Dave Zirin | The Nation
INTERVIEW: Why Pro Wrestler ‘MVP’ Made the Trip to Ferguson
Pro wrestler Montel Vontavious Porter (MVP) made the trip to Ferguson as himself, “as Hassan.” (Wikipedia commons)
His name is Hassan Hamin Assad. But pro wrestling fans know him as Montel Vontavious Porter, otherwise known as MVP. In a sporting spectacle known for its profoundly backward representations of African-Americans, MVP has always chosen to showcase himself as a man of intelligence and confidence that—when playing the villain—could morph into grandiose cockiness. This past week, MVP—“acting as Hassan,” as he said to me, made the decision to travel to Ferguson, Missouri, the site of the police killing of Michael Brown and subsequent clashes with a shockingly militarized police force. I was able to speak with MVP while he was in Ferguson about why he felt compelled to make the journey.
DZ: Why did you, MVP, decide to make this trip to Ferguson?
MVP: Because, I was sitting on the couch, watching the footage coming in.… And, I’ve been saying this over and over, I just got tired of shaking my fist at the TV. My biggest issue was watching the militarized St. Louis County Police come in with a heavy-handed approach, to peaceful protesters. Media blackout, arresting journalists, and I just felt like I had to speak up about our Constitution being trampled on and our constitutional rights being violated.
You’ve now been there a couple of days, what’s your sense of what’s happening on the ground?
I’ve had had the opportunity to speak to a lot of the local residents who were there in the chaos. One guy who was actually, according to him, beaten up by the police in the process. And last night was extremely calm, there were peaceful protests… no violence. But there was no police presence. Earlier in the evening, there were a few black police officers, and I think the local police chief—it was, I think, a minimized police presence. The night, as it got darker and as it got later there were even less police. And, I’m sad to say, that much, much later in the evening—probably around 1 am—a few police responded to minor incident at a McDonald’s. There was nothing going on and they left. They didn’t bother anyone, and as they were leaving, some were throwing rocks and bottles at the police cars as they left. Which is counterproductive to do, but unfortunately you always have that angst.
So what’s your analysis of the approach of the police?
I‘ll paraphrase, because I believe the quote was that the St. Louis County Police Department… they hadn’t even had the opportunity to drill for that type of situation. So, what I think you have is a bunch of overanxious individuals with improper training responding to a situation not knowing how to do so. And as seen in some of the video that’s still shot as well as the accounts of some of the people who were there, you had officers on hand who were—instead of de-escalating the violence were intentionally escalating it. Mocking the citizens, there’s a still photo that I saw of some of the officers with their hands up… The major chant [of the protest] has been “Hands up, don’t shoot.” And there’ve been people walking up and down the street with their hands up and T-shirts that say “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Because allegedly, according to eyewitness accounts, Mike Brown had his hands up in a surrender position when he was shot. And there’s actually a still photo floating around that I saw, and a number of individuals related that they saw firsthand of officers raising their hands up, mocking the protesters and the “Hands up, don’t shoot” pose. That’s not professional, that’s not an attempt to de-escalate violence. There was talk of officers calling them animals. From what I understand it was just a complete lack of professionalism and leadership. Before this, where were the local community leaders? Where was the governor? Where was the mayor? Where was the city council? Where were the people who should have stepped in and called for peace? Where were the people who should have stepped in and said, “Wait a minute, this is not how we handle these sort of situations.”
Speaking of leadership, I don’t know if you knew this or not, MVP, but you are the first person from the world of athletics to actually make the trip to Ferguson and offer solidarity to what’s happening there. Were you aware of that, and are you actually trying to be an example for others to try to leverage their fame to bring attention to what’s happening there?
Well, I wasn’t aware of that, and I think it’s rather unfortunate. I can kind of understand why people wouldn’t want to get involved, but that’s part of my position… I’m so tired of apathy. I got tired of tweeting about it, I got tired of shaking my fist at the TV screen and talking about it. I didn’t come here as MVP, I came here as Hassan, a guy who wanted to stand up for my civil rights and everyone else’s. And if my visibility as MVP can bring more attention to the violation of civil rights and the trampling of the constitution, then that’s cool too. But I didn’t come as a “celebrity” or as a pro athlete, I just came as a citizen that was fed up.
I have to ask: you have always been a strong African-American character in an industry that does not have, to put it mildly, a history of strong African-American characters. Do you feel like you’re also making a statement to the world of professional wrestling that African-Americans need to be treated with more respect and less dehumanization than we’ve seen over the l decades?
While I wholeheartedly agree with your last statement, that thought never crossed my mind, actually. So, one had nothing to do with the other. What I said to a few people in Ferguson was, while the incident might have been set off by a racial distrust, disharmony, discord… whatever you want to call it. It quickly escalated to something much than that. In just this last month there were four African-American men who were unarmed and killed by police. I think that it has to be a conversation about use of force, use of deadly force, and excessive use of force. I think that, and I want to make this very clear, my father was a cop, my brother’s a cop, my sister-in-law’s a cop. I’m the black sheep in a family of cops. I understand how difficult the job is. I also understand that with great power comes great responsibility, and police officers have to be held to a higher standard because we entrust our society to their care. The problem is, when you deal with humans you deal with the frailty of the human psyche and the human ego, and people make mistakes. But when those mistakes are made, somebody has to be held accountable. And in this particular case, we don’t have all of the facts in yet about why this young man was shot, and whether the officer’s life was in jeopardy or whether it was justifiable, but eyewitnesses say that he turned with his hands up, and was surrendering, and was shot multiple times. If that is in fact the case, then somebody has to answer for that. And these other cases across the country… I’m not saying that all cops are bad. There are many who would like to say that. But I believe that you’re complicit by inaction if you witness something illegal take place and you don’t take a step to correct it.
