MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. A lot of people watch sports to escape from politics, to step away from the bickering over tax cuts or the body counts from Afghanistan and Iraq. But when Dave Zirin tuned into the sports broadcast this weekend, it was impossible for him to separate the political universe from the athletic one. He saw a Heisman Trophy, college football's greatest honor, awarded amongst a controversy that cemented his opinion that NCAA football has become a neo-plantation. He saw galactic stadiums built with millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars and a level of commercialism that reinforces what he believes are dangerous ideas about sexism, racism and homophobia.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIDave Zirin joins us in studio. He is sports editor at The Nation. He's the author of the book "Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love." He's also the writer of the new film "Not Just a Game: Power, Politics & American Sports," which will be showing tonight at Busboys & Poets in Washington, D.C. Dave Zirin, welcome.

MR. DAVE ZIRINGreat to be here, Kojo. We also saw a stadium collapse this weekend.

NNAMDIThe stadium in Minneapolis, Minn., which I spent a lot of time around when we were there…

ZIRINYes.

NNAMDI...covering the 2008 Democratic National Convention or Republican National Convention.

ZIRINAnd I went to college in the -- Yeah, and I went to college in the Twin Cities. And when you're talking about a city that saw a bridge collapse a year ago, sending 13 people to their death the same week that they broke ground on a new $300 million publicly-funded stadium for baseball, and, now, the owner of the Vikings is pushing hard for a new publicly-funded football stadium, you see how politics and sports just cannot be separated.

NNAMDIWell, I want to go at politics and sports in another way, even as I remind listeners that we'd love for you to join this conversation early and often at 800-433-8850 or go into our web -- by going to our website at kojoshow.org or by sending us a tweet, @kojoshow. Dave, the Heisman Trophy is supposed to be one the greatest honors in amateur athletics, let alone college football. This weekend, the award was given to Cameron Newton, a player trailed by accusations that his father essentially shopped his talents to a school for hundreds of thousands of dollars. But you wrote that this controversy should not be about whether or not the Newton family broke the rules and looked for money, that it's about the hypocrisy of calling college football an amateur sport to begin with. Please explain.

ZIRINAbsolutely. The coach of Cameron Newton's team, the Auburn Tigers, is a gentleman by the name of Gene Chizik. Gene Chizik is going to get a check for $500,000 because his team made the National Championship game this year. The Auburn Tigers' conference, the Southeastern Conference, will get $18.5 million because the Auburn Tigers have made this game. They have made this game because of Cam Newton. He had the greatest season, arguably, in the history of college football. And so there's something very twisted and wrong about a system that asks young men to put their very lives at risk, their very health, their very life at risk, for the possible dream and chance of playing in the NFL while at the same time generating millions and millions of dollars for what are often public institutions.

NNAMDICouple of questions about that. How long is Auburn University likely to continue to be making money off of Cam Newton?

ZIRINFor years and years and years.

NNAMDIHow come?

ZIRINBecause, already, they are selling things like authentic Cam Newton jerseys, which you can buy online for $300 to $400 -- I checked that. You can also buy commemorative Cameron Newton Heisman Trophy T-shirts in prices ranging anywhere from $10 to $100. You could even get special credit cards with Cam Newton's face on it that gets you discounts at games.

NNAMDIHow much will Cam Newton, when he is 30 years old, 40 years old, 50 years old, 60 years old or maybe 70 years old, will be able to make from the sale of those jerseys?

ZIRINOh, 0.0. He'll make nothing. And not only that, if Cam Newton, hypothetically, decided to go back to school next year -- because he does have more eligibility -- and he falls over a garden sprinkler over the summer and twists his ankle and can't play football, he would have his scholarship taken away. A lot of people don't know this. They think, well, they get a four-year ride to go to school. Actually, those scholarships are only renewed on an annual basis.

NNAMDIIf you are playing.

ZIRINIf you are playing.

NNAMDIIf he is not playing next year and were he to go back to school next year and couldn't play, they would take away his scholarship, which, I guess, gets rid of the argument, well, he got an education in return.

ZIRINRight. And, also, even for players who are deeply, deeply committed to the academic side of things when they play college football, nobody harbors the illusion that they're anything resembling ordinary students. And I've interviewed a great many college players, and what you -- the impression that you get in the 21st century is that playing a major college sport -- men or women at the division 1 level -- is a 365-day-a-year job. It is a 12-month endeavor that absolutely rips you away from student life.

NNAMDIDo you think college football players and college basketball players who earn large sums of revenues for the colleges themselves should be paid given that many of them are not going to graduate? 800-433-8850 is the number to call. Or you can send us an e-mail to kojo@wamu.org. Dave Zirin, you think these players should be compensated?

ZIRINOh, absolutely. There must be some form of compensation. And the effects of not compensating players goes beyond just issues of basic justice and injustice. I would argue it creates an entirely skewed value system on these campuses where you can, I think, peg to everything to issues of sexual assault between male athletes and female students, to certain perks and favors that are granted athletes. It creates what I call a gutter economy between the players and the institution itself, and it creates incredibly distorted and bizarre value systems. Like at Notre Dame, for example.

NNAMDII was about to say you'd also written that it's not just the athletes who get the short end of the stick in college football. It's the student bodies. You say that recent events at Notre Dame are calls for that school's football program to be shut down.

