The Eagles fans–desperate for a Super Bowl trophy and proclaiming that since Vick paid his time he should be forgiven–gave him a hearty ovation when he first appeared in the game early in the first quarter.

Vick, the All-Pro felon who was convicted in federal court of conspiracy, financing, and operating a dog fighting operation, appeared in only 11 plays, rushed for seven yards, threw two incompletes, and was largely a decoy on the other plays. But he drew the attention of sportscasters and reporters in his first NFL game since his suspension.

Based upon the number of column inches the print media threw to Vick, combined with the air time TV devoted, he was the star and the rest of the team were supporting players.

Quarterback Kevin Kolb, who ran the offense while starter Donovan McNabb sat out his second game while recovering from a broken rib, did everything Vick couldn’t do. He threw for 327 yards and two touchdowns, becoming the first quarterback to throw for more than 300 yards in his first two career starts. Almost as an afterthought, the media later reported that Kolb was the NFC offensive player of the week. Not reported is that Vick, with a $1.5 million salary, is making about $400,000 more this season than Kolb.

Also overlooked by much of the media were DeSean Jackson and Brent Celek, each of whom had 100-plus yards as receivers and and LeSean McCoy who had 84 yards rushing. The media also ignored the offensive line, which gave Kolb the time to throw, and the defense, which yielded only two touchdowns.

The Eagles don’t have a game this Sunday, so the media will focus not upon Kolb, not upon the receivers or running backs, not upon the Eagles defense, and certainly not upon the offensive line. “Rehabilitation” will be the key topic this week. It’ll be stories about Donovan McNabb’s recovery from his rib injury–and Vick’s “rehabilitation” from a life of animal cruelty, and his hoped-for march to another All-Pro appearance. It’s just a good thing there aren’t any live eagles as team mascots.

The sports world has been buzzing for some time over the rumor that Semenya may be a man, or more specifically, not “entirely female.” According to the newspaper The Age, her “physique and powerful style have sparked speculation in recent months that she may not be entirely female.” From all accounts an arduous process of “gender testing” on Semenya has already begun. The idea that an 18-year-old who has just experienced the greatest athletic victory of her life is being subjecting to this very public humiliation is shameful to say the least.

Her own coach Michael Seme contributed to the disgrace when he said, “We understand that people will ask questions because she looks like a man. It’s a natural reaction and it’s only human to be curious. People probably have the right to ask such questions if they are in doubt. But I can give you the telephone numbers of her roommates in Berlin. They have already seen her naked in the showers and she has nothing to hide.”

The people with something to hide are the powers that be in track and field, as well as in international sport. As long as there have been womens’ sports, the characterization of the best female athletes as “looking like men” or “mannish” has consistently been used to degrade them. When Martina Navratilova dominated women’s tennis and proudly exposed her chiseled biceps years before Hollywood gave its imprimatur to gals with “guns,” players complained that she “must have a chromosome loose somewhere.”

This minefield of sexism and homophobia has long pushed female athletes into magazines like Maxim to prove their “hotness”–and implicitly their heterosexuality. Track and field in particular has always had this preoccupation with gender, particularly when it crosses paths with racism. Fifty years ago, Olympic official Norman Cox proposed that in the case of black women, “the International Olympic Committee should create a special category of competition for them–the unfairly advantaged ‘hermaphrodites.’”

For years, women athletes had to parade naked in front of Olympic officials. This has now given way to more “sophisticated” “gender testing” to determine if athletes like Semenya have what officials still perceive as the ultimate advantage–being a man. Let’s leave aside that being male is not the be-all, end-all of athletic success. A country’s wealth, coaching facilities, nutrition and opportunity determine the creation of a world-class athlete far more than a Y chromosome or a penis ever could.

What these officials still don’t understand, or will not confront, is that gender–that is, how we comport and conceive of ourselves–is a remarkably fluid social construction. Even our physical sex is far more ambiguous and fluid than is often imagined or taught. Medical science has long acknowledged the existence of millions of people whose bodies combine anatomical features that are conventionally associated with either men or women and/or have chromosomal variations from the XX or XY of women or men. Many of these “intersex” individuals, estimated at one birth in every 1,666 in the United States alone, are legally operated on by surgeons who force traditional norms of genitalia on newborn infants. In what some doctors consider a psychosocial emergency, thousands of healthy babies are effectively subject to clitorectomies if a clitoris is “too large” or castrations if a penis is “too small” (evidently penises are never considered “too big”).

The physical reality of intersex people calls into question the fixed notions we are taught to accept about men and women in general, and men and women athletes in sex-segregated sports like track and field in particular. The heretical bodies of intersex people challenge the traditional understanding of gender as a strict male/female phenomenon. While we are never encouraged to conceive of bodies this way, male and female bodies are more similar than they are distinguishable from each other. When training and nutrition are equal, it is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between some of the best-trained male and female Olympic swimmers wearing state-of-the-art one-piece speed suits. Title IX, the 1972 law imposing equal funding for girls’ and boys’ sports in schools, has radically altered not only women’s fitness and emotional well-being, but their bodies as well. Obviously, there are some physical differences between men and women, but it is largely our culture and not biology that gives them their meaning.

In 1986, Spanish hurdler Maria José Martínez-Patiño was stripped of her first-place winnings when discovered to have an XY chromosome, instead of the female’s XX, which shattered her athletic career and upended her personal life. “I lost friends, my fiancé, hope and energy,” said Martínez-Patiño in a 2005 editorial in the journal The Lancet.

Whatever track and field tells us Caster Semenya’s gender is–and as of this writing there is zero evidence she is intersex–it’s time we all break free from the notion that you are either “one or the other.” It’s antiquated, stigmatizing and says far more about those doing the testing than about the athletes tested. The only thing suspicious is the gender and sex bias in professional sports. We should continue to debate the pros and cons of gender segregation in sport. But right here, right now, we must end sex testing and acknowledge the fluidity of gender and sex in sports and beyond.

Somewhere over the next 40-plus years, the game became a multi-billion dollar sports industry with lucrative TV contracts, merchandise galore, corporate sponsorships and public subsidies for constructing luxury sports domes.

But some things haven’t changed. The owners are again digging in their heels, citing a tough economy to wring concessions from the NFL Players Association (NFLPA).

One of the big sticking points is money. Currently, players get almost 60 percent of the NFL’s revenue; owners want an even bigger piece of the pie and blame players for the high ticket prices fans are forced to pay.

The union counters that the average profit of an NFL team is $24.7 million. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, spokesperson for the bosses, claims “there is a lot of fiction in that.” The NFLPA’s reply? Open the books!

In March 2008, NFL owners voted to terminate their collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the players’ union after the 2010 season — two years ahead of schedule. The owners are also threatening to lock out players in 2011.

The strike of 1987.

The last NFL labor dispute got pretty ugly. The bosses hired scab players and convinced the networks to put the games on TV. The union didn’t have a strike fund and some players gradually crossed the picket line. After the strike of 1987, the NFLPA’s Executive Director Gene Upshaw eventually formed a less adversarial relationship with owners. Both sides duked out their issues in court, and players prospered a little in the subsequent years, although not nearly as much as the industry, which last year raked in $8 billion.

Players who retired from the game were an entirely different story. As anyone who watches football knows, players suffer bone-crushing injuries that affect them long after they leave the field. Only a select few parlay their success into TV careers. In 2006, USA Today reported that 78 percent of players wind up bankrupt or unemployed three years after retirement.

Unlike owners, who typically come from money and earn their wealth elsewhere, players come from poverty and spend years playing football in high school and college before earning a dime in the big leagues.

Former players, such as the late Hall-of-Famer Mike Webster, have wound up homeless because of sky-high medical costs the union health plan doesn’t cover. A star player with the Pittsburgh Steelers in the ’70s, Webster earned the owners fabulous profits.

As a union rep, Upshaw formed a cantankerous relationship with retirees even though he was one himself; retirees are shortchanged on pension money and the millions being made by companies that sell their images to a thirsty fan base. Upshaw, who lived a lavish lifestyle, took the position that retirees didn’t pay his salary.

Perhaps a new era.

Upshaw died of pancreatic cancer last year and in March, the players elected DeMaurice Smith, a lawyer, as Upshaw’s successor. Smith, 45, comes from a working class background. He was elected on the first ballot by 32 union reps — one for each NFL team — after he presented the Players Association with a comprehensive plan for the future. Key was his view that the union had “a moral and business obligation to former players.”

And in a departure from Upshaw’s top-down style Smith is meeting with players in an effort to unify them. This summer, he has travelled from one team to the next, educating players about their business — how much the owners make and how the stadiums they play in are publicly financed.

In June, Smith reached out to former players agreeing to settle their lawsuit against the union. Herb Adderly was the lead plaintiff in a class action suit representing 2,056 former players who won a claim that the union had breached licensing and marketing terms. The players were awarded $28 million but the union promised not to appeal and settled out of court for $26 million.

Meanwhile, with the retirement of NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, owners also have a new rep. Roger Goodell sent a message to the NFLPA in March: get a new labor contract done before the 2010 season or the bargaining will get much tougher. Goodell’s strong-arm message came at the owners’ meetings where it was also announced that the NFL had just received $1 billion per year for 2011-2014 from DirecTV.

The owners get that money even if games aren’t played in the 2011 season. In other words, the owners have lockout insurance; they are guaranteed $31 million per year, whether or not football is played.

Are football players well off?

While some fans have trouble sympathizing with the NFL players they watch on TV every week the reality is that most players are anything but rich. The average salary for football players is about $750,000, while baseball players cleared an average of $3 million. For NFL rookies, it is around $400,000.

On the surface that sounds great, but NFL salaries, unlike those in pro basketball and baseball, aren’t guaranteed. Players receive signing bonuses up front, but can get released at any time without severance pay.

The average length of an NFL career is about 3.5 seasons, compared to 6 for major league baseball players.

While some leave the game with their health relatively intact, many are literally carried from the gridiron and live the rest of their lives in pain. Given this, it’s easy to see why current players voted for Smith’s vision to do better by retirees. They know their time will also come soon.

The owners clearly have the money advantage as negotiations start, but players have incentive and, increasingly it seems, unity.

“Our guys understand the cost of playing football on a Monday or Tuesday morning when they struggle to stand upright,” said Smith. “What they don’t understand is what does the average team make per game?”

As both sides prepared for a possible lock out, Smith is coaching his players to tackle that question. Stay tuned. Fans may be asked to turn off a blank TV screen in 2011 and join real players on the picket lines.

You play football and basketball, but you don’t play boxing.

– the late Buster Mathis, Sr.

This July, all the boxing news of note has been in the obituaries. Death has visited the sport like a plague, shocking even the most callous observers.

On July 1, Alexis Arguello, 57, who became the mayor of his native Managua, Nicaragua, and battled depression for years allegedly shot himself through the chest.

Then, on July 11, recently retired 37-year-old brawling icon Arturo Gatti met a brutally violent end in Brazil. Gatti was choked to death by a purse strap belonging to his wife, Amanda Rodrigues. Brazilian authorities are labeling it a suicide. Virtually no one else is.

Two weeks later, on July 25, 38-year-old former WBC welterweight champion Vernon Forrest was murdered. Two men attempted to rob him. Forrest reportedly pulled a gun, gave chase and took several bullets for his efforts.

Arguello, Gatti and Forrest were the most famous boxing casualties in the boxing world of July, but there were several more.

