Dave Zirin | The Nation
Baltimore Ravens Summon the Poetry of Muhammad Ali
John Harbaugh. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
As 80,000 Baltimore Ravens fans gathered at MB&T Bank Stadium to rally and celebrate their team’s triumph in Sunday’s Super Bowl, head coach John Harbaugh had something to say to the massive crowd. “We had a visit from the greatest of all time, Muhammad Ali…. And he used to say, ‘What’s my name?’ We’re going to finish it off right here, with our whole stadium declaring to the football world, loud and clear who we are. Three times. Are you ready? What’s our name? [crowd answers, “Ravens”] What’s our name? [crowd answers, “Ravens”] What’s our name? [crowd answers, “Ravens”] Yeah! Thank you!”
It was deeply moving to hear Coach Harbaugh invoke the champ. Ali visited the team before the start of the season and was a source of inspiration throughout the year. There were stories over the weekend that the great Ali was close to death. Thankfully, this turned out to be false and his daughter Laila tweeted a picture of him getting ready for the big game and very much alive.
The words of Muhammad Ali are also a beautiful thing to hear in the twenty-first century. Harbaugh is keenly aware of its history and what Ali meant in his day. As he said in September, “He molded a generation. He was courage for a generation. He changed the world, but not just in the ring. The ring was his platform to change the world.”
Harbaugh is absolutely right, and the phrase “What’s my name?” encapsulates that courage. In 1967, heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali was defending his title against challenger Ernie Terrell. By now, “the Greatest” had already cemented his position as the most controversial and derided athlete in the history of the United States. Ali had already changed his name from Cassius Clay after joining the Nation of Islam. His name change meant that he had declared allegiance to an organization that called white people “devils” and believed racism was an incurable part of the United States. He had also by this time become an anti-war lightning rod by becoming a draft resister and refusing to be any part of the US war in Vietnam. Sportswriter Murray Robinson echoed the overwhelming majority of the media when he said, “[Clay] the adult brat, who has boasted ad nauseam of his fighting skill but who squealed like a cornered rat when tapped for the Army, should be shorn of his title.”
This is what was swirling before his fight against Terrell yet Ali was his typical, Louisville Lip cool. He uncorked a classic poem saying,
I predict that Terrell will catch hell at the sound of the bell. He is going around saying he’s a championship fighter but when he meets me he’ll fall 20 pounds lighter. He thinks he’s a champ but after I’m finished hell just be a tramp. Now I’m not saying this just to be funny. But I’m fighting Ernie because he needs the money.
But in advance of the opening bell, the tenor changed. “I had a question for him when we met to sign [the fight contract],” Ali said two days before the fight. “It was only three words: ‘What’s my name?’ Terrell said, ‘Cassius Clay,’ using my slave name. That made it a personal thing, so I’m gonna whup him until he addresses me by my proper name. I’m gonna give him a whupping and a spanking, and a humiliation.” Terrell continued to call Ali “Clay” in the lead up which turned out to be a very bad idea. Ali decimated Terrell, calling out with near every punch, “What’s my name? What’s my name? What’s my name fool?”
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It’s beautiful that Coach Harbaugh chose this particular moment of triumph to honor the Greatest. It’s also ironic, given what took place before the rally. To get to the stadium, the Ravens all traveled in massive military Humvees, as adoring crowds cheered. If we are to remember the Ali who said, “What’s my name?” it would be myopic to not also remember the Ali who said, “The object of war is to kill, kill, kill, and continue to murder innocent people.” Many in the sports media saw the use of military Humvees as a fantastic tribute to the troops. One can only wonder what these same sportswriters would have said about Ali in the 1960s. One can only wonder what they would write if a modern-day Ali emerged to say, “The object of drones, the object of assassination lists, the object of war is to kill, kill, kill, and continue to murder innocent people.” We need to remember what it was that made Ali so hated as well as so dangerous. It wasn’t his quotes. It was, as Coach Harbaugh said, his courage.
Dave Zirin, the author of the Muhammad Ali Handbook, just released Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down. Watch his interview with W. Kamau Bell.
'The Blackout Bowl,' or 'The Most Depressing Super Bowl Column You'll Read'
Play is halted after half the lights went out during the third quarter of the Super Bowl. (Reuters/Mike Segar)
Super Bowl XLVII will be remembered for the Baltimore Ravens’ thrilling 34-31 victory over the San Francisco 49ers. It will be remembered for Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco’s MVP performance. It will be remembered for San Francisco’s remarkable comeback from a 28-6 deficit led by their quicksilver quarterback Colin Kaepernick in just his tenth career start.
But more than anything else, the game will be remembered for a thirty-four-minute stadium blackout early in the second half that plunged the New Orleans Super Dome first into darkness and then a kind of eerie twilight. The official reason for this calamity was that too much electricity was coursing through the dome after Beyonce’s fierce halftime show. Unofficially, this was a symbolic moment that could resonate far longer than the game itself.
