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Truth be told, I have never been much for following sports. It always seemed to me that there was too much ideological baggage that came with it--usually of a racist, hyper-masculine, militaristic, homophobic, and/or heterosexist nature. Additionally, I live in Urbana, Illinois, a community bitterly divided over the racist farce of continuing to use an Indian mascot for the university's sports teams. In many ways, Dave Zirin's writing on sports is aimed at (among others) readers like myself who are too often tempted to write off the enjoyment of sports as fundamentally at odds with hopes for progressive change in the world. In What's My Name Fool?, Zirin uses sports as a cultural text, a lens through which we can understand the dynamics of both the processes of cultural dominance and exploitation as well as the history of movements based in resistance to continued racial, sexual, or economic colonialism which found expression in particular moments on or off the playing field.

While acknowledging, for example, that players' salaries in certain sports can tend toward the excessive side, Zirin goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the primary source of economic inequity in contemporary sports is, without question, the seemingly bottomless pit of greed on the part of team owners. He "credits" former Texas Rangers owner George W. Bush for popularizing the corporatized stadium debacles of recent years (the team-owning classes populated, not surprisingly, by many of Bush's friends and campaign contributors) whereby local municipalities capitulate to the extortion of granting tax breaks, infrastructure development, and essentially funding the remodeling (or more often, rebuilding) of stadiums whose profit in turn remains safe within the tempered clutches of private hands. Such an approach, of course, mirrors the corporate model of the past few decades where we see communities bidding in a race to the bottom for the "privilege" of having OmniMegaCorp, Inc. choose to set up shop in their area.

From Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali's embrace of Islam and refusal to participate in America's racist, colonialist war ("I ain't got not quarrel with the Vietcong"), to Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising black-gloved fists on the medal stand of the 1968 Olympics, to Billy Jean King, to Barry Bonds' calling out Boston as a racist city, to the Washington Wizards' Eton Thomas delivering scathing criticisms of Bush's domestic and foreign policy that read like the poetry of Amiri Baraka, Zirin highlights great (and even at times lesser-known) moments of political resistance in the world of sports. Zirin relates the telling anecdote of five-time MVP Bill Russell where "once in Marion, Indiana, he was given the key to the city during the day, only to be refused service that evening in his hotel's dining room. Russell went to the mayor's house, woke him up, and returned the key." When asking Toni Smith, the captain of the Manhattanville College women's basketball team who chose to protest the Iraq war by turning her back on the American flag during the national anthem, how she responds to those who suggest that "Sports is no place for political acts," Smith countered:

"During World War II, when America decided that we needed to show our superiority to other countries, they implemented playing the national anthem before sporting events and when they did that, they put politics in the middle of sports. The question is not why did I choose to turn my back on the flag. It's why do we have to do this at basketball games? If they don't want politics in sports then they need to take the national anthem out because that is inherently political."

Indeed! What's My Name Fool? is full of plenty of stories just like these. Dave Zirin's writing on sports is accessible, enjoyable, thought provoking, and truly original.