On July 22, a 23-year-old junior welterweight named Marco Antonio Nazareth died of a brain hemorrhage four days after being knocked unconscious in the ring. That same day, Marc Leduc, the openly gay 1992 Canadian silver medalist, died of heat stroke at age 47. On July 25, 21-year-old Francisco “Pancho” Moncivais died twenty-four hours after an in-ring knockout. Also on July 25, 37-year-old Colombian boxer Nicolas Cervera committed suicide. Finally there was welterweight William Morelo, gunned down in a gym in Colombia on July 27.

Eight deaths, occurring all over the world, and on the surface entirely unrelated. Yet they are bound by an athletic endeavor that remains, as the late sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, “the red light district of sports.” Imagine eight current and former NFL players, including two Hall of Famers, being buried over one month. Or baseball. Or even fatality-familiar sports like auto racing.

If any other sport were visited by the array and diversity of death we have seen in boxing, Congressional hearings would already be in full swing. But we don’t talk about what happens in the “red light district.” It’s a Vegas mentality: What happens in boxing stays in boxing.

It starts with the metronome-like punishment to the head. The brain begins to bruise, the words start to slur, the interviews become painful and the price paid for our pleasure becomes pernicious. This was especially the case with the freewheeling Gatti, whose bouts often resembled Guernica more than a boxing match. It made him very popular, very rich and very hurt.

As Jack Todd wrote in the Montreal Gazette, “[Gatti] was what they used to call ‘punch drunk’ and he was still fighting. My father, a veteran of more than 100 fights as an amateur and pro, was also called punch drunk: prone to sudden, explosive rages and memory loss. It isn’t pretty. From what we know of Gatti’s death, it is a particular variety of tragedy that seems to follow the warriors of the ring, a shadow they are never quick enough to outbox. Violent backgrounds, a violent sport, violent deaths.”

We need to confront everything that’s rotten in boxing. Right now there is no commissioner and no governing authority. There are no unions, and there is no collective bargaining on behalf of fighters. There is no healthcare, no mental health treatment and no one watching out for those who suffer from the debilitating effects of brain damage and its conjoined twin, depression.

Furthermore, no one is charged with counseling fighters who have been unable to keep the violence of the ring out of their personal lives. Gatti’s death, no matter what the police assert, was most likely the result of a domestic dispute with his wife. This spring she had a restraining order slapped on Gatti, demanding he stay 200 meters away from her at all times. The great boxing writer Thomas Hauser wrote to me, “I don’t know a single person who believes that Arturo Gatti killed himself. That’s not denial on our part. It’s our disbelief with regard to an apparently corrupt criminal justice system in Brazil.” No one has been brought to account for the deaths of Nazareth and Moncivais either. Did they belong in the ring? Was there ringside healthcare that could have saved them? There are no inquiries, only eulogies.

So despite spirited efforts by groups like Joint Action for Boxers (JAB), boxers still have no union protections. As former light heavyweight champion Eddie Mustafa Muhammad said, “Every professional sport has a union. They have a pension, they have a medical plan, they have a chance at a life. In boxing, they don’t have anything.”

The biggest boxing fan I know, the poet Martín Espada once told me, “In this country, as a rule, boxers come from the bottom: Black, brown, immigrants, the poor, the uneducated. This society treats such human beings as contemptible and disposable, channeling them into the military, into prison, into the shadows. Our collective attitude towards boxing is nothing more or less than a reflection of our attitude towards those who become boxers.”

Those who become boxers battle more than their opponents, the industry and crooked promoters–they have to fight our indifference.

It shows how the Governor can give even a good bill, one that provides funds for San Joaquin River salmon and steelhead restoration and grants wild and scenic status to more California rivers, a toxic green taint!

“Preserving and restoring California’s wilderness and waterways has been a top priority of my Administration and I am pleased that our environmental goals will be furthered by many aspects of this bill, specifically the San Joaquin River Restoration Act,” claimed Schwarzenegger in a statement on March 30. “This bill preserves 700,000-plus acres of California’s pristine wilderness and also provides additional funding to supplement the millions of dollars California has already invested to restore the San Joaquin River — helping rejuvenate a critical fishery, restore a devastated habitat and improve a water-delivery network that is the lifeblood of a Central Valley farming economy all Californians depend on.”

The operative phrase is “improve a water delivery network.” When Schwarzenegger talks about “improving” water delivery, he means building a peripheral canal and more dams, a goal that he shares with Senator Dianne Feinstein and the Nature Conservancy in their Unholy Alliance to destroy the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast of the Americas.

His claim that “preserving and restoring California’s wilderness and waterways has been a top priority of my Administration” is simply not backed up by his actual record in office, since Schwarzenegger’s administration’s has presided over the collapse of Central Valley Chinook salmon, delta smelt, longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other fish populations, along with imperiling the southern resident population of killer whales (orcas).

Schwarzenegger’s version of “environmentalism” is nothing other than corporate greenwashing on a massive scale, in collusion with “Gang Green” groups such as the Nature Conservancy. While the Governor constantly preaches about promoting “green energy” and “solving global warming,” he and his minions have done nothing to stop the collapse of Central Valley salmon and California Delta pelagic fish populations.

Instead, Resources Secretary Mike Chrisman and Schwarzenegger are working to exacerbate the imperiled status of these fish by pushing for the construction of a peripheral canal and more dams. They want to divert more water out of the declining estuary when dramatic cuts in water exports to corporate agribusiness and the retirement of drainage-impaired land in the Westlands Water District are urgently needed to restore Central Valley Chinook salmon, steelhead, green sturgeon, delta smelt, longfin smelt, Sacramento splittail, striped bass, threadfin shad, American shad and other fish that depend on the estuary for their survival.

At the same time, Schwarzenegger is doing everything he can to pull the biggest defenders of fish and the environment – sustainable commercial and recreational fishermen and seaweed harvesters – off the water by creating massive marine protected areas on the North Coast of California, a region already devastated by de-facto marine protected areas and fishing closures, in a privately funded process rife with conflict of interest, mission creep and a lack of transparency.

Grass roots environmentalists from the North Coast, in contrast to corporate funded “environmentalists” that often gush about how “green” the Governor is in their press releases, are fighting Schwarzenegger’s fast track MPLA (Marine Life Protection Act) because it would devastate coastal communities and pave the way for corporate aquaculture, PGE’s wave energy projects and offshore oil drilling in remote areas such as Point Arena.

Schwarzenegger’s “green” record on restoring California’s waterways and fisheries includes:

* Vetoing legislation to limit the destructive impact of suction dredge mining on salmon and steelhead in northern California rivers;

* Sending lay off notices to 98 game wardens and cadets from the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) at a time when fish and wildlife populations are under attack by poachers — and California has the lowest ratio of wardens to state residents of any state in the country;

* Pressuring the Central Valley Regional Water Resources Control Board to grant waivers to agricultural polluters at the expense of fish in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and farmworkers in rural communities with poisoned wells;

* Allowing tens of thousands of striped bass, Sacramento blackfish, Sacramento splittail and other fish to perish during the Prospect Island fish kill in November 2007 after the DFG signed off on a levee repair by the Bureau of Reclamation.

However, the most egregious attack that the Schwarzenegger administration has launched on California’s fisheries was when he allowed the Department of Water Resources, in collaboration with the Bureau of Reclamation under the Bush administration, to export record amounts of water to Westlands, the Kern County Water Bank and southern California at great expense to Delta fish and Central Valley salmon. Record water export levels occurred in 2004 (6.1 MAF), 2005 (6.5 MAF) and 2006 (6.3 MAF). Exports averaged 4.6 MAF annually between 1990 and 1999 and increased to an average of 6 MAF between 2000 and 2007, a rise of almost 30 percent, according the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA).

While Schwarzenegger played the role of the Terminator and other villains in his movies, he is now playing the real life villain role as the “Fish Terminator.” When he leaves office, he will leave behind a unprecedented toxic green path of salmon and other fish populations on the abyss of extinction, rivers devastated by siltation and suction dredge gold mining, poisoned wells in the San Joaquin Valley, and no fishing zones on the coast.

When are the leaders of national environmental groups going to have some courage and expose the Governor for the environmental fraud that he is? When is the mainstream media going to wake up to the fact that there is nothing green about Schwarzenegger other than the corporate money that he and his staff worship?

* For more information about what you can do to save Central valley salmon, southern resident killer whales and the Delta, go to www.calsport.org, www.water4fish.org and www.restorethedelta.org.

Jewish Israeli forces recently committed multiple war crimes, killing over 1300 Gazans, wounding more than 5450 Gazans, destroying homes, hospitals, schools, and societal infrastructure, and creating over 85,000 refugees out of a population of 1.5 million. I am unaware of any tennis player from any nation speaking out against this slaughter.

While many of the world’s governments actually sided with the massacre of humans by Israeli Jews, a few states did deplore the Israeli aggression: Malaysia, Mauritania, Qatar, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Turkey among them.

There is growing activism, led by unions and progressivists, calling for boycotts of the Jewish state.³ Academic boycotts are also called for.⁴ Why should sports not be a part of the boycott?

At the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, 26 nations boycotted the inclusion of Aotearoa (New Zealand) for maintaining sporting relations with the the apartheid states of Rhodesia and South Africa.⁵

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided that segregation on a state’s Olympic teams was wrong. South Africa was expelled by the IOC in 1970.

It is a widely held view that Israel is an apartheid state. A distinction has been made between South African apartheid and Israeli apartheid, in that the latter is more insidious, being premised on committing genocide.⁶ The recent slaughter in Gaza is but another demonstration of the genocidal intent of the Zionists.

The Palestinian Sports Foundation, Atlas, accused apartheid-state Israel of targeting Palestinian athletes, a violation of the IOC Charter.⁷

Tennis Principles

Tennis was not so stringent against sporting links with apartheid regimes. It did ban South Africa from international play in 1970 Davis Cup, which re-instated South Africa won in 1974, after India refused to play it in the final. South Africa was again barred from team competition, but individual South Africans were allowed to play on the pro tours.

The WTO chairman voiced concern about fair treatment for Peer.

Peer said in a statement to the AP, “I am very disappointed that I have been prevented from playing in the Dubai tournament. I think a red line has been crossed here that could harm the purity of the sport and other sports. I have always believed that politics and sports should not be mixed.”

Unfortunately, Peer is, indeed, a victim here. Nonetheless, one wonders what Peer believes about human rights for Palestinians, victims of her country’s government’s racist policies. What does she think about the fact that Israeli Jews are living on land that they violently dispossessed the indigenous Palestinians of? What does she think of the red line that Israeli Jews crossed when they invaded and slaughtered Gazans?

What has priority: that a person is not barred from playing a game or that Palestinians are not barred from living in peace and dignity? Does justice for Peer, the individual, take precedence over the fate of an entire people? Peer has an opportunity, few people are so meaningfully presented in life, to sacrifice her love of playing tennis to bring attention to the plight of an oppressed people. Her silence about the plight of Gazans and her right to play tennis speak loudly.

Peer was given no reason for the visa rejection. AP speculated that it was connected to “anti-Israel sentiments” in the UAE, “particularly after last month’s three-week war between Israel and Islamic militants in Gaza.” The bias in the AP’s reporting is palpable. According to the AP, it was not antiwar sentiments or pro-Palestinian sentiments. The situation was framed as stemming from “anti-Israel sentiments.” It would be quite something to read about AP reports on “anti-Palestinian sentiments” or “anti-Lebanese sentiments” or “anti-Arabic sentiments” in Israel. The slaughter is described as a war, and it is between “Israel” — a state — and “Islamic militants in Gaza.” It is not a “war” between “Jewish militants” and “Islamic militants.” It would not do to acknowledge Palestine as a state; that is reserved for the apartheid state that was spawned in the Holocaust it wreaked on Palestinians: the Nakba.