Last question, and I wasn’t going to ask you this, but given that you come from a family of African-American police officers, and given that you’re clearly attuned to these issues it seems appropriate: How big a problem do you think we have in this country of racism in the police departments of the United States, racism in the criminal justice system of the United States? How big of a problem is there that needs to be confronted?
Wow. You got an hour? There are people who often, say, “Racism doesn’t exist anymore.” And, “Nobody’s racist anymore.” And, to that I say, all you have to do is go on Youtube and read the comments. That will tell you just how racist people will be if they can’t be called out on it. Where nowadays, racism isn’t as overt as, say, fifty years ago. It still exists, and I’m not just talking about white against black racism. There’s black against white racism. There’s Jewish against Muslim racism… All people, all cultures have some sort of racism. It’s a cultural thing and I think that part of the issue is that people aren’t necessarily taking the steps to be understanding and aware of other cultures. I think that people are willfully ignorant of other cultures, and black people, white people, Asian people… everybody’s guilty of it. And I don’t think, in the near future, we’re going to see racism disappear. In the criminal justice system, of course it exists. Just look at the disparity in sentencing between people who deal crack cocaine and people who deal powder cocaine. We know that crack cocaine is prevalent in the African-American communities and powder cocaine is a lot sexier, and it’s a little more expensive and therefore used by more affluent people. But if you’re caught with crack cocaine, the same amount of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine, your sentence is—I think—five times more severe. There’s something to be said for that. I think that there is racism, just recently I believe in Florida there were two of three cops that were fired from the department because they were exposed to be active members of the Ku Klux Klan. It exists. You can’t deny that it exists, but racism is due to an unevolved thinking and as a society, as a human race, we have to become evolved thinkers. Our thinking has to evolve with our technology and everything else. If you don’t like somebody because of the God that they worship, or because of the color of their skin… there’s something wrong with you, not them. But, I’ll also say this, we don’t—and when I say “we,” I’m talking about the African-American community, the inner city—a dialogue has to be had with young black men about how to communicate with white police officers specifically. You don’t escalate the situation by saying, “Hey, man, why you fuckin’ with me?” You have to be able to communicate, and I think it happens on both sides. You have cops who, unfortunately, don’t de-escalate the situation and, by the same token, [young black men] don’t de-escalate the situation. And they say, “You know, I’m tired. I’m fed up with being racially profiled.” OK, when you’re being taken into custody, at that moment, that’s not the time to protest. That’s not the time to resist arrest. That’s not the time to cuss the cop out. Your best bet is to just be as polite as possible and go file a report or go do whatever you can within the proper channels. And as we know often enough, it gets swept under the rug. But if it happens enough, something has to be done.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
At this point, man, I want to make it very clear. They’re showing the video now about Michael Brown and the cigars that he stole and the shop owner who he apparently had a physical altercation with during that theft. However, now it’s being revealed that the officer who stopped him had absolutely no idea that he was involved in that crime. And, just because of that, I’m hearing people saying, “Oh, well now we have to take a look at this in an entirely different light.” Let’s not be distracted from the issue at hand—excessive use of force. And, that leading to an overt trampling of our Constitution. Even if you are the most overt racist and you are glad that Michael Brown is dead, another young dead nigger… that makes you happy… you can’t be happy about the response of the police department coming in and saying, “As of this moment, the constitution is not valid. It’s a media blackout, we’re arresting journalists who try to take our pictures. We’re going to ban satellite trucks from the area. There’s a no-fly zone so media helicopters can’t report on the situation.” This affects you too. This affects everyone. And, you know what? Today, it’s someone else’s kid, it’s someone else’s neighborhood. Tomorrow it could very easily be your kid and your neighborhood.
Robin Williams and a Moment of Magic
Robin Williams performs. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
When I was 12, I was trudging along on 77th and Columbus with my sister and father, another desultory post-divorce dinner with dad. Like it was yesterday, I remember looking up and doing a double take, then a triple take, then a quadruple take: Robin Williams was walking alongside us. Robin. Effing. Williams.
This would have been Robin Williams at the apex of his powers—at least in the eyes of a 12-year-old. After Mork and Mindy. After Popeye—which I was shocked to find out years later was “a bomb”—after Moscow on the Hudson, after his Night at the Met HBO special, a videotape of which we passed around school with the electric reverence of an illicit nudie magazine. Save Eddie Murphy, there was no one cooler. No one.
Seeing him walking next to me was as remarkable and otherworldly for me as if my own 10-year-old was walking to school and bumped into Finn and Jake from Adventure Time.
As I did speechless double and triple takes, Mr. Williams noticed me gawking at him, looked down and smiled. He was with a woman whose arm was entwined in his and she was bumping into him with her hip, smiling, as if to say, “Look at this goofy kid.” His smile turned into a wide grin beneath his beard as my eyes continued to expand.