Some will see the blackout as a comment upon New Orleans. The Super Dome is supposed to stand, in post-hurricane, post-levees New Orleans as a symbol of the city’s resurgence. It’s also supposed to stand as a symbol of the city’s reborn tourism industry and status as an “event town” ready to be the Mecca for Fortune 500 companies and the hottest happenings in sports. But this economic comeback, with an emphasis on low-paying, zero-benefits service-industry jobs, has had another effect as well: widening inequality. The poverty rate is up to 29 percent, 8 percent higher than in 2007 when the city was still rebuilding after the Hurricane. Child poverty is up to 42 percent and the Lower Ninth Ward has seen its population drop by 80 percent in the last decade. The “event economics” of what Professor Jules Boykoff calls “celebration capitalism” only exacerbates these trends, creating a small army of migrant service-industry workers forever attempting to catch on to the “seasonal work” brought by these splashy yet temporary gatherings. Nineteen sixty-eight Olympian Dr. John Carlos once said, “The reason the Olympics are only every four years is because it takes them four years to count all the money. The problem is who gets a piece of the pie and who gets the crumbs.” This completely correlates with an event like the Super Bowl. It’s a neoliberal Trojan Horse that brings a tremendous amount of capital that flows up and barely trickles down. As for infrastructure, city officials trumpet the millions an event like the Super Bowl will bring into the city, while not saying a word about the billions in corporate welfare that goes into making the gathering “suitable” for the thousands of outside guests. Roads, bridges and public transportation, actually see a net loss. This isn’t a New Orleans story. It’s the story of Urban America whose levees broke long before the 2008 recession.
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But the Blackout Bowl speaks to an even greater sense of unease. When South Africa hosted the World Cup, the European Press was filled with denunciations of this choice, because surely “a developing nation” wouldn’t have the wherewithal to host an event of such status and magnitude. What does the thirty-four-minute blackout—caused by too much electricity—say about this country? Have we overdeveloped or are we actually undeveloping? Are we the player, so pumped up on steroids that we can barely squeeze out of their jerseys or are we the player so decimated by repeated blows to the head, we need help remembering the names of our family? We’re both: two Americas defined by structural inequality and the withering of the idea that this could be one indivisible country with collective, common interests.
If there was one commercial in the swamp of Madison Avenue goop, that actually had an unintentional ring of truth, it was the ad for CBS’s sitcom 2 Broke Girls. The show is about two young waitresses, the whip-smart Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs, as they struggle through the Great Recession in Brooklyn. The ad had Dennings and Behr strip and pole-dance while the phrase 2 Broke Girls flashed in neon over their heads. This is neoliberal America in nutshell: a place where there are those who strip and those who watch; those who serve and those who get served. This is an unsustainable state of affairs. The problem with widening inequality is that like the blackout, it really doesn’t matter whether it happened because there was too much electricity or not enough. It results with everyone sitting in the dark with no solution in sight.
Read Dave Zirin's take on the NFL and LGBT (in)equality.
Is It Getting Better? Homophobia Rocks Super Bowl
Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo, center, stands with openly gay Maryland state Delegate Mary Washington. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark)
When Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo said he hoped this year’s Super Bowl would be a platform to discuss LGBT rights, I don’t think this is exactly what he had in mind. First on media day, San Francisco 49er Chris Culliver was asked by Howard Stern acolyte and living symbol of American declinism Artie Lange if he’d ever accept a gay teammate. Culliver said, “No, we don’t got no gay people on the team, they gotta get up out of here if they do. Can’t be with that sweet stuff. Nah…can’t be…in the locker room, man. Nah.” In rapid-response fashion, Culliver then issued the finest, most heartfelt apology a 49er public relations intern ever had to write.
Then two 49ers, Ahmad Brooks and Isaac Sopoaga, denied ever appearing in the team’s much praised anti-LGBT bullying “It Gets Better” Public Service Announcement, despite video evidence to the contrary. Sopoaga said, “I never went, and now someone is using my name.” This pushed “It Gets Better” founder Dan Savage to actually remove the video from its website. After tweeting that the 49er PSA was being taken down, Savage used three hashtags: #homophobia #NFL #horseshit.
As if this weren’t enough vitriol for one week, on Sunday the league will be holding their twenty-fourth annual Super Bowl Gospel Celebration, and for reasons they have refused to comment upon, it is stacked with an all-star cast of anti-gay bloviators. We are talking about religious singers and preachers who have said things that would make Rick Santorum blush.
This is the point where I’m sure people might ask why any of this matters. Well, it matters for a multitude of reasons. First, whether we like it or not, athletes are role models. Complaining about this fact of American life is like complaining that the sky is blue or John Boehner is orange. Therefore it makes a difference if they are modeling inclusion and respect for our LGBT friends and family. As Hudson Taylor, founder of the organization Athlete Ally said in a statement, “Chris Culliver’s comments are disrespectful, discriminatory and dangerous, particularly for the young people who look up to him.”
It also matters because as long as there has been football, from its inception when Teddy Roosevelt would lash out at “sissies” who refused to play, it has been one of the ways manhood has been defined in the United States. Being a “real man” means playing through pain, harming others and limping away when the game is done. To be gay means, as Culliver said in a modern incarnation of Teddy Roosevelt, you are bringing “that sweet stuff in the locker room.” When NFL players like Ayanbadejo, Chris Kluwe, and Scott Fujita speak out for gay rights, they are also implicitly speaking out against these rigid, crushing, social constructions that are long overdue to be thrown in the dustbin of history.
If the 49ers don’t want to do this for some abstract notion of “society” maybe they can think of their former teammate 30-year-old Kwame Harris. It was announced this week that Harris is in trouble with the law after allegedly assaulting his ex-boyfriend last year. For many of his teammates, it came as a shock that their friend and colleague was gay. Even though Harris is dealing with his own legal troubles, he still found time to bravely address Chris Culliver’s comments saying, “It’s surprising that in 2013 Chris Culliver would use his 15 minutes to spread vitriol and hate. I recognize that these are comments that he may come to regret and that he may come to see that gay people are not so different than straight people.”
