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Do #BlackLivesMatter to White Athletes? Let’s Ask Them

As the news that Officer Darren Wilson will not face trial for killing unarmed black teenager Michael Brown reverberated across the country, more than a few athletes took to social media to express their disgust, sadness, and even rage.

New NBA Union Chief Michele Roberts Slams the League’s Old Labor Practices

The labor movement slogans that have guided generations include “an injury to one is an injury to all” and “solidarity forever.” But my favorite—because it speaks most directly to strategy—is, “The best way to avoid a strike is to prepare for one.” In other words, bosses will only back down and blink if they survey your side and think that they can lose.

Beyond the Drug Raids: Why the Feds Are Fed Up With the NFL

Let’s be clear: the recent raid on five NFL teams by the Drug Enforcement Agency to see if teams were doubling as illegal painkiller dispensaries has little to do with concerns about how our nation’s Sunday heroes Novocain themselves for gridiron glory. The fact that the NFL and their teams of doctors and nurses give out prescription pills like Halloween candy and break out syringes to top off sessions of physical therapy has been public knowledge for over forty years. Player memoirs like the 1970s Out of their League, by Cardinal linebacker Dave Meggyesy, and Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Peter Gent’s semi-autobiographical bestseller North Dallas Forty, addressed such things with a nonchalant frankness bordering on the blasé. These practices are also discussed by former players with a shrug as just the price they pay for keeping the trains—those same trains carrying billions of dollars in revenue—running on schedule. Players tend to come from poverty and play an average of just three and a half years on largely non-guaranteed contracts. They will do what they have to do to get out there on Sunday, and teams will be only too happy to oblige.

Dave Zirin on the Dan Patrick Show: Roger Goodell & Adrian Peterson

On the Dan Patrick Show today, Dave Zirin called out Roger Goodell for “basically using a beaten 4-year-old child as a stepping stone to reclaim the moral highground that was lost after the Ray Rice scandal.” Zirin points out that you can both be repulsed by what Adrian Peterson did to his son, and see what Roger Goodell is doing for what it is: “a profoundly cynical exercise in personal and professional brand rehabilitation.”- Jessica McKenzie

Kurt Busch, Ray Rice and How Sports Disseminates the Burdens of Racism

Over the weekend, we learned that NASCAR star Kurt Busch was being investigated by police for assaulting his ex-girlfriend Patricia Driscoll. Driscoll has requested both a restraining order and that the court compel Busch to seek counseling after he allegedly“accused her of ‘having spies everywhere and having a camera on the bus to watch him’ ” and then “jumped up, grabbed her face and smashed her head three times against the wall next to the bed.”

Boston Is Already Saying ‘Hell No’ to the 2024 Olympics

As someone who has reported from most of the Olympic sites since 2002, I have written—often—that these games, so treasured by athletes and fans, operate off-camera as a colossal scam. It doesn’t take Naomi Klein to see that the games arrive with a shock doctrine of debt, displacement and militarization of public space. This has always been the case, but since 9/11, as the security needs for the Olympics have exploded alongside the profit margins of private security and tech firms, it has become an utter disaster for host cities. In fact, staging the games has become so burdensome that the only countries which seem to want the them are places that have a more, let’s just say, dictatorial method of handling cost overruns and dissent among the general populace.

FIFA Denies Women’s World Cup Players an Equal Playing Field—Literally

At some point in the near future, a Canadian tribunal will determine whether or not the 2015 Women’s World Cup will be the setting not only of guts, goals and glory but torn ligaments, stretched hamstrings and a profound level of disrespect. A group of the top players in the world, including US stars Abby Wambach and Alex Morgan, are suing soccer’s international ruling body, FIFA as well as the Canadian Soccer Association, over their insistence that the Cup be played on artificial turf.

Why the Movement Against Washington Football’s Racial Slur Is ‘Idle No More’

On Sunday, as many as 5,000 people marched on the Minnesota-Washington football game in the Twin Cities, with a simple message for DC’s seething carbuncle of an owner, Dan Snyder: change the damn name of your franchise. Change your mascot from the dictionary-defined slur of Native Americans and enter the twenty-first century.

A-Rod and Ray Rice: If They Go Down, Let Them Not Be Alone

Alex Rodriguez and Ray Rice: a middle-aged, steroid-addled baseball star from Miami and a young Pro-Bowl running back caught on camera striking his then-fiancée Janay Palmer, have a couple of things in common these days. Owners and masses of fans want to each of these men to just go away, disappear, never heard from again. Each of their respective leagues would love nothing more than to be able to “pull a Stalin” and erase them from every photo, every video and every memory from their respective worlds. But neither is going anywhere, quietly or otherwise.

The Bridge: A Political Appreciation of Steve Nash

Anyone who loves the game of basketball when played to its free-flowing, near-narcotic full-potential is in mourning over the announcement that the career of Steve Nash has in all likelihood come to a close. People will miss Nash above all else, because the future Hall of Famer had the capacity to both control the pace of a game and inspire onlookers like few players of his generation.