At the corner, they crossed the street and I finally was able to find my tongue, turn to my father and sister and stammer, “Wobin Rilliams! Bobin Billiams! Yo! That was Robin Williams!!” I think my father, whose comedic tastes tended toward the cartoons of The New Yorker, may have grunted. My older sister—although I frankly can’t remember her response—almost certainly rolled her eyes, as if I had just said I saw a Sasquatch.
I remember grabbing them both and gesticulating at the couple across the street and saying, “I’m totally serious! That guy is Robin Williams!” After I was able to focus everyone’s disbelieving gaze, Robin Williams looked over at us, and danced. I’m completely serious. He did that Chuck Berry dance where you kick one leg up and down and hop up the street as if you are doing the guitar solo from Johnny B. Good. He looked over at us, and at at our walking pace, did that dance for about one quarter of a city block. Now it was my sister’s turn to have her jaw hit the ground. Then we cheered.
I have, obviously, never forgotten that small moment of pre-adolescent magic. As I’ve been reading the obituaries and remembrances of Mr. Williams it has been striking just how seamlessly that tiny story fits with the words of people who actually knew him. You hear the same things; He was uncommonly kind. He absolutely adored children. He gave of himself without desire for public relations. Hell, he walked picket lines. And he truly—even manically—cared about being loved. Some of the most heartbroken remembrances, tellingly, have come from adults who acted with the man when they were still kids. It’s a rare quality: those who take the time to actually be kind to children.
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I don’t want to speculate about why Robin Williams took his life. People trying to tie it to the vicissitudes of his career—his show was cancelled!—frankly need to stop. Depression in this day and age is that powerful. If it finds you in the wrong place at the wrong time, it can swallow you whole. It’s happened to people I’ve loved. It’s happened to Robin Williams. I hope if nothing else that people in a similar circumstance reach for a phone instead of whatever instrument of death is handy. I also hope that Robin Williams’ family knows that their dad was truly loved. Not just for his art but for the small anonymous moments that revealed who he actually was when the applause stopped. I wish I’d been able to meet him as an adult and simply thank him for gracing my young self with a dollop of magic.
Read Next: The NBA finally hires a female coach
Why Has It Taken This Long for a Men’s Pro-Sports Team to Hire a Female Coach?
Becky Hammon takes questions after being introduced as the assistant coach for the San Antonio Spurs. August 5, 2014. (AP Photo/Bahram Mark Sobhani)
The biggest line of horseshit you will ever hear in professional sports not uttered by Dan Snyder is that no one in the executive suites cares if you are black or white, male or female, gay or straight. As long as you can help the team win, there is a place for you. Wrong. The pivot of all executive decisions is not “How can the team win?” but “How can I keep my damn job?”
The front office fear is that if they bring in a “distraction” and the team flounders, they’ll be scapegoated for bringing in this “distraction,” quickly dispatched, unemployed or otherwise ass out. (And Lord do I hate that word “distraction” as a stand-in for “triggers someone else’s bigotry.”)
That impulse to avoid difference rewards cowardice—politely called “risk-averse behavior”—as teams bypass players that differ from established norms, even if they can help. Someone has to choose to not be the coward. It took the St. Louis Rams’s Jeff Fisher to make the decision to not be another NFL milksop and draft Michael Sam at the end of the seventh round.
Gregg Popovich, coach and Kaiser of the San Antonio Spurs, is no one’s idea of cowardly. So predictably, even obviously, it was Coach Pop who made the decision to hire Becky Hammon as the first full-time female assistant coach in any major professional men’s sport in the United States.
“I very much look forward to the addition of Becky Hammon to our staff,” Popovich said. “Having observed her working with our team this past season, I’m confident her basketball IQ, work ethic and interpersonal skills will be a great benefit to the Spurs.”
Hammon comes to the Spurs after sixteen years in the WNBA, her last eight with the outfit in San Antonio where she got to know the Spurs operation. But Becky Hammon on a bench was going to happen. As Kate Fagan wrote in her indispensable piece on the hire, “If you know Becky Hammon, one thing has always been clear: She would become a coach after she finished playing….
“She could see a play once and know all its options and offshoots, categorize them from most to least effective. And she could do this for every position on the court, instantly—as if the X’s and O’s had been coded into her DNA.”
Becky Hammon by all accounts has the skills to coach. Yet that glass ceiling would have been a glass fortress if not for Pop’s being Pop. Of course it was going to be Coach Pop. Beneath the military crew-cut and Roger Murtaugh demeanor, Coach Pop lives his life as the reality of Phil Jackson’s image. He doesn’t talk in New Age riddles and hang out with lefty celebs while, when it matters, scoffing about keeping politics out of sports.
Instead, Coach Pop looks for real ways to make his corner of the world a little more just. Hiring Becky Hammon on the merits of her ability—while not giving one holy hell about the fallout in Texas or beyond—is how he does it. I don’t know if a part of Pop is also fighting for the idea that there is a place for women in sports beyond being sexist clickbait, but that’s the result. I do know from my interactions with the man that he admires those who have historically risked their perch of privilege in pro sports to impact the works. He thinks about the world beyond sports and wants it to be better.
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American sports—structured and codified over a century ago as a leisure pastime created by men for male consumption—just got marginally better, and that is cause for celebration. While the NFL seems to see disrespecting its female fan base as part of its mission statement, Coach Pop—by just being Pop—lives by a different code. Because of that code, Becky Hammon will be a coach in the NBA. It feels great to tell my young daughter about the news. Hell, it feels great to even type the words.
