basic narratives that I thought I knew about – people like Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, the Olympics, the World Cup, everything started to look different. And it has been a very fascinating process for me. And at the point in my life I was really trying to understand if sports should be rejected or if it should be reclaimed because there is something good in sports. Or if it is really about that displacement – public funding for stadiums, racism, sexism, homophobia, and really coming to grips with the fact that sports are two things at once. It has two different traditions, good and bad, fair and foul. I’m trying to do my best to revive and dig up that tradition of social justice that does exist in sports and try to make it come alive for a new audience.
NR: Have you faced any blow back? Was anyone saying, “Just let sports be a game?”
DZ: You definitely do get some of that. And I feel it. I really feel it, and I’m sympathetic to it. I would love for sports to be ala carte. I really do wish sports were just the fun of the game and the artistry, no different from going to a play or an opera, just another form of cultural entertainment. Unfortunately, the very power of sports has made it something else. If I wasn’t talking about it it’s not like these things would cease to exist. The Washington football team would still be called the Redskins. The St. Louis Rams would still be moving to Los Angeles. These things would still be happening. To call out these things, and it’s not just me to doing this; I’m not some kind of lone wolf. But to say the house is on fire is not the same as being an arsonist. We’re not setting the house on fire. It’s burning independently of us. And pointing it out, that the fire is raging, is a prerequisite to putting that damn fire out. Not just reveling in the fact that the world is burning.
NR: I have to ask about Cam Newton. You wrote your own open letter, which I thought was great, and recently Cam has said, without reservation, that he felt a part of the criticism he has received is because he is African American. Will these comments open eyes or just make more folks deny any racism?
DZ: Well, it’s interesting because his exact words were that he is an African-American quarterback that no one has seen before. We have gotten past the point where it has been normalized to have African American quarterbacks. I mean, Russell Wilson has been in the last two Super Bowls, for goodness sake. What Cam Newton is trying to say is that he is going to be authentically himself, even if it puts people on edge. And that means he’s going to keep smiling, keep celebrating, he’s going to keep being him. He was acknowledging that makes people afraid, but it’s actually an important thing to address. He has to still be himself. It reminded me so much of another athlete who was also very clear that he was going to be himself and that is Muhammad Ali, who said “I don’t have to be what you want me to be” early in his career. That was his great statement of independence. Now I’m not comparing Cam Newton to Muhammad Ali in full. Ali risked years in prison opposing the Vietnam War, all manner of hate and death threats and all the rest of it. But in the 21st century it is still very liberating for a lot of people to have Cam Newton be willing to be himself in a manner that can be described as unafraid. It’s still rare, it’s still powerful in his willingness to do that and it’s making him friends and enemies all over the place.
NR: Not to be too NFL heavy…
DZ: No, that’s okay. It’s funny that you don’t want to be NFL heavy. Sometimes people ask me why I cover the NFL. The NFL is so hegemonic in the US sports world that to be a sports and politics writer and not talk about the NFL should be utterly irrelevant; it is basically to not be a sports writer. Eighty of the top 100 sport shows watched last year were all NFL games. I mean, it’s not even close. So, I have no problem with you being NFL heavy. If we’re talking sports and politics this is the number one discussion in town.
NR: This has to do with CTE. Antwaan Randle El recently came forward and expressed his feelings that he wouldn’t play football again if given the chance due to his physical and mental ailments. Calvin Johnson is retiring at 30. What’s your opinion on the future of the NFL and when do fans value players’ health and future as much as our own?