The WTO’s Scott enounced, “Sports and politics should not mix and the fundamental principles upon which the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour are founded include open and fair competition to all, regardless of nationality, creed, race, religion, etc.”

“That’s not just a principle that our Tour is founded upon, but I think it is the underlying spirit of international sports in general and therefore I think the ramifications of what happened here ripple well beyond tennis.”

Whenever someone invokes fundamental principles, a lofty, moral stance is conjured. At face value these tennis principles sound fine. But how lofty are these tennis principles? They do not specifically appear in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), all 30 of whose articles the Jewish State, arguably, fails to fulfill.

What is a fundamental principle that favors the tennis playing rights of a woman while a people are slaughtered, even though she is not the slaughterer or that athletes from a nation that is a serial violator of international laws, practices open racism, carries out slow-motion genocide, and commits wanton violations of human rights with impunity are prevented from playing to stop the war crimes?

What takes precedence? Sports are not played in a vacuum. Sports are tightly twined with patriotic sentiments.⁸

The WTA, in consultation with Peer, decided to continue with the tournament to avoid hurting the other players already in Dubai.

It is an often heard refrain that silence equals complicity. Scott said, “She [Peer] didn’t want to see her fellow players harmed the same way she was being harmed.” If only these same sentiments were openly expressed for the long-suffering Palestinian victims of Israel’s war crimes.

1. This principle of not mixing sports and politics does not seem to hold for baseball and US politics. See Kim Petersen, “When It is Okay and Not Okay to Lie to Congress,” Dissident Voice, 11 February 2009.
2. John Leicester, “Dubai tournament risks sanctions over visa denial,” Yahoo, 16 February 2009.
3. ”South Africa: Dock workers solidarity with Gaza,” Green Left, 6 February 2009. “CUPE in Ontario votes to boycott Israel,” CBC News, 27 May 2006.
4. Andy Beckett and Ewen MacAskill, “British academic boycott of Israel gathers pace,” Guardian, 12 December 2002.
5. ”African nations boycott costly Montreal Games,” CBC Sports, 30 July 2008.
6. See Gary Zatzman, “The Notion of the ‘Jewish State’ as an ‘Apartheid Regime’ is a Liberal-Zionist One,” Dissident Voice, 21 November 2005.
7. Saed Bannoura, “Report: Israeli attacks on Palestinian athletes violate Olympic Charter,” IMEMC News, 6 October 2008.
8. See Kim Petersen, “Sports as War,” Dissident Voice, 11 March 2004.

Tajeda’s alleged lies about the steroid usage did not result in one person, and certainly not 1.3+ million people, being killed.

Tajeda’s alleged lie was not a pretext to enable launching an assault on human beings. Moreover, his alleged steroid usage did not result in widespread destruction of another country’s economic infrastructure, hospitals, centers of worship, schools, the ransacking of a country’s historical artifacts, the littering of a country with depleted uranium. It did not result in war crimes being committed with glaring impunity. It did not result in the erasure of habeas corpus, the humiliation and torture of captives, and setting up of gulags around the world. Tajeda did not occupy another person’s land.

Apparently, nowadays when the president and vice-president and their coterie lie to Congress, then everything is kosher.

Unsportsmanlike and deceitful though it is, there is something perverse in considering a lie about seeking an unfair advantage over opponents in a game that causes no direct harm to anyone else a greater crime than the willful destruction of a nation state and its people. That is the logical conclusion flowing from the action against Tajeda and the inaction against George W. Bush and his neocon and Zionist collaborators.

The lies of George W. Bush, a former substance abuser himself, have been exposed. The Downing Street Memos provide sterling evidence that the intelligence and facts were fixed around the administration’s desire to invade Iraq. The alleged existence of weapons-of-mass destruction was just a pretext. Bush’s lies resulted in the excess mortality of over 1.3 million Iraqis, yet he managed to serve out two terms without being brought up for impeachment.

Congress’s double standards in the seeking of justice are manifest. The outstanding crimes of George Bush and his administration stand as a test of Congress and now for president Barack Obama.

What are Obama’s principles? Is justice worth seeking? Does justice apply to everyone?

For justice applied unequally is a denial of justice.

Days before the ceasefire halted the carnage in Gaza city this month, history repeated as Sevilla (Spain) striker Fredi Kanoute raised his shirt after scoring a goal to reveal a shirt that said “Palestine” in multiple languages. Kanoute is not an obscure player. In 2007, he was named African player of the year, even though he was born in France (his family is from Mali).

After earning a £3,000 fine for his political gesture, famed Barcelona coach, Jose Guardiola stood up for him, saying: “The fine is absolutely excessive. If they always banned these type of things, then journalists would not be able to write columns. … Every war is absurd, and too many innocent people have died for us to be fining people for things like this.”

Welcome to 2009, when Israel’s offensive on Gaza, ceasefire or no, is finding expression in the sports world. It’s a development that should give supporters of Israel’s actions in Gaza a great deal of pause.

Kanoute’s actions come on the heels of an event in Ankara, Turkey when the Israeli basketball team, Bnei Hasharon, had to flee the court from what the Associated Press described as “hundreds of fist-pumping, chanting Turkish fans”.

Before the game could begin, angry chants of “Israeli killers!” came down from the crowd, as Palestinian flags appeared in their hands. Then, in a scene that would look familiar to George Bush, off came the shoes, and footwear rained down from the stands (the shoes didn’t hit any players).

A melee then began between 1,500 police officers and Turkish fans, as the fans advanced toward the court. Both Hasharon and the Turkish team Turk Telecom were hurried to the locker rooms where they remained for two hours.

Hasharon forfeited the contest. It says something that Israel found reckoning on the basketball court long before any kind of International Criminal Court.

According to sports historians, a sporting event hasn’t been actually stopped in such a manner — with fans turning the stands into a site of protest — since 25 July 1981, when South Africa’s Springbok rugby team had to cancel a game in New Zealand when fans occupied the field of play to protest apartheid.

Israel has historically been adamant that any comparisons between the Israeli state and South Africa are absolutely false and even antisemitic. Jimmy Carter provoked their outrage of course when he published his book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.

But this parallel, when related to sports, should not be taken lightly. One of the most effective tools against apartheid South Africa was the South African Non-Racialised Olympic Committee, which attempted to use sports as a way to highlight and broadcast the inequities of the South African government. Sports can bring a political spotlight and unwanted attention onto a society like few other forces in the international community, galvanising, attention, passion and, as we saw in Turkey, anger.

Israel hasn’t helped itself in this regard by making sports a target in the war. On 9 January, the IDF bombed Gaza’s Palestine National Stadium. The stadium was also the head of the Palestinian Football Association. The structure was built in 2005 partially with funds from Fifa. The facility will now need to be rebuilt again (in 2006 it was also bombed). It was meant to be a symbol of a Palestinian state, something that united the West Bank and Gaza as an expression of unity. Now it is rubble.

In addition, perhaps fearing a repeat of Ankara, the Israel Football Federation is preventing any club matches from being played in Palestinian towns. As Jimmy Johnson, who works in Jerusalem for the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions told me: “These are not Palestinian clubs from the West Bank, East Jerusalem or Gaza, but for Palestinian citizens of Israel, sometimes called Arab Israelis, who are almost 20% of the population, vote in Israeli elections, etc.”

This has gotten little press in the US, but in the soccer-mad Middle East, it is altogether insult on top of injury.

Sports, which we are told repeatedly represent a sacredly apolitical space, a place to flee the headaches of the real world, has now been thrust into the heart of a conflict raw with politics in a way we haven’t seen in quite some time. Protests against Israeli actions in Gaza are sure to continue in sporting events outside the US. But the ramifications could very easily be felt inside our borders, as political leaders come to the White House and tell the new administration tales of sports fans gone wild.

The three new pinstriped multimillionaires join third baseman Alex Rodriguez, who has a 10-year $275 million contract, and shortstop Derek Jeter, whose 10-year $189 million contract ends in 2010. First baseman Jason Giambi, who won’t be with the Yankees next year, picked up about $23.4 million during the 2008 season. Although the Bronx Bombers bombed this past year, and didn’t even make the playoffs, they are on the fast track to the World Series of Obscene Salaries. They aren’t the only ones in contention.

America pays major league professional athletes far more than even the most efficient long-term factory worker. For the National Football League the minimum wage is $225,000 a year; for Major League Baseball, it’s $390,000; for the National Basketball Association, it’s $442,000. Almost every athlete earns far more than the minimum, with most earning seven-figure incomes, plus endorsements worth another 6- or 7-figure income. Leading all athletes is Tiger Woods, whose team of accountants and business managers had to figure out where to put his $128 million earned in 2008. “Only” $23 million was from playing golf; the rest was from endorsements and business deals.

Although about 70 percent of the 120,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild make less than $5,000 a year, A-list movie stars command at least $10 million a picture. Their worth is based not upon acting ability but upon their B.O. — box office, that is. Prime-time network TV stars grab at least $2 million a year. Charlie Sheen leads the list, with a salary of about $825,000 for each 30-minute episode, about $19 million for the 2008–2009 season, according to TV Guide.

Super models, whose main talent is to be anorexic and have high cheekbones, are pulling in million dollar salaries, with Giselle Bundchen netting a very gross $33 million this year. Kate Moss, Heidi Klum, Adriana Lima, and Alessandra Ambrosio each earned $6–9 million this year, just for modeling. Supermodels average about $70,000 a day. That’s well above the average annual salary of teachers, firefighters, and police officers.

Miley Cyrus, who’s just 16, raked in $25 million this past year, about double what the High School Musical stars each earned in 2008.

If you’re a rapper, it’s hard to be a part of the ’hood if like 50-Cent you earned $150 million this year. Jay-Z, who led the list in 2007, trailed with $82 million. The top 20 rappers each earned at least $10 million, and that’s a lot of scrillah fo’shizzle.

Rush Limbaugh, perhaps radio’s greatest comedian, has a $400 million eight-year contract that will carry his voice on 600 stations through 2016. Far behind are factually-challenged Sean Hannity with a five-year $100 million contract, and Bill O’Reilly, the bloviator-in-chief, who is cashing a measly $10 million a year.

Oprah leads the list of celebrity income — she got about $385 million last year. Every TV celebrity judge makes more than the $208,000 that a Supreme Court justice makes. Leading the pack is Judge Judy, whose screechy shouting on TV earned her about $25 million last year.

The president of the United States, even the most incompetent one, earns $400,000. Compare that to the average salary for each of the Fortune 500 CEOs who earns about $13 million a year, about 400 times more than that of the average worker.

But, it’s the average worker who is the one who actually produces America’s goods, who actually helps other Americans. If life was fair, and people were paid what they were worth, there would be only a very small pay gap between bosses and workers. Here’s some news I think should be published in the new year — but probably won’t be.

* In an exclusive to KBAD-TV, Avarice K. Toadstool, president of Amalgamated Conglomerate Industries, said he will increase the pay of all line workers to at least $175,000 a year. Toadstool also said his company not only will provide full health coverage and college expenses, but will assist the workers to unionize. To pay for the increase, Amalgamated will cut executive salaries, quarterly “retreats,” and stock dividends.

