Dave Zirin

Dave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation, and author of Welcome to the Terrordome: the Pain Politics and Promise of Sports (Haymarket) and A People's History of Sports in the United States (The New Press). His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, SportsIllustrated.com, New York Newsday, and The Progressive. He is the host of XM Radio's Edge of Sports Radio. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Articles by this author
Views Tuesday, September 20, 2011 Tomorrow, Georgia Murders Troy Davis It’s with shock that I report that the George Board of Pardons and Paroles on Tuesday denied clemency for Troy Anthony Davis. The 42-year-old Davis is now due to be executed tomorrow, Wednesday September 21, at 7 pm . For those unfamiliar with the case, let’s be clear: Davis’s execution is little more than a legal lynching. Read more |
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Views Wednesday, August 31, 2011 Michael Vick and the Forgotten Masses “All these guys who were saying that we've got it made through athletics, it's just not so. You as an individual can make it, but I think we've got to concern ourselves with the masses of the people – not by what happens as an individual, so I merely tell these youngsters when I go out: certainly I've had opportunities that they haven't had, but because I've had these opportunities doesn't mean that I've forgotten.” – Jackie Robinson Read more |
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Views Tuesday, July 12, 2011 Why I'm Boycotting Major League Baseball's All-Star Game in Arizona Over the last year, civil rights organizations, politicians, sportswriters and baseball players have asked Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig to move Tuesday’s 2011 All-Star Game out of Arizona. He chose not to listen and now I choose not to watch. If I lived within a day’s travel of Arizona, I’d be choosing to protest at the stadium gates. Ever since Arizona passed its darkly punitive racial profiling law SB 1070, thousands of people have pleaded with Selig to do the right thing and move the game. Baseball is 27.7 percent Latino. Read more |
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Views Friday, June 17, 2011 Understanding Vancouver's 'Hockey Riot' How do we understand the riots that exploded in Vancouver after the beloved Canucks lost the Stanley Cup Finals? How do we understand the burning cars, broken glass and injuries that stand as an enduring coda of their game seven defeat at the hands of the visiting Boston Bruins? Having communicated with several dozen people in “the most livable city in the world,” I think I have a modest perspective on why the Canucks’ 4-0 loss was followed by fire. Read more |
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Views Thursday, May 12, 2011 Brazil's Disappearing Favelas In Chile, it was called the The Brick . It was the many-thousand page economic manifesto of Dictator Augusto Pinochet, written by "the Chicago Boys" - Chilean exchange students from the University of Chicago. Disciples of the university's conservative, neoliberal economics professor Milton Friedman, they printed The Brick on "the other 9/11" - September 11th, 1973. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, March 08, 2011 Say it Loud on Opening Day: Baseball Must Move the All-Star Game from Arizona At the risk of profound understatement, it’s been a difficult 2011 in the state of Arizona. Jared Loughner’s shooting spree that grievously injured Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killed six, including 9-year old Christina Green, was a national horror. The killings also focused global attention on Arizona’s toxic political culture. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, August 17, 2010 'Today We Did Some Good': The Diamondbacks Demonstration in DC On Sunday in DC, I attended the seventeenth ballpark protest of the Arizona Diamondbacks during the 2011 baseball season. As in the other actions-in cities from Houston to San Francisco to Milwaukee-people chanted a loud and clear message to Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig: move the 2011 All-Star Game out of Arizona and make the state pay a price for enacting legislation that sacrifices immigrant families at the altar of election-year politics. But this demonstration was also deeply different from the sixteen others. Read more |
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Views Thursday, August 12, 2010 On Sunday the Arizona Diamondbacks Come to DC… and They're Not Alone There is a joke going around about Arizona's spate of anti-immigrant legislation: it may be fascism but at least it's a dry fascism. Welcome to Arizona, the home of dry heat and dead-end bigotry. The DC metro area, at least climatically, couldn't be more different. This is a town where summer means the kind of muggy humidity that soaks you to the skin. On Sunday at high noon, the dry nativism of Arizona collides with steamy weather and steamed immigrant rights activists at DC's Nationals Park. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, July 13, 2010 All-Star Speak Out: Baseball Players Pledge to Boycott Arizona All Star Game If Major League Baseball’s 2011 All-Star Game is held as planned in the anti-immigrant “meth lab of democracy” otherwise known as Arizona, players are letting it be known that the show will go on without them. On Monday's media day for this week's 2010 game in Anaheim, several Latino All-Stars were asked for their thoughts about next year’s game taking place in a state being monitored by the justice department for racial profiling. Read more |
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Views Sunday, June 27, 2010 Putting Tears Aside: Celebrating Ghana's Victory Over the last week, everyone from the New Republic , to Reason Magazine to the various inept corners of the right wing blabbospehere (neocons, libertarians, and wingnuts OH MY!) has taken a whack at my little blog post in the Nation After Donovan's Goal: Joy or Jingoism? The article Read more |