Read Next: Dave Zirin on the needless killing of a Palestinian soccer legend
His Name Was Ahed Zaqout: Former Palestinian Soccer Star Killed in Gaza
Palestinians cheer as they watch their team play in the AFC Cup final. (Reuters/Mohammed Salem)
All it took was a recording of Donald Sterling insulting Magic Johnson in a derogatory manner for the twenty-four-hour news world to stop on its axis. Now imagine if Donald Sterling—in all of his paranoid, racist fervor—had an army at his disposal and bombed Magic Johnson in his home, killing him in his sleep.
If such a scenario sounds like hacky Phillip K. Dick fan fiction as written by Mike Lupica, then you have not been paying attention to the dystopian, genocidal panorama in Gaza, where no one is safe. You are unfamiliar with the name Ahed Zaqout.
Ahed Zaqout was a 49-year-old sportscaster and television host in Gaza, a national sports voice for a people without a nation. Two decades ago, he was a soccer star: the midfielder for the Palestinian national soccer team. On Wednesday, he was killed in his bed by the bombs of the Israeli Defense Forces.
As Gaza sports journalist Khaled Zaher told Reuters, “Palestine has lost one of its best players, he may have been the best midfielder we ever had.”
Why the IDF was “defending” itself against Zaqout is a mystery. He was no Muhammad Ali, using sports to advance any kind of political cause. He was that most conventional and familiar of person in sports: the ex-star jock turned broadcaster. But in Gaza, what we may see as conventional can become political. Zaqout was someone whose voice, sharp wit, and trenchant analysis was a source of joy and escape for a people under constant siege. Providing escape to the trapped of Gaza was in and of itself a political act.
Was Zaqout actually targeted, or did he die in yet another pitiless IDF bombing of civilians? If we believe Netanyahu and his defenders—that the reports by journalists and the United Nations of indiscriminate mass killings are a fabrication—then it is worth asking, Why did Ahed Zaqout have to die?
Based on the description and reports of the bombing, it is doubtful that his was a pinpoint assassination. Far more likely, Zaqout was a victim of Netanyahu’s mania for total war—a mania that makes my earlier Donald Sterling comparison frankly insulting to Mr. Sterling. But if he was in fact targeted, it would be yet another example of the ways in which Israel has attacked the soccer community of Gaza as a way to choke any respite or relief that the people could possibly possess.
Soccer is about people feeling a sense of collective joy and hope. It creates scenes, like the ones in earlier this year—it feels like a lifetime ago—of thousands of people on the Gaza beach celebrating the ascension of their national team.
Attacking soccer is about attacking these very national aspirations. It’s the inhumane act targeting a collective expression of humanity.
Currently FIFA is debating sanctions against Israel’s membership in the organization because of formal accusations that it has used state violence to stunt the Palestinian national team
Ahed Zaqout should be a part of this debate. Whether Zaqout was targeted or was caught up in an indiscriminate killing should be irrelevant to FIFA. One of their own was killed, and that has to count for something.
A critical voice in this debate is FIFA’s European President Michel Platini. Platini has been sharply critical of Israel yet also has championed the staging of tournaments there over international objections. Platini was also once a great player for the French national team. In a 1994 friendly match between France and the Palestinian national squad, Platini played across a fair-haired whippet named Ahed Zaqout. Perhaps he will remember his name as this debate moves forward.
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I know it is stunning to think that FIFA could be any kind of force for social justice, but unlike the United Nations, the United States can’t unilaterally block FIFA’s decisions. And unlike the United Nations, FIFA could do something that would have teeth and that people across the world would actually notice. Perhaps in the face of the bloodshed in Gaza and in the memory of Ahed Zaqout, it will send a message that a country that imprisons another has no place in the world of international sports. If the politicians won’t act, then perhaps the world of sports must. After all, even Magic Johnson just cancelled an event in Jerusalem.
Read Next: Dave Zirin on the luxury of medical care in a country where hospitals aren’t bombed
At Least My Hospital Isn’t Being Bombed
Air strike in Gaza, July 2014 (Reuters/Stringer)
I’m in the hospital as I write this, getting ready to be cut open for some kind of intestinal surgery. I feel stressed, a little scared, yet given the news in the world, oddly grateful. I’m grateful that this clean facility, and its overworked but exceptionally kind staff, is not in the process of being bombed by the Israeli Defense Forces.
It is a sick sign of our times that human beings throughout the world cannot take for granted the concept that your hospital will not have a bullseye on its roof, but this is exactly where President Benjamin Netanyahu has dragged us. He is not the first, and he will not be the last, to take this tactic as a legitimate means of war. But defending these actions by saying, “George W. Bush has done it!” or “Assad does it, too!” is only an argument the morally bankrupt could possibly make.
No part of Israel’s war on Gaza—or any war—is more unconscionable than the targeting of hospitals. The shelling of institutions where people go to heal not only adds to the spiraling body count, it also creates mortality figures that will never ever be uttered by Wolf Blitzer, as the sick, the dying and the pregnant find themselves imperiled by Netanyahu’s slaughter. The reports from the UN about the effects in Gaza on pregnant women makes one wonder when fetuses became enemy combatants—their mothers, human shields.
Then there is Al-Wafa hospital, the only facility equipped to handle brain and spinal injuries in Gaza, which is now a “smoldering ruin.” According to Jonathan Miller of NBC News, in a devastating report, patients had to be evacuated from the hospital and carried to the center of Gaza City in blankets.