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The San Francisco 49ers might want to take a lesson from one of the players they’re opposing this Sunday on the Ravens. Perhaps it’s too much to ask them to emulate Ayanbadejo, a courageous activist for LGBT equality. But maybe they can take a baby step to being more like Terrell Suggs. When asked if he would object to having a gay teammate, Suggs said, “Absolutely not…. whatever a person’s choice is, it’s their choice. On this team, with so many different personalities, we just accept people for who they are and we don’t really care too much about a player’s sexuality. To each their own. You know who you are, and we accept you for it.”
This week perhaps hasn’t gone as Ayanbadejo dreamed. But it’s also been very instructive. We’ve seen the truth about whether there is an LGBT-friendly culture in the NFL, and the truth is that we have a ways to go. The truth is also that, whether the league or some of its players like it or not, it is in fact getting better. But if an active player is ever going to feel confident enough to come out of the closet, it’s going to have to get one whole hell of a lot better than it is now.
Read Dave Zirin’s primer on LGBT equality and football.
Soccer and Egypt's Current 'State of Emergency'
Supporters cheer after the Egyptian army commander addressed protesters in Tahrir Square in 2011. Soccer fan clubs, or “ultras,” played a large part in securing the square for the protesters. (Reuters/Suhaib Salem)
If you want to understand why Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has declared a “state of emergency” or if you want to understand why the country’s defense minister warned Tuesday of “the collapse of the state”, you first need to understand the soccer fan clubs in Egypt—otherwise known as the “ultras”—and the role they played in the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Under Mubarak’s three decade kleptocratic rule, the hyper-intense ultras—made up almost entirely of young Egyptian men—were given near-free reign to march in the streets, battle the police and, of course, fight each other. This has been a common practice in autocracies across the world: don’t allow political dissent, but for the young, male masses allow violent soccer clubs to exist as a safety valve to release the steam. Mubarak, surely to his eternal regret, underestimated what could happen when steam gets channeled into powering a full-scale revolt. After revolution in Tunisia spurred the Egyptian uprising, the ultras transformed themselves in the moment and played a critical role in securing Tahrir Square, setting up checkpoints, and fighting off the police. This is not to say it was seamless. As one Egyptian revolutionary said to me, “In those first days, the Ultras were indispensable. But the hardest thing, it felt like at times, was to keep them all focused on the goal [of removing Mubarak] and keep them from killing each other.”
Distinguished by their uniform of skinny jeans and hoodies, they quickly became objects of admiration in Tahrir Square. “They stayed there in the square almost through 100 hours of fighting,” said protester Mosa’ab Elshamy. “It’s easy to notice them because of their use of Molotov cocktails, their extreme courage and recklessness, their chants. They became a common sight.”
Their strength as a coherent and durable political force was seen after Mubarak was removed and a military junta assumed power. The ultras didn’t dissipate but remained on the front lines pushing for changes that would go beyond the cosmetic. Then came Port Said. One year ago, seventy-four people died in clashes that followed a soccer game between visiting Al-Ahly and Port Said’s Al-Masri. People were stabbed and beaten when Al-Masri fans rushed the field after their team’s 3-1 victory. The majority of deaths, however, took place because of asphyxiation as Al-Ahly fans were crushed against locked stadium doors. There is ample video evidence that shows the military and security forces were complicit in these deaths, either through inaction or worse. As James Dorsey of the Middle Eastern Soccer Blog wrote, “The incident is widely seen as an attempt that got out of hand by the then military rulers of the country and the police and security forces to cut militant, highly politicized, street battle-hardened soccer fans or ultras down to size.”
This tragedy, however, immediately took on a political, anti-regime dimension. Instead of one ultra group pledging death to the other, they blamed the junta and their hated police. Diaa Salah of the Egyptian Football Federation said, “The government is getting back at the ultras. They are saying, ‘You protest against us, you want democracy and freedom. Here is a taste of your democracy and freedom.’”
The current crisis stems from that moment. Last week, the verdicts came down in the Port Said “soccer riot” and twenty-one people were sentenced to hang. Not one of the twenty-one was from the state and security forces. The message was clear. Even though Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were now in charge, this government would be no different: protecting and defending their state at the expense of justice. It is true that the Al-Ahly fan club initially praised the verdict for providing closure for the families who lost loved ones, but this quickly soured into frustration. There was nothing to celebrate as the people in Port Said rose violently first in opposition to the verdict, then in opposition to the brutal state repression ordered by Morsi, and now in opposition to the regime itself.
As Dorsey wrote, “Neither the ruling nor government policy to date addresses an equally fundamental demand that both Al-Masri and Al-Ahly fans share: the need for a thorough reform of the police and security forces. The riots in the wake of the court verdict constitute the peak of an iceberg of growing discontent in Egypt with the government’s failure to hold accountable police and security forces believed to be responsible for the death of more than 800 protesters since mass demonstrations erupted two years ago against the Mubarak regime and to address the country’s economic decline as well as Mr. Morsi’s rushing through of a controversial new constitution.”
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The days of Morsi’s reign are now being challenged in Cairo where on Monday demonstrators battled police in street fights that lasted for hours. In Suez, thousands left their homes and marched at 9 pm in violation of curfew laws. And at Ground Zero, in Port Said, demonstrators declared their own state while thousands chanted, “LEAVE! LEAVE!” to Morsi, the same rallying cry used in the last days of Mubarak. The future for Morsi is unclear, but what is clear is that the ultra clubs aren’t leaving the stage of Egypt’s history until there is justice and those in the state and military apparatus are held accountable not only for what took place in Port Said but for all the hundreds who’ve been killed protesting over the last two years. Since this latest eruption, sixty more are now confirmed dead, including Tamer al-Fahla, former goalkeeper of the al-Masri team, and Mohammad al-Dadhwi, who played for Port Said’s al-Mareekh team. There will be more deaths to come, as Morsi seems determined to crush and not heed the opposition. The great tragedy is that clearly, as long as there is no justice there won’t be peace.
