Abstract
When I read Dave Zirin’s commentaries, I usually have mixed feelings. The analyses offered in his latest book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down, are no exception.
On the one hand, I experience Zirin’s passion to lay bare the inextricable relationship between politics and sports viscerally as a rush of excitement. The fiery, irreverent tone, and utopian impulse in his writing transports me back to more idealistic days as an undergraduate, amazed to find that the ‘big’ questions about life, humanity, politics, and society could be contemplated through examining sports. So, reading Game Over reminds me to stoke the uncompromising, fearless radical spirit to stand up and speak out against systemic violence and injustice, especially when mortgage, occupational status, and related comforts can threaten to diminish it.
I admire Zirin’s witty, rhetorically gifted, media-ready, morally righteous, and unapologetic voice. It is something I wish I could muster in conversations when family members, colleagues, and students dismiss taking a critical sociological perspective on the world. And I must confess, as I watch Zirin, whether on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry show or elsewhere, discussing a topic like Roger Goodell’s mismanagement of the domestic violence cases involving NFL players, I fantasize about whether I—if given the chance—would be able to make the same savvy structural critique he makes in the 30–45 seconds of time he is allotted. And, no doubt, I would have Melissa laughing and nodding just like Dave does.
Only I wouldn’t.
But, Dave Zirin sure can.
And that is the value of the public intellectualism on sports he provides in every bit of his writing, including Game Over.
Just like his previous book, Welcome to the Terrordome (2007), Zirin, in Game Over, displays mastery of a writing formula that clearly works for him: relatively short commentaries firmly guided by socially progressive principles (pro-democracy, pro-labor, anti-racist, pro-feminist, and pro-LGBT) that are entertaining, easily digestible, and devoid of the theoretical peccadilloes that can mar academic writing on sports for non-academic audiences.
Zirin’s chapters always provide a sprinkling of anecdotes and references from which readers can learn something new about the social, political, and historical significance of sports. Also, they usually offer perfectly portable one-liners for readers to use, as if their own, in tomorrow’s proverbial water-cooler conversations.
In Zirin’s analytic framework, sports and social worlds have a Manichean quality. There are white hats and black hats. And in the end, the white hats always win out over the black hats. Howard Zinn’s words, ‘You can’t be neutral on a moving train,’ dance off every page. He wills the world in which he wants to live into reality through his act of writing, another characteristic of his work that I envy.
Indeed, Zirin’s essays are meant to provoke readers into social action. One way Zirin accomplishes this is by spotlighting athletes who engage in progressive social activism. They are role models whose courage and action are worthy of emulation. He even goes as far as to imagine most Americans, and sports fans, as left-leaning partisans! In short, Zirin models what a socially progressive voice on sports can look like on the page and sound like in conversation. This quality of Zirin’s public intellectualism has been particularly invaluable for someone like myself, who was raised more socially conservatively and rarely encountered progressive writing or voices until later in my life. It is this distinctive rhetorical style—one that he ably performs in any given moment—that enables Zirin to enjoy the title of America’s preeminent progressive commentator on sports.
Game Over is an impressive collection of smart, insightful essays that reveal sports as contested terrains for the competing interests of progressive social movements, global, neoliberal capitalism, and an increasingly controlling and repressive State. Zirin writes cogently on a wide range of sporting contexts and a variety of social issues. From the progressive racial politics of the Phoenix Suns organization’s public solidarity with protestors who railed against Arizona’s notorious anti-immigration bill, S.B. 1070, to the unjust policing of the bodies of women and LGBT individuals in American and international sporting contexts, to the links between the Occupy Wall Street movement for economic justice and NFL and NBA labor struggles, to the ‘plantation politics’ (p.164) organizing labor relations between the NCAA, universities, football and basketball coaches, and scholarship student-athletes.
And while seven of the nine chapters in the book focus on the nexus of sports, culture, economics, and politics in the United States, Zirin also proves analytically adroit at turning his critical gaze outward beyond the shores of the US. For example, Zirin provides a trenchant discussion (including his own original reporting) of the socio-political processes (i.e. discussion of the economic inequalities, labor exploitation, corruption, surveillance politics, and popular resistances) that surrounded the staging of mega-events like the World Cup and Olympics in Brazil, South Africa, London, and Vancouver.
In yet another chapter, Zirin illuminates how football ‘ultras’—a group of particularly rabid male fans of individual football clubs who display a propensity for fighting during times of social and political stability—played a key leadership role in the early days of the resistance movement in Egypt that were part of the broader Arab Spring. Zirin details how, during this initial phase of the revolution, the ultras drew on their years of fighting with Egyptian police and military officials to show Egyptian citizens how to effectively fight against, and protect neighborhoods from, the agents of Mubarak’s State regime. Later, in the same chapter, Zirin explains how the al-Khalifa royal family, who autocratically rule Bahrain, took draconian measures against some of its iconic athletes who participated in a 2011 demonstration also a part of the Arab Spring. Zirin recounts the story of how football legend, A’ala Hubail, and his brother, Mohamed, both members of the national team, were handcuffed and forcibly removed in the middle of a practice, in front of their teammates and on lookers, and detained ‘on an indefinite basis’ (p.47). Through these examples, Zirin shows the important role that athletes and supporters of sport clubs played in the maintenance of, and struggle against, repressive State power during the moment of the Arab Spring.
