Dave Zirin | The Nation

Today's Tiger Woods press conference was an exercise in painful self-abasement that will achieve the opposite of its intended effect. I haven't seen anything this painfully scripted since the Phantom Menace. The same George W. Bush media advisers who gave us Mission Accomplished were hired by Tiger to present the world with Emission Regretted.

There are right now two kinds of people on earth. Those who would die happy if they never hear the name of Tiger Woods again and those who want their pound of flesh. The people sick of the Tiger Woods drama could care less about his marriage, his personal life, and today's awkward, scripted statement. Those who want their pound of flesh, are itching for Tiger to do the stations of the tabloid-cross: Oprah, tears, and "humility." "He owes us an apology," they say. What they don't say is that an uncomfortable part of this is as American as apple pie: a prurient obsession with black male sexuality – particularly those African American men involved with sports. From boxer Jack Johnson to Tiger Woods, a sex scandal is never so juicy as when black men are at the center of it.

Tiger tried today, but the day's carefully scripted message served to satisfy neither those sick of this story nor people who like their reality television in-the-raw. Tiger spoke repeatedly and vaguely about "never repeating the mistakes I made" and "running through the boundaries of acceptable behavior." I'm sure he believes he humbled himself, but the chum is now officially in the water. The chum stinks to the haters and just makes the fanatics hungrier.

But both sides don't get the central dynamic of today's Seinfeld-like press conference (it was about nothing). This is about brand rehabilitation for the first billion dollar athlete. This was about game-planning to get Tiger back on the course for the Masters in April. Apologies were forthcoming for Tiger's business partners, as well as the people who "work for me" at Tiger Woods, inc.

Now he returns to the "sexual addiction clinic in Mississippi" (to help those wealthy men who get caught with their pants down. Men who aren't caught need not apply).

The sad truth is that Tiger Woods the man clearly wanted to get up and say, "I publicly apologize to my wife and family who I have publicly humiliated. To everyone else, it's none of your business." That might have felt right to the Tiger the man, but today we saw what you do when you're a brand before a man.

News Flash: Winter Olympic officials in tropical Vancouver have been forced to import snow - on the public dime - to make sure that the 2010 games proceed as planned. This use of tax-dollars is just the icing on the cake for increasingly angry Vancouver residents. And unlike the snow, the anger shows no signs of abating. As Olympic Resistance Network organizer Harsha Walia wrote in the Vancouver Sun, "With massive cost over-runs and Olympic project bailouts, it is not surprising that a November 2009 Angus Reid poll found that more than 30 per cent of [British Columbia] residents feel the Olympics will have a negative impact and almost 40 per cent support protesters. A January 2010 EKOS poll found that almost 70 per cent believe that too much is being spent on the Games."

Officials are feeling the anger, and the independent media, frighteningly, is paying the price. Just as Democracy Now's Amy Goodman was held in November for trying to cross the border for reasons that had nothing to do with the Olympic Games, Martin Macias Jr., an independent media reporter from Chicago, was detained and held for seven hours by Canada Border Services agents before being put on a plane and sent to Seattle. Macias, who is 20 years old, is a media reform activist with community radio station Radio Arte where he serves as the host/producer of First Voice, a radio news zine.

I spoke to Martin Macias today and he described a chilling scene of detention and expulsion. "I was asked the same questions for three and a half hours in a small room. They told me I had no right to a lawyer. I went from frustrated and angry to scared. I didn't know what the laws were or how the laws had been changed for the Olympics. I kept telling them I wasn't going to Vancouver to protest but to cover the protests but for them that was one and the same. This is bigger than me. We need to ask who is exactly ordering this kind of repression. Is it the government? The IOC? Why the crackdown?"

Then insult on top of injury when they deported Macias and insisted he pay his own way out of the country. "They wanted me to buy a $1,300 plane ticket back to Chicago. I said ‘no way' and now I'm in Seattle."

Martin's story is not unique. Two delegates aiming to attend an indigenous assembly taking place alongside the games were also detained and turned away.