Read Dave Zirin's take on how LGBT equality plays into this year's Super Bowl.
'It's a New World': The Super Bowl Becomes a Platform for LGBT Equality
Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendan Ayanbadejo. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
Super Bowl XLVII is being billed as the Harbaugh Bowl: the battle between Jim and John Harbaugh, head coaches, respectively, of the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens. It will also be played by two NFL teams connected directly and indirectly to the struggles for LGBT rights. Read that last sentence again, and appreciate for a moment how far fighters for LGBT equality have traveled.
In August, the 49ers became the first NFL franchise to film an “It Gets Better” video to combat anti-LGBT bullying in schools. The team was compelled to produce the public service announcement when a diehard Bay Area fan named Sean Chapin initiated a Change.org petition asking the 49ers to break the NFL’s conspicuous silence. He received 16,000 online signatures and the team responded. Several players were featured with the most stirring comments coming from hard-hitting safety Donte Whitner who said, “The San Francisco 49ers are proud to join ItGetsBetter.org, to let all LGBT teens know that it gets better. On behalf of the entire 49ers organization, we are on your side, and we promise it gets better.”
As for the Ravens, they are the team of linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo, who is part of a new wave of outspoken athletes for LGBT rights. Ayanbadejo aided the successful referendum for marriage equality in the state of Maryland in November while braving disagreements from teammates, criticism on sports radio and even a Maryland state delegate requesting that team chief executive Steve Biscotti “take the necessary action, as a National Football League owner, to inhibit such expressions from your employees.” But the Ravens took no such action and Ayanbadejo hasn’t stopped expressing himself, and won’t stop this coming week.
After Baltimore beat the New England Patriots to go to the Super Bowl, the Ravens linebacker typed out what he is calling his “Jerry Maguire e-mail” at 3:40 am. He wrote to the founder of New Yorkers for Marriage Equality, Brian Ellner, and the political director for media mogul Russell Simmons, Michael Skolnik. Ayanbadejo’s message was that the Super Bowl, the shiniest, most watched event in all of North American sports, could be a remarkable podium to make the case against homophobia. He wrote, “Is there anything I can do for marriage equality or anti-bullying over the next couple of weeks to harness this Super Bowl media?”
After the e-mail went public, Ayanbadejo spoke to Frank Bruni of The New York Times about why he reached out in the wee hours of the morning. “It’s one of those times when you’re really passionate and in your zone,” he said. “And I got to thinking about all kinds of things, and I thought: how can we get our message out there?”
Ellner, who saw the impact athletes like Steve Nash and Michael Strahan had in the New York fight for marriage equality said, “He understands that as a straight biracial player in the Super Bowl, he can have a huge impact on the future of this issue.”
Ayanbadejo also told Bruni that he’s been in contact with Hudson Taylor, who founded the organization Athlete Ally to challenge anti-gay bigotry on all levels in professional sports. “He’s so excited and ready to take a stand in whatever way he can,” said Taylor. “He is leveraging the biggest sports stage in the world.”
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This isn’t the first time a Super Bowl player has tried to leverage “the biggest sports stage” to raise awareness about LGBT rights. Linebacker Scott Fujita, then of the New Orleans Saints had similar goals in 2010, but what a different three years makes. I spoke to Fujita about Ayanbadejo and he said,
I’ll never forget three years ago, I was at the Super Bowl playing for the Saints. I’d endorsed the National Equality March (the previous fall) and at that same Super Bowl, Tim Tebow was doing his ad for Focus on the Family (an organization that promotes “gay reparative therapy"). I remember my support for marriage equality made a little bit of noise, because there just weren’t many guys in our business talking about this sort of thing. I received a few media inquiries, and on Super Bowl media day I walked up and down radio row prepared to speak out on this and only a few folks really knew how to talk to me about it. The rest would only ask me what I thought about Tim’s ad but little else. Fast forward three years and I feel like we’re in a different world. People are asking all the right questions and I’m so glad Brendon is going to be there with some answers. It’s just a new world.
Ayanbadejo has to know that using the Super Bowl to do something other than play the game and smile for the cameras carries a great deal of risk. He seems to be not only rising to the risk but taking great joy in the journey. The linebacker says that his dream is to win the Super Bowl and then dance with Ellen DeGeneres on her talk show. Once again, read that last sentence again. In just three years, as Scott Fujita said, it’s a new world. Whether the NFL, CBS or anyone else likes it or not, this new world is now jostling to be heard in the land of make-believe that is Super Bowl week. Even in the NFL, clearly, it gets better.
In pro football, there's a lot that can get better. Read Dave Zirin's take on the NFL and MLK.
