9UNP0214SD_Zirin_Guenette_WordPress

- Welcome to the 2008 Wisconsin Book Festival. I'm Allison, and this is one of our very first events this year. Thank you so much for coming out. I think it's going to be a fabulous one. I'd like to thank a number of sponsors, because without our sponsors, we couldn't be here. And by here, I can mention one of our biggest sponsors, the Overture Center. We have almost a third of our events in the Overture Center this year. We really feel at home here. And we're very grateful to them for making it possible in partnering with us. 

So, thank you, Overture. Thank you also to the Evjue Foundation, and the DCCAC, the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation, IMS Distillery, and the American Girls Fund for Children, all of which are our presenting sponsors, and without whom none of us could be here. So if we could have just a little round. I don't know if any of them are here, but thank you sponsors. 
(applause)

 I also want to thank our super event volunteers. They gave up their time to help you find your way in. And also the booksellers. Tonight's booksellers are Rainbow, they have books by both of these awesome authors. 
(applause)

 And you can support the festival by supporting the book-- You can support the book festival by supporting the booksellers, because more books they sell, the more we report to publishers that we sold a bunch of books, then they send us more great authors, like these guys, next year. So without further ado, I am going to do a short introduction of Matthew Guenette. But actually, I just found a little bit of remarks that I wanted to thank everybody who came here tonight, especially for coming to this real experiment. The Sudden Anthem Meet-- What was the title? "Sports and Resistance." It's an amalgamation of genres that was, once I thought of it, I really couldn't resist putting them together. And I guess part of it was because of stereotypes. If there's a stereotype of sports fans kind of being couch potatoes, there's also a stereotype of poetry lovers being kind of nebulous aesthetes. But I really got very jazzed up by both of these guys' work. 

And it's really about that energy that connects us and, you know, how we marvel at what people can do. There's a lot in common in the spirit of what these guys are doing. So, I'm really excited about this. Matt Guenette has been a Madisonian since 2005. And he won a really super poetry award, the 2007 American Poetry Journal Book Prize. And so that is a huge congratulations to you. And the book that he won that for is "Sudden Anthem." He's a teacher at MATC. He's originally, I believe, from New Hampshire, where he says he was raised by friendly wolves. And I think you are really going to love his poetry. 

I want to read a quotation by someone who reviewed his poetry, Josh Bell. He says, "I know of no irreverence as steadfastly ethical and political as Guenette's. His speaker is a comedian and a philosopher, a kind of stand-up humanist, a super hero in a red, white and blue jockstrap, who will redeem us from the shoddy, inevitable and completely humorous machineries of death." Please join me in welcoming Matthew Guenette. 
(applause)

- Can everyone hear me? I'm wearing that jockstrap now. 
(laughter)

 It's a real honor to be here this evening, and to be reading on a panel with Dave Zirin. 

When I first moved to Madison four years ago, this was such an amazing festival to visit. I never dreamed I would actually get to be a part of it. My first poem tonight, I'm going to read in honor of David's book, "A People's History of Sports in the United States." It's a short poem. It's called "A People's History of the United States." The Bunker Hill monument is rising in the distance. Dad whistles. That's one hell of an erection. But why did they put it there? I ask. 

I'm in the back seat with a book in my lap. My thighs are sticking like string cheese. According to this book, I say, the Battle of Bunker Hill actually happened on Breed's Hill. Nobody knows what to say. I guess an erection on Breed's Hill was too much for the historians to take. And that's kind of how they go. 
(laughter)

 There's a debate tonight. Maybe you've heard of this debate that's going on tonight. Before Sarah Palin got into this race, I thought that the funniest person in the race was Mike Huckabee. 

And this is a poem called "Presidential Debates." And not a word of it is not out of Mike Huckabee's mouth. I basically took a paragraph of his from a newspaper and broke it up into lines. I think it's hilarious. I hope you will, too. "Presidential Debates" after Mike Huckabee. I decided one way or the other this hunt was about to be over. I could not stand anymore, the cold. And somehow, by the grace of God, when I squeezed the trigger, my Weatherby 300 mag, the greatest gun I think ever made, did its work. Somehow the angels took that bullet and took it right to the antelope. 