ZIRINI think they should be shut down for a year. And I think they need to -- as they say in the blues music community -- go to the woodshed and...

NNAMDIWhat happened there?

ZIRINTwo horrible events happened this year at a school that claims to prize academics as much as they prize an almost religious adherence to football. The first was a young man named Declan Sullivan who, at the age of 20, was the videographer for the football team. That means he would get on a 50' scissor lift and film the team doing its practices. That's a scholarship position, by the way, that's under the auspices of the Athletic Department. It's a four-year ride to be a videographer.

ZIRINThe coach of that team, Brian Kelley, brought the team out during what was the Midwest version of a hurricane, like swirling, massive winds, and Declan Sullivan was up there in the scissor lift. He was tweeting to his friends about how frightening it was. The scissor lift fell, sending Sullivan to his death, and they can -- actually continued practice for another 25 minutes, not even realizing or not even caring what had occurred before the team was brought inside.

ZIRINThe second incident was a horrible story of a young woman named Lizzy Seeberg, 19 years old, who took her own life on Sept. 7 -- I believe it was -- after -- on August 31st of this year, complaint -- issuing a complaint that a member of the Notre Dame football team had sexually assaulted her. She was getting no action from local authorities in terms of getting any kind of justice. She felt isolated on the campus and in her community, and she was eventually found by her rape counselor, dead of an overdose in her room.

NNAMDIAnd you think that, on the basis of those two incidents, the Notre Dame football program should be suspended by the NCAA for at least a year?

ZIRINLet me explain why. In both of those instances, the school president, a reverend by the name of Jenkins -- Rev. Jenkins -- 'cause it is ostensibly a religious institution, praised the "values" of the head coach, Brian Kelly, and the values of the football team. Brian Kelly joked with reporters, mocked the idea that anything was amiss when they pressed him about Lizzy Seeberg's suicide. Clearly, the values of this institution have gone just terribly awry, and, clearly, what actually -- what W.E.B. DuBois a century ago called the problem of king football -- as he referred to it on the college campus -- has gotten so big that it becomes this sort of things where the death of student -- of a student, Declan Sullivan, in an instance that could reasonably be called negligent homicide.

ZIRINThere's no way he should have been up there on that scissor lift in the middle of a hurricane. He was sent up there by the staff. Or when young students are ignored when they make accusations of sexual assault, says that king football has just gotten way too powerful. And, to me, that offends me so much more than whether or not a player took some money under the table.

NNAMDIWhat led you to W.E.B. DuBois' writings about king football, an area about which I am personally ignorant and, frankly, ashamed of?

ZIRINWell, I think what you see throughout history -- I mean, you don't get this a lot on the sports page, and you certainly don't get a lot of it on SportsCenter. But throughout history, people who pride themselves on being serious thinkers have looked at the role that American sports have played in the broader society. That doesn't mean that they were haters of sports at all. I mean, just one example of it is Booker T. Washington, who was a tremendous critic of the first African-American heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson. Booker T. Washington also surreptitiously would have people send him notes when Johnson was fighting to find out what the progress was round to round to round.

ZIRINSo it's not that there was a disinterest in sports, but there's always been a concern about the role that sports played in the broader culture. I really want to alert readers if -- just go on to Google and look at things like Richard Wright's writings on Joe Louis, the African-American heavyweight champion in the '30s, or James Baldwin's brilliant writing about Sonny Liston, the heavyweight champion. I mean, it's the kind of stuff that just makes you wonder, wow, can't all sports writing be like this?

NNAMDIDave Zirin is the sports editor of The Nation, author of the book "Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love." He's also the writer of a new film, "Not Just A Game: Power, Politics & American Sports." That film will be showing tonight in -- at Busboys & Poets in Washington, D.C. I want to get back to the Cam Newton story because the story that broke was that Cam Newton's father was seeking $180,000 from Mississippi State, and the NCAA rule that Cam Newton did not know anything about that. And so he was not liable. And why is that not a significant story? There are people who would say, well, the boy's father was obviously being dishonest and knowledgeably violating NCAA regulations.

ZIRINThere a lot of ways to look at the story. I mean, what the NCAA determined is that Auburn as well had no knowledge that these kinds of arrangements were happening by Cam Newton's father.

NNAMDIWhich strains credibility.

ZIRINYes, it does. The entire story strains credibility. The conclusion that I've come to, though, is that even worst-case scenario, that this was an entire elaborate plan by the Newton family to try to figure out where their six-foot-six son could play quarterback -- even worse-case scenario, I say that this is like the magical fishing net that catches the minnows while the whales go free, that by turning our attention to Cam Newton, we're not looking at the way that the system itself is set up in such a way to breed this kind of malfeasance.

NNAMDILet's take a look at the Washington Redskins for a second because the Redskins, of course, yesterday won -- lost a very close game in a very innovative way. The man who used to quarterback the Philadelphia Eagles, Donovan McNabb, is now the quarterback here in Washington -- which is experiencing another abysmal season -- but the man who's been made -- who made the most headlines in (word?) this year has been Albert Haynesworth, who the Redskins have suspended for the rest of the year.