* The federal government today approved the salary cap for all social workers. Although no social worker may now make more than $6 million a year, the base for entry-level social workers was raised to $750,000. Not included in the cap are signing bonuses and work-performance incentives. “We believe in the American philosophy of paying employees by what they’re worth to the advancement of society,” said Hull House director Jane Addams IV, who received a $2.5 million bonus last year for performance in suicide prevention assists, catastrophic disaster relief, and employment reclamation.

* The Humane Society today signed Polly Pureheart to a 10-year $104 million contract, largest in history. “Polly’s a triple-threat terror, and worth every penny we pay her,” said general manager Wolf Greycoat. During a 22-year all-star career, Pureheart is the all-time leader in animal rescue/rehabilitation, arrests for felonious animal cruelty, and lobby influence. Pureheart is personally credited with 1,087 unassisted tackles of recalcitrant legislators.

* The West Wattabago Daily Blab today signed investigative reporter David Bergman to a three-year $17.4 million contract. Bergman, who had been the clean-up hitter with the East Pacoima Tribune the past four years, was granted free agency status in November. During 2007, Bergman led the league in school board meetings coverage and uncovering local political scandals. For each of the past five years, he was a consistent .300 hitter, averaging at least three successes for every 10 news stories he reported.

In a related story, Phillies pitcher Harry Horsehide became the highest paid player in sports when he signed a three-year contract for $108,000 a year. The new contract will mean general admission ticket prices will rise to about $10, with premium seating at $30, according to Phillies management.

The ASG test is marketed toward parents interested in determining their children’s “natural predisposition” towards particular sports. For $149 and a swab of the back of the child’s throat, ASG will search for the presence of the gene named ACTN3. Scientific studies, the company claims, prove that the presence of R577x, a variant on the ACTN3 gene, allows the body to interpret signals from the gene in a manner which predisposes a child for either endurance or endurance and power sports.

According to a recent NY Times article,¹ the primary study supporting the testing was conducted on 429 elite white athletes including 50 Olympians. 50% of the 107 sprint athletes had two copies of the R577x variant. Some 25% of elite endurance athletes also had two copies. Conducting such tests after the fact creates interesting scientific hypotheses. Marketing the conclusions to parents with young children has the potential to place serious limitations on the activities engaged in by young people.

Parents willing to participate have read the test as an opportunity to gain a strategic advantage for their children. Since the test has been marketed to parents with toddler age children, test results could translate into the very early tracking of youth-athletes and the further creation of hyper-competitive youth athletics. This fits the general trend identified by child psychologist Bill Crain who argued that adult pressures to perform in narrowly prescribed ways are increasingly being imposed on children. In his book Reclaiming Childhood, Crain cited a report which documented the concerns six-year old’s held about college admissions.²

One key part of the high-pressure regime comes when adults assume too much control over childhood. For instance, early responses to the ASG test have placed the focus squarely on the positive benefits for parents instead of the consequences for children. Donna Campiglia a 36 year old mother from Boulder, Colorado who supports the test told the NY Times, “I think it would prevent a lot of parental frustration.” Boyd Eply, a former conditioning coach for the University of Nebraska said the test could help, “set realistic goals for you and your children.” Parents, who will ultimately become ASG consumers, are placed at the center of considerations even as test results threaten to narrow children’s life possibilities based on their genetic makeup.

Luckily for children everywhere, the ASG test was not administered to Dustin Pedroia. If genetics determined possibilities, the diminutive Pedroia would certainly have been relegated to the sidelines. In fact, seemingly any other objective measurement including size, speed or style of swing, Pedroia has a long looping swing, could have been used to disqualify him. Thankfully, sports retain many features which transcend genetics such as determination, luck and collaboration. Pedroia made the most of these while producing an AL MVP season with 17 home runs 83 runs batted in 118 runs scored and a .326 average.

For Dustin Pedroia, and every other professional athlete, sports are now a business. He received his monetary reward in the form a six-year $40 million contract. But youth sports should remain something other than a business. Youth sports should not be shaped by “realistic goals” but should create safe spaces for open exploration and development. Young people should be encouraged to enjoy the pleasures of camaraderie without regard for the possibilities of future professional success. Reading future potentials or narrowing activities based on genetic makeup will only allow the marketplace to take a firmer hold on the future. This is the surest road to a spoiled childhood and societal divisions based on genetic makeup.

Our society should be encouraging the next Dustin Pedroia to develop by removing the already existing restrictions on youth sports. Every child should be able to explore a wide variety of activities regardless of wealth or genetics. “Few tragedies,” the late Evolutionary Biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “can be more extensive that the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.”³ ASG is a company dedicated to producing limitations on youth in the name of profit. Let youth be youth and explore every avenue of possibilities. Our society will be the better for doing so.

1. Juliet Macur, “Born to Run? Little Ones Get Test for Sports Gene,” NY Times, Nov. 30, 2008
2. William Crain, Reclaiming Childhood: Letting Children be Children in Our Achievement-Oriented Society, Times Books, 2003.
3. Stephan Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, Norton, 1981.

The NFL is divided into two conferences, the AFC and the NFC. The NFC consists (sort of) of the NFL teams that have been around since 1920. The AFC consists (sort of) of the teams from the old AFL. The AFL was formed in 1959 as a competitor to the NFL, and by 1970 the two leagues were fully merged. The AFL-NFL merger is what produced the Super Bowl.

Currently, the AFC and NFC are further organized into four divisions each: East, West, North, and South. Each division has four teams, for a total of 32 NFL teams. The divisions have been reorganized and renamed over the years; the current alignment has been in effect since 2002.

In 1960, the Dallas Cowboys were formed as an NFL expansion team. At that time, the NFL consisted of 13 teams divided into Eastern and Western conferences with no further divisions. Cowboys’ founding owner Clint Murchison Jr. hired Tex Schramm to be the team’s first general manager.

Schramm, who died in 2003, was the Cowboys general manager for nearly 30 years. Schramm was a marketing genius. He formed the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. He got the Cowboys their yearly Thanksgiving gig.

But the most important thing Schramm did was lobby hard, and successfully, to get the Cowboys into the NFL’s Eastern conference. Originally, the NFL wanted to put the team in the West. But Schramm was driven to get maximum exposure for his team, and he understood that meant getting them into the East.

That wouldn’t have meant anything had the Cowboys not been winners. No one cares about teams that perennially lose. But Schramm didn’t just know marketing, he knew football too. He hired Tom Landry to be the first Cowboys coach. Twenty-nine years later, when Landry was unceremoniously fired by current owner Jerry Jones, he had five Super Bowl appearances and two victories to his credit.

But Jones has been glomming off of Schramm’s achievements. Jones does want to win — something that cannot be said about many sports owners, who don’t care how their teams perform as long as they’re making money. But that’s about where the credit Jones deserves stops.

Jones hired his college buddy Jimmy Johnson to succeed Landry as head coach. Johnson had won a national championship in college football as the head coach of the Miami Hurricanes in 1987. Johnson went on to win two Super Bowls with the Cowboys, and because of these three overall championships, some people have gotten the mistaken impression that Johnson was a great coach.

Tom Landry was a great coach. Johnson was a great motivator and a great evaluator of talent, but not a great coach. At the collegiate level, success is determined not by X’s and O’s, but by recruiting — if you can recruit the talent, you’ll be successful. If you can coach on top of that it’s a bonus, but it’s not required.

In 1989, the Minnesota Vikings made what was arguably the stupidest trade in the history of professional sports — a trade so monumental it has an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to it.¹ The Vikings basically gave their entire complement of draft choices to the Cowboys in exchange for Dallas running back Herschel Walker. With Johnson’s acumen in talent evaluation, he was able to use those myriad picks to build the Cowboys dynasty of the 90s – a team so loaded with talent that even a doofus like Barry Switzer could get it to a Super Bowl.

In 2003, Jones hired legendary NFL head coach Bill Parcells to run the team and stop the bleeding brought on by his own mid-90s mismanagement. Parcells improved the team greatly, but Jones just couldn’t keep his sticky fingers out of the cookie dough, bringing in the talented but obnoxious team-killing wide receiver Terrell Owens against Parcells’ will. Parcells left Dallas to work his magic in the front office of the now-much-improved Miami Dolphins, while current Dallas head coach Wade Phillips presides over a soft team disintegrating into irrelevancy.

Despite all this, the genius wrought by Tex Schramm lives on, and that’s why the Cowboys are football’s most consistently polarizing team. Some fans want to them to win, some want them to lose, but everyone has an opinion. That makes Dallas the NFL’s moneymaker – which makes them the Ass of the NFL. But what’s the relevance of this for left wingers?

Capitalist societies pretend they’re meritocracies. Rich people promote the mythology that we all get what we deserve. Now, plenty of people know this is a load of horse dung, but the mythology is still shoved down our throats from cradle to grave. Why? Well, if it’s true — if we all really do live in a meritocracy as the privileged would have us believe — then none of us have any call to begrudge the rich what they have. They’re rich because they deserve it, and if we don’t like it, then it’s our problem to deal with, and we obviously just need to stop whining and work harder.

Of course, capitalist societies aren’t meritocracies. Most people in them who are rich made their money the old-fashioned way: They inherited it. But this simple truth has to be constantly denied, and to the greatest extent possible people must be diverted from thinking about it and instead fed fairy tales about hard work leading to “success.”

Currently, the Tennessee Titans are the NFL’s only undefeated team at 9-0. Everyone acknowledges them to be the best team in the AFC and one of the two best teams in the league (along with the defending Super Bowl champion New York Giants, who currently sit at 8-1). But when you watch ESPN’s SportsCenter, or listen to national sports talk radio, the story is always the Cowboys. No matter what media outlet it is, they virtually always lead with talk about Dallas.

In a true meritocracy, being 9-0 would count for more than being sexy. The fact that the Titans are a small-market team wouldn’t prevent them from being mentioned first or second on SportsCenter. Tennessee has earned that. Even if they lose the remainder of their games and finish the regular season at 9-7 (an impossibility), as of this writing they’re alone among the ranks of the NFL’s undefeated. Only being the defending champs, as the Giants are, should be able to compete with that.

But we don’t live in a meritocracy. We live in a market-based economy where profits and market share are king. The Dallas Cowboys name alone generates more money in our capitalist society than can the hard work and success of the small-market Titans.

Prior to this season, ESPN ranked the 32 NFL teams based on who has the “best fans.”² Other than the Philadelphia Eagles, ESPN’s top five of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Green Bay Packers, Cleveland Browns, Eagles, and Kansas City Chiefs contain four small media market teams.

But the real rankings (as far as the NFL, its advertisers, and national media outlets are concerned) are those from September by Forbes.com: the NFL team valuations. According to Forbes, the five most valuable NFL teams — which are also the five most valuable franchises in all of U.S. sport — are the Cowboys, Washington Redskins, New England Patriots, Giants, and the New York Jets.³ In case you hadn’t noticed, each of Forbes top five teams plays on the east coast, and three of them (Cowboys, Redskins, Giants) are in the NFC East.

You’ll know we’re living in a good society, or least a better one, when teams get more love for being perfect than they do for simply being worth $1.6 billion.

1. “Herschel Walker trade,” Wikipedia.
2. Matt Mosley, “NFL’s best fans? We gotta hand it to Steelers (barely),” August 29, 2008, ESPN.com.
3. Kurt Badenhausen et. al., “The Business Of Football,” September 10, 2008, Forbes.com.

In the NFL, wide receivers seem to need attention like green plants need sunshine. From New England Patriots wideout Randy Moss (who, to be fair, has settled down since his worst attention-seeking days when he played for the Minnesota Vikings) to Dallas Cowboys pass catcher Terrell Owens, Chad is just carrying on an NFL tradition of getting the TV cameras pointed at him.