As of this writing, Al Shifa hospital, the most well-equipped in Gaza, has been under bombardment. Israel is arguing that Hamas has bombed their own hospital. Ayman Mohyeldin of NBC News, who witnessed the shelling, reported otherwise, although the story from NBC has changed repeatedly without explanation.
This is yet another example of Netanyahu’s—as he speaks of his war on Gaza being one of “civilization vs. barbarism”—violating Geneva protocols.
As Allison Deger summed up in her searing report on Al-Wafa hospital,
According to International Humanitarian Law (IHL) hospitals are protected sites. Article 19 of the Fourth Geneva Convention also states: ‘The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit…acts harmful to the enemy.’ The Geneva Convention also requires ‘a reasonable time limit,” for allowing an evacuation. If a hospital is used to launch weapons, under IHL it can only be targeted when there is an imminent strike originating from the location. Even storing caches of weapons do not meet international law’s stringent threshold for firing on humanitarian sites.
As for Al-Wafa, there were no weapons, no rockets. Just doctors, nurses and patients. Just teenagers, like Aya, paralyzed with a tumor on her spine, being transported with makeshift gurneys into an open space. Just bodies. Just civilians increasingly seen as legitimate targets by the IDF.
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One final point. I write this from a hospital bed in the middle of the night, with help from a bedside lamp and extension cord attached to my computer. In other words, I have electricity.
The main power plant of Gaza has been bombed, plunging the city into darkness. CNN reported that this was either an accident of the IDF or Hamas took out their own power. (If Wolf Blitzer said Hamas was killing Israeli unicorns with the key to eternal life at this point, no one in Atlanta would blink.) Fox News was more blunt, saying that Israel was “striking at symbols of Hamas’s power.” How the media spin this is irrelevant to the pressing fact that it has imperiled every health facility for a place with a population three times the size of Washington, DC. I have a lot of worries right now, but the absence of electricity is not one of them. Nothing exposes the lies underpinning Netanyahu’s battle for “civilization” quite like this kind of savagery. Nothing feels more illustrative of the horrors Israel has unleashed quite like feeling privileged that my hospital isn’t under lethal attack from the skies.
Read Next: Dave Zirin on violence against women in the NFL
Here’s What Happens When an NFL Player Beats His Fiancée Unconscious
Ray Rice. 2014 (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Two games. Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice was caught on a security camera dragging his unconscious wife-to-be Janay Palmer by the hair, after knocking her unconscious, and the National Football League has chosen to suspend him for two games. Rice in fact will return to the field just in time to wear the NFL’s pink-festooned uniforms to celebrate their deep commitment to breast cancer awareness—and their even deeper commitment to selling sixty-dollar jerseys marketed aggressively to their female fan base. In fact, the Ray Rice all-pink number is available for purchase right now. The NFL actually needs a Violence Against Women Month instead, to raise awareness about a killer that malignantly throbs in every locker room. But that is not going to happen, and it is worth understanding why.
The NFL, as many have been writing for too many years, has a violence-against-women problem. The incidents are too many to catalogue. But by suspending Ray Rice for two games, a lighter suspension than the league’s marijuana smokers receive, Roger Goodell and his coterie of owners are sending a message that it just doesn’t matter. I don’t know why anyone would expect more from a league notorious for racist nicknames, out-of-control owners and a locker-room culture that would shame some high schools. But still. Two games. I did not think the NFL had the capacity to stun me with its blockheadedness, but I was wrong.
There is without question an important discussion to have—an unheated discussion not made for sports radio—about why violence against women and football seem to walk arm-in-arm. We could discuss the inability for football players to compartmentalize violence, taking the hyper-aggression of their sport home with them—something that affects families in the armed forces as well. There is a discussion we need to have about its connection to traumatic brain injury, and the ways that some of the side effects according to the NFL’s own neurologists, are mood swings, fits of temper and the inability to connect emotionally with the people in their lives. There especially is a discussion we need to have about a culture of entitlement that starts in high school and runs even more profoundly in college football, where young men produce billions in revenue and are often “rewarded”, since they can’t be paid, with a warped value system that says women are there to be taken.
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If we can confront how players deal with violence and with the women in their lives, then we can prevent tragedies before they take place. Unfortunately, the NFL has shown absolutely zero interest in taking this issue seriously. The league didn’t do anything after Kansas City Chiefs player Jovon Belcher killed the mother of his child, Kasandra Perkins, before taking his own life in front of his coach and general manager.If they did not do anything then, they are not about to take it seriously now. It is very difficult to not be cynical about why it is so casually indifferent to this issue. To discuss violence against women means by necessity to talk about everything endemic in the NFL that creates this culture. The NFL has been aggressively marketing its sport to parents, telling them that, despite what they may have heard, football is as healthy for their children as a Flintstones vitamin. To discuss the causes of violence against women means to put its golden goose under the harshest possible light. It means producing negative publicity, and it means blowing wind on the brushfire movement of young parents who do not want their children playing this sport. To not discuss it, however, means not only ignoring a problem that won’t go away. It means sending a message to every general manager, coach, player and fan that the worth and humanity of women is at best negligible.