Three Card Manti: Why the Media Is Swallowing Manti Te'o's New Narrative
Manti Te’o talks to the press during media day for the BCS National Championship game. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
Manti Te’o has a story and he’s sticking to it. With millions of dollars hanging in the balance, the Notre Dame star, whose cancer-stricken girlfriend Lennay Kekua turned out to never exist, has decided that it’s better to look like a doe-eyed victim than a furtive fraud. In an interview with Katie Couric to be aired Thursday night, the All-American with NFL dreams finally breaks his silence on camera. Te’o reportedly tells Couric that he was deceived into carrying on a three-year online relationship with a fake woman whose identity was really created by “family friend” Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. Te’o spent the season talking about how Lennay’s death broke his heart, but he had to play on in her memory. He built a heroic stature and helped create—he says unknowingly—a hokey narrative that was repeated as gospel at Sports Illustrated, ESPN and The New York Times.
The interview includes Te’o’s parents, who say they are going public not as a way to salvage the millions that are evaporating with their son’s draft status but to warn others who might also be ensnared in an online multi-year relationship. As for Te’o, he insists that he consciously lied about his imaginary girlfriend only after finding out he was a hoax victim. In parts of the interview already released, Te’o says, “Katie, put yourself in my situation. I, my whole world told me that she died on Sept. 12. Everybody knew that. This girl, who I committed myself to, died on Sept. 12. Now I get a phone call on Dec. 6, saying that she’s alive, and then I’m going be put on national TV two days later. And to ask me about the same question. You know, what would you do?”
“What would you do?” is a bizarre question when it implies you might find yourself in a three-year relationship followed by nursing your loved one through a car accident and leukemia without ever so much as Skyping or visiting her in the hospital. It also implies that a “family friend” would choose to devote years, recruit partners in crime and spend thousands of dollars to ensnare you for motives that remain a mystery. So I have no idea what I would do.
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I do know, however, what I would do if I found myself in a scandal with a seven-figure fortune on the line. I would do exactly what the Te’o family did and that’s hire entertainment’s top damage control/public relations expert Matthew Hiltzik to make it all go away. Mr. Hiltzik was the person Justin Bieber called after Beebs was smacked with a paternity suit in 2011. He also has an extensive client list including—guess who?—Katie Couric. It’s a one-stop-shop for damage control and media makeover. After Hiltzik entered the Te’o camp, they also gave ESPN ace reporter Jeremy Schaap a spreadsheet showing 1000 phone calls and 500 hours of discussions between Te’o and someone at a phone number they said Te’o believed to be Lennay Kekua. Widely publicized immediately by ESPN, and then other media outlets looking to spread the latest scoop, this unverified list is supposed to further plant the seeds of “Te’o as hoax victim.”
We don’t know if the Te’os are telling the truth or just spent the last week getting their story straight. We don’t know, but to be honest, I’ve stopped caring about that facet of this. This is an inside-out story, where banal substance—what is up with this guy’s social life?—is irrelevant compared to all of what it says about the side players involved. ESPN, Sports Illustrated and many other outlets printed stories of a young woman’s cancer and death, the mourning over her and then her rebirth without checking to see if any of it was true. Notre Dame helped perpetuate that story even though people are saying anonymously that they had “doubts” whether Lennay Kekua existed. Now the Te’o group is again expertly exploiting the media’s desire to have access and break the story. Good PR people like Hiltzik only create the new narrative. They then depend on big media to not only tell the world but also analyze the new information, and turn something as prosaic as an unverified spreadsheet of phone numbers into beautiful prose. ESPN senior writer Ivan Maisel, wrote an accompanying piece to Schaap’s scoop that compared Manti Te’o to a character in a Frank Capra movie—I wish I was kidding—and argued that the linebacker may just be too good for this world. “I believe Manti Te’o,” wrote Maisel. “I believe he told the truth at Notre Dame. I believe he told the truth to ESPN correspondent Jeremy Schaap…. Where the Twitter memes see an easy target, I see a naïf who just discovered in public that the world can be mean.” I can absolutely see Hiltzik reading this and, paraphrasing Alan Rickman in Die Hard, cackling “You ask for a miracle and I give you ESPN.”
This is a story about so much more than what we see in its frigid, grifting, little heart. It’s about how the twenty-four-hour sports media are in such desperate need for copy, they will let their subjects dictate their own narratives. It’s a story about the way we are being bred for cynicism by a press we are being conditioned never to trust. It’s also a story, barring new information, that is now officially living on the fumes of speculation. But one thing that requires no speculation is whether this kind of media flimflam could happen again. Based on what we’re seeing right now before our eyes, it is already taking place.
Watch Dave Zirin discuss the Te’o scandal on Democracy Now!
The NFL: Where Dr. King's Dream Goes to Die
The Air Force Honor Guard Drill Team performs at halftime at Giants Stadium, November 15, 2009. (Flickr/NYC Marines)
As the United States celebrates the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with the swearing-in of this country’s first African-American president, there will no doubt be commentary on the great gap between ceremony and reality. It’s the gap between the public spectacle of President Barack Obama’s inaugural oath—sworn on one of Dr. King’s Bibles, no less—and a country still ravaged by what King called “the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic injustice.”
In addition to the inaugural festivities, this weekend was also marked by a spectacle that will rival or exceed the inauguration in passion and interest: the National Football League playoffs. NFL football, by a country mile, is the most popular sport in the United States. It also stands as a living monument of the distance we still must travel to slay King’s “giant triplets.” I write this, in full disclosure, as someone who follows the sport religiously, but struggles to not be blind to the politics the NFL pumps through its play.
