MOLI VIEW™

While teaching elementary school in '90s Washington, DC, a young Dave Zirin saw the immediate fallout from sports being cut from public school budgets. Of course, the quality of most urban athletic programs began to slide. And a lot of the best athletes were recruited to private schools in the suburbs. The other exceptional players? They began showing up to class dressed in expensive sneakers that Zirin knew their parents could never afford. These kids had joined up with the increasingly exploitative youth sports leagues. Right before the teacher's eyes, the playground's best at wiffle ball and tag were becoming commodities, from the feet up.



"There's just something about it that seemed so wrong," Zirin told me last night in a telephone interview, "that something as beautiful and innocent as play was becoming so sullied."



Witnessing the fundamental corruption of American athletics helped the aspiring sportswriter become the rare sort who could have Chuck D write the foreword to one of his books, Welcome to the Terrordome. Zirin, 32, has written for dozens of magazines, websites, and newspapers, including The Nation, Slam, and Counterpunch, and he comments quite a lot on radio and television, most regularly on Canada's The Score network. His weekly columns at Edge of Sports shed harsh light on the top issues. And no less a mainstream authority than Sports Illustrated called Terrordome, Zirin's third book, "a provocative, sometimes chilling look at sports and society right now." I called the DC-based writer last night to discuss why so few independent, critical voices dot the sports landscape. But first we talked a little nuts-and-bolts wins and losses.

Previous Page  1  2  3  4  5  6  Next Page