For people with just a passing knowledge of our neighbors to the north, it must all seem quite shocking. When we think of human rights abuses and suppression of dissent, Canada is hardly the first place that comes to mind. But there actually is a long history in Canada of this kind of abuse of power. The latest chapter in that history has been written during the pre-Olympic crackdown of 2010. Now as protestors and independent, unembedded journalists gather for the February 10-15 anti-Olympic convergence, as tax dollars go toward importing snow, the need to silence dissent becomes an International Olympic Committee imperative.

As Chicago's Bob Quellos, who entered Vancouver successfully after accompanying Macias, said to me,

"Walking the streets, residents here are very clear about who is responsible for the billions of dollars of Olympic debt they will be paying off for generations. They are outraged that the over $1 billion that is being spent on security has placed a cop on almost every corner of Downtown Vancouver. And they are outraged by the government's priorities. For example, while Vancouver's Downtown East Side struggles with poverty similar to third-world countries and social programs continue to be gutted, VANOC is spending an untold amount of money helicoptering in snow to the Olympic venue of Cypress Mountain that would otherwise be a mud hill due to the warm weather."

It's not hard to deduce why the snow is melting: it's the heat on the street.

[Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming "Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love" (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]

First let me put my cards on the table. I consider Jemele Hill, sports columnist for ESPN.com, to be as incisive and interesting as they come. She has been a frequent and fearless guest on my radio show and is always aces on the air. That's why I'm so gobsmacked by Jemele's latest column, subtly titled, Laud the Courage in Tim Tebow's Stand.

Jemele makes the case that Tim Tebow's presence in an anti-abortion Super Bowl Ad, funded by Focus on the Family, "should be praised rather than condemned." This by itself shouldn't be too surprising. All week, every sports writer on earth from the Washington Post's great Sally Jenkins to Tebow's personal foot masseur, Sports Illustrated's Peter King, have raised this "defend the courage of Tim Tebow" line to a deafening din. (Tragically in our culture, I would argue that taking a stance against women's reproductive rights, is anything but "courageous." It's clearly as mainstream as the Super Bowl itself.)

But Jemele Hill chose to take it to an entirely higher level: a level that deeply miseducates her readers and demands a response. She chose to write, "Tebow's decision to appear in this ad should be considered just as courageous as Muhammad Ali's decision to not enter the draft, or Tommie Smith's and John Carlos' black power salute at the 1968 summer Olympics."

Dear Lord, Jemele. Where do we possibly begin to unpack this? Tim Tebow is starring in a 2.8 million dollar ad while being praised by sports writers, pundits, and politicians from coast to coast. In contrast, Muhammad Ali's decision to refuse the draft and say "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong" resulted in getting stripped of his title, being abandoned by almost every significant person in his life, pushed to bankruptcy, and hit with a five year Leavenworth prison sentence, which included revoking his passport. The very same day of his conviction in federal court, the US Congress voted 337-29 to extend the draft four more years. They knew how important Ali was and the full weight of the federal government was hell-bent on breaking his will. As Jack Olson wrote years later inSports Illustrated, "The noise became a din, the drumbeats of a holy war. TV and radio commentators, little old ladies...bookmakers, and parish priests, armchair strategists at the Pentagon and politicians all over the place joined in a crescendo of get Cassius get Cassius get Cassius."

As for Tommie Smith and John Carlos, after their black-gloved salute, they were kicked out of Olympic Village, with a firestorm waiting for them at home. They were pariahs, unable to find work and support their families. The Chicago Tribune called their act "an embarrassment visited upon the country… contemptuous of the United States," and "an insult to their countrymen" who would come home to be "greeted as heroes by fellow extremists." Brent Musburger called them "a pair of dark-skinned storm troopers." As John Carlos said to me years later, "Today, I don't feel embraced, I feel like a survivor, like I survived cancer. It's like if you are sick and no one wants to be around you, and when you're well everyone who thought you would go down for good doesn't even want to make eye contact. It was almost like we were on a deserted island. That's where Tommy Smith and John Carlos were. But we survived."