NNAMDIEven though he's one of the most expensive players in the league, what do you make of what's happened to Haynesworth and what it says about the business culture in the NFL? But before you answer that, it seems to me that -- and I don't often express this kind of view on this show -- but it seems to me that the team's owner, Dan Snyder, may not be given sufficient credit for his marketing ability and his understanding of human psychology. He gives us a gimmick a year.

NNAMDILet me read a list of names: Deion Sanders, Jeremiah Trotter, Steve Spurrier, Joe Gibbs, Jason Taylor, Jim Zorn, Albert Haynesworth, Donovan McNabb. When each one of these highly-heralded individuals came to the team, each brought a lot of fanfare and new hopes of playoffs and the Super Bowl. We now blame Albert Haynesworth, it would appear, for everything that has happened to the Redskin. And I look forward to next year's gimmick because all the owner has to do is bring in one big name next year, and we'll be talking playoffs and Super Bowl again.

ZIRINHe's P.T. Barnum more than he is...

NNAMDIAnd very successfully so...

ZIRIN...a typical NFL owner.

NNAMDI...because the team hasn't won in a long time, but the stadium is sold out. And we now have to pay for parking when you buy a season ticket, whether or not you're driving to the stadium.

ZIRINAnd let's talk about the financials of that. The Washington Redskins have been largely abysmal for 18 years. Dan Snyder has owned the team for 11 years. They are the second most valuable brand name in all of sports to the Dallas Cowboys, and it tends to switch, Cowboys, Redskins, Redskins, Cowboys.

NNAMDICowboys got it with their new stadium, et cetera, last year.

ZIRINYes. That moved them ahead…

NNAMDIYes.

ZIRIN...because they opened up a more than $1 billion stadium. And Dan Snyder has continued to market the team in the way that you described, in terms of holding up these exciting, shiny baubles for us to look at and not looking at the rot at the core of the team. I mean, it is the oldest team in the National Football League. And I always think, you know, they always have a better chance if they play at 1:00 instead of 4:00 because they need to get their sleep. So they got to leave at 4:00, they get the early bird special, and they get to go night-night.

ZIRINIt's not a team worthy of a city that invests so much passion in them. And what's interesting is that you have a whole generation of people growing up in this town. Because the team really hasn't been good for 18 years, who -- names like John Riggins and Joe Theisman and Art Monk, I mean, you might as well be talking about names from yesteryear. You know, William the Conqueror in Battle of Hastings. They are of a historical sepia value as opposed to something that's a living part of their memory. And I would argue that really does -- not unlike the team moving from RFK to Landover, it takes a real shot at the kind of community cohesion that, I think, sports at its best can bring.

ZIRINAnd we also -- we -- I think we have to be critical of the fact that Dan Snyder refuses to listen to the idea of changing the team's name. Because the Redskins -- we were talking about history before. They're called the Redskins for one reason and one reason only, and that's the team was founded and brought here by a segregationist named George Preston Marshall. And so Dan Snyder has decided that the brand of Redskin -- having a team that's basically a racial slur -- is more important than it is to have some sense of accountability, reconciliation and justice.

NNAMDIHow is that, in your view, representative in general of owners of professional sports franchises today?

ZIRINWell, it's interesting because I think Dan Snyder is of a particular ilk. And -- but he's illustrative in a lot of ways because I think Dan Snyder is the sort of person who looks at the short-term profit interest of his club at the expense of the long-term ability to create something that has real lasting value. And in that respect, I think a lot of sports ownership mirrors the people on Wall Street who looked out for short-term profit at the expense of long-term stability. And you see that so clearly with a team like the Washington Redskins for all the reasons that you described before. I mean, saying to -- how can we win the off-season? That's always the expression for the -- like, we're the best team in the spring for the Washington Redskins.

ZIRINWe won the spring again. We won the media cycle again. And so he makes certain decisions, like decisions that say, you're going to pay for parking whether you have a car or not. Certain decisions like, well, if you can't re-up on your tickets, we might bring you to court. If you can't re-up on your season tickets, like what happened to Pat Hill, a grandmother over the age of 70 who was brought to bankruptcy because the team took her to court as described by The Washington Post. Or other decisions as well, like, it probably makes good business sense to sell beer in the bathrooms as they were discovered doing last year.

NNAMDIYou've mentioned that before.

ZIRINWell, it's so particularly disgusting, and I think it breaks every health code since Hammurabi, and yet still, Dan Snyder does it. Because, you know what, hey, if you're in the bathroom, it's a short trip to take care of it. But the problem is that it tends to erode the feeling of, I guess, even family that you want to develop with your local franchise.

NNAMDIWe're talking with Dave Zirin -- he's sports editor at The Nation -- and inviting your calls at 800-433-8850. We're going to take a short break. You can still call during that break. Or send us an e-mail to kojo@wamu.org. Do you enjoy sports when politics are out of the picture? Let us know why or why not. How do you think sports have shaped America's political culture? 800-433-8850. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWe're talking with Dave Zirin. He is editor -- sports editor of The Nation, also author of the book "Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love" and writer of a new film, "Not Just A Game: Power, Politics & American Sports," which will be showing tonight at Busboys & Poets in Washington, D.C. Zirin, one local athlete got a lot of attention for piping up about politics last week.

ZIRINMm hmm.