That is why when Rice’s coach John Harbaugh said, upon learning of Rice’s suspension, “It’s not a big deal, it’s just part of the process,” he is just taking his cues from the league that provides him with employment. Harbaugh also said, “He makes a mistake, all right? He’s going to have to pay a consequence. I think that’s good for kids to understand it works that way.” Unfortunately, the only lessons that kids are going to learn from this episode is that the vaunted “shield” of the NFL protects perpetrators of violence against women, for the sake of what it sees as the greater good. When its “breast cancer awareness month” begins, people should take these jerseys and light a big old bonfire outside of NFL stadiums. They are symbols of a monstrous joke that sees women as either revenue streams, cheerleaders or collateral damage to what takes place on the field.
Read Next: Dave Zirin on the transformation of safe havens in Gaza into warzones
Four Little Boys and the Price of Play in Gaza
Palestinians mourn over the lifless bodies of four Bakr Children. July 16, 2014. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)
When the Palestinian national soccer team secured entry into the 2015 Asia Cup, winning the right to play in an international tournament for the first time in its eighty-six-year history, crowds gathered by the hundreds to dance, play music and watch the triumph of their national team on large movie-sized television screens on the beaches on Gaza. The oceanfront represents the illusion of freedom for a land otherwise encircled by walls and checkpoints. People often gather on the beach to celebrate because it is a refuge from densely populated squalor that defines so much of an area that they have been compelled to call home. This is especially the case for children.
That brings us to the four Bakr boys. There was Mohamed Ramez Bakr, eleven years old, Ahed Atef Bakr and Zakaria Ahed Bakr, both ten, and Ismael Mohamed Bakr, nine. They were all killed by an Israeli Defense Forces military strike while playing on the beach in surroundings as familiar to them as a corner playground. The first shell sent them running. The second took their lives. Existing in a land where are you are always underfoot, the beach is one of the precious few places a child can freely roam. In Gaza City, which sewage and pollution could make unlivable by 2020, according to a United Nations study, this is one of the only places where the air feels clean in your lungs. In a land where soccer fields are constantly under bombardment—Israel says that parks and stadiums are popular places for Hamas to launch rocket attacks—the beach is where you go to play.
The Bakr boys were killed in an area they believed to be safe. Mohamed’s mother, grieving at the hospital, was quoted by CNN as saying, “Why did he go to the beach and play—for them to take him away from me?” Several reporters on hand were shocked at what happened. Ayman Mohyeldin of NBC, tweeted: “4 Palestinian kids killed in a single Israeli airstrike. Minutes before they were killed by our hotel, I was kicking a ball with them #gaza.” After this, Mohyeldin was taken off the air, and was only allowed to return following an online campaign launched to defend him. The reasons behind NBC's decision to pull him and then return Mohyeldin to Gaza are still very much in depute. Whatever the cause, Mohyeldin was doing the kind of journalism that forced people to see Palestinians as actual human beings.
* * *
When people write, tweet, and message me with their unquestioned belief that Hamas is using the children of Gaza as human shields, I often wonder whether they make these assertions out of unknowing ignorance or out of a deeper kind of “let them eat cake” cruelty.
Maybe they don’t know that these same “human shield” accusations, made in 2008 and 2009 during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead bombing of Gaza, were found to be without evidence by Amnesty International.
Maybe they don’t know that to even speak of “human shields” in Gaza is absurd, because the Strip is fenced-in and residents have little right to come and go as they please. Maybe they don’t know that Gaza City is one of the most densely populated areas on the planet, with most of Gaza’s 1.8 million people living in the urban heart of Strip.
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People in the United States may be ignorant about these overcrowded conditions, but the Israeli military commanders are certainly not. Marie Antoinette’s apocryphal quote that if the poor were starving and without bread, we should “let them eat cake,” has become Netanyahu’s “let them find shelter.” He says, “Let them evacuate” when the only truly safe place is on the other side of a checkpoint. Someone fleeing one missile strike may be heading directly into another.
Perhaps these four little boys are examples of the “telegenically dead Palestinians” that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told us we should disregard. Or perhaps what Netanyahu fears is people who see nothing “telegenic” about dead children. Perhaps he knows that there are people who cannot imagine anything more human than a group of children playing on the beach, and cannot imagine anything more inhumane than taking their lives from the sky.
Read Next: Dave Zirin on Cowardice, The NBA and #FreePalestine
On Dwight Howard and #FreePalestine
Dwight Howard. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
When LeBron James made the decision (as opposed to “THE DECISION”) to rejoin the Cleveland Cavaliers after four seasons in Miami, many commentators praised the social conscience that seemed to amplify his desire to return home. They said that by leaving the South Beach scene for North Eastern Ohio, James was admirably demonstrating aspirations to be more than an athlete, and a yearning to be something beyond a Jordanesque “brand”.
This week we learned that admiration has limitations, particularly if the concerns of an athlete extend to Palestinian children. NBA players Dwight Howard, Amar’e Stoudamire, and Metta World Peace all received a withering backlash for daring to tweet a desire to see an end to the casualties caused by Israel’s relentless bombing campaign of Gaza. Metta World Peace, in a full defensive posture, was reduced to tweeting, “I’m not taking sides, I’m saying stop the BS and love the children. How can you do arts and craft when bombs and guns going off[?]” Amar’e Stoudamire who is Jewish and even has funded an Israeli basketball camp, was pressured to delete an Instagram picture of an Israeli and Palestinian child arm in arm with the caption “Pray for Palestine.” Yes, even this was too much.