First and foremost, this weekend’s football games presented an orgy of militarism. From the armed forces ads, to the live shots of the 101st Airborne watching overseas, to the warplanes flying overhead, the unspoken slogan was, “If you like the NFL, you’ll just love the US military.” Amidst the militarism, there was no mention that the greatest commonality between the violent, high-adrenaline excitement on the field and the drudgerous, when not dangerous, poverty-wage work in the US military is traumatic brain injury. The league has even engaged in a joint partnership with the US Army to share research because of the stark similarities between being hit with a concussive grenade or an IED and being hit repeatedly by a middle linebacker. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the tributes to King by the NFL don’t include the time when he said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”
The issue of economic injustice that King was tackling at the end of his life pulses throughout the NFL as well. As King said, “The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspires men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life.” The fact that athletically gifted children see the NFL, with all its attendant dangers, as being their ticket out of poverty says so much. The need of their friends and family to attach themselves onto these players as if they are substitutes for the antipoverty programs that no longer exist, also speaks volumes. The fact that for many of the nation’s poor, they can’t even enter the stadium unless they are there to sell pretzels or beer, even though they paid for the stadium with their tax dollars, says even more. The fact that NFL owners are never held accountable for the injuries on the field, the exploitation of players, or the robbing of the public treasury to pay for their domed palaces, only proves another of King’s maxims: “Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice but tolerated or ignored economic injustice.”
Finally, there is the issue most closely tied to Dr. King’s legacy: the “dream” of living in a colorblind world where people are judged by the content of their character. To say that the NFL’s deeply conservative all-white ownership doesn’t exercise racial prejudice is like saying Florida doesn’t suffer from sunshine. This past off-season, the league had eight head coaching positions to fill. All eight were filled by white hires. Despite the NFL’s much-celebrated Rooney Rule, which requires the interviewing of “minority head coaching candidates,” the league is down to four head coaches of color, including Latino Ron Rivera. That means only 9 percent of coaches are African-American in a league where 70 percent of players are African-American: the greatest disparity in a decade.
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Yahoo! Sports football writer Mike Silver wrote, “I know some of you don’t want to be bothered with such inconvenient truths and would rather believe that every NFL owner (and/or individual with hiring power) is a color-blind, ultra-competitive beacon of nobility who is simply trying to find the best man for the job. If so, feel free not to read columns such as these—and to ignore the facts that suggest otherwise. Just know that in my world, the evidence isn’t so easily dismissed, and a lot of very qualified and proficient men are baffled at the way the NFL seems to be regressing as we enter the early stages of the 21st century.”
I spoke to N. Jeremi Duru, author of Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL, about the all-white hiring wave. He said to me, “It seems the most sought after head coaching candidates during the last couple head coach hiring cycles have been offensive coaches, and for various reasons the NFL’s African-American coaches who’ve attained head coaching positions have for the most part been defensive coaches…. This year only one of thirty-two NFL offensive play callers is African-American, the Baltimore Ravens’ Jim Caldwell. If the league’s clubs remain infatuated with offense, I don’t see the numbers of head coaches of color appreciably increasing until head coaches of color are given greater opportunities at the top of clubs’ offensive coaching hierarchies. The NFL said late last week that it is looking into altering the Rooney Rule. Hopefully any such alterations will impact the coaching pipeline on the offensive side of the ball.”
The Rooney Rule, as Duru details, only came into being because of threats of a massive lawsuit. That tactic may need to be revived. As Tony Dungy, the first African-American head coach to lead a team to a Super Bowl victory, said, “I don’t know what the answer is. I just know the system is broken.”
The popularity of the NFL, the popularity of a league that promotes, reflects and exemplifies Dr. King’s “giant triplets,” might signify nothing. Maybe it’s just an incredibly entertaining product, a magnetic mix of violence, suspense and fellowship. Maybe, as nature abhors a vacuum, it’s a force for community cohesion in our isolated, atomized world. Maybe it’s all of these things but maybe it also symbolizes something far more rotten beneath the massive 100-yard American flag they unfurl before every playoff game. To quote Martin Luther King one last time, “I have come to see that America is in danger of losing her soul. Something must happen to awaken the dozing soul of America before it is too late.”
Read John Nichols's analysis of President Obama's MLK-infused inauguration speech.
Lance Armstrong Wilts in Oprah's Glare
Lance Armstrong talks on Oprah’s show, January 14, 2013. (Flickr/George Burns)
Lance Armstrong’s much-ballyhooed “confessional” interview with Oprah Winfrey about his history of performance-enhancing drug use was an unmitigated disaster for the cycling icon in both form and content.
In form, Armstrong was reptilian. His steely glare and cold and matter-of-fact tone about the false lawsuits he’d filed, the reputations he’d destroyed and the people he’d slandered was disturbing. If his goal by choosing Oprah was to appear sympathetic, it proved, at least for this viewer, to create the opposite effect. Oprah’s New Age glow acted as a harsh spotlight highlighting every flaw in the tenacious Texan’s salty demeanor. He also wanted to dispute the part of the report that makes him out to be the Tony Soprano of his cycling team: the facilitator of the PED intake of his riders and willing to bully, threaten or destroy anyone who stood up to him or threatened to blow the whistle. Armstrong was not just the star cyclist of his team but its boss: the man in charge, and USADA claims that he would destroy the careers of people who didn’t want to take part in his illegal ride. Armstrong’s claims that he didn’t do this were unconvincing.
In content, Armstrong had two goals in this interview, and he failed on both in spectacular fashion. He needed to show the US Anti-Doping Agency that he was contrite, and he needed to make it clear that he accepted their findings. Ideally, if he did so, they would consider lifting his lifetime ban from competition.