NNAMDIBaltimore Oriole Luke Scott generated a lot of headlines when he questioned President Obama's citizenship in an interview. Now, what would you say to the person who hears your message -- that we'll talk about later -- about athletes and political courage? We'll talk about Muhammad Ali and LeBron James and make that comparison later. But you talk about athletes and political courage, and somebody says, hey, Luke Scott is a good example of speaking up. Is he not?

ZIRINWell, I would -- first of all, I would say, hey, I think it's a good thing when athletes say what's on their mind because the pressure is the other way. The pressure is for them to be -- well, as athletes sometimes refer to it, a child of Jordan, as in Michael Jordan...

NNAMDIYes.

ZIRIN...which is all you say is, well, we play one game at a time, good Lord willing, play one game at a time. And the goal by sports marketers is to say, be a blank slate. And then people can project whatever they want on you. Be as bland as possible 'cause that's the way that you sell the widest amount of product. So anytime an athlete speaks out, my first -- and they're criticized for it -- my first instinct is to always say, well, you know what, they're human beings. And we're so bred in this country to think that politics is what people with bad hair cuts and fake tans -- John Boehner -- do on Capitol Hill.

NNAMDIStop.

ZIRINSorry. But that's all that politics is. And so anytime someone breaks out of that is very important. James Baldwin, who we mentioned before, he once said that America is a country devoted to the death of the paradox. And anytime you have somebody who breaks out of the paradox and is willing to be an athlete who's also political and not just a jock, I think, is a good thing. That being said, what Luke Scott said was, you know, it's -- not only it's demonstrably false, it's also absolute fodder from some of the most, I think, racist elements in our society who question President Obama's citizenship.

ZIRINI think it's interesting that if something similarly controversial was said on the other side of the aisle, I think Luke Scott would have gotten a tremendous amount more criticism. Like, it seems to have been a bit of tempest in a tea pot that he said that. But if you'd have an athlete, for example, say that they think George W. Bush should be brought up on war criminal charges and be brought to The Hague, I think the response might have been quite different and quite more difficult, and we have proof of that.

ZIRINI mean, players like Craig Hodges, for example, who was a star on the Chicago Bulls' championship teams in the early '90s, he showed up at the White House when George H. W. Bush was president, you know, with the Bulls team to do the photo op. And he handed a letter to the president expressing his disagreement with the first Gulf War, found himself drummed out of the league. That's a more typical response when you think about actual resistance politics as opposed to the stuff that Luke Scott was talking about.

NNAMDITwo things, I noticed that there were a deafening of silence from most of Luke Scott's teammates and most of the other players...

ZIRINYeah.

NNAMDI...in Major League Baseball about this which, I guess, hues to the earlier comments you were making about being a blank slate and how important that is. And John Boehner was on "60 Minutes" last night...

ZIRINFascinating.

NNAMDI...in which he was explaining that the tan that he has, which has been made -- a lot of fun has been made of it by writers and columnists, was in fact natural, that he in fact never ever went under a tanning machine any place or anything like that, and now it's receded somewhat.

ZIRINI have to tell you that Barack Obama -- I have a lot of criticisms of President Obama. I think one of his best lines, though, was one he said about John Boehner. He said, like myself...

NNAMDIHe's a man...

ZIRIN...John Boehner is a man of color. I'm just not sure what the color is.

NNAMDIAnd that was played on the "60 Minutes" episode last night.

NNAMDIWhy is that you feel that professional sports have a particular affinity for reinforcing the status quo? And would you believe our conservative values demonstrated by, I guess, the Craig Hodges story that you just mentioned?

ZIRINYeah, I mean it's interesting because we talk about sports being a no-politics zone, and you mentioned that when we went into break. The fans want sports to be free of politics. But the thing is, it's like the old expression that says, you don't have to believe in gravity to fall out of an airplane. Sports is political whether we want it to be political or not. If I choose to say nothing about it, if we choose to not do this show and have this kind of discussion, sports is still political because the politics that are represented are the politics of professional sports, particularly, of pro-sports owners.

ZIRINAnd those are the politics of corporatism, which means you're going to sell anything that's not nailed down. And, I mean, for goodness sakes, a few years ago, Major League Baseball wanted to put movie ads on second base. And it took a revolt of fans to prevent that from actually happening. I mean, can you imagine that? Like, when there are ads everywhere else, but sticking them on second base, that you're a step removed from NASCAR if you do that. And the second thing is, of course, I think, especially you saw this after 9/11, I mean, the politics of nationalism and even militarism. Two years ago, it was Gen. David Petraeus who flipped the coin at the start of the Super Bowl. And this is normalized. This is seen as normal. This is seen as just the way things are, and it's never questioned and never challenged.

NNAMDIIt's my understanding that your fascination with sports and politics really got started when you attended a New York Knicks basketball game during the first Gulf War.

ZIRINYeah, it was at Madison Square Garden. It was actually between two college opponents, but I went there. I was just a huge sports fan. I mean, I grew up just a sports nerd, just memorizing everything. I played baseball, basketball. I was the center in my high school's basketball team.

NNAMDISmall high school team.

ZIRINYes, very small. I was petite for a center, to be sure -- the Fighting Quakers of Friends Seminary. But funny in and of itself -- but at the game itself, the halftime show involved someone going out to center court in what was like an exaggerated Arab costume, a costume of somebody who would be, say, from Saudi Arabia. And then the mascot of one of the schools coming out and elaborately beating them up while the JumboTron got everybody to chant, U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A. And I remember seeing that and just thinking, wow, something is very wrong here.

