At some level this is an antidote to all of the positive, happy-world sports writing that has been served up over the decades. I have read many books over the years emphasizing the owner as sportsman, the player as role model, and sports as a utopian meritocracy. There is enough truth in these characterizations so that they serve as useful messages dispensed by major sports about themselves. In short, they are propaganda.
"Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports" takes head-on this dominant narrative and offers an assessment of sports in the context of the politics of social change. It cannot fail but force one to rethink how they understand the history of sports in the United States and its larger societal dimensions. Dave Zirin, a freelance journalist who has written for the "Los Angeles Times" and the "Nation" magazine approaches his story as something of a muckraker, something of an investigative journalist, and something of an historian. He is more successful in the first two categories than in the last one, but taken altogether this book opens the door to some rather important aspects of modern sports in the U.S.
Zirin acknowledges that games are never just games, and sports are a significant arena for political, economic, and social justice. Divorcing these activities from the cultural messages embedded in them ill serves society as a whole. The author focuses on many well-known but less well-understood aspects of modern sports. In the process we are exposed to inequities and exploitation in baseball, the role of soccer as a world phenomenon and the place of players in social change, the NBA and racism and culture, the politics of the Olympics, power and privilege in sports, and related issues.
The most interesting parts of the book, at least for me, was the politics of the Olympics and especially the famous Black Power salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 medal ceremony and what it meant for social justice around the world. Almost as interesting was a strong defense of Barry Bonds in the controversy over steroids and despite his not having been formally charged in any abuse his broad denunciation in American society. Zirin asserts, and I believe he is right in this assertion despite his not making the case conclusively, that Bonds is the target of astounding racism in a society that was supposedly past all of that. It's not, of course, and an ugly in-your-face reemergence of racism has manifested itself in the last few years.
This is an important book, but more for the heat that it generates then for the light. Zirin's passion is well articulated and powerfully visible. Bravo! His analysis is somewhat less reasoned. He is not quite another Howard Zinn, whose powerful alternative historical analysis of the U.S. has altered the thinking of millions though certainly not enough Americans. Zirin starts down that path, and succeeds to a degree. I'm looking forward to reading other works by Dave Zirin, and seeing what else is present to counteract the candy-coated master narrative of sports that we all know is both misleading and detrimental to the quest for justice in modern America.
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