My hunt was over. In a wonderful way. Thanks to those angels, that elk was dead. That's something he said at a National Rifle Association. 
(light laughter)

 So, thinking about tonight's theme about resistance, I've tried to choose a few poems here from the book that I think are motivated by my own attempts at resisting, in particular, the plot culture that I've been raised on. When I first starting writing poems, I tried to write poems that sounded really smart and sensitive. And then one day, I realized that I was raised on Coca-Cola and MTV. And that somehow, I had to do poems that talked about that experience. So this is a poem called "The Today Show," motivated by a kind of irrational dislike I have for Katie Couric because I don't know her. 

And of course, she's not there anymore. "The Today Show." My daydream where Katie Couric wanders through the rubble. Her beige pantsuit is torn and covered with filth. Her eyes have gone wild. She lets loose this primal scream. She radiates fear. She twitches and growls as I draw near her. Yet I coax Katie into my arms. I wrap her in a blanket and I take her home. 

If I could do this, if I could save Katie Couric, help her heal, the effort would bring together my family in this whole lost city. We would keep a constant vigil. We would play smooth jazz and administer proton beam therapy in the abandoned church basement. Later, soldiers would come by to see what we were doing. They'd take one look at Katie, at the raw skin suffering her arms and legs, and the protective lampshade around her head, and they'd say we should put her out of her misery. But she would be family by then, a citizen. Her pain having made the wars real in a way that TV never could. I would tell the soldiers look into her eyes and you will see that Katie Couric has the will and the right to live. I think that's true. I think she does. 

This is one that maybe some of you have heard before. It's a poem I wrote when I first moved to Madison and first went to a grocery store, and saw the cheese aisle. So it's kind of inspired by the monumental amount of cheese that you have to choose from. It became a poem about my kind of anger at the choices that I'm often forced to make during the course of a day, the energy that goes into choices that are really kind of pointless. This is called "Vortex, the Super-sized Supermarket." For more than once, I have been elbowed in the ribs and have been made to ask, where are the Q-tips? Where are the refried beans? For I have wandered cheese aisles so long they have storm drains. I've seen rows of frozen pizzas vanish like pins on the horizon. And when you catch yourself humming something as vanilla as Billy Joel's "In the Middle of the Night," what is left but to set your head on fire? 

Into what are we being undone, receding from ourselves like ice defrosts into mist, for one more magazine charting the celebrity progress of a parting heiress rotted like a fish, for one more mug-shoot of Tom Cruise who, I'm sorry, he just looks 
(---)

 crazy. His face is a hijacked car. His eyes are headlights bearing down this dark ravine. For the endless packaging and the meat shiny, like the opposite of grace. For the barcode rising hot on the back of my neck, I dream of a lover's teeth sunk into my flesh. And for the checkout line, that teenager blithely chewing gum who asks, "Paper or plastic?" These false dichotomies we pretend to, that pretend to us in a discourse of freezing and thawing, cleaning and preheating, paper or plastic. For that I say, "Dealer's choice." 

And I am met almost always with suspicious stares. Try it. I always tell people to try it. I did that once. They said paper or plastic, and I said dealer's choice. You could feel the whole store stop almost. 
(laughter)

 He's on to us. I don't want to take too much more time here, so I'm just going to read two more poems. This one is a favorite of mine because I spent so damn long on it. 

It's called "Sestina Aguilera," so if you know what a sestina is, and if you know who Christina Aguilera is, they're like peanut butter and chocolate coming together in this poem. But it's really a funny poem, I guess. It's also a poem about history and what happens when our history really starts to get filtered through an entertainment medium, and what that future might look like. So... Christina Aguilera has a blue tongue. That scream you hear when you drop her in boiling water is actually just the steam escaping her shell. She invented the word agnostic in 1869, because she was tired of being called an atheist by Baudelaire and -- to wit, she is the only platinum singer who, at room temperature, acts as a liquid. The odds of her being injured by a crowbar are somewhere around 13%. Yet, in coal mines, that percentage will rise to a whopping 75%. The word Aguilera actually means dreams with one eye open. 

