This will be the last column I write about the major league baseball team Arizona Diamondbacks in the foreseeable future. For me, they do not exist.
They will continue to not exist in my mind as long as the horribly named anti-immigrant “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act”, signed into law on April 23, remains on the books in Arizona.
This law has brought echoes of apartheid to the state.
Dave Zirin
The February 19 Tiger Woods press conference was an exercise in self-abasement that will achieve the opposite of its intended effect. I haven’t seen anything this painfully scripted since The Phantom Menace.
In our 5000-channel, Tweeting, shouting culture of constant distraction, there are precious few annual events that unite the US national gaze. In fact, there is really only one: the Super Bowl.
During the Bill Clinton impeachment idiocy of 1998, many on the left said if Clinton were removed from office, let it be for gutting welfare or for imposing sanctions on Iraq, and not l’affair Lewinsky.
All Brandon Marshall wanted was the opportunity to be part of the moment.
Ever since Andrew Johnson welcomed the New York Mutuals to the White House in 1867, presidential politics has exploited professional sports. Its a foolproof way for politicians to show voters they enjoy competition, fair play and are salt-of-the-turf Americans.
Witness the massive padlock, tightly hugging its doors. That will tell you all you need to know about Hurricane Gustav and the federal US government’s carefully orchestrated response.
Go Red for China! was the slogan unveiled on the Chinese mainland by Pepsi-Cola, whose ubiquitous blue can will, for a limited time, be red.
Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano once stated about US domination of Latin America: Marines shouldered bats next to their rifles when they imposed imperial order in a region by blood and fire. Baseball then became for the people of the Caribbean what baseball is to [them].
In a world where the mainstream media riddles dumbed-down news reportage with inane sports metaphors, sometimes it takes sports to remind us of the gravity of the actual news.
Almost four decades later, the image can still make
hairs rise on unsuspecting necks. Its 1968, and 200-metre gold medalist Tommie Smith stands next to bronze winner John Carlos, their raised black-gloved fists smashing the sky on the medal stand in Mexico City. They were Trojan Horses of Rage bringing the Black revolution into that citadel of propriety and hypocrisy: the Olympic games. When people see that image, their eyes are drawn like magnets toward Smith and Carlos, standing in black socks, their heads bowed in controlled concentration.
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