Dave Zirin | The Nation

Connecticut Senate candidate Linda McMahon, along with her husband and children, headed World Wrestling Entertainment through the peak of its misogynistic, homophobic heyday in the ’90s. That’s not to mention the multiple deaths and destroyed lives associated with rampant steroid use, a practice supported up by the WWE. Nation sportswriter Dave Zirin spoke with Exploded View’s Bill Dwight to ask why McMahon’s career in destructive entertainment doesn’t disqualify her from the Senate, or any public office.

—Steven Hsieh

The NFL referee lockout is over and we now have an answer to the question, “What does it take to pierce the shame-free cocoon of unreality where NFL owners reside?” All you need, it seems, is condemnation across the political spectrum ranging from the president of the United States to small-town mayors, to even anti-union corporate lickspittles like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. All you need is one of your flagship teams, the Green Bay Packers, publicly threatening to strike or “take a knee on every play.” All you need are your star quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees blasting your product. All you need are online petitions with miles of signatures and 70,000 fans calling the league offices in the twenty-four hours following the debacle of a Monday night game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Green Bay Packers. All of this collective scorn finally punctured the owners’ magical mental space, bringing them to the negotiating table to settle.

The deal is damn near a slam dunk for the NFL referees. Remember the root of this lockout was two-fold: the league wanted to end the pension system and ban refs from holding jobs outside of the sport. Now the league will continue—and even increase—the pension payouts for the next five years before a negotiated transfer to a 401(k). Refs will also be given a 25 percent hike in pay starting next year, with more salary increases until the end of the seven-year agreement. The NFL owners wanted to hire twenty-one more officials to phase in as full-time employees. The refs agreed to seven new full-time hires, and no restrictions on their own abilities to take outside work. In other words, Roger Goodell and the owners were shellacked by the same people they locked out, dismissed, and disrespected. The now infamous words of NFL VP Ray Anderson, “You’ve never paid for an NFL ticket to watch someone officiate a game,” is now the league’s version of “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie.”

But there is a bigger story here as well: the entire country received a high-def, prime-time lesson in the difference between skilled, union labor and a ramshackle operation of unskilled scabs. When Scott Walker is sticking up for the union, you know we’ve arrived at a teachable moment worth shouting from the hills. People who care about stable jobs with benefits and reversing the tide of inequality in the United States should seize this moment. We should ask not only the Scott Walkers of the world but politicians of both parties drinking from the same neoliberal fever-swamp, Why do you think we need skilled union labor on the football field but not in our firehouses, our classrooms, or even our uranium facilities? Similarly players need to be asking questions to the owners: how can you actually posture like you care about our health and safety ever again after subjecting us to this hazardous environment the first three weeks of the season—or, as Drew Brees tweeted, “Ironic that our league punishes those based on conduct detrimental. Whose CONDUCT is DETRIMENTAL now?”

As a child, my family owned just one lonely Zenith-brand television with no remote and no cable box. My fearsome big sister controlled the set under threat of violence and would subject me to the lowest form of entertainment: bloopers. Shows like TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes or its sad network competition Foul-Ups, Bleeps, and Blunders—which was co-hosted, amazingly, by Don Rickles—blared throughout our house and like a squat, Jewish Scarlett O’Hara, I swore I would never watch such dreck again.

But now the National Football League owners and their Commissioner Roger Goodell, in their infinite greed, have returned the blooper show to the airwaves with the weekly hijinks of their stumbling, bumbling, scab referees. The lockout of union refs has turned the nation’s Sunday NFL ritual into a profane farce. You could look at it as a living argument for the importance of trained union labor, or like a dangerous practical joke: a group of Sacha Baron Cohens in black and white stripes poking at fans and players to see just how much they’ll take before they snap.

Yesterday we were served the spectacle of 49er coach Jim Harbaugh berating some meek scab into giving him both an extra challenge flag and an additional timeout. Then there was the sight of the referee who threw his hat on the field of play, causing receiver Kevin Ogletree to step on it and slip awkwardly in the end zone. Fortunately, his knee ligaments remained attached. But this was all high comedy compared to seeing helmet-to-helmet hits go unregulated, Bill Belichick physically accosting an official and 70,000 fans in Baltimore chanting “bullsh*t” in unison for a solid minute. The owners might want to note that it’s only funny until the peasants grab pitchforks.

Carlos Tukano worries that the hundred-year-old Indigenous Cultural Center will be demolished for Maracanã Stadium parking spaces.

Carlos Tukano is around 50, give or take a few years. He’s an indigenous Brazilian born in the state of Amazonas who worked for thirty years to build a collective organization of Brazil’s dozens of indigenous groups. Now he lives in Rio and cannot sleep.

There’s no sleeping when a 1 billion Real ($500 million) fast-track construction project is happening next door, with twenty-four-hours-a-day of deafening noise: of jackhammers, cranes and whistles that mark the shift-changes of blue-overalled construction workers.