While the word itself tastes like cream, which tastes like Beatles and apples and worms, which tastes like sleep deprived. You cannot fold Christina Aguilera in half more than seven times, yet in Iceland it is against the law to keep her as a firearm. Ditto, Siberia and in a Boeing 747. When her wires kink, and cannot be straightened out by a team of skeptics, this is called the dog-leg, which she sings beautifully of in a number of her hit songs, including "Dirty," "Slowdown, Baby," "The Way You Talk To Me," as well as in her cover version of "Word To Your Mother" by Sir Vanilla Ice. Aguilera is the longest single syllable word in English, and the only one that rotates on its side in counterclockwise. As the youngest Pope ever, she was only 11. She instituted one slot machine per every eight citizens in Vegas. Contrary to popular rumor, she keeps her heart in her head like a shrimp or a pregnant goldfish. In animal crackers, cookies, she appears as 15 different shapes, including a herd of red blood cells, lightning bolts and the Nobel Peace Prize. It was said she trapped the wind like a tired man. 

The hope radio station in Sweden continually beams her lyrics into space. A bylaw in Utah bans her from unionizing or having sex with a man in a moving ambulance, or so it would seem on her coat of arms, which reads, in the beginning was the word. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled Aguileras yearning to be free. When I was researching that poem, one of the disturbing things I found out is at Guantanamo Bay, where they did sleep deprive prisoners, one of their methods was to play Christina Aguilera loud, over and over and over, which is horrifying for everybody. I'm not trying to make light of that. I just thought that was an astonishing piece of information. This last poem is the title poem from this book. It's called, "Sudden Anthem." This is the Wisconsin Book Festival, so this is all about, I think, writing your life, writing your future, writing your identity. There's an assignment that I give to my students called "A Literacy Autobiography," where they talk about their encounters with language, as a reader, as a consumer of language, and how they make meaning of that. 

For me, this is a poem about that. It's about the first time that I learned to spell my name, which seemed an awfully important thing. "Sudden Anthem." It was snowing so hard I thought we were inside the stretched out belly of an arctic pig. I was afraid if I ventured through the storm, I'd be erased halfway to the swings. This was the age of Aquarius. I had star maps for eyes and thoughts like rats down an alley of dumpsters. This was back in kindergarten. I carried a Star Wars lunch box and had an attitude like Jupiter. I wore Spiderman Underoos. 

I still peed the bed after scary dreams, but I knew where to fence the sheets. The other kids were gone. They'd disappeared like postage stamps, licked away clean on their mother's tongues. I was the sole candle pin, wobbling at a small, round table, a single lamp shining down, inventing me like hope as I practiced writing my name. I can see me through this shook-up snow globe of memory, eager and serious, like a lawyer with his mistress, like a muscle car ramped up on the skids. I can see me chewing my lips, like I do now whenever I take a hammer to nails. I'm a 40-pound shoulder hunched over like a question. I'm an astronaut planting the flag of a yellow pencil into the moonscape of a page. Thank you. 
(applause)

- Oh, you didn't want to be introduced? 
(inaudible)

- My name is David, I'm a staff writer for Isthmus and the Daily Page. And tonight, I am the segue between Matthew and Dave Zirin. It's a privilege for me to introduce Dave. How many of you have read Dave's new book yet? You are in for such a treat. Please note that after this program, his books will be available in the lobby from Rainbow, as well as Matthew's. 