DZ: It’s interesting because we really are at a point where the NFL has an existential problem. The journalist James Reston once said that the press is much better at covering revolution rather than evolution, and I think that’s what we are looking at here in that the popularity of the NFL is evidence that it’s not going anywhere this year, next year, five years from now. But there is this kind of 20-year generational issue that hangs over the league, and it has to do with everything you are saying. Science is not the league’s friend. Currently we can find out about CTE, this horrific brain disease that affects NFL players who have to have these repeated sub concussive hits. Of course, it can affect anybody who gets repeated concussions, but there’s nothing quite like the NFL where if you get a concussion it never really gets the chance to heal because you are constantly in this motion of playing this sport where you are running into other people. It’s so interesting to see what the next 20 years are going to bring because the science is going to improve and we’re going to get to the point, I think very soon, where we’re going to be able to detect CTE not just in the dead, but in the living. When that happens, you might see players retiring in mass at 26, 27. Or signing release forms that they’re never going to sue. And you’re going to have parents, so many parents, and this is already happening, that prevent their kids from playing youth football. That’s why the NFL is involved in this ferocious, and utterly unprincipled PR campaign that is all about getting kids to play this sport. This is what we’re dealing with. So who knows what it’s going to look like in two- or 30 years’ time. I think that’s the CTE issue kind of at large. What’s going to happen to a sport when more and more families aren’t letting their kids play, particularly if their kids have skills at multiple sports?
NR: You write not only about American sports but also sports and its politics around the world. Have you noticed any differences in the manner in which athletics, or athletes, or even fans, are viewed outside the US?
DZ: Yes. It’s not that the fanaticism is any different, and I’m talking about hyper fandom, it’s really a global phenomenon and it tends to reflect whatever country it happens to be in. What it means to be a sports fanatic in Egypt is very different from what it means in Serbia, what it means in London, what it means in New York City. I’d say the biggest difference between the US and the rest of the world is what we’ve been talking about. It’s about American football versus soccer. The big difference between football and soccer is the fact that soccer, I mean, how do you monetize soccer is what marks the biggest difference. In other countries politics is less policed. When athletes are political it is less corporatized. In Greece recently two teams sat down in the middle of the field to protest the migrant crisis and had a two minute moment of silence for the children who died in the passage from Syria over the Aegean sea and the PA announcer read out their complaints. Now imagine that happening at the Super Bowl. Or at any US sporting event. I mean, you just can’t. That’s what we’re dealing with.
NR: Recently Johnny Manziel was in the news again for all the wrong reasons. I feel sometimes that kind of story gets more press. Where an athlete screws up or does something wrong. What athletes do serve as good role models? Who should we be looking at?
DZ: It’s so interesting because the sports industry has become this 24-hour thing and it’s being run much more from the bottom up instead of the top down. In other words, it’s being run, in terms of what’s being covered, through the Internet and social media more than it gets run by what executives think we need to know. In some ways that’s very progressive. For example, this Peyton Manning HGH story, or violence against women, that’s happened from the bottom up. Or the controversy over the Washington football team name. That has happened from the bottom up. Not from the top down. And that’s great. But what also happens is that profits get governed by clicks and by attention and by eyeballs because there is so much competing for attention. It’s just proven by these scandals what generate clicks, more than an athlete’s social consciousness, more than charity work, and all the rest of it. So that’s what I think creates this gutter culture. This US magazine of sports. Where TMZ can start its sports site and can have it be very popular very quickly because it is willing to dwell on these kinds of scandals. Which aren’t illustrative or indicative of how most athletes are living their life. But it is what draws the most attention.
NR: As a sports journalist, what is the state of the profession? Is it where it should be or has it been reduced to sound bites and 90-second highlight clips?
DZ: That’s exactly right. It’s so crazy, man. I mean the sound bite culture, the 140-character culture, the twitter culture, it makes it very difficult, sometimes, to talk about the more substantive issues. But, at the same time it makes a broader audience. And an audience that feels they are being under-served by this culture. So if anybody is listening out there, who is an aspiring sports writer, I would just say, don’t be afraid to be counter intuitive. Because there are a lot of people who do feel that they are under-served by this climate, where everything is TMZ and the rest of it.
NR: What sports writers do you go to? What outlets do you go to for your sports journalism?