But I want to focus on the person who has received a backlash from every side of this equation, Dwight Howard. First Howard was slammed by the pro-Israel crowd for daring to tweet #freepalestine after being sent images of the carnage. Then he was crushed by those who stand with the Palestinian people for tweeting a near immediate retraction, calling him “Howard the Coward.”
Howard clearly had a very human gut reaction to seeing the horror being inflicted upon the people of Gaza, and then was contacted by someone: his agent/publicist/team owner who told him to get that shit down and apologize for it as soon as possible. For those who wanted Howard to grovel for daring to even muse that Palestine should be free, he did not disappoint, tweeting, “previous tweet was a mistake. I have never commented on international politics and never will” and then, “I apologize if I offended anyone with my previous tweet, it was a mistake!” This was not enough for Zionist Organization of America chief Morton Klein who told TMZ(!) that Howard “should be publicly condemned as strong as Donald Sterling was.”
Yes, this is hardly a profile in athletic courage. Yes, I understand why some, frustrated by the craven US media coverage of the shelling of Gaza, were enraged that Howard ran away from a basic statement of solidarity. Yes, I cannot quite grasp why Dwight Howard dismissed what is happening in Gaza as “international politics”, given the fact that his own country delivers $8 million of military aid to Israel every day.
In addition to all of this, I share people’s teeth-grinding frustration that Dwight Howard’s former Rockets teammate the Israeli-born Omri Casspi has felt no pressure to apologize, nor has he taken down his tweet that said, “600 missiles been fired from GAZA by Hamas in the last 4 days. NUMBERS DONT LIE. STOP LYING.”
In a sane world, Casspi would be roundly shamed—and not Twitter-shamed, but really shamed—for daring to say the words “numbers don’t lie” in relation to Israel-Palestine and not starting with the number of dead children in Gaza.
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But I am actually not mad at Dwight Howard. I suppose I am not mad for the same reason that former NBA player Etan Thomas is not mad. Thomas has also been tweeting #freepalestine. I asked him for his thoughts about Howard and he said, “I see the fact that he tweeted anything at all as a step in the right direction. At least he did something and provoked conversation. That’s more than a lot of people are doing. Whether they deleted their texts or not respect to Amare Stoudemire, Dwight Howard and Metta World Peace for showing a social conscious.”
It’s a point well taken. If people are mad at Howard for actually saying and then deleting something, then where is our anger for those with a major platform who are choosing to say nothing? If anything, Howard performed a public service by demonstrating how Palestinian people are imprisoned not only by walls, barbed wire and checkpoints but also by Western hypocrisy. Here we have one of the most densely populated areas on earth, 1.7 million people, and half of them under the age of 16, being relentlessly bombed. At last count, the numbers are 1,500 wounded and 192 killed, including thirty-eight children. This is not a war in Gaza. This is a war crime. Everyone should be demanding that the targeting of civilians end. People should universally condemn scenes of Israelis going to the top of a hill and watching the bombing of Gaza like it is a night out at the theater or wearing neo-Nazi symbols at pro-war rallies in Tel Aviv. And yet, an athlete tweeting #freepalestine is smacked down with an immediacy that speaks to how desperate Israel and their backers in the United States are to keep them insulated from even a whiff of criticism. I am not mad at Dwight Howard. I want to thank him. I want to thank him for showing with utter clarity what few will say openly: that acknowledging the humanity of the Palestinian people comes with a price.
Read Next: Dave Zirin on why LeBron James was destined to return to Cleveland
Thanks to Sounders, I See Another World Cup Is Possible
Seattle Sounders players celebrate on the pitch after they beat the Portland Timbers 2-0 in an MLS soccer match, July 13, 2014. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
I am often asked, given my love of soccer and my criticisms of how the World Cup is organized, whether it is possible in the twenty-first century to have the spectacle of top-notch organized sports and have it done ethically? Or, can it at least be done more ethically than the neoliberal carnival of debt, displacement and militarization we normally see?
Well yesterday, I witnessed a better, more humane version of the mass spectacle of soccer, and feel remarkably rejuvenated for the experience. No, I’m not talking about the World Cup final between Argentina and Germany. I’m not talking about an event that is supposed to be the apex of “the people’s game” that the people cannot afford to attend. I’m not talking about an event surrounded by a one-kilometer exclusion zone and guarded by a small army for the pleasure of a den of thieves including Vladamir Putin, Angela Merkel, Dilma Rousseff and their pied piper of graft, FIFA chief Sepp Blatter.
I’m not talking about a final game that took place while protesters who had been promised by their government that they could assemble peaceably were tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets at the supposed fan-fest put on by FIFA for tourist consumption.
I’m not talking about an event that displaced thousands of people for the almighty purpose of producing billions in profits for Brazil’s construction, real estate and surveillance industries. I’m not talking about an event that put a fortune in the hands of Israeli armament companies and counterinsurgency “advisers” who market themselves as bringing the hands-on experience they have had turning Gaza into an open air prison, and then sell that experience to countries hosting the Olympics in the World Cup. I’m talking about another game entirely.
I’m talking about the game yesterday between the Seattle Sounders and the Portland Timbers here in the Emerald City. It was just me and 65,000 of my closest friends chanting, screaming, yelling and of course standing for the full ninety minutes as the Sounders beat the Timbers 2-0, led by the inimitable Clint Dempsey, scoring Seattle’s opening goal and then hitting the cross bar at the end on a shot that would’ve been highlight material for the next year. Having recently returned from Brazil where I attended World Cup matches, it was not difficult to count off the ways that this experience was not only different but also “ethical” in the way a FIFA-run tournament could never be.
