Column Archive

25 years since Al Campanis Shocked Baseball: what's changed and what's stayed the same

The Campanis lesson for Major League Baseball hasn’t been to take on racism in the sport, but find executives who can smile for the camera and talk a cat out of a tree. But the bigger problem today is less the old school prejudice, than something far more systemic.

Ozzie Guillen, Free Speech and the Case of Loretta Capeheart

The space where we can reasonably be heard is becoming constricted exactly at the moment when people are beginning to break out of their shells. We have seen both the Occupy movement and the national struggle to win justice for Trayvon Martin present a new willingness to fight. Attacks on speech are efforts to strangle that impulse in its crib. That’s what makes the legal case of Northeastern Illinois University Professor Loretta Capeheart so critical for anyone who cares about freedom of speech and the ability for us to actually be able to shape our surroundings without fear.

A Question of Human Rights: Keeping the F1 Racing Series Out of Bahrain

On April 22nd, the royal family of Bahrain is determined to stage its annual Formula 1 Grand Prix race. This might not sound like scintillating news, but whether the event goes off as planned is a question with major ramifications for the royal Khalifa family, as well as for the democracy movement in the Gulf kingdom. It will be viewed closely by the US state department and human rights organizations across the globe. From a renowned prisoner on a two month hunger strike to a British billionaire fascist sympathizer, the sides have been sharply drawn.

Big Trouble in Little Havana: The Perilous Politics of Ozzie Guillen

Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen decided to make a statement about Fidel Castro and Cuba. What could possibly go wrong?

Players Getting Played: Why a Look at the NCAA’s Past Makes Me Weep for Its Future

As much as I’d like to believe that shame and scandal would cause the NCAA to change in a positive fashion, the past tells us a different story. It’s worth remembering the NCAA's post-war scandals and the change they wrought. This shows in stark terms that when it comes to the NCAA, change doesn’t always mean progress.

Trayvon Martin’s Death, LeBron James and the Miami Heat

The senseless killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a self-appointed “neighborhood watch captain” has provoked anguish, rage and now, at long last, resistance. We’ve seen rallies, demonstrations and walkouts at dozens upon dozens of high schools in Florida alone. Even more remarkably, this resistance has found expression in the world of sports. An impressive group of NBA players from Carmelo Anthony to Steve Nash to the leaders of the NBA Players Association have spoken out and called for justice. 

Jackie Robinson, Trayvon Martin and the Sad History of Sanford, Florida

Sanford, Florida is a city that will now be known for all times as the place where Trayvon Martin was killed for the crime of Living While Black. It was also the place whose institutions – the police department, the local press, and even the city morgue - treated Trayvon and his body in ways that should disturb anyone with a shred of conscience. But Sanford, Florida does have its own history and it includes a collective moment of intolerance and bigotry that almost derailed the history of the man Martin Luther King called “a freedom rider before freedom rides,” Jackie Robinson.

"Why I’m Shock-Raged by the New Orleans Saints Suspensions"

I am so angered by the insane, over-the-top suspensions of Saints football coach Sean Payton, General Manager Mickey Loomis, and pretty much everyone in New Orleans except for the cast of Treme, that I had to create a new word. I'm shock-raged. The entire 2012 season for a team that could rightly be called a Super Bowl favorite has been sliced to ribbons by the SportsWorld's favorite judge, jury, and executioner, NFL Commissioner. Roger Goodell. By taking out the entire Saints brain trust, like he's Michael Corleone at the end of the Godfather, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is sending one hell of a loud message. But cacophony is not the same as clarity. 

More March Madness: The Persecution of Jamar Samuels

This past weekend saw the sharpest possible demonstration of what makes the NCAA basketball tournament, otherwise known as March Madness, so thrilling as a sports spectacle and so repellent as a business. We witnessed two number-fifteen seeds win in the opening round, the first time that’s happened in tournament history. Then came ugly, otherwise known as the case of Kansas State center Jamar Samuels. Samuels, the team’s second leading scorer and a senior, was declared ineligible and summarily humiliated by the NCAA just twenty minutes before the Wildcats’ second-round game against Syracuse. What was Samuels’s crime? He’s accused of taking $200 from his Amateur Athletic Union coach, Curtis Malone. Samuels had to miss his last game as a collegian and watch his dispirited team lose to the top ranked Orange, 75-59. I’m not sure which part of this to be enraged by first. Let us count the ways.

Beneath the Brackets: March Madness and the “Civil Rights Movement for Our Times”

In 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists at the Olympic games, taking a stand against the injustices they saw in their corner in the SportsWorld. The year 2012 is crying out for similar displays of athletic militancy but we shouldn’t have to wait for this Summer’s Olympics. The time for action is right now during the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament. We need young people of uncommon courage stepping forward into what sports sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards calls “The Civil Rights Movement for our times," the inequity and exploitation engineered by the NCAA.