ZIRINAnd then a similar thing happened a few years after that when Mahmoud Abdul Rauf for the Denver Nuggets was effectively drummed out of the league for refusing to come out for the national anthem. And I remember somebody on one of the talking head shows saying that Rauf must see himself in the tradition of activist athletes. And I remember seeing that and thinking, wait a minute, I thought I knew so much about sports. What's an activist athlete? And that led me to really examining this history.

NNAMDIWe're going to get back to activist athletes in a second. But, now, on to the telephones were several listeners would like to join the conversation. Let's start with Sharon in Lovettsville, Va. Sharon, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

SHARONHi. Thank you for the public service of your show, Kojo. And to your author, thank you so much for doing this work. And I simply want to say that inspired by the heroine in the story, "The Color Purple," who turned to her philandering husband and said, "A curse on you," I just have gone to myself -- a place in myself where I mildly said to husband and all other fans of the national football team, a curse on you until you change your name, a curse on you. So I just thank you for the depths of your work, and that's all I really have to say, except I appreciate the time to say it.

NNAMDIYou may have handed the owner his next marketing gimmick, change the name.

ZIRINWell, Tony Kornheiser says, you should keep the name but just put a potato on the helmet, so they're the Redskin Potatoes. So that could be an option as well.

NNAMDIThank you, Sharon, for your call. We move on to Don in Salisbury, Md. Don, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

DONA brief or quick comment. Thank you very much for the work you're doing here. The relationship of sports -- the jingoism in this country is blatant and terrible. It skews, in sports -- skews politics in a terrible way. We have huge amounts of money spent on the stadia in cities...

ZIRINMm hmm.

DON...that have slums that will turn your stomach. Now, there is something terribly wrong with that. Sports corrupts education -- I'm a retired university professor. Let me tell you, I've seen it all from instructors who have students placed in their classes and then are paid as tutors. So guess what kind of grades these guys get in those classes?

NNAMDIAll As, baby.

DONFinally, these games kill and maim children. I don't understand why we allow that, particularly football. And you look at somebody like Michael Vick, who was put on a field when he was nine years old and trained to be a fighting dog. And when he grows up and he fights dogs, he goes to jail for two years. But he gets out, and they put him right back on the field as a fighting dog. This makes no sense at all.

NNAMDIOkay. Don, thank you very much for your call. I'm glad you ended with Michael Vick. I'm sure that Dave Zirin has a lot of comments. And after he does, we'll go to Michael Vick's story.

ZIRINYeah, first of all, I thank you for those comments. About stadiums in our cities, I mean, I've written about this a great deal. Thirty billion dollars is the number that I've come up with since the early 1990s, have been publicly -- on publicly funded stadiums. And, particularly, if you go to some of the cities that have been the hardest hit, like we could do a whole "Kojo Nnamdi" tour and get on the bus and go to Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Oakland and Pittsburgh.

ZIRINAnd the story is the same, which is an eroded industrial base in these publicly funded stadiums. It's really been the closest thing to an urban policy that we've had in this country, is the public running their sports stadiums. The problem is, is that it doesn't work. It does not do a return on its investment. And every data shows this. From left wing, right wing, centrists, non-partisan, all the economic think tanks have come up with these same conclusions. The second thing is I'm glad that the caller talked about, I was a university professor, and I've seen it all. I'm glad he said that because it made me think about the Notre Dame issue.

ZIRINAnd I did write that column saying the football program should be shut down. I'd never gotten more hate mail in my life from a column than doing that. And I write about a lot controversial stuff, but this was by far the most violent responses, the most cruel responses to me -- sent to me personally. But I also got a raft of comments from Notre Dame Alum, who said, absolutely. Like, the people who were closest to the problem in South Bend, Ind. said, yes, that is absolutely true. We need to take a year off and figure out what the heck our priorities are as a university.

ZIRINAnd then just the last issue about kids in football -- we'll save Michael Vick -- but I will say this. Every time now I interview an NFL player, I always ask them the question about, would you want your kids to play football with all we know now about injuries and concussions and the rest of it? And you know what, every single one, even the ones who've made the most money and gotten the most fame, they all think about it before they answer. And I can't think of another sport -- perhaps, boxing would be the only other sport where you would...

NNAMDIYou might get asked.

ZIRINYou would have them actually think about it.

NNAMDIYou were vilified by a lot of people when you publicly supported Michael Vick's rights to resume his professional football career after he did jail time for running a dog-fighting ring.

ZIRINYeah.

NNAMDIBut now that he's back on the field throwing touchdowns, winning games, there's a lot of talk about Michael Vick's personal journey to redemption, that he's a changed man, that sponsors are giving -- are sponsors are going to give him a second chance. When you look at how his performance on the football field is affecting his public image, what are your thoughts?