Chad is actually a talented football player. He’s not a chump; he really does have game. But he hates playing in Cincinnati. He feels — correctly, as it turns out — that the Bengals organization isn’t committed to trying to field a championship-caliber team. Chad may want attention — and he does — but he also wants to win a Super Bowl. That won’t happen in Cincinnati, and Chad knows it.

Why won’t it happen? Because the Bengals are owned by Mike Brown, who is easily one of the worst owners in professional sports. (I’m an anti-capitalist, pro-pareconist. But I promise not to mention that even one time during the course of this essay.) Brown, the son of the legendary NFL coach Paul Brown, sees his team strictly as a business. He just wants his money.

See, if pro teams in any sport are going to be competitive for championships, then those teams’ owners need to spend money. It is possible for an owner to spend money on enough talent to compete for championships and still make money. But a team that wins cuts into an owner’s profit margin.

There are some owners — like Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft — who do want winning teams and do pay for them. But Mike Brown only starting paying for talent a few years ago (after owning the team for decades) when, thanks to increasing fan outrage over a team nicknamed by ESPN the “Bungles,” the political situation in Cincinnati had deteriorated to the point that Hamilton County officials (which built Brown a shiny new football stadium and handed him the deed a few years earlier) had to lean on Brown to stop his habit of having his team have the lowest payroll in the NFL every year. It got so bad that, at one point, then-NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue even had a sit-down with Brown about it.

So Brown shelled out a few bucks and upgraded the offense. Quarterback Carson Palmer is a legitimate stud, running back Chris Perry might be pretty good, and number-two wide receiver T.J. Houshmandzadeh is pretty good. But despite head coach Marvin Lewis’s defensive background, the defense sucks, and it’ll suck again this year. (Steeler fans can look forward to Pittsburgh winning the AFC North again.)

So against this backdrop, Chad decided last season was enough. He wanted out, and he made that known during the off-season. Now, if you’ve ever seen the movie The Godfather, you know two things: (1) The Godfather, while a very good movie, is a little overrated. (2) Never let personal matters influence business decisions.

All successful businesspeople understand the difference between what’s business and what’s personal. (If only Sonny Corleone had kept that in mind before heading over the causeway…) But while Paul Brown was a genius, his son Mike doesn’t have that problem. Mike Brown is an idiot, and he lets personal matters affect his business judgment. Considering his judgment isn’t that good to begin with, Brown needs all the brain cells working in his favor that he can get.

The Washington Redskins actually wanted to trade for Chad during the off-season. It was rumored that Washington offered Cincinnati a first-round pick and a third-round pick for Chad. If that’s true, it would have been a helluva deal for both teams. But Mike Brown refused to even speak with the Redskins about the trade. He wanted to show Chad who was boss.

Now look, I’m not saying you necessarily have to pull the trigger on that deal if you’re Brown. But if Washington really was offering a first and a third, you at least have to talk to the Redskins about it. That’s what Michael Corleone would have done. (Talk hell — Michael would pulled the trigger on that deal — figurately and literally, putting a bullet through Dan Snyder’s glasses-covered eye after the fact. But I digress…) Mike Brown let it get personal, because he’s a moron. He’s a rich moron. But a moron nonetheless.

Now Chad has gotten revenge. Chad’s self-annointed nickname is “Ocho Cinco.” His jersey number is 85, and since he knows just enough Spanish to be dangerous (since ocho cinco is actually “eight five” in Spanish, not eighty five), he wanted to put ocho cinco on the back of his jersey, in place of his birth name, Johnson. The Bengals said no. The NFL said, under league policy, only last names could go on the backs of jerseys.

Now, there are a lot of things one can fairly say about Chad — but stupid isn’t one of them. He may not be Albert Einstein, but he’s smarter than Mike Brown (okay, okay — that’s not saying much). Look, Chad really is a bright guy. And he’s actually not a bad guy. Unlike Randy Moss (who literally hit a cop with his car when he played in Minnesota) and Terrell Owens (who has made a career out of questioning the sexual orientation of his quarterbacks), Chad has never broken the law. He’s not a drug user, and he’s friendly with the fans. I actually like Chad (I wish I could say the same for the Bengals, but fuck them; I’m a Steeler fan).

Chad legally changed his name from “Chad Johnson” to “Chad Ocho Cinco.” (Haven’t you noticed I’ve been going through this entire piece calling him by his first name?) So now he can put ocho cinco on the back of his jersey.

How will this affect the Bengals? Quite simply, get ready for the return of the Bungles. Chad’s action will destroy what little chemistry the team still had. Chad has killed the team’s chances of winning squat this year. And I, for one, love it. Why? Because Mike Brown is a fuckhead, and he deserves what he’s about to get.

So what in the blue hell does all this have to do with the left? Well, you know that old expression “What goes around…”? How about “You reap what you sow?” Just like Mike Brown is about to get what’s coming to him, so too are the Democrats.

The Democrats and Barack Obama spent the last year shitting and pissing all over their rank-and-file supporters. The details need not be reviewed here. We shouldn’t even be talking about the Republicans right now, except to ask whether it’s going to be a burial or a cremation. But the mealy-mouthed, spineless, corporate-grubbing, and base-screwing-over Democrats are now getting their asses handed to them by one formerly little-known-Governor-turned-rock-star Sarah Palin. The Democrats deserve it. And I’ve got to tell you, I’m laughing my ass off watching it.

I watched a little of McCain and Palin on the stump this evening – or should I say, I watched John McCain gravy-training on the next Vice President. McCain is so obviously just a spectator during his own damn presidential campaign. He should be on his knees every night thanking Palin’s parents for conceiving her. McCain should change his name to American Tourister, because Palin is carrying him like a cheap piece of luggage.

And there’s not a damn thing the Democrats can do about it.

Obama left the Republicans the opening when he fucked his base over. Radical lefties tried to tell Obama, but he wouldn’t listen. Now he’s getting exactly what his arrogance deserves: a one-way ticket to the same mausoleum where the political corpses of Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry are interred.

So long, Barry. It was nice knowing ya. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out…

Fortunately, sportswriter and activist Dave Zirin has written a book that could change this situation. Sports, argues Zirin in his soon to be released A People’s History of Sports in the United States, does not stand outside of politics and its history. Indeed, it is often where the political conflicts of the day are most dramatically played out. And, conversely, it is often the wars resulting from these political conflicts that precipitate the spread of certain games. For example, baseball was popularized during the civil war as soldiers played it during lulls in the fighting and its popularity in the Caribbean and Japan can be traced to US servicemen teaching the conquered locals the game.

Of course, when the history of anything in the United States is discussed, the topic of race and racism will be present. Sports is not only no different, it is arguably the greatest element of that history. From the story of the boxer Jack Johnson, a black man who beat white men with regularity and without regret (and incurred the wrath of the legal system for his efforts), to the heroic pose of 1968 Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos, sports in the US is in large part the story of black men and women overcoming athletic competitors and societal racism. Most of us are familiar with the tale of Jackie Robinson’s entry into the previously all-white Major Leagues. We know about Branch Rickey choosing him not only for his athletic abilities but also because of his inner fortitude. It was a fortitude that enabled him to keep quiet in the face of racist players, fans and towns. What we don’t hear so much about is the anger he could barely contain and the fact that what he went through during his Major League career might very well have caused his death at 53. There are may stories similar to Robinson’s in US sports. Olympic runner Wilma Rudolph is an inspiration to many girls nowadays, but her road to Olympic glory was not easy. Besides overcoming polio, she had to overcome the racist institutions of the US south and the prejudices of Olympic officials.

Appropriately, a good deal of the history Zirin relates occurred during the 1960s. This decade saw sports in the United States begin to take on the role it plays in today’s culture. In other words, the 1960s saw the rise of sports as a multibillion dollar entertainment venue. Those years were also the most contentious US historical period since the period before, during and immediately after the Civil War. Like the Civil War, the primary reason for the fissures split open in the 1960s was the racist treatment of African-Americans. The conflagration of sports’ rise to the top of the entertainment heap and the struggle for black liberation and equal rights created a situation where sports figures became political figures as well. Perhaps none is as well-known as Muhammad Ali. Naturally, Zirin spends a few pages on the boxer and freedom fighter’s story. After all, Ali’s story is not only about sport. It is also about racism, dignity, the nature of imperial war, and the struggle of colonized peoples against their oppressor.

Speaking of the latter, there is no sports photo I can think of that represents that struggle better than the photo of the aforementioned stand by US Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos, their fists raised in defiance and pride. I still recall watching that moment on television back in 1968. My adolescent mind felt a combination of shock and awe. Shock that these men were actually defying the racist powers of Avery Brundage’s International Olympic Committee and awe in the face of their certainty and strength. After seeing that awards ceremony, I knew that I had to do more than just be against racism and the war in Vietnam. I had to do something about it. Zirin’s telling of the circumstances and planning that went into the movement which convinced Smith and Carlos to take the stand in such a way does justice to the men, the history and the action itself.

Writing a history is a complex endeavor. One debates what to include and what to leave out while simultaneously attempting to write something that will reach the largest possible audience. The people’s history is no different. Naturally, there is an acceptance by the author and the reader that any history titled a people’s history is not pretending to be objective like so many standard histories. All history is, after all, partisan. Zirin has composed a wonderfully written, well-researched, and very readable story of US sport and its meaning to the oppressed and those who fight with them against the rulers. Like any sports book, there are stories of glory and prowess. Unlike the standard sports tale, however, these tales of glory are not only about individual struggles but also about the struggles of those individuals on the court and track; in the ball park and in the ring and their meaning to the people from whence the athletes come. A People’s History of Sports in the United States is about the playing field and its role in the struggle for freedom and equal rights. It is about the rulers attempts to keep sport safely in the realm of nationalism and the status quo and the struggle of some athletes to make their efforts much more than that. Zirin makes it clear that it is a also a history that continues to be written.

There’s just one problem with this analogy. We don’t take politics even half as seriously as we do sports.

Imagine turning on ESPN and watching commentators predict the outcome of Sunday’s big game based on who has the most handsome quarterback or whose kicker is cheating on their spouse. Imagine tuning into a commentator on sports radio explaining the chances of one team winning based on the fashion of that team’s uniform or the personality of their coach. To serious sports fans, this kind of analysis would be too much to bear.

Not so in the world of politics. In any given election season, such trivial issues are the rule and not the exception. In fact, superficial coverage has become so commonplace, the average voter is lucky to truly understand the policy stances of any major candidate, much less the independent candidates.

To the sports fan, strategy and performance really mean something. Political strategy, on the other hand, is the art of beating your opponent while avoiding any real performance.

Boxing journalists decry fighters who spend all their time running around the ring, never engaging in any real action. Political pundits, on the other hand, relish in playing the part of a boxing referee who breaks up the action every time any real contact occurs.

While I could go on and on about these differences, it might be more useful to propose a better analogy. Rather than soil the image of our beloved sports, I would suggest it is more appropriate to compare our politics to the world of professional wrestling.

Now I know that I’m not the first person to make this connection. But that may be for good reason. Anyone familiar with this particular field of entertainment can spot the similarities a mile away.

One of the most important parts of a professional wrestling match is the buildup. For many, the trash talk and the antics outside the ring are as much a part of the experience as the fight itself. Wrestlers come out for interviews, displaying great passion and intensity. They throw out all these clever one-liners, and the next day everyone is running around quoting them to their friends.