Yet—and this speaks to my reservations about some of Zirin’s analyses—there is always a moment in each of the chapters of Game Over where, as a scholar, I am left wanting fewer white and black hats and more shades of gray. For example, in his chapter on the Egyptian ultras, Zirin largely and rather uncritically lionizes them. In his schema, they get to wear the white hats. And while I certainly am not an expert in ultra supporter subcultures, as a fan of global football, I am aware that in many European countries, ultra groups are often oriented by hyper-masculine, xenophobic, sexist, racist and hyper-nationalistic values that make them anything but ‘inclusive.’ And in more politically stable times the ultras would likely not support the socially progressive principles that Zirin holds dear. Yet, such a well-rounded, deeply historicized, intersectional analysis of the ultras does not materialize in Zirin’s chapter.
In fact, perhaps a more general critique of Zirin’s overall analytic framework for Game Over is that he has a tendency to analyze one social issue or aspect of a phenomenon at a time (there is a chapter on race, a chapter on sexuality, a chapter on immigration, etc.) rather than offer more intersectional analyses of the various topics he addresses.
A similar criticism can be levied against Zirin’s chapter on the shamefulness of the unwavering support of many Penn State fans for Joe Paterno and Penn State football in the shadow of the Sandusky sexual abuse case. Zirin takes Paterno to task for his immorality in not alerting police of Sandusky’s behavior when first informed of it. He lambastes Penn State students for mounting a ‘frat riot’ in reaction to the university’s eventual firing of Paterno (p.99). Finally, he criticizes Penn State alumni for their unwillingness to bear witness to Paterno’s moral lapses because doing so might disrupt their beloved perception of their alma mater and warm memories of an entitled college experience at Happy Valley.
While I wholeheartedly agree with the various points of his critique, one might also recognize how Zirin’s analysis offers readers a feel-good moralistic critique of Paterno, Penn State’s administration, and supporters of Paterno—even of Mark Emmert and the NCAA for their largely symbolic penalty against the university. This moralistic frame allows readers to imagine themselves as wholly different from Nittany Lions fans that Zirin describes as being blinded by their faith in ‘Father’ Paterno and the religion of college football. In addition, it leaves little space to recognize how such abuses of power in sports will likely continue whether or not Penn State is punished today or if the NCAA still exists in the future. Unlike Zirin’s analysis of Penn State, the best academic research by sport historians and socio-cultural analysts of sport allows a greater socio-historical truth to be exposed on this sort of topic: the NCAA and Penn State are transient players involved in the longer history of exploits by capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. These—capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy—are the systems we all should rage against, not simply Penn State or the NCAA. In addition, Zirin’s critique of Paterno and Penn State fails to name the substantive roles that whiteness and patriarchy played in providing years of safe harbor for Sandusky, deifying Paterno, and protecting the ‘frat rioters’ from penalty and prosecution in the present. Admittedly, more sober academic analyses of these historical and systemic roots are not always accompanied by the feel-good moralism of Zirin’s work. Nonetheless, they play an important role in exposing more fundamental truths about our social history and present—and cannot be substituted by the work of Zirin or others like him—especially when such critical, politicized, socio-cultural scholarship is under threat in the context of the corporatizing university.
Perhaps it is too much to ask for a more thorough—nuanced, systemic—sociological analysis from Zirin. To be fair we must be cognizant how anyone writing in his position must simultaneously entertain and educate in order to make a living. Besides, such an analysis would surely undermine the black-and-white moral universe upon which many of his commentaries stand. Yet, I am also mindful that perhaps we should not ask these sorts of things from Zirin’s writing in Game Over.
For all the reasons mentioned at the onset of this review, I do not really want Dave Zirin to write more temperately about the politics of sports. I want him to be the bombastic leftist public intellectual who cleverly shows us how to articulate progressive social movement politics with contemporary sports. His work makes me wish I had thought of what he thought, wrote what he wrote, and said just what he said. I want Zirin to keep writing more books like Game Over that I can use in my undergraduate classes as a ‘gateway drug’ to get students hooked on the pleasures and merits of the social, cultural, political and historical study of sports.
Finally, all sport studies scholars should consider reading Game Over in conjunction with Zirin’s (2008) article in Contexts, if only to reflect on such things as: the writing styles we employ, the place of theory, the intended purpose(s) of our scholarship, the potential value in writing for non-academic audiences, and the extent to which we embrace the political stakes in our work. Zirin’s call was a critique cast as a compliment to the field of sport sociology: an invitation for us to make our scholarship more useful for social progressives interested in intervening in the local politics of sports; a call to make our research and expertise matter in real time, contemporary struggles over race, gender, sexuality, labor relations, and globalization. At the very least, we should take the time to engage with these issues because maintaining a future for the critical, socio-cultural study of sports in the academy—in the United States at least—may just depend on it.