But perhaps the most glaringly obvious difference is that Ali, Smith and Carlos had to face the ugliest most vile edge of racism, and not just in the press. Klansmen, Nazis, and all manner of "lone nuts" threatened their lives. Tim Tebow, in sharp contrast, has only burnished his credentials as a hero of both the sports media and the right wing, as well as cementing his relationship with Focus on the Family, an organization with access to the highest echelons of political power. The ensuing public appearance with Sarah Palin, I guarantee, will be coming to a city near you. Comparing the protracted struggle of Ali, Smith and Carlos, to Tim Tebow's Super Bowl ad, is more than simply wrong. It's hyperbole on steroids and it's beneath Ms. Hill. As Ali might have said, "Jemele Hill-a. This piece is more broken than Frazier in Manila."

Howard Zinn, my hero, teacher, and friend died of a heart attack on Wednesday at the age of 87. With his death, we lose a man who did nothing less than rewrite the narrative of the United States. We lose a historian who also made history.

Anyone who believes that the United States is immune to radical politics never attended a lecture by Howard Zinn. The rooms would be packed to the rafters, as entire families, black, white and brown, would arrive to hear their own history made humorous as well as heroic. "What matters is not who's sitting in the White House. What matters is who's sitting in!" he would say with a mischievous grin. After this casual suggestion of civil disobedience, the crowd would burst into laughter and applause.

Only Howard could pull that off because he was entirely authentic. When he spoke against poverty it was from the perspective of someone who had to work in the shipyards during the Great Depression. When he spoke against war, it was from the perspective of someone who flew as a bombardier during World War II, and was forever changed by the experience. When he spoke against racism it was from the perspective of someone who taught at Spelman College during the civil rights movement and was arrested sitting in with his students.

And of course, when he spoke about history, it was from the perspective of having written A People's History of the United States, a book that has sold more than two million copies and changed the lives of countless people. Count me among them. When I was 17 and picked up a dog-eared copy of Zinn's book, I thought history was about learning that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. I couldn't tell you what the Magna Carta was, but I knew it was signed in 1215. Howard took this history of great men in powdered wigs and turned it on its pompous head.

In Howard's book, the central actors were the runaway slaves, the labor radicals, the masses and the misfits. It was history writ by Robin Hood, speaking to a desire so many share: to actually make history instead of being history's victim. His book came alive in December with the debut of The People Speak on the History Channel as actors, musicians, and poets, brought Zinn's book to life.

Howard was asked once whether his praise of dissent and protest was divisive. He answered beautifully: "Yes, dissent and protest are divisive, but in a good way, because they represent accurately the real divisions in society. Those divisions exist - the rich, the poor - whether there is dissent or not, but when there is no dissent, there is no change. The dissent has the possibility not of ending the division in society, but of changing the reality of the division. Changing the balance of power on behalf of the poor and the oppressed."

Words like this made Howard my hero. I never thought we would also become friends. But through our mutual cohort, Anthony Arnove, Howard read my sports writing and then gave his blessing to a book project we called A People's History of Sports in the United States.

We also did a series of meetings together where I would interview Howard on stage. Even at 87, he still had his sharp wit, strong voice, and matinee-idol white hair. But his body had become frail. Despite this physical weakness, Howard would stay and sign hundreds of books until his hand would shake with the effort.

At our event in Madison, Wisconsin, Howard issued a challenge to the audience. He said, "Our job as citizens is to honestly assess what Obama is doing. Not measured just against Bush, because against Bush, everybody looks good. But look honestly at what Obama's doing and act as engaged and vigorous citizens."

He also had no fear to express his political convictions loudly and proudly. I asked him about the prospects today for radical politics and he said,

"Let's talk about socialism. … I think it's very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name. Socialism had a good name in this country. Socialism had Eugene Debs. It had Clarence Darrow. It had Mother Jones. It had Emma Goldman. It had several million people reading socialist newspapers around the country… Socialism basically said, hey, let's have a kinder, gentler society. Let's share things. Let's have an economic system that produces things not because they're profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism because you have to go beyond capitalism."

Howard Zinn taught millions of us a simple lesson: Agitate. Agitate. Agitate. But never lose your sense of humor in the process. It's a beautiful legacy and however much it hurts to lose him, we should strive to build on Howard's work and go out and make some history.