ZIRINWow. I mean what a twisted, twisted example of the values of sports culture. I believed Michael Vick should get a second chance because, I've said, look, he spent two years in Leavenworth, for goodness sakes, which is more than some people get for murder. I mean, the police officer in Oakland who killed Oscar Grant isn't going to serve two years -- shot him in the back on a cell phone camera. But Michael Vick served two years. And the humane society gave their seal of approval to Michel Vick playing because they said him getting a second and having the platform to speak will do a tremendous amount to actually educate people about cruelty to animals and dog fighting. And Michael Vick has been assiduous in going to schools and community centers and talking to people.

ZIRINThe rest of the sports media took it as a time -- not exclusively, but a lot of them took it as a time to pile on Michael Vick, to pile on the Philadelphia Eagles for giving him the second chance. But now that he's successful on the field, it's almost like he's been dipped in Lourdes. It's like the -- it's this magical thing where it's like, my goodness, let's give this young chap a second chance. Why he's as American as apple pie. And what makes him that way? Because he's successful, because he's generating ratings, generating revenue, and it really is a kind of twisted view into how sports views issues of redemption.

NNAMDIOn to the telephones again. Here is Nat in Gaithersburg, Md. Nat, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

NATHi there. I have a quick question, and then I'll hang up -- a question for your guest. Back to Dan Snyder and the Redskin fans, I'm glad you pointed out the episode where they started suing their fans when the economy went south. And that's when I turned them off. I don't watch them, don't listen to them, don't (word?) conversations about them, even for my own sons. I'm wondering, do you know of a situation where fans have gotten this disgusted en masse and have made it so distasteful for the business of the owner that they finally gave up and sold the team, and how they did it?

ZIRINOh, that's a tremendous question. You don't -- you'd be hard-pressed to find instances where the owners themselves have been pressured by fans to give up the team. You can look at instances like Ted Stepien, who owned the Cleveland Cavaliers and almost sent them into bankruptcy and was pressured by the league itself to unload the team. You do have instances like that. But as long as the Redskins remain so profitable, you're not going to see Roger Goodell or the other owners pressure Dan Snyder to move the team. In fact, Dan Snyder is one of the most powerful owners in the sport despite the fact that the team has been so bad for so long.

ZIRINNow, as far as fans themselves organizing, I will say that -- I'm on the board of an organization called the Sports Fan Coalition, and I mention that because I want to encourage people to join it. Because I do think that unless fans organize themselves independently to make demands on sports around issues like the public funding of stadiums, for example, or even the issue you raised, about the idea of suing people who are delinquent in re-upping their season tickets, these problems are going to continue. As long as fans are viewed as a passive player in the business of sports, these kinds of problems will continue.

NNAMDIThank you very much for your call, Nat. We're going to take a short break. But before that, this breaking news item, a federal judge in Virginia has declared the Obama administration's health care reform law unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson is the first judge to rule against the law, which has been upheld by two others in Virginia and Michigan. Virginia Atty. Gen. Ken Cuccinelli filed the lawsuit, challenging the law's requirement that citizens buy health insurance or pay a penalty starting in 2014.

NNAMDIHe argues the federal government doesn't have the constitutional authority to impose the requirement. Other lawsuits are pending, including one filed by 20 states in a Florida court. Virginia is not part of that lawsuit. The U.S. Justice Department and opponents of the health care law agreed that the U.S. Supreme Court will have the final word -- that report from the Associated Press. We'll be following the story for the rest of the day on WAMU 88.5, then we'll -- first, we take this short break, and then we return to our conversation with Dave Zirin. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIOur guest is Dave Zirin. He is sports editor at The Nation and author of the book "Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love." He's also writer of a new film called "Not Just a Game: Power, Politics & American Sports." That film will be showing tonight at Busboys & Poets in Washington, D.C. We received this e-mail from Constantine in Silver Spring, Dave.

ZIRINMm hmm.

NNAMDI"When I was teaching at a Big Ten school, the athletic department took good care of their athletes. We had to send regular reports on how they were doing in class. And if it looked as though they would not pass, the department wrote their term papers for them. So there you are as an instructor, looking at a beautifully written paper by a student who had no grasp of the subject and who couldn't pass a quiz if his life depended on it. But since you can't prove that the paper was ghostwritten, you have to give the student a passing grade anyway. So the athlete stays on the team, the team wins, and the donations from alumni roll in. The athletes didn't invent the system, however, and it's unfair to penalize them for athletic department's hanky-panky. Since the athletes do the work, pay them for it."

ZIRINMmm. Absolutely. You know, for every hundred stories I hear like that -- and you hear stories like that all the time from people on a grassroots level, people coming up to me at, say, a book event or calling to my radio show. And for every hundred stories you hear like that, you hear maybe one from somebody who says, well, I was an instructor at a school, and everything was on the up and up. I mean, it's just not something that people go out of the way to say because it strains credulity to such a profound degree.

NNAMDIAnd you just were telling me off the air about the University of Oregon?

ZIRINThe University of Oregon, they're in the championship game for all of college football. They're ranked number two in the country. They have gotten $100 million from Phil Knight, the athletic department -- $100 million. And this is a school that's had to put people on furloughs, professors and instructors on furlough to make up for their budget deficits. The athletic department is rolling in Phil Knight's cash, and I went to -- and I did a tour of their athletic academic help center. And it's a three-story building called the Jaqua Center. That's really the name of it, the Jaqua Center.