And I invite you to support the festival by buying copies for yourself, but also for your friends and neighbors as gifts. Mr. Zirin is perhaps best known for his "Edge of Sports" column, Web Site and XM Satellite Radio show. Press Action has twice recognized him as its sportswriter of the year. He's contributed to the Progressive, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and a good number of other journals. He has brought his perspective to ESPN, the BBC, CNBC, C-Span and Democracy Now. He is the author of previous books, including "Welcome to the Terror Dome," subtitled "The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports," and "What's My Name For?" subtitled "Sports and Resistance in the United States." In his new book, "A People's History of Sports in the United States," Dave peels back the myths that shroud our sports history, corrects countless misconceptions and forces us to question much of what we think we know about our sports history, reconsider it. In the best muckraking tradition, he comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable by rescuing discarded heroes from the brink of obscurity, and calling to account the hypocrites, cheaters, thugs and corporate villains who have too often hijacked sports. 

He resuscitates the reputations of sports figures whose accomplishments have been all but erased by the violent intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia. And he replaces our sports history in a social and political context where it belongs, not separate from it. In speaking truth to sports, Dave fights to take them back for those of us who have grown impatient and disillusioned by each successive doping scandal or felony charge, or by every gloomy new stadium built on the back of taxpayers despite the fact that it is destined for demolition when the franchise moves to another city. I wish we were in a stadium tonight with 80,000 people. Sports writers never get to do their job at mid-field or center court, and thus never enjoy the opportunity to look up and see fans doing the wave in appreciation for their work, standing and roaring, cheering. A "People's History of the United States," is a three point shot from mid-court at the buzzer, a 98-yard interception return in sudden death overtime, a bottom-of-the-ninth grand slam in game seven, a 12th round knock-out. If we were in a stadium, perhaps we could all rise and pump our fists, high-five each other, raise your arms skyward, cheer and exalt in welcoming Dave Zirin to the 2008 Book Festival. 
(cheers and applause)

- Wow, thank you! 

We've got a mini wave in the back. I've got to get business cards that say, "Comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable." I think that's awesome! That was so great! Thank you for that introduction. Thank you, Matt. Was Matt great, or what? Can we give him another round of applause. 
(applause)

 Before coming here tonight, a couple people did ask me, like what do sports and poetry possibly have to do with one another. 

It is true, certainly in my high school, that far too often it was the athletes beating up the poets in the hallway. I'll just say, me personally, I was an athlete in high school. But I'm also Jewish, so I would beat myself up in the hallway. 
(light laughter)

 Sorry. Moving on. But it's interesting, because sports and poetry actually have something very elemental in common, in that they're both taught with an over emphasis on rigidity, structure and drills, and yet, the athletes or poets who really inspire us are the ones who transgress the very rules that are drilled into our heads. I mean, it's the athletes who dare do things a little bit differently. Those are the ones who stay with us over time, whether it's Michael Jordan driving into the lane and switching from his right hand to his left and doing a lay-up, or whether it's Martina Navratilova playing a serve and volley game, when everybody tells her she's really supposed to be back at the baseline. Or poets, certainly. 

I don't know enough about poetry to give firm examples of this, but certainly the ones I've read who've touched me over my lifetime, people like Alan Ginsberg; people like e.e. cummings; people like Langston Hughes, were the ones who actually took rules and just spit a big gob of spit in the face of them. So that's something to me that sports and poetry have in common. And also, when I was thinking about my book, it's interesting how many athletes, when they have chosen to be political, have chosen poetry as a medium to actually express that. I mean, obviously the person on the cover, Mr. Muhammad Ali. He was somebody, early in his career, taking advantage of the beatnik craze. He would go down to the Bitter End in Greenwich Village and recite his poetry in front of all the beatniks and the lefties in the West Village as a way to promote himself. No one had ever seen anything like that before. So before a fight, he would say, "They never dreamed when they laid down their money that they would see a total eclipse of the Sonny." 