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But Armstrong wouldnt cop to it. Instead Armstrong drew a sharp line in the sand, saying “absolutely not” to the question of whether he “bullied” other riders into doping or fired anyone who disagreed. This is in direct opposition to the sworn testimony his riders made to USADA under oath, meaning that Lance Armstrong basically accused them of perjury. But then in the next breath, he admitted to being “a bully,” but “a bully” in the name of “controlling the narrative”: in other words, trying to destroy anyone who tried to tell the truth. It was the worst of both worlds. He was saying, “USADA is wrong, but I’m still an awful lying bully.” It was Bizarro World public relations. He did look, as ESPN’s Rick Reilly said (and I’m paraphrasing) “like a hitman recounting his crimes under oath while casually cleaning his nails.”
Oprah tried to help. Resembling a softball practice pitcher, she set him up repeatedly to be forthcoming and honest, and to humanize why he felt the need not just to use PEDs but attack anyone who dared get in his way. Yet despite her generous set-ups, Lance Armstrong whiffed time-and-again. It was like watching horribly mismatched dance partners: Ginger Rodgers arm-in-arm with Captain Kangaroo.
To be clear, I don’t think Lance Armstrong is obligated to participate in this kabuki theater of contrition, but it’s gobsmacking why he would choose to sit on Oprah’s couch and not, as Oprah would say, “meet the moment.” If this was politics—and of course on one level it is—his handlers could be sued for malpractice.
We will see in part two of the interview tonight whether or not Lance Armstrong shows contrition, remorse or a beating heart. If he doesn’t, this might be the end of Armstrong as a public figure in any meaningful sense beyond a cautionary tale. That would be a stunning result of the Oprah-effect.
Check out Dave Zirin’s primer on Armstrong’s chat with Oprah.
Crying for Manti Te'o
Manti Te'o watches on as the Fighting Irish defeat USC, November 27, 2010. (Flickr/Neon Tommy)
Two years ago, I called the Notre Dame football program a moral cesspool. Two weeks ago, I wrote a story about the horrible treatment of women who have accused members of the Notre Dame football team of sexual assault, harassment and rape. These strands knotted together Wednesday in a drama that threatens to break the Internet: the incredibly bizarre, but unbelievably true, story of Fighting Irish star Manti Te’o and his fake online girlfriend.
Te’o was a campus icon: the runner-up Heisman trophy winner, and the acknowledged inspirational leader of a team that came within one game of a national championship. He also, as Deadspin.com reported in a brilliant piece of investigative journalism by Tim Burke and Jack Dickey, shared, knowingly or unknowingly, an elaborate lie with major media outlets about a girlfriend, Stanford student Lennay Kekua, who didn’t really exist. In the last six months as Teo’s fame ballooned, America learned about the football star’s soul mate who suffered a terrible car accident and, while hospitalized, discovered that she had leukemia. Lennay, according to Te’o, would stay on the phone with him for eight hours while he slept because hearing him breathe would ease her suffering. In September, she passed away. This tragic relationship was covered in Sports Illustrated, ESPN and even The New York Times. Te’o did interviews where he choked back tears. He spoke of their time together as well as her parents. People raised thousands of dollars in her name for cancer research. Once again, she didn’t exist.
A family friend of Te’o, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, in fact created the fictitious Lennay Kekua. Today I listened to a recording of Te’o on The Jim Rome Show, his voice quavering as he spoke about “Lennay’s death.” The only conclusion one can draw is that he was either the victim of an insanely elaborate grift whose ingenuity would humble David Mamet, or something stinks in South Bend. Either one believes that for three years, Te’o was content with an online relationship that involved neither Skype nor Facetime and just gilded the lily about their meetings. Or this was a ruse that started before anyone knew or cared who Manti Te’o was and as he grew into a college football superstar, it spun out of control. Te’o issued a statement within hours of the Deadspin report claiming that he was the victim of a hoax. A press conference commanded by Te'o is also forthcoming, which will probably resemble a wildlife special where a gazelle is feasted upon by a pride of lions. Maybe Te’o, a devout Mormon, wanted to find a way to disengage from a campus hook-up culture that allegedly often strays into sexual assault. But if he is hiding facts about his personal life, it’s hard to imagine the press backing off until they find out exactly what they are. If it was a hoax, then Manti Te’o, a man who would fall in love online, have a three-year long-distance relationship and nurse a young woman through leukemia without ever seeing her in person, should be put in a lab and studied for the greater good.
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Yet as with the far more serious previous scandals attached to this storied program, the problem is not just the behavior of students but the moral compass on display by the adults in charge. Within hours of the story breaking online, Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick held a press conference where he backed Te’o to the hilt saying, “Every single thing about this was real to Manti. There was no suspicion. The grief was real, the affection was real, and that’s the sad nature of this cruel game.”
Swarbrick revealed that a private outside firm had been hired to investigate just who had perpetrated this “cruel game.” The athletic director even cried. His behavior only raises more important questions than anything Te’o will face tomorrow. Why hasn’t there been any kind of privately funded, outside investigation into the alleged sexual assaults committed by members of the football team? Why was there no private, outside investigation into Coach Brian Kelly’s role in the death of team videographer Declan Sullivan? It says so much that Te’o’s bizarre soap opera has moved Swarbrick to openly weeping but he hasn’t spared one tear, let alone held one press conference, for Lizzy Seeberg, the young woman who took her own life after coming forward with allegations that a member of the team sexually assaulted her. Swarbrick’s press conference displayed that the problem at Notre Dame is not just football players without a compass; it’s the adults without a conscience. Their credo isn’t any kind of desire for truth or justice. Instead it seems to be little more than a constant effort to protect the Fighting Irish brand, no matter who gets hurt.