ZIRINAnd it's the most beautiful building, first of all, I've ever been in my life. And it was so incredibly beautiful, and it's three stories. Professors are not allowed to go above the first floor. So this is a campus building on a public campus where professors can't go to the second or the third floor. Second of all, you walk in there, and there's a fountain, there's black marble everywhere. And there are all these people at desks, and they all look like -- I'm not joking around -- like Italian models wearing black, skin-tight clothes from head to toe, men and women with big, purple swooshes across their chest. So they're branded with Nike.

NNAMDIWho are these people?

ZIRINThey're hired by Nike to run the Jaqua Center, which is, once again, supposed to be on a public campus institution. And when I was there, a person told me, you need to go to the bathroom and just check out the bathrooms. I went in the bathroom. I'm not joking around. The bathrooms were nicer than my house. I almost called home and said, we're moving to the bathroom at the Jaqua Center. It was so nice.

NNAMDIYour film -- in your film that we mentioned earlier, "Not Just a Game: Power, Politics & American Sports," you take aim at LeBron James for his desire to be compared with Muhammad Ali, an athlete whose popularity and marketability suffered because of his political activism. Let's hear what Ali had to say about why he felt that speaking out was worth it.

NNAMDIOf course, you know what administration that was said during.

ZIRINYeah.

NNAMDINow here's...

ZIRINNixon did hear it. He had quite the file on Ali, actually.

NNAMDINow, let's hear a commercial LeBron James shot for Nike this fall, where he waxes philosophically about how his popularity took a hit when he joined a new team.

NNAMDIThis commercial, you say, is an example of why LeBron James' goal of, on the one hand, being like Muhammad Ali and, on the other hand, generating great wealth don't exactly work well together.

ZIRINYeah, I mean, LeBron James has said this explicitly. He said his goals in life are to be a global icon like Muhammad Ali and to be the richest professional athlete in history. Now, there's a problem there.

NNAMDIMuhammad Ali is not nearly the richest professional athlete in history.

ZIRINAnd he -- that's what makes Ali an icon, is what he sacrificed -- financially, physically and all the rest of it. So these goals are at great odds with each other. And that commercial in particular, I was very critical of Kevin Blackistone, who is a local guy, actually, whom people may know from ESPN's "Around the Horn," lives in the D.C. area. We're critical of that because that entire commercial is a play on an Ali quote, where he said, I don't have to be who you want me to be.

ZIRINAnd it was a great incredibly revolutionary statement because, first of all, it so sums up so much of the 1960s and the generation divide and the movements against war and all the rest of it, even people growing their hair long and free love, just say, I don't have to be what you want me to be. And he was saying, I'm not going to be a nationalist role model who kisses up to the powers that be. I am going to change my name. I am going to say what I think, and that is who I am going to be.

ZIRINAnd to have Nike take that snippet -- and we don't know if those are LeBron James' thoughts or concerns. I mean, it's a Nike ad for goodness sakes. It was sculpted by a company in Nike that's been brilliant over the years -- first, most famously, with Tiger Woods -- of taking a lot of the iconography of the civil rights movement and using it to sell shoes. The famous Tiger Woods ad where it says, I am Tiger Woods, with all the different kids from different backgrounds saying, I am Tiger Woods, is a direct reference to a film that was made after Fred Hampton was murdered, with the kids on the south side of Chicago saying, I am Fred Hampton, I am Fred Hampton.

ZIRINI mean, Nike, they are smart at Nike. They know what they're doing. But you know what? Because they use the iconography of "Eyes on the Prize" to make these kinds of commercials, I think what that does is it opens up us having every right to say, well, what are you doing for civil rights? What are you doing that's socially conscious? And under -- maybe under normal circumstances, it would be an unfair question to ask an athlete that. But if they're going to trade on that to sell us shoes, we have the right to ask what they're actually doing.

NNAMDIFred Hampton was a Black Panther party leader famously killed by police in Chicago...

ZIRINYes.

NNAMDI...in the late 1960s. Well, what do you think about the fact that Ali is now being used by Gatorade to sell sports drinks?

ZIRINIt says to me that the wheel has finally come full circle. I mean, Muhammad Ali recently -- they -- there's something called Muhammad Ali Enterprises, Muhammad Ali Incorporated. And they sold the rights to it to the same people who turned Elvis Presley into a velvet painting, the same company that is in the process of doing that. And they're producing things like Thrilla Dilla fruit snacks and Rumble Young Man fruit crumbles and, like, the kind of snack foods, mass-produced snack foods and -- I mean, this is very out of Muhammad Ali's hands. He's, of course, suffered greatly from Parkinson's disease over the course now of several decades, and this is the sad reality of the situation.

NNAMDIHere is Jack in Washington, D.C. Jack, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

JACKYeah, thanks, Kojo. Yeah, just two things. I actually play ice hockey, and we have a lawmakers versus lobbyists game every spring. And this year, we've beefed it up, and I've gotten a chance to play with Sen. Kerry and some other folks. And we try to raise funds for inner-city hockey programs, and I just wanted to get Dave's view on ice hockey in terms of how he perceives their -- the ownership there and guys like Ted Leonsis. And then, secondly, too, you know, talking about icons like Muhammad Ali, symbolism. And I got to believe that building stadiums in cities raises the symbolism that a city might need, too. And it's not going to show up necessarily in the economic side of things, that it's going to show up more in terms of, you know, citizenry's mood and that sort of thing. So I'd just like to hear your comments on those two thoughts.