As in any good show, half the work is in selling the fight. With this in mind, the promoters are looking not just for athletes. They’re looking for professional actors. A successful candidate must be able to convince the public of their worthiness as an opponent and have the charisma to make fans root for them.

While their marketability is the unique personality injected into their lines, the bulk of the script has been written by someone else. While these dressed up warriors may do battle in the ring, they’re ultimately all part of the same acting troupe.

Sound familiar? Well, that’s just the beginning of the analogy.

Political candidates are careful to avoid in-depth policy discussion like wrestlers are careful to avoid serious injury. The finesse in pulling off such moves without getting hurt or tripped up is quite a sight to see.

Honest straightforward answers are sidestepped in the same manner a wrestler stomps on the mat when he’s punching an opponent. Strangely enough, everyone in the audience knows it wasn’t a real punch but goes along just the same.

But is it really that strange? I often wonder if people are most fascinated with the craft of it all. When you think about it, it’s not much different from a stage play. The practice and rehearsing that must go into such skillful deception is all really quite impressive.

In a world where the first and last answer to every question is “let the market sort it out,” politics is a lot like wrestling in that it is all about giving the people what they want. And what, you might ask (or rather our elites have asked), do people want?

Well, at a wrestling event, you may be for someone or you may be against them, but in the end what you really want is a good show. Even if your favorite wrestler didn’t win, you can still go home feeling satisfied.

That, in a sense, is what our democracy has become. The people behind the scenes try to put on a good show, so that if your candidate doesn’t win you can still go home feeling satisfied (or at least pacified) for showing up and taking part.

I know this all may sound very tongue in cheek, but the cynicism in such an analogy is quite warranted. For example, when wrestlers are seen cheating during a match, fans don’t go out and tear up the place because they think it’s unfair. And why? Because it’s all part of the show.

So what happens when you have two consecutive elections where irrefutable evidence of fraud and voter disenfranchisement arises? Not only will the media not cover it, but the very candidates who have a legitimate challenge to the results refuse to even bring it up.

And you wonder why people are so cynical? You wonder why people don’t vote? Well, maybe it’s the same reason why wrestling fans don’t riot in the streets (as testosterone-driven as such matches are) after the champion loses the title. That’s because they know there’s nothing they can do about it. It was all part of the show.

Now am I saying that our democracy is as fake as a professional wrestling match and that all elections are fixed? Absolutely not. But this is where the analogy gets tricky.

Sure, you may not know the outcome in wrestling, but someone does. Moreover, even if the vote was fair in an election, the big winners are already set in stone. And just like in the world of professional wrestling, the big winners are those who sign the checks.

See, even though the people who’ve paid for the campaigns may not necessarily know who’s going to win the election, they still know the outcome. In other words, they know what the public doesn’t know.

When a wrestler gets his hand raised at the end of a match, we all know it’s phony. Indeed, it’s not like we really know anything. We just know we’ve been entertained, and now it’s time to go home.

Likewise, at the end of the election, the feeling is that we’ve all been entertained and now it’s time to go home. The only ones who know that it’s all been phony are those who paid to put on the show.

And by phony, I mean that they understand that when a candidate gets his or her hand raised, that’s not the end of the fight. That’s still part of the buildup. The real fight hasn’t even happened yet. The real fight is what happens after the election (after everyone else has gone home). The real fight is about policy. And I think we all know whose hand usually gets raised at the end of that match.

The problem with the analogy is that a lot of people think of election day as the main event. Yet voting, in a way, is more like buying tickets for which particular fight you’d like to see. Again, the real fight happens after the election. Voting is merely the last part of the buildup to decide who’s even going to be in the fight.

In fact, the winner of the election is more like a judge or referee, primarily there to decide who gets the most points.

The real fight is between those who pay for their salaries and those who pay for their campaigns. And it doesn’t take a political scientist to extrapolate that politicians may not necessarily be in it for the salary.

Again, I’m not suggesting that all of politics is a puppet show. Hell, even wrestlers have the freedom to improvise once in a while. When there are hundreds of policy fights, it’s inevitable that there are going to be many instances in which your elected officials will proudly and accurately represent your best interests. This of course is in their free time when they haven’t been contracted by their promoters to work the fight.

Although I, myself, believe wholeheartedly in voting, I understand why some do not. For the same reason many don’t watch wrestling, they believe the outcome is already decided and see no point in just being part of the spectacle.

Similarly, I know a lot of ordinary voters who dismiss wrestling as folly, unable to grasp why people would sit around making believe they’re watching a real fight. Acknowledging that it’s less messy than actually getting into a real fight, the wrestling fan might counter the voter by asking why he or she is not an activist.

While wrestling is about the spectacle of a fight and not a real fight, some might say that our elections are about the spectacle of democracy and not real democracy.

With no end to the mockery in sight, it’s no wonder why some have lost hope and simply refuse to buy tickets. Neither is it a wonder that others only see hope in tearing up the place.

The one thing I’m certain of is that if we’re ever going to find a new analogy, it’s going to take more than just greater attendance at the ticket booth. If we expect to see real democracy in this country, it’s going to require that we stay after the elections and fight.

One could tell right away that Goldberg didn’t read a book, an article, even a fortune cookie, about the 1968 Olympics before whipping out his laptop. I know, research is hard … and who needs facts when you have dogma? — but Smith and Carlos never advocated any kind of violence. Furthermore, they saw their symbol as a sign of resistance that would connect broadly across ethnicities, not a narrow expression of “black power.”

But the title turns out to be the intellectual summit of the piece.

Goldberg writes, “The stench of self-congratulation surrounding ESPN’s decision [to honor Smith and Carlos] is thicker than the air in a locker room after double overtime. The argument that Smith’s and Carlos’ critics must dine on their denunciations rests on an inch-deep nostalgia and the triumph of celebrity culture.”

Note that Goldberg doesn’t mention a word about why Smith and Carlos made their
stand and why his intellectual forbearers “must dine on their denunciations.” Smith and Carlos wanted South Africa and Rhodesia banned from the 1968 Games because of their apartheid politics. They demanded more black coaches in sports. They sought to hold Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, accountable for what many black athletes thought to be a barely concealed racism. They wanted Muhammad Ali to have his heavyweight boxing title restored after it was stripped because of Ali’s refusal to fight in Vietnam. Goldberg never makes clear if he even knows this history. I’m guessing no.

And yet he continues:

“In today’s culture, is it even worth trying to remind people that the black power salute was, for those who brandished it most seriously, a symbol of violence — rhetorical, political and literal — against the United States? It was the high-sign for a racist militia, the Black Panthers, which orchestrated the murder of innocents and allied itself with America’s enemies.”

This is little more than an ugly screed against the Black Panthers. They were popular in their day not because they were a “racist militia” but because they were seen as standing up to racism. They armed themselves to challenge police brutality. They set up breakfast programs and health clinics in neighborhoods dying of neglect. They were popular enough that J. Edgar Hoover called them “public enemy number 1″ and set out a plan to kill their leaders and destroy their organization. There are many reasons to raise criticisms of the Panthers but not by someone who seems to have done little more than read the David Horowitz Cliff Notes on the subject. And I have to ask, what the hell is a “high sign”? Is that Goldberg trying to be “down”? I’d love to see a reality show where he is dropped in South East DC and has to find his way home. I think he’d starve to death

Jonah continues:

“But even a more benign view of the salute shouldn’t obscure the intense contradictions of ESPN’s decision to honor Carlos and Smith. Both men were members of the Olympic Committee for Human Rights, which wanted a complete black boycott of the ‘68 Olympics. The committee considered an entire generation of heroic black athletes “including Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson — to be Uncle Toms.”

Here we have an error followed by a lie. Their organization was called the Olympic PROJECT for Human Rights, not the “committee.” (A Google search would have cleared that up. Once again, research is hard.) And it is a lie is that they called out Jackie Robinson as an Uncle Tom. The truth is that Robinson supported OPHR.

As Robinson said, “I do support the individuals who decided to make the sacrifice by
giving up the chance to win an Olympic medal. I respect their courage. We need to understand the reason and frustration behind these protests… it was different in my day perhaps we lacked courage.”

As for Jesse Owens, they 1968 Olympians were angry with him because he worked with Avery Brundage to undermine their protest both publicly and privately. Owens came to regret his actions this, writing an entire book in 1972 called “I Have Changed.”

But let’s turn back to Jonah. It gets “better.”

“Another important distinction that should matter is that this was 1968, not 1938. By the end of the 1960s, the United States had seen two decades of steady — if too slow — racial progress. The black power vision of an irredeemably “racist Amerikkka” was all but blind to the desegregation of the military, the accomplishments of Owens and Robinson, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and even 1968. One hopes ESPN disagrees with those views as well.”

It’s as if Dan Quayle learned how to type. Does Goldberg have even a basic knowledge of American history? Does he really think black people were feeling good about the USA in 1968? Did he hear about that guy who got shot in Memphis that year? Dr. Martin Luther Somebody? And when he was shot how there were riots in every major city in the country? Did he know that Smith and Carlos were profoundly affected by this, wondering how they could represent a country that could breed such hate? Where did Goldberg grow up? Mayberry?

Jonah concludes,

“But the question is not, and never has been, whether the Olympic ideal can be achieved but whether it should be pursued. By embracing those who spat on that idea, it seems ESPN thinks the answer is no.”

Sigh. Smith and Carlos weren’t spitting on anything. They were challenging the hypocritical ideals of an Olympics that welcomed apartheid nations, employed a paucity of African American coaches, and had an open white supremacist, Avery Brundage, at its helm. Once again, Goldberg simply makes no effort to engage with the actuality of that moment. He never mentions the flood of hatred and death threats Smith and Carlos brought upon themselves. He could care less about the toll it took on their families, their friends, and their pocket books. Jonah Goldberg, like some kind of dull-witted, dime store propagandist, can only unleash a one-dimensional hateful diatribe on a period and moment that he simply doesn’t understand.

But I have to admit there is a small part of me that took great satisfaction in seeing this column. It demonstrates that after 40 years, the audacious gesture of Tommie Smith and John Carlos still holds the power to upset the bullies, the dullards, and the scoundrels. It still holds the power to upset all the right people.

4. The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practising sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play. The organisation, administration and management of sport must be controlled by independent sports organisations.

5. Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.¹

It is well known that the International Olympics Committee has over the years been a aristocratic club, where royalty could hobnob with other dignitaries. Originally the selection of wealthy IOC members was purportedly because they would be above corruption to money. But some IOC members are not above corruption, as the 2002 Olympic Winter Games scandal revealed.²

With the corporatization of the Olympics, money has flowed and the attraction for some IOC members to accept bribes has grown.³

At the very least it might be expected that the elitist circle of IOC members might respect the hard training of athletes in preparation for the Olympics. It seems, however, that preserving the perks and prerogatives of the exclusive IOC club members trumps the dedicated effort of athletes.

The IOC has banned Iraqi athletes from competing reportedly because of the Iraqi government’s “political interference” in sports.

CCN reports the ban is because of an Iraqi government decision in May to suspend the nation’s Olympic Committee and form a temporary committee to handle its duties.⁴

The Iraqi government thought the committee had not been operating properly and as a result undermined the sporting movement there.

The Iraqi government complained that the original Iraqi IOC committee had been holding meetings without a quorum and had officials, many residing outside Iraq, serving over five years in one-year posts.

According to IOC spokeswoman Emmanuelle Moreau, Iraq was suspended it removed elected officials and installed people the IOC wouldn’t recognize.

