Courtesy Haymarket Books

A furious Ali did more than sting the aging Patterson like a bee. He established an early dominance in the bout but preferred to drag out the proceedings by landing all kinds of punches from all angles on the hapless former champion, ignoring trainer Angelo Dundee’s exhortation to deliver a knockout punch. As he danced around Patterson, prolonging his agony, Ali combined his blows with a torrent of verbal assaults that included calling Patterson an “Uncle Tom” and demanding from the reeling fighter, “What’s My Name, Fool?”

Dave Zirin’s book has the equivalent effect on its reader. By the end of it, one has experienced a barrage of impassioned jabs against everything that’s wrong with professional sports in the United States. Zirin, a sports columnist and radio commentator, is relentless in pointing out the dark side of professional sport, not only in the United States, but also in major international competitions such as the Olympic Games. Admittedly, there is a lot to write about, ranging from commercialization to racism, sexism, social inequality, and political exploitation. In Zirin’s words, “If I had a dollar for everything that’s wrong with sports, Bill Gates would be my butler” (p. 289).

Zirin’s account is full of clever turns of phrase, and is a joy to read. One can easily forget that writing about sport can still be an art. Present-day sportswriting, with a few notable exceptions, has become clichéd and formulaic. One notices an over-emphasis on short sentences full of alliteration, outlandish metaphor, and macho values designed to entertain rather than explain. You would almost think that when Jacques Derrida spoke of the syntactical overshadowing the semantic, he was referring to articles in Sports Illustrated, the weekly magazine read by almost twenty percent of American males. What would Derrida have said if he had had access to the testosterone-driven, sports-radio talk shows that plumb the depth of good taste and intelligence?

Zirin starts out by taking issue with Noam Chomsky’s view that “sports keep people from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they may have some idea of doing something about” (p. 20). Zirin agrees with Chomsky that sport plays a bread-and-circuses function in modern society, but then goes on to suggest that Chomsky does not recognize that “the very passion we invest in sports can transform it from a kind of mindless escape into a site of resistance” (p. 21). The “we” refers to persons who find sport exciting and lose their breath with the artistry of the virtuoso athlete. Not everyone belongs to that category, and Zirin suggests that critics like Chomsky should pause and consider why sport can be so appealing. It is hard to see how that might happen, but non-sports fans will recognize the validity of Zirin’s suggestion that sport can be—and, in fact, has been—a site of resistance.

The book’s first five chapters make a compelling case that there have been instances in which certain brave individuals have stood up to the corporate sports establishment’s dominant orthodoxy, whether that was anticommunism, anti-unionism, or, especially, racism. Zirin begins by providing vivid descriptions of how Lester Rodney, former sports editor of the communist Daily Worker newspaper, engaged in a campaign against the color bar in baseball. Zirin’s account then moves on to Jackie Robinson, the first black player in American major league baseball who also became a controversial spokesman on race by criticizing the communist actor, singer, and political activist Paul Robeson. Zirin then turns to Muhammad Ali and describes his struggle against racism, his conversion to Islam, his anti-Vietnam war stance, and his battles against the white sports establishment in the 1960s and 1970s. The next chapter deals with the black-gloved protest of the black American athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the winner’s podium following the 200-meter race in the Mexico City Olympic Games of 1968.

Moving from issues of race to unionism, Zirin discusses how baseball players in the late 1960s rejected the tradition of company-run unions and formed their own, and then fought against the “reserve clause” that tied them to the team that had “drafted” them when they became professionals. Their eventual success in the mid-1970s ushered in the era of free agency that spilled over into other sports and revolutionized them all. Free agency limited the contracts that new professional athletes signed with teams, and enabled the athletes to negotiate freely with other teams after a stipulated period. This free-market approach meant that salaries soared upward, so much so that many now believe that athletes are overpaid, whatever that means.

The book’s last five chapters lack the cohesion of the first five, however, and are more scattered chronologically, as they deal with a number of instances of “resistance,” combined with examples of discrimination or manipulation of sports figures from the 1970s to the present. There is still plenty to write about, including, most notably, the struggle of female athletes for equality led by tennis star Billie Jean King. Zirin’s narrative extends to the impact of the United States’s “war on terror” following September 11, and ranges from the proliferation of displays of patriotism and militarism at sports events to the initial cover-up of the death by “friendly fire” of NFL player Pat Tillman, who had volunteered and served with the US army in Afghanistan.

Zirin does not acknowledge this, but he is essentially dealing with two different eras, an earlier one marked by parallel, and collective, initiatives by athletes and a later one that consists of a range of uncoordinated and mostly short-lived instances of opposition. Zirin recognizes those differences only implicitly in the final chapter, in which he writes hopefully of the stirrings of a new sporting resistance. He believes that isolated moments such as those that make up most of his post-1970s account will somehow fuse into a more recognizable “movement” of protest against the increasing influence in the sporting world of corporations, money, and a win-at-all-costs attitude.

But if we consider carefully the movement launched by Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and the baseball players who stood up against the reserve clause, we cannot help but notice that their initiatives belonged to a bigger and deeper social development in the US at the time, the civil rights movement. In other words, the resistance within the sports world reflected broader social trends and was nurtured by them. Indeed, it was a manifestation in the world of sport of those trends—do we need wonder where Carlos and Smith got the idea of raising a black-gloved fist?

If this is so, however, a present-day “resistance movement” in sport needs the wider context of a social movement resisting the social ills that unfettered corporate values inflict on society. Anyone who follows sport in North America and Europe will sympathize with Zirin’s sense of urgency. Everything, it seems, is being taken over by big money, and that win-at-all-costs mindset is turning the artistry of virtuoso athletes into a commodity used by agents and publicists to inflate athletes’ salaries, which, in turn, raise the cost of admission to stadiums and of subscriptions to sports-media outlets.

But can the sporting world resist the logic of corporate capitalism on its own? That resistance would not last long if it did not spark a wider social movement opposing business interests. If that happened, even Noam Chomsky would probably agree that sport is not all bread and circuses.