And then, later on, of course, when he became the most famous draft resister in the history of the United States, there was one time when he was doing a press conference. And before the press conference, all of press row was absolutely convinced that this was when Ali was going to break, that he was going to sit down and say, all right, I'll put on the red, white and blue trunks; I'll go out there and I'll throw some jabs for the troops; that's what I'll do; I don't want to go to jail; I don't want to do anything like that; I want to keep my title; I don't want to be kicked out of boxing. And Ali sat down and he greeted the press with a quick poem, a little bit of verse. He said, what did he say? He said, "Keep asking me how long on the war in Vietnam I sing this song. I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong, because it's better to be in jail fed than to be in Vietnam dead." And the press was kind of like, oh, wow. He didn't join the USO did he? So there certainly is that tradition. And just like people might say sports and poetry have nothing to do with each other, certainly there's equal if not greater resistance that sports and politics have anything to do with one another. 

That is one of the great truisms that are pounded into your head when you try to break in as a sports writer, or an athlete, or at any level involved with sports and media. They say, wait a minute, sports and politics do not mix. They must not go together. There's a reason why we have ESPN over here and C-SPAN over there. There's a reason why you've got your front page over here and your sports section over there. These two worlds are not allowed to go together. And the people who usually make that argument are the people who control sports. Because it's not really politics that they don't want in sports. It's resistance politics. It's the politics that actually raise a critique of things, like racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalism. 

That's what they don't want in sports. But when it's about their politics, they're only too happy to flood our brains with whatever happens to be on their minds. And you saw no greater example of this, in my mind, this past summer, with the Olympics in Beijing. I mean, people may have heard that the Olympics were in Beijing, and it was a tad controversial. Did people hear that? And some concerns started to be raised by athletes, by people in the mainstream media, by even people on Capitol Hill. They were starting to raise issues like, wait a minute, China is spending $42 billion on the Olympics, even though there was recently an earthquake where schools fell on people's heads. Wait a minute, doesn't China support the government in Sudan with relation to Darfur? Is that a problem? Wait a minute, China's cracking down on Tibet. 

Is that a problem? Wait a minute, General Electric just donated 300,000 closed circuit cameras to Beijing to spy on people. Wait a minute, two million people were just kicked out of their homes to make way for Olympic facilities. Gee whiz, maybe we should be raising some issues about that. And the head of the International Olympic Committee, who by the way, was an Olympian himself in 1968 in the sport of yachting. And he's a Knight from the Court of Belgium, which he actually brags about. I don't know if you'd want to be associated with the Royal Court of Belgium. But he is very proud of that. If you -- Leopold's --, you'll know why that's disgusting. But he goes up to his podium, and this is what he says, "For all the people who are raising critiques about the Olympics being in Beijing, let me tell you that it's absolutely vital that we keep politics out of the Olympic movement." 

And he's saying this, even though the opening ceremonies of the games had George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Vladimir Putin, all sitting in the same box together. And yet, heaven forbid you raise the issue of politics with the Olympics. You wonder if he's allergic to irony. I mean, when he said that, I got this total connection, during the Russia-Georgia conflict, when John McCain said, "In the 21st century, big nations must never invade smaller nations." And you're just like, really? 
(laughter)

 I mean, I agree. But out of your mouth, really? But it wasn't just the head of the Olympic Committee, this was like an almost military discipline of all the leaders of the Olympics saying that politics had to be kept out of it. 

The coach of USA basketball, who in my part of the country, in Maryland, we also refer to as the anti-Christ, for more sporting as opposed to political reasons. He said, "Athletes have no obligation, nor have they ever had an obligation to be political." But the worst was probably the head of the Canadian Olympic Committee. A very unfortunately named gentleman, by the name of Dick Pound... 
(light laughter)

 That's his real name. There's really no need to laugh, it's the poor man's name, Dick Pound. I'm sure he suffered enough in grade school. But actually, a true story. I was doing a radio show talking about Dick Pound, and in the commercial break, the producer actually came in and said, "You can't say that on the air." 