NNAMDIHockey and the impact of new stadiums, even if they are taxpayer-financed, on citizen morale.

ZIRINYeah, first of all, ice hockey, anything that raises funds, I would argue for any sports or access to sports in the cities is very important because of the way physical education programs are being brutally cut and with the professionalization and privatization of youth sports. So I applaud you on those efforts. As for ice hockey ownership, on the broad sense, I mean, they almost ruined their own sport. I mean, the sport shut down several years back because of a gross over-expansion of the product and the moving of teams from the north of the United States, as well as Canada, to such hockey hotbeds as Florida and the Carolinas and Phoenix, which declared bankruptcy. I mean, this would be like if NASCAR said, I see the future of our sport, and it's in Winnipeg. I mean, you wouldn't quite have that.

ZIRINSo it's a revoltingly mismanaged sport. Ted Leonsis certainly, by all accounts, seems like he knows what he's doing much better than Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the NHL, a man who bragged about never having seen a National Hockey League game before he took over as commissioner. He was brought up on the right hand of David Stern of the NBA. And it's long been posited by conspiracy theorists that Stern got him that job to sink the National Hockey League, and, unfortunately, there is some real reason for people to think that.

ZIRINAs for the symbolism argument, that is an argument -- and I get in debates about this a lot -- that are -- is made often by people who are on the side of pro-public financing of stadiums. In -- over the last several years, I've heard that argument more and more, and one of the reasons you hear that is that the financial arguments have all died. I mean, there is -- right now, if we argued the financial merits of public stadium funding, it would be like arguing whether or not the earth is flat. It's not a rational argument given the data that we have.

ZIRINAnd as far as the symbolic argument, I'm sure that there is truth in seeing that a new gleaming stadium and politicians get to pose next to it, and it makes everybody maybe feel warm and fuzzy, although that would be news to people in Washington, D.C. When National Stadium was built, according to one poll, 70 percent of the citizens in the district were against doing a billion dollars for that. Adrian Fenty became mayor of D.C. largely out of being a voice of opposition against the stadium when he ran.

ZIRINSo that makes me wonder about its -- about the symbolic value of stadium funding publicly, especially in these tough economic times. I mean, I think the message is not so much anti-stadium, but it's anti-socializing of the debt of stadiums while privatizing the profit of stadiums. Either billionaires should pay for them themselves, or we should demand some sort of public ownership or public stake.

NNAMDIJack, thank you for your call. Emmanuel in Upper Marlboro, Md. You're on the air, Emmanuel. Go ahead, please.

EMMANUELHey, Kojo. Excellent show today. I'm glad I got a chance to speak with your guest. I think he has some good information, very good information. However, I just got two statements. One is I kind of disagree with his position as it relates to LeBron James on making the two statements that he said that are not, you know, possible to be connected. One, wanting to be the most influential as it relates to being an ally. That's just an example that he used. And the other, wanting to be the most wealthiest.

EMMANUELAs we know in our world, we can do very little with money. We applaud somebody like Bill Gates, who has billions of dollars, not to say that LeBron, whatever, reached that height. But it is a message and a mentality that a lot of our athletes have to be exposed to, that they can control their own destiny. When an athlete is taken from our community and put up on a pedestal in NCAA, NBA -- what have you -- what goes along with that is an agent that oftentimes tells that person what real estate agent to use, what lawyer to use, where to get his insurance, and oftentimes that strips us of any opportunity to be associated with these...

NNAMDISo you are seeing LeBron James more like a Curt Flood kind of individual, somebody who allows the athlete to finally take control of his own destiny?

EMMANUELExactly. And when...

NNAMDILet me hear Dave Zirin on that 'cause we're running out of time.

ZIRINWell, the first thing to say is, I was in South Africa last year before the start of the World Cup. And there -- it was an open air market, and I had my choice of bootleg knockoff items with Muhammad Ali's face on it. And I saw nothing with Michael Jordan's face on it. Ten years earlier, ESPN decided that Michael Jordan was, in fact, the number one most influential athlete and Ali was number two. So you have to ask yourself the question, why does Ali have this continual resonance? And why has Michael Jordan -- I would argue -- already started to fade from the cultural landscape?

ZIRINAnd it's not about play. It's about the fact that Ali risked something, I mean, that he was seen as having stood up to the United States in their war in Vietnam, to stood up to racism and to take very, very unpopular stands that, for a lot of people, were later proven to be prescient or even correct.

NNAMDIFinally, this from Daryl in Chinatown. "Did Dave watch the Army Football game this weekend? I seriously think the only reason they still show this game on TV is so they can show the recruiting advertisements for the armed services. The teams are terrible. The games are uninteresting, but the pre-game jet fly sure looked great."

ZIRINYeah, and, of course, University of Maryland football fans have the Military Bowl to look forward to at RFK Stadium in the next couple of weeks.

NNAMDIDave Zirin is the sports editor of The Nation. He's the author of the book "Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love." He's also the writer of the new film, "Not Just a Game: Power, Politics & American Sports." That film will be showing tonight at Busboys & Poets in Washington, D.C. Dave Zirin, always a pleasure.

ZIRINMy privilege, Kojo.

NNAMDIThank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.