Whatever the reason in the dispute between the Iraqi government and the IOC, the IOC has chosen to penalize athletes innocent in this matter. Where is the Olympic spirit in this?

The IOC is violating its own Olympic Charter. It is denying what it maintains is a human right: “the practice of sport.” These athletes have qualified for the games, and yet they are banned to practice their sport for no wrongdoing on their part.

The Olympic Charter also holds that there must be no “discrimination with regard to a country.” But seven athletes are being banned because they are from Iraq.

Is this the Olympic spirit of friendship, solidarity, and fair play?

1. International Olympic Committee, “Fundamental Principles of Olympism,” in Olympic Charter: In force as from 7 July 2007.
2. Six members of the IOC were expelled for accepting bribes over the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. “The Olympics Industry,” PBS, 19 February 1999.
3. Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, Inside the Olympic Industry: Power, Politics, and Activism (SUNY Press, 2000): 60.
4. “Iraq banned from Summer Olympics,” CNN, 24 July 2008.

David Zirin:When did you become a sports fan?

Ralph Nader: I was really taken by Lou Gehrig when I was a little boy because of his demeanor and his stamina. Remember, he played in over 2,000 consecutive games at that time, which was since eclipsed by Cal Ripken. But you know how everyone has a sports hero when they’re a boy? This one really stayed with me. The concept of stamina and persistence. And it turned me into a Yankees fan.

DZ: Persistence is a word that a lot of people associate with you in your public life. Is Gehrig an inspiration in this regard?

RN: Oh, most definitely. There’s only one picture in my office on the wall, only one: Lou Gehrig.

DZ: When did you realize that League of Fans was a project you wanted to be involved in?

RN: Well, actually there’s a precursor. We had a fans’ group in the 1970s that put out a very probing newsletter. The idea then was how fans are being ripped off; they had no voice; they had no organized role. They were being overcharged. They were being subjected to blackouts in their hometown for example, if the stadium didn’t sell out. This was also the beginning of a move for tax-funded stadiums and ballparks. There were really quite a lot of issues. We had 1,000 dues-paying members, but we couldn’t get it beyond that. But my desire was to have fans organize–because after all, they’re consumers. They’re consumers at the service of mammoth sports enterprises that have antitrust exemptions, that have all sorts of tax-depreciating rights for their players.

I mean, it’s almost a mint to produce money. They gouged the fans as consumers; parking, food, tickets, and they gouged them as taxpayers too. So it was really a composite situation that is replayed throughout the economy between large corporations and consumers. Since, as sports fans, we’re very, very clever and understanding of the rules of the game, the strategies and the players, and…know the history of the players and teams and [are] loyal to the teams, I said, “Imagine if voters did their homework, and imagine if voters had that kind of tactical and strategic sense. Imagine voters who rooted for rookies–if voters wanted to give new candidates a chance to play on the field. So we started leagueoffans.org, and once again we came up with all kinds of needs to organize fans–especially to oppose tax-funded stadiums while clinics, libraries and schools were crumbling in the same cities for lack of public investment.

There was over $600 million dollars spent to build the new Washington Nationals’ baseball stadium, but if you look around Washington, DC, you see schools crumbling, clinics–the usual urban deterioration. And not enough recreational facilities for youngsters so they can engage in participatory sports, not just spectator sports.

DZ: That’s one thing that sticks in my craw too: the sports industry loves to create passive consumers, when in theory, sports is about active participation.

RN: That’s why the sports pages in the newspaper should be called the spectator sports pages. Because they don’t cover participatory sports: amateur sports, amateur leagues, what’s going on at the local playgrounds or any effort to promote activity and competition.

DZ: Presidential candidates frequently talk of a “patients’ bill of rights” or “passengers’ bill of rights.” What would a fans’ bill of rights include? What items would you include in relation to this often abusive relationship between sports owners and fans?

RN: One is in any tax-supported sports facility, the fans should become shareholders. Because they’re tax payers. The stadium and ballpark should be called “Taxpayer Stadium,” not some sold-off brand name, or some bank, or computer company…

DZ: Like [the former home of the Houston Astros] “Enron Field”?

RN: Yeah, right! But more important than that, there should be organized fans’ groups that can sit at the table. Anything that intersects public policy with the sports teams, the fans have got to have representatives at the table. Yankee Stadium is now going to be demolished. Imagine demolishing Carnegie Hall! The new Yankee Stadium is going to be built with heavy–not total–taxpayer money, although the Yankees want another $350 million in tax-free bonds to be issued, and the mayor is apparently supporting that.

Anyway, they took over a twenty-acre park, a very important park in the neighborhood, with beautiful trees. The trees have all been cut down and the stadium is going to be built in that park. The residents were promised four or five little parks in the neighborhood that would be refurbished. Well, now there’s a two-year delay, and it’s not clear that there’s enough money, that the city has enough money to do it. There’s enough money to build the stadium; that part of the deal was secure, but not the trade-off. The fans and the neighborhood were never there. The fans were never consulted and the taxpayers were never consulted. So a fans’ bill of rights really means that there are players at the table. If the food and tickets and parking are going sky-high, the fans should be in on this. The moment a tax dollar touches a stadium, the fans, the taxpayers, the neighborhood, they’ve got to be given a voice; and that includes the right to take the city and the sports team to court intending to sue.

DZ: You’ve actually been in the sports pages a lot recently in regard to a 2002 playoff game between the Sacramento Kings and the Los Angeles Lakers. Something occurred during the game that really troubled you. What was it?

RN: The worst performance by referees I’ve ever seen! The Kings were up three to one–here’s this upstart, small-market team against the giant Lakers big-market, Lakers were favored three-to-one. They were in the sixth game, they could have won the championship. The referees called something like twenty-seven fouls in the fourth quarter against the Sacramento Kings and didn’t call fouls–egregious fouls–against the Lakers. For example, Kobe Bryant elbowed Mike Bibby in the face, Bibby fell, was bleeding, went to the sidelines. Everyone saw it; no foul against Kobe. So the suspicion arose of the referees being company referees–after all, they were selected by David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA to officiate in the playoff games. Basically, it was really good for the league financially to throw it into the seventh game. Well, the seventh game went to the Lakers, and the Lakers won the championship.

Now, nobody could prove this–there was no directive, no secret e-mail, no wink by David Stern. There didn’t have to be. So is it just a case of massive, sudden incompetence, that favored one team, or is it something else to earn more revenue for the league by throwing it into the seventh game? Well, maybe we’ll never know, but it was massive incompetence. Why didn’t David Stern–who I spoke to on the phone after I sent him this objecting letter… he’s cordial but very imperious if you can believe the combination. He spoke like he was head of a corporate dictatorship.

The NBA is a corporate dictatorship. Once the contracts, however lucrative, are signed with the players it’s dictatorship-land. There is a provision in the contracts with the players called the “antidisparagement provision” where they give up their free-speech rights. So if they complain publicly or criticize a referee or David Stern, they can be fined five-thousand, ten, fifty, a hundred thousand dollars! Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks has already paid $1.5-plus million in fees, in penalties. Now, the government can’t fine you for free speech. Most corporations can’t fine you–they can fire you, but they can’t fine you if you speak your mind. So my recommendation is the following: I understand that it’s very disruptive while the teams are actually playing each other during the season to have people spouting off about managers, coaches, players against players and so on. But the anti-disparagement clause should stop after the season, and there should be a free speech period in the off-season so that any potential cover-ups can be exposed.

DZ: With all of the other problems in the world right now, why focus on the world of sports?

RN: There are much more serious problems affecting people in our country, in our community and in our world, to be sure. But people deserve a sanctuary where they can trust what’s going on is going to be based on the merits and not influence-peddling or shenanigans of various sorts, and that’s sports. One reason people are attracted to sports is because things happen on the merits. Teams win or lose on the merits of their players and coaches and managers. When that trust is betrayed, you can see that there’s a real letdown among the fans.

It’s more than just a psychological letdown. It’s like, “Oh no! This stuff is happening here too? Where will it all end?” If we want to build trust, sports is a good place to do it. But with the commercialization of giant sports conglomerates, you’re not going to see that any time soon without strong fan organizations, like the League of Fans, to inspire around the country.

Woods is a trailblazer and already a legend for his ability to perform when the spotlight is at its hottest. But he has also established a reputation for reticence when confronted with the real world off the greens. For all his cultural capital, Woods has refused to take stands on issues that should hit close to home, such as restricted golf courses, or even when the Golf Channel’s Kelly Tilghman suggested young PGA players “lynch him in a back alley” in a “joke” about how they might overcome his dominance. Tiger has largely maintained the tight-lipped silence of a Benedictine monk.

After the lynching comment, ESPN’s Scoop Jackson became so frustrated with this disciplined quietude he wrote, “Because of who he is, Tiger Woods has the power to make people listen. Not just hear his words–but embrace what he has to say…. It’s a stand he needs to take because people who change the world eventually have to take stands. Whether strong or silent, good or evil, they take stands not to prove their beliefs, but to rectify a situation or condition.”

His defenders have always said that behind the scenes Woods has been an agent for change, and that he shouldn’t be criticized just because he does his good deeds without media fanfare. They say he wields that influence through his nonprofit Tiger Woods Foundation. Go to the website, and a virtual Woods walks right onto your screen and welcomes you to a place where “kids can achieve anything.” The site boasts: “more than 10 million young people have benefited from the Tiger Woods Foundation since its inception in 1996. What started out with limited access throughout America, now reaches out to young people around the world.”

Yet now the Foundation is “reaching around the world” in a way that has human rights activists concerned about a business partnership that smells like sulfur.

The Tiger Woods Foundation has entered into an extensive five-year partnership with Chevron Corporation, with the oil and energy giant becoming the title sponsor of the Tiger Woods Foundation World Challenge Golf Tournament.

“Chevron has a track record and a commitment to bettering the communities where they operate,” Woods said in a press release on April 3. And Chevron’s executive vice president chimed in, “Chevron, Tiger and the Tiger Woods Foundation share similar values…as well as a deep commitment to make a difference in local communities.”

They have certainly “made a difference in local communities,” but it’s nothing they should be bragging about, and certainly nothing with which Woods should want his name attached. Chevron is in full partnership with the Burmese military regime on the Yadana gas pipeline project, the single greatest source of revenue for the military, estimated at nearly $1 billion in 2007, nearly half of all the country’s revenue. These are the same people who are blocking international aid workers from assisting the victims of Cyclone Nargis. The death toll has been estimated at 78,000, but this number can explode as disease spreads and help isn’t allowed through the military lines. Even the US State Department has called the actions of the government “appalling.”

Ka Hsaw Wa, co-founder and executive director of EarthRights International, wrote in an open letter to Woods, “I myself have spoken to victims of forced labor, rape, and torture on Chevron’s pipeline–if you heard what they said to me, you too would understand how their tragic stories stand in stark contrast to Chevron’s rhetoric about helping communities.” ERI’s request to meet with Woods or someone from the foundation has been met with silence

But while the Burmese junta’s crimes are localized in Southeast Asia, Chevron is global. Lawsuits have been issued against Chevron’s toxic waste dumping in Alaska, Canada, Angola, California. Then there’s the matter of 18 billion gallons of toxic waste the company has been accused of dumping in the Amazon.

In a US District Court in San Francisco, the case of Bowoto v. Chevron, Nigerian plaintiffs have accused Chevron of actually arming and outfitting Nigerian oil security forces to shoot and kill protesters. Judge Susan Illston has refused to dismiss the case because, as Democracy Now! recently reported, “evidence show[s] direct links to Chevron officials.”

