Left on base

Dave Zirin offers a sports chronicle for the politically minded

By Tom Gallagher

› lit@sfbg.com

Politically engaged, but living in fear of your friends catching you reading the sports section first? Then What's My Name, Fool? is right up your alley. Or perhaps I should say, it's in your wheelhouse. But don't the rest of you stop reading just yet, even if you do think that we sports fans really should just grow up and direct our attention to the business section or the arts listings. If you recognize the name Jackie Robinson, then you already know the impact of sports upon American life extends far beyond the stadiums. And if you don't know who Jackie Robinson was, well, then, you really do need to read Dave Zirin's new book.

The title of the first chapter states, "It all starts with Lester Rodney." And so it was at Zirin's recent Bay Area book party. As the guests arrived, they first encountered an official husher warning them there was filming going on inside. The man in front of the camera turned out to be none other than guest of honor, Lester Rodney, the onetime sports editor of the Daily Worker. Rodney assumed this extremely improbable job with the American communist party's New York City newspaper back in 1936, yet here he was in the process of being rediscovered all over again, at age 95.

In his two decades as a mostly one-man sports department (he left the Worker in 1956 following Nikita Khrushchev's revelations about the Stalin-era Soviet Union), Rodney naturally covered lots of stories, but what cemented his place in this hidden history of American sport was his unrelenting campaign to integrate baseball. After Rodney, baseball's ban on African Americans may still have been unofficial, unspoken, and unwritten, but now it was at least written about — in the Worker, that is; the mainstream press still acted as if nothing unusual was going on.

When Jackie Robinson finally took the field in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform in 1947, everyone knew sports mattered. As Rodney told a forum 50 years later, "There are very few people of whom you can say with certainty that they made this a somewhat better country. Without doubt you can say that about Jackie Robinson."

Malcolm X once made unfavorable comparison of Robinson to Muhammad Ali (the former Cassius Clay), who, he said, was "the finest Negro athlete I have ever known, and he will mean more to people than Jackie Robinson. Robinson is an establishment hero. Clay will be our hero." This, Zirin feels, simply does not do justice to a man who was once court-martialed while in the military for refusing to give up his seat on a bus, years before Rosa Parks set off the civil rights movement by doing the same.

With the Boston Red Sox having ended their 85-year championship drought in 2004, Zirin reminds us that one of the teams that passed up an opportunity to sign Robinson (they actually gave him a tryout) was the Red Sox, the last major-league team to integrate. "They waited so long to sign African Americans," he writes, "that the city's hockey team, the Bruins, actually beat them to it," which is pretty amazing, considering the relative numbers of black players available in the two sports. So, he says, "the next time you hear a Boston fan complain about 'the curse of the Bambino,' inform them that 'the curse of racism' has had a much more adverse effect."

(Although Zirin has not chosen to mention it, the fact is that Boston's history on the matter is not so bad as that of the Red Sox. In 1950 — nine years before the Red Sox — the now virtually forgotten Boston Braves actually brought up a black player. He was named Sam Jethroe and, according to one Negro Leaguer, could "outrun the word of God." Good to his reputation, Jethroe won the Rookie of the Year award and led the league in stolen bases his first two years; the Braves, meanwhile, moved to Milwaukee in 1953. I raise this bit of hidden history not so much to exonerate Boston as to mention a name that ought to be better remembered. Likewise, since Zirin is obviously a true fan, he will surely want to stand corrected in his claim that Jackie Robinson stole home a record 18 times. The politically unsympathetic Ty Cobb actually did it 35 times.)

But while no American athlete was more historically significant than Robinson, none was better known worldwide than Ali, the book's other central figure. His joining the Black Muslims after winning the heavyweight boxing championship in 1964 caused a national sensation, but this was dwarfed by the uproar following his refusal of induction into the US Army, which was then prosecuting the war in Vietnam, and the subsequent stripping of his title. In the current moment of ineffectual hand-wringing by political figures who recognize that it was wrong to start the war in Iraq but can't acknowledge that it is equally wrong to continue it, the clarity of Ali's stated reason for refusing to go — "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong" — seems admirable, even if he has settled comfortably into being "an establishment hero."

The book's most useful bit of information may be its explication of the famous picture of US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising black-gloved, clenched fists at their 1968 Olympic-medal ceremony. Zirin points out that the Australian silver-medal winner you might otherwise assume was put out by this protest during his moment of glory is actually also wearing an Olympic Project for Human Rights button, in solidarity with his American co-medalers.

Much of the book consists of short, snappy, contemporary pieces from "The Edge of Sports," a weekly column Zirin writes for the Prince George's Post, the Maryland newspaper he also edits. There will be few sports fans who won't learn something from them. Many in the Bay Area, presumably home to a disproportionate number of "the 15 percent of people in a national poll who believe [Barry] Bonds's story that he did [steroids] once and without knowledge," may be happy to learn that Zirin stands starry-eyed with them. Male sports fans may benefit from learning a bit about the career soccer star Mia Hamm enjoyed before marrying former baseball immortal Nomar Garciaparra. And is it just me, or did anyone else miss the fact that major-league baseball had plans to emblazon ads for Spider-Man 2 on the bases until the idea tanked with the fans? Which brings us to the question of why Kareem Abdul Jabbar can't get an NBA coaching job.

Most sports fans will have fun reading this book. And the nonfans might consider it a sociological obligation. *

WHAT'S MY NAME, FOOL? SPORTS AND RESISTANCE IN THE UNITED STATES

By Dave Zirin

Haymarket Books

293 pages

$15.00

Tom Gallagher is a writer in San Francisco and a Lit contributor.