For more on Notre Dame's moral hypocrisy, read Dave Zirin's column about the university's silent rape scandal.
Lance Armstrong's Discordant Redemption Song
Lance Armstrong speaks as part of a United Service Organization tour in Iraq, Dec. 18, 2007. (Wikimedia Commons)
This week Lance Armstrong, our most famous cyclist/cancer survivor/suspected Performance Enhancing Drug user, aims to do something more daunting than ride a bike up the face of the Pyrenees. He is attempting to ride Oprah’s couch back into the good grace of public opinion. On Monday night, Armstrong will, after fifteen years of strenuous, Sherman-esque denials, “come clean” and admit to imbibing illegal “performance enhancers” during his record-setting career. This will not go well—and not only because the broadcast will have already been leaked, dissected and thoroughly flambéed before it airs Thursday night.
If Armstrong were only trying to win back the public support he’s lost since the United States Anti-Doping Agency stripped him of his seven Tour de France titles, that could prove challenging enough. But he is attempting the public relations of equivalent of riding his bike through the eye of a needle. Armstrong needs to demonstrate to USADA that he is now, according to reports, on a “path to redemption”. This interview is meant to encourage USADA to lift their lifetime ban on Armstrong’s competitive career and allow him to enter triathlons as well as other events under USADA’s umbrella. But that’s not all. Armstrong needs to look like he’s playing ball with USADA while also gently challenging the most damning sections of their lengthy report on his performance enhancing drug use. Their expose, put together with numerous eye-witnesses over the course of years and at a public cost of millions of dollars, makes him sound like less of a run-of-the-mill PED user and more like Joe Pesci on a ten-speed. They paint the fallen icon as a bullying, intimidating and threatening presence who compelled other competitors to use PEDs and aimed to bribe or scare off anyone who attempted to challenge his cycling empire. And by the way, Armstrong is also seeking to rebuild his cancer foundation, Livestrong, which has taken a massive public relations hit since USADA’s lifetime ban compelled him to resign from the board.
He is attempting to use the forgiving, New Age, healing glow of Oprah to please multiple masters with a mix of candor, charm and puppy-dog sympathy. There is a slight flaw however in this plan, which would challenge the smoothest of operators: that’s the stubborn fact that Lance Armstrong is also a person who makes Rahm Emanuel look like Tickle Me Elmo. As his friend Sally Jenkins, co-author of Armstrong’s bestseller It’s Not About the Bike, wrote in The Washington Post, “I like Lance Armstrong, have always liked him. Not the fairy-tale prince, but the real him, the guy with the scars in his head, both visible and invisible, the combative hombre who once crossed a finish line swinging his fists at another rider, the contradictory, salty-mouthed, anti-religious nonbeliever, who nevertheless restored a chapel.”
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I interviewed Sally Jenkins on my radio show and she reaffirmed this part of his character while also rejecting the section of USADA’s report that paints Armstrong as a bullying, even criminal, ringleader. As she made clear, “I have to doubt it, because it’s not my personal experience. What I don’t doubt is that Lance is a very intimidating character on the bicycle. As a competitor it’s a situational personality that he puts on when he was riding in those Tours. Lance can use a lot of very tough language and there’s no question that he can be a very tough character. Now, did he intimidate people on a criminal level? I don’t believe that for a second and I think that’s an extremely overdrawn portrait…”
Armstrong needs to figure out a way to deny this part of USADA’s report while also demonstrating repentance in order to extract a modicum of mercy from the anti-drug agency. At the same time, if he opens up too much about what went on behind closed doors, Armstrong could also expose himself to an absolute Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade of lawsuits. He’s already being sued by the London Sunday Times which is aiming to recover $500,000 it was ordered to pay him in a libel case concerning his PED use. He’s also facing a federal whistle-blower lawsuit issued by former teammate Floyd Landis, who was also stripped of his own 2006 Tour de France for PEDs. (The sport really does make Las Vegas look like Salt Lake City.) Landis claims that Armstrong’s attorneys tried to intimidate him into silence after he accused his former friend and teammate of using PEDs. The Justice Department will surely be watching the Oprah interview as they assess whether to enter the fray, back Landis’s lawsuit and attempt to get back the $30 million the US Postal Service spent in sponsoring Armstrong’s team. If that wasn’t challenging enough, Armstrong is also, according to USA Today, trying to mend fences with Landis in hopes that he will drop the suit. If Ms. Winfrey pushes on this relationship, Armstrong will probably demur gently, which will anger USADA. If he expresses that salty side of himself, he will invite more lawsuits. Whatever you feel about Lance Armstrong, he finds himself in a waking nightmare. If only the leaders of the financial crisis and those who orchestrate the Pentagon’s torture and drone program could find themselves in a similar tsunami of attention, condemnation and legal proctology.
Oprah Winfrey recently wrote a positively Oprah-esque, goopy column titled “What I Wish I Knew At 21.” In this piece of cavity-inducing wisdom, Oprah wrote, “The older I get, the less I worry about anything. I can see life unfolding in divine order. And even in times of the greatest turmoil, I can stop, get still, and see with utter clarity: This, too, shall pass.” Lance Armstrong doesn’t have the luxury of that perspective. This shall not pass no matter what he says this week. But it could get one whole hell of a lot worse.
Baseball’s (reputed) performance-enhancing drug users are also stuck in a media vortex. Read Dave Zirin’s take on the Hall of Fame vote that wasn’t.
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