When pressed for comment, Tiger Woods Foundation President Greg McLaughlin issued this statement to me: “The Foundation’s vision is to help young people reach their full potential. All our partners share in this vision, allowing us to make a positive impact in millions of young lives.” That response, to very serious and very direct charges, is the golf equivalent of a triple bogey.

President McLaughlin should think more seriously about what Chevron is and what they do: they pollute, they destroy, they conspire with dictators, and heaven help anyone who gets in their way. Now they want to burnish their “brand” by partnering with Tiger Woods. Tiger’s late father Earl, once said of his son, “He will transcend this game… and bring to the world… a humanitarianism… which has never been known before. The world will be a better place to live in… by virtue of his existence… and his presence.”

The partnership with Chevron makes a mockery of Earl Woods’s hopes.

To use an analogy from a different sport, the ball is now in Tiger’s court. Will he allow himself to be tamed by corporate interests, or will he roar?

The Impact on Communities Coalition, the Pivot Legal Society and the Carnegie Community Action Project, with the help of Professor Michael Byers and student Mike Powar, are arguing that the specific articles of the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights have been violated by Canada and its obligations to provide the human right to adequate housing.

In essence, neo-liberal policy-making, without effective public policy intervention, directly violates human rights—in this case, the right to adequate housing.

Early on during the Olympic bidding process, games organizers and government partners made promises that evictions would not occur in the inner-city neighbourhoods. Concerns were raised as early as August of 2001 that evictions similar to Expo 86 would occur when a thousand people were evicted during the World’s Fair.

A plebiscite on the Olympics passed with 64% support in 2003 largely due to assurances that Vancouver would host the first socially sustainable Olympic Games.

A vaguely worded Inner-City Inclusive Commitment Statement was signed but did not include specific numbers despite the protestations of community groups at the time.

After the Bid Corporation morphed into VANOC after Vancouver won the bid in 2003, no civil society representatives were appointed to its Board. After several years of piecemeal attempts at consultation, VANOC’s own housing table recommended building 3,200 units of social housing and closing tenancy loopholes which were allowing long-term low-income tenants in Single Resident Occupancy hotel housing to be evicted easily.

As the rapid pace of gentrification resulted in dilapidated property quadrupling and quintupling in value in a few short years, it placed low-income inner city residents at risk. City Hall and the provincial government turned down requests to place a moratorium on SRO conversions.

Since the Olympic bid process began, over 1,000 units of affordable SRO housing units have either been converted to other uses or shut down permanently. This imperfect housing stock often times represents the housing of last resort for low-income people. Furthermore, the increase in property values has now led owners to move to double-bunking in some 10 foot by 10 foot rooms, often infested with bedbugs. Though this is not illegal, it raises serious public health concerns in a neighbourhood with third world health indicators.

In an October 2007 visit by UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, Miloon Kothari stated, “You have in government a legacy of misguided policy decisions which have led to this massive crisis in housing and homelessness. We didn’t hear this in other places—the decrepit nature of SROs, the conditions of the buildings that people are living in, the very poor health. As has been the case throughout our visit, I was repeatedly struck by the contrasts in such a beautiful city. Because there has been so much investment, it is striking that a few blocks from million dollar condominiums there is such immense poverty.”

In a January 2008 visit to Vancouver by Dr Kris Olds, a member of the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions Advisory Committee on hallmark events, said, “These events magnify existing development paths, they are implicated, but they are not the only factor. They are a key acceleratory mechanism to spurring on change, particularly since the 1970s. There is clear evidence that they have played a role in generating evictions from place to place. Is it the only force? No, but an event of this magnitude does play a role, it is implicated, absolutely.”

Despite forwarding the recommendations from COHRE’s June 2007 report on hallmark events, no level of government has taken initiative or leadership in a way that is changing the facts on the ground. Despite the province’s purchase of 17 SRO hotels, their inability to close tenancy eviction loopholes leave open the reality of economic displacement in the housing of last resort. It is this housing stock that is the essence of the human rights complaint.

The idea that the poorest, most elderly and most vulnerable people are being thrown out into the street as a result of property speculation, aided by the hype of the pre-Olympic environment, is an embarrassing footnote to the first “socially sustainable Olympic Games.”

The Toronto-based Wellesley Institute released a report card in early February which raised the issue of growing housing inaffordability—a leading cause of evictions and homelessness. Renting costs outpaced renter incomes in six of the 10 provinces. There are estimated to be between 200,000 to 300,000 homeless people in Canada.

Nations such as Canada that sign on to optional treaty protocols such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights often invoke the term “progressive realisation” to justify the time lag between domestic policies meeting international standards. Scott Leckie of the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions has written that progressive realisation is used as “an escape clause from the obligations generated under the Covenant.”

Canada, along with other G-8 countries, has openly worked within the international system to deny a complaint mechanism on optional human rights protocols related to economic, social and cultural rights.

The Maastricht Guidelines on Violations of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights contend that, “As in the case of civil and political rights, States enjoy a margin of discretion in selecting the means for implementing their respective obligations … the burden is on the state to demonstrate that it is making measurable progress toward the full realization of rights in question. The State cannot use the ‘progressive realisation’ provisions in Article 2 of the Covenant as a pretext for non-compliance.”

Canadian law professor Craig Scott has written, “Canadian governments have long invoked averages and medians as adequate accounts of the state of human rights enjoyment in Canada, thereby showing how little understanding (or sincere attempt to understand) there is of the very nature of human rights. … That Canadians on average are not homeless, on average have adequate nutrition, on average go to adequate schools, or on average raise their children in a dignified way says nothing at all about whose human rights are being respected and whose are being violated.”

The federal government has been cutting housing policies since the early nineties. In 1993, the government cancelled funding for new co-ops and non-profit housing and capped its expenditures at two billion dollars annually, according to the Wellesley Institute.

As IOC head Jacques Rogge rolled in to Vancouver a few months earlier in 2008, he effusively praised VANOC for its socially sustainable legacy. Despite little or no opportunity for civil society organizations to be at the table, despite the obvious gentrification and displacement being exacerbated by the Olympic project, the head of the IOC had the audacity to praise’ VANOC.

Public relations and marketing have trumped reality in pre-Olympic Vancouver.

VANOC turned down requests for a $1 homelessness levy to be charged on Olympic tickets and merchandising that would be matched by the provincial and federal governments. VANOC and government partners turned down their own housing table’s recommendations of building 3,200 units. They have pointed fingers at one another as people get evicted from the inner-city virtually every month. It takes a lot of people working in unison to produce the sheer inertia of this unprecedented incompetence.

Added to that, an uncritical pre-Olympic media environment has distorted Vancouver’s public sphere in a way that has delegitimized critical discussion of the issues and forced many mainstream civil society organizations from publicly expressing their criticism for fear of losing their funding.

Rather than invite civil society organizations to the table, VANOC has shown an arrogant, fortress-like approach to community engagement.

There are 200,000-300,000 people expected to come to Vancouver in 2010 where there are only 27,000 hotel rooms. Even with homestays and cruise ships, that will still leave thousands of spaces still unaccounted for and will place pressure on the existing rental market. Without government intervention, a few thousand people will likely be evicted.

There is not one person at VANOC or any level of government that has addressed this question in a public way. Even calls for temporary legislation to protect tenants have been spurned.

The UN complaint is a strong and damning indictment of Vancouver’s pre-Olympic housing environment and the use of the term “social sustainability” as a marketing and public relations term by VANOC.

Instead, the journey has been a public relations apocalypse, and an obstacle course for unsuspecting athletes and dignitaries, confronted by an international gauntlet of agitators. In France, police alongside Chinese security officers had to use tear gas to keep protesters at bay and officials had to extinguish the torch five separate times. In London, 37 people were arrested trying to impede the torch. In San Francisco last Wednesday, thousands turned out to demonstrate, which led to a bizarre situation where the torchbearers ran a few yards, disappeared into a warehouse, and then reappeared on a city bus. This isn’t the esteemed expedition of the torch. This is Planes, Trains, and Automobiles go to the Olympics.

China has blamed the protests on “a few Tibetan separatists.” That would be news to the protester Charles Altekruse, who as a member of the U.S. Olympic rowing team, was forced to sit out the 1980 Moscow Games because of the U.S. boycott. “Today, my voice is the voice for thousands of people whose voices cannot be heard,” said Altekruse, who lives not in Lhasa, but Berkeley.

China’s recent crackdown on Tibet has opened a view on a host of abuses throughout the Chinese mainland, as well as the complicity of the International Olympic Committee and the West embedded in every abuse: the 2 million people displaced for Olympic facilities, the violation of labor standards so Western nations have an endless army of cheap labor, mass jailing of dissidents who dare to complain, and the environmental degradation of the country.

But the protests have been also aimed at the IOC and their efforts to shamelessly promote China’s titanic economy. Juliana Barbassa of the Associated Press could not have been clearer writing, “The torch’s global journey was supposed to highlight China’s growing economic and political power.”

IOC president Jacques Rogge lamented the protests, saying that the journey of the torch was supposed to be “a Journey of Harmony, bringing the message of peace to the people of different nationalities, cultures and creeds.” Would that it were.

The first torch run was actually the brainchild of Dr. Carl Diem, the organizer of Adolf Hitler’s 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He convinced Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, that 3,422 young Aryan runners should carry burning torches along the 3,422 km route from the Temple of Hera on Mount Olympus to the stadium in Berlin. The event would be captured by the regime’s filmmaking prodigy, Leni Riefenstahl, and broadcast over radio.

In fact, Rogge’s dream that the torch be a symbol of “peace, harmony and global unity” is reminiscent of Hitler’s own words in 1936. “Sporting chivalrous contest,” Hitler proclaimed before the torch’s inaugural lighting, “helps knit the bonds of peace between nations. Therefore, may the Olympic flame never expire.”

As Chris Bowlby wrote for BBC News, “…it was planned with immense care by the Nazi leadership to project the image of the Third Reich as a modern, economically dynamic state with growing international influence.”

China today, with the IOC’s backing, wanted the torch to travel through the nations of Western Europe and the United States, as well as Tibet, as a way to spread the gospel of China’s global reach. In 1936, Diem also planned the route with political considerations in mind. The torch was carried exclusively through European areas where the Third Reich wanted to extend its reach.

When the flame made its way through Vienna, it was accompanied by mammoth pro-Nazi demonstrations. Two years later, Austria would be annexed.

Today, without question, there are people with dubious motives calling for a boycott of the Summer Games. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has hedged on attending even though Britain’s Olympic Committee has already laid down the law that its athletes are forbidden from any political acts on Chinese soil. The reptilian Sen. Hillary Clinton has said President Bush should boycott, even though she and her husband in the 1990s fought to make China a part of the World Trade Organization, and repeatedly granted China Most Favored Nation trade status. Barack Obama just joined Clinton in the “me too” chorus to see who can blame China for the ecoomic maladies facing the U.S. Republican Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan lamented in a commentary that President Bush and the Republican Party is “coddl[ing] Communist China.”

None of these critics existed before people started protesting. And none of them will refrain from doing business with China in the future.

Protesters have held a light to the present hypocrisy of the Olympic torch. In expressing concern about the San Francisco protests, USOC President Peter Ueberroth said, “The only concern is our reputation as a country.” Perhaps, as this debacle runs its course, Ueberroth should be more concerned with the reputation of the International Olympic Committee and the quadrennial orgy of sporting nationalism and corporate greed.