DZ: There’s a lot out there. For me, honestly, it usually governed more by stories than by individual writers. The work by people like Jessica Luther who has a real focus on the issue of violence against women in sports, or the work by people like Christopher Gaffney, who has been covering what has been happening in Brazil with the World Cup and the Olympics. That’s the kind of stuff that I look for. What is great about this moment is that anybody can write these stories and put them up. So there’s a lot of good out there. Sports Illustrated’s new website Cauldron is really good. Medium is really good. Sports on Earth still puts good stuff up. Vice Sports, Patrick Hruby’s stuff, there’s no shortage of things for people to find. And I would suggest people search on the basis of the issue more than on the basis of the writer. Then they can discover some of these new writers who are cropping up all the time.
NR: A few questions about your writing. Obviously your love of sports brought you to your profession, but what brought you to writing?
DZ: For me, and for a lot of people who write, it’s just the desire for some form of self-expression. Usually we read books that really touched us. For me it was reading James Baldwin and just seeing the power of words. And then when I read James Baldwin’s articles about Sonny Liston as he prepared for his fight against young Cassius Clay. That for me was kind of mind blowing as far as what sports writing could be. The thing that I love about writing and what I love about being a writer is that we live in such a deeply, deeply superficial society where people are judged so quickly on what their jobs are. When you meet someone one of the first things they usually ask is what do you do and whatever answer you give is how they start to define you. And it’s really messed up if you think about it. So many of us don’t have the choice as to what our job is going to be, yet, people still define us by what they are. And being a writer, it really does not require someone else to sanction you or label you as such but you can self identify and you can work on your craft and it doesn’t really matter what else you’re doing to pay the bills.
NR: So who you like this weekend (still pre-Super Bowl)?
DZ: It’s interesting; this is the first Super Bowl in a while, largely because I’m such a Patriots hater, where I haven’t really been stressed about the Super Bowl! I really don’t give two craps about either team too much. But I do like the Carolina Panthers. I do like the way they play. I do like Cam Newton. I certainly don’t like the way that Peyton Manning has gotten such an unholy pass from the media about things that other quarterbacks would get roasted for and the latest HGH scandal just being the latest incarnation of the ways in which Peyton is protected by big media and the NFL. So I’d like to see the Panthers win only because I feel like it would upset all the right people. If the Broncos win I’m not going to be crying into my cheese dip on Sunday night, unlike last year when tears flowed in a manner that I’m ashamed to describe.
NR: If Peyton retires, win or lose, is the HGH story dead forever? If he comes back, will we hear more of it?
DZ: It all depends on new information. That’s the thing about it. And the reason I’m even talking about it now is that I’m kind of gob smacked by this new story that came out about these private investigators who went to the home of the HGH whistle blower and misrepresented themselves as police officers to the parents of this guy, Charlie Sly, who is the intern who gave the initial interview. And the day after the PIs go to their home and they call 911 and you can hear the 911 tape of the whistleblower’s sister in a very frightened manner calling 911 saying there are people here who are saying they’re police, we’re scared, and all the rest of it. But without new information the story will die. And if he retires with a victory, yeah, that’s all people are going to remember, absolutely and positively because that’s the way that sports works. But we’ll see what happens.
NR: Anything you’d like to add here that wasn’t covered?
DZ: Just that people should keep a very, very close eye on Brazil this year with the Olympics. I wrote a book called Brazil’s Dance With the Devil and went down to Brazil a bunch and looked at how the World Cup and the Olympics were being planned and everything that’s happening right now in Brazil with the economic crisis, with the spread of the Zika virus, and with a lot of dissatisfaction in the country as a whole. I mean this is the sort of thing that is keeping me up at night. I think about the uses of sports and I hope people keep a close eye on this because the Olympics could come to your town next and that’s not anything you want.
NR: That sounds ominous.
DZ: Yes. I’ve said before that the slogan for the Olympics shouldn’t be, “Bigger, Faster, Stronger,” or whatever it is. It should be, “Something wicked this way comes.”
NR: Well, like I said, we really appreciate you talking to us. I really enjoy reading your work.
DZ: Thank you.
Nicholas Reading is the author of the chapbook The Party In Question (Burnside Review Press, 2007) and Love & Sundries (SplitLip Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, jubilat, Nimrod, Painted Bride Quarterly, and San Pedro River Review. He serves as the managing editor for Sport Literate.