{"id":6391,"date":"2024-03-06T20:58:56","date_gmt":"2024-03-06T20:58:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-the-words\/?page_id=6391"},"modified":"2024-08-16T20:53:20","modified_gmt":"2024-08-16T20:53:20","slug":"from-the-mac-weekly-how-dave-zirin-96-created-his-niche-political-sports-journalism","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/home-2\/the-words-march-2024\/from-the-mac-weekly-how-dave-zirin-96-created-his-niche-political-sports-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Mac Weekly: How Dave Zirin \u201996 created his niche: political sports journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Daniel Graham ’26<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Dave<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In his 28 years since graduating Macalester, Dave Zirin \u201996 has become the first-ever sports editor for the political news magazine The Nation, produced multiple feature-length documentaries and co-written books with Olympic athlete and civil rights activist John Carlos and NFL Pro-Bowler Michael Bennett. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zirin has spent his career investigating the convergence between sports and politics. On Tuesday evening, Zirin returned to Macalester to give a lecture on his newest area of interest within this convergence: sports futurism.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSports futurism is about the power of the imaginary \u2014 your imaginary,\u201d Zirin said. \u201cIt\u2019s about envisioning what sports could look like if liberated from the problems that plague our world. Above all, it\u2019s about hope.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zirin got the idea for sports futurism from a visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, where he lives. The museum had an exhibit on Afrofuturism, a concept that scholar Mark Dery introduced in the early 90s to describe methods of envisioning a liberated future for Black people. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zirin says that the key concept he wants to take from Afrofuturism is that the current state of the world is not necessarily the way the world must be. Through sports futurism, Zirin wants to imagine a culture where sporting competition is the only kind of competition. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[It\u2019s about a] society where people can compete to score touchdowns, not to put food on the table, compete to score home runs, not to get healthcare, to be able to play soccer in the field without fear of being bombed,\u201d Zirin said.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The concept of sports futurism is part of the niche that Zirin occupies as a political sports journalist. Political sports journalism did not exist when Zirin attended Macalester, but two classes got Zirin thinking about the topic.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It started with a class called \u201cThe Black Athlete Since 1945.\u201d Zirin didn\u2019t get into the class, because History Professor Emeritus Mahmoud El-Kati, who taught the class, was so popular, but Zirin\u2019s roommate got in.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI read all of [my roommate\u2019s] books and even sat in on the class, even though I got no credit for it whatsoever, and even though I wasn\u2019t doing great in my other classes,\u201d Zirin said. \u201cThe way Professor El-Kati brought together sports and politics to explain the fight against racism post-World War II absolutely blew my mind. I thought I knew a lot about sports but realized that I really only knew half the story.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zirin did make it onto the class roster for the other course that changed his perspective. English Professor Emeritus Robert Warde offered a class called \u201cAutobiographical Writing,\u201d and suddenly, Zirin began to connect sports and politics to writing.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI found myself in that class, writing stories about my own life \u2014 which was, of course, the class \u2014 but it was all related to sports,\u201d Zirin said. \u201cThings I\u2019d seen, things I\u2019d experienced, things I\u2019d learned from sitting in on Professor El-Kati\u2019s class. And as I was learning all this, something amazing happened in the NBA.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Mar. 12, 1996, Denver Nuggets guard Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf decided not to stand for the national anthem before an NBA game to protest US foreign policy abroad and racism at home. The NBA suspended Abdul-Rauf for a game and fined him over $30,000. Zirin took note.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat living demonstration of how sports and politics could come together made me realize that the history I\u2019d been learning from [Emeritus] Peter <\/span>Rachleff<\/span> and Mahmoud El-Kati actually had tremendous relevance to the present,\u201d Zirin said. \u201cAnd that, combined with Robert Warde\u2019s class, was what did it for me. This is what I wanted to do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, Zirin was far from political sports journalism. While at Macalester, he wrote political op-eds for <\/span>The Mac Weekly<\/span><\/i> but never anything sports-related. Post-graduation, he slowly progressed towards writing about sports and politics.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t have a lot of models of people who were doing that kind of writing, which made it hard at first,\u201d Zirin said. \u201cI was able to get onto some jobs in my twenties working on newspapers \u2014 small newspapers \u2014 in the DC-Maryland area. And with every job, all I asked was, \u2018May I have a little space in the sports section to write about sports and politics?\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The newspapers obliged, and Zirin went to work with the real estate they granted him. Because of the diminutive size of the audience for the publications he was writing for, Zirin\u2019s columns didn\u2019t have many readers, but that changed once his brother-in-law started distributing his column online. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI found myself building a base of readers across the country,\u201d Zirin said. \u201cHaymarket Books got wind of it and said, \u2018Hey, you know, we want to take your columns, expand on them, and put a book together.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After Zirin\u2019s first book, \u201cWhat\u2019s My Name, Fool?\u201d sold well, he began to get more opportunities. He started to write more books and continued to write columns, until one of his columns caught the eye of New York Times sportswriter Robert Lipsyte.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The publisher and editor of The Nation magazine at the time, Katrina vanden Heuvel, knew Lipsyte and had approached him about becoming the first sportswriter for her magazine. Lipsyte said he was too old for the position, instead pointing her to Zirin.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI say very proudly, I\u2019m the first sports writer ever hired by The Nation,\u201d Zirin said. \u201cI\u2019m proud of it because I think sports belong in political magazines \u2026 and not having [sports] in spaces like The Nation, to me, constitutes a degree of prejudice against the importance of sports. I think sports is a very important lens for understanding our political life, and it\u2019s a very important entry point for people who love sports but hate politics.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon, Zirin became the sports editor at The Nation, cementing the role of sports at the politically-focused magazine. The position has led to many more opportunities for Zirin, including his podcast and blog \u201cThe Edge of Sports,\u201d and documentaries like \u201cBehind the Shield.\u201d Zirin thinks these platforms allow him to demonstrate to his audience that despite what they might think, sports and politics do not exist on parallel tracks.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHoward Cosell, the great sportscaster, said that rule number one of the jock autocracy was that sports and politics should never mix,\u201d Zirin said. \u201cAt the same time, we see politics all over sports. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhether it has to do with billion-dollar land deals to create new stadiums, whether it has to do with hyper patriotism, hyper militarism, the war planes flying overhead before football games, all of these actions are, in fact, political. [Like] keeping transgender kids from taking the sports field. That’s a political act, of course, and a pernicious one at that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

These acts \u2014 and the reactions to them \u2014 define for Zirin what it means to be a political sports journalist.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe first thing I try to do is establish for the reader that it’s not sports and politics that they don’t want to mix,\u201d Zirin said. \u201cIt\u2019s sports and a certain kind of politics they don’t want to mix, and those certain kinds of politics are resistance politics. Being a political sports writer is teasing out the political messages in sports and also providing a platform for the words of athletes who are trying to use their hyper-exalted \u2018brought to you by Nike\u2019 perch to say something about the world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This piece originally appeared in the <\/em>Mac Weekly<\/a>. Thanks to the <\/em>Mac Weekly for allowing <\/em>The Words to reprint this article!<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Daniel Graham ’26 In his 28 years since graduating Macalester, Dave Zirin \u201996 has become the first-ever sports editor for the political news magazine The Nation, produced multiple feature-length documentaries and co-written books with Olympic athlete and civil rights activist John Carlos and NFL Pro-Bowler Michael Bennett.  Zirin has spent his career investigating the […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":913,"featured_media":0,"parent":6337,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-6391","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/913"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6391"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8169,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6391\/revisions\/8169"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}