Let’s start with the ticket prices. We were right there just a few rows up from the field for $24 bucks a pop. Twenty-four dollars would pay for about two minutes of World Cup action, especially if you bought your tickets through FIFA’s don’t ask, don’t tell network of ticket brokers.
Speaking of the stadium, there was also not a one-kilometer exclusion zone surrounding it and people could actually—even without tickets!—get near the facility that their tax dollars purchased. It is also worth adding that the Sounders play in the home of the Seattle Seahawks. As of now, anyway, there are no demands to build a new publicly funded stadium just for them.
I loved everything about the Sounders-Timbers game. I loved the singing of Woody Guthrie songs. I loved the signs. I loved the colors. I loved the group-cussing (to each their own). I loved the chants and cheers that made it seem like everyone in the crowd had been rehearsing for hours before the start of game time. I loved that it seemed to be a combination of sports and Queen at Live-Aid.
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I loved the fact that the 6-year-old I was with had the time of his life and didn’t sit down for ninety minutes. And I loved the play. Maybe it wasn’t World Cup semifinals quality but it was passionate and powerful. Its very existence stands as a threat to FIFA: a living embodiment of the idea that there is an alternative to their wretched stench.
The Sounders-Timbers game, coming just hours after a desultory World Cup Final, entirety convinced me like little else that sports truly is like a fire and you can use a fire to cook a meal or burn down your house. In the hands of FIFA, the house of international soccer is burning down while they play a chorus of discordant violins. But this doesn’t have to be the case. If we want ethical soccer on a local, national or global scale, then along with the out-of-control flames of greed, corruption displacement and match fixing, FIFA itself will need to be extinguished.
Read Next: Dave Zirin on why LeBron James was always coming back to Cleveland
The Preordained: Why LeBron James Was Always Coming Back to Cleveland
Cleveland Cavaliers fans cheer as then-Cav LeBron James takes the floor in the 2007 NBA playoffs. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta)
In 2013, I predicted that LeBron James would shock the world and return to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Many, “insiders” with pipelines into executive suites and owners’ boxes said there was no way this would happen. The consensus was that the four-time-MVP would never marry the last years of his prime to a profoundly dysfunctional franchise and a wretched team owner, Dan Gilbert, who insulted James like a bratty adolescent on his way out of town.
All logic said they were right. But I still thought they were wrong and was confident, even throughout this last Bynum-and-Bailey circus of a season in Cleveland, that LeBron would find his way home. I apologize for this self-aggrandizing “snoopy dance” over my predicting something correctly, especially when my personal record of predictions is, on the whole, wretched. (My belief that a Zach Randolph, Eddy Curry–led Knicks team would make the 2008 NBA finals remains a sore subject.)
But for me, the idea that James would return to Cleveland, no matter how much of a train wreck of a franchise it had become, seemed preordained, even obvious, to anyone paying attention to his off-court persona. First of all, LeBron James is the most “meta”, self-aware, consciously cinematic athlete we have ever seen. If Michael Jordan was the superstar of his own blockbuster movie, LeBron has always aspired to be actor, producer and director. Every step he takes has one eye on posterity. “The Decision” of 2010, when LeBron “took [his] talents to South Beach”, which brought him the rings that he craved but left hurt feelings and bad vibes in its wake, did not fit the script that LeBron James had already written in his own mind. If LeBron sees himself as Martin Scorsese, The Decision was his Bringing Out the Dead. By coming home to possibly bring a sports championship to the city of Cleveland for the first time since 1964, LeBron James can make Goodfellas. He can produce and direct his own magnum opus even—perhaps especially—if it means an ending where he’s eating egg noodles and ketchup.
Securing a title for Cleveland would establish a legend far greater than winning multiple championships in Miami. Dragging a snake-bitten city to the heights of the sports world and smashing on all of the Modellian bad karma in his path would establish a narrative singularly his own. Choosing to return to Cleveland, a city that has lost almost a fifth of its population over the last two decades, makes him a prospective folk hero.
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LeBron, as I wrote in 2013, has always aspired to be something more than a collection of specialty sneakers. Early in his career, he said he wanted to be a “global icon like Muhammad Ali” without the clearest sense about what that meant. In recent years, by speaking out for Trayvon Martin or becoming the first prominent NBA player to say that Donald Sterling had no business in the league, it seemed like he was figuring out what Jordan never did: that “being Ali” meant standing for something bigger than yourself.
By going back to Cleveland, LeBron is embracing his power as someone transformative, someone who could be, without cliché or Nike branding, more than an athlete. By making all the haters, from Dan Gilbert to the fans who burned his jersey, to the vicious media voices, sob in gratitude over his return, he is making this about more than just his own redemption, but theirs as well. Even by insisting on maximum money and not succumbing to the owner-friendly media-driven narrative that stars should accept less “for the good of the team”, he is doing right by young players currently getting hosed by a boss-friendly collective bargaining agreement. It may take some time to make it all work in Cleveland, but by shouldering the burden of a city’s collective damaged psyche and demonstrating the power to rebuild the most burned of bridges, LeBron is going for folk-hero status. He is attempting to produce the ultimate movie of his athletic life. Succeed or fail, it will be a collective thrill to see him try to write the final act. In other words, he’s already won.
Read Next: Dave Zirin on the Real Losers of the World Cup
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