I said, "It's the man's name." If the FCC calls because I'm saying his name, that's a serious problem. Dick Pound. So this is what Dick Pound said. He had all of the Canadian Olympians together and he said, "If you can't keep your mouth shut in Beijing, then you might as well just stay home." And I'll give Dick Pound credit for this, that it's honest. The idea of keeping your mouth shut, directed at athletes, at sports writers, at fans, is oftentimes the way you hear about politics and sports. It's about saying to people who might want to challenge the status quo, you need to keep your mouth shut. The hypocrisy is staggering. While they tell athletes to keep their mouths shut, my goodness, people in politics, probably the most unsafe place to be, is between a politician and a professional athlete if there's a camera nearby. 

I mean, the way presidential politics this season have pimped sports is unbelievable. That critique is never raised about politics and sports in this context. Just the basic example, of course, is you know, Barack Obama, basketball. He shoots 3-point shots in front of the troops. Of course, Sarah Palin, America's number one hockey mom, although don't tell the Philadelphia Flyers fans that, 'cause they booed her off the ice, if people got to see that That was very satisfying. 
(light laughter)

 Yeah. I don't know what she was inhaling, Sarah Palin, going out there-- Sorry, a little poetry for you. I don't know what Sarah Palin was inhalin' going out on the ice in front of Philadelphia. Philadelphia fans are famous once for booing Santa Claus, that's very famous. 

That really did happen. But the better Philadelphia fans being ornery story involved a Philadelphia Phillies game about 25 years ago, where they did an Easter egg hunt right in the middle of the field. I'm sorry to digress, but this is too good a story. And all the kids of the players went out there to find the Easter eggs. They asked for a big round of applause for all the kids who found Easter eggs, and everybody clapped. They asked for a big round of applause for the kids who didn't, and people booed and threw things at the kids. 
(laughter)

 And so, here's Sarah Palin, and she says, well, I'm going to go out there to center ice and drop the puck. And she says explicitly, she says, "I know Philly fans can be rough, but I'm going to go out there with my 7-year-old daughter in a Philadelphia Flyers jersey, and then they wouldn't dare boo Piper," her daughter. Sarah Palin, once again, trying for that mother of the year award, goes out with her 7-year-old daughter, and of course, they did dare. 

They did boo her. And it was a beautiful thing to see. But, there you go. Joe Biden. Sorry, just going through presidential politics and sports. Joe Biden, huge college football fan, huge fan of a team called the Delaware Blue Hens. That's his sport. Then, John McCain, shuffleboard, I don't know what he does. He plays soup. Whatever John McCain is doing these days. 

But the hypocrisy is really profound. It's like athletes, no, no, no. You cannot in any way, shape or form be involved in politics. But yet, the politicians always get involved in sports. One last word about Sarah Palin, I've never seen-- not even Mike Huckabee, with all due respect, I've never seen any politician so deeply enmesh themselves in the world of hunting, to the point of which where she celebrates the idea of riding in a helicopter and shooting moose, shooting caribou, then cutting off their hooves and putting them around her neck as some sort of ritual that they do. This is why Chris Rock calls Alaska "Road Warrior with Snow." This is what they do. Chris Rock had this comment about it on David Letterman. He was talking about her hunting habits. He said, you know Michael Vick is watching this somewhere saying, "I'm in jail, why?" 
(laughter)

 It truly boggles the mind. And yet, when you try to raise this about sports and politics, and try to raise the idea that fans, athletes, sports writers, not only have the right, but the obligation to not pretend that sports exists in its own hermetically sealed universe, people invariably, absolutely invariably say, well, you're trying to take the fun out of things. You know, all people want to do is kick up their legs and watch the game and have a good time. And you're trying to ruin it. You're trying to make it all serious. So let me just say quite explicitly. This book was a labor of love, not because I want to destroy the fun in sports, but because I absolutely love sports. I want to help save it, be part of a movement to save it from the very people who want to take it over and turn it into a right-wing sounding board. Because sports is beautiful. 

I love sports. I grew up in the 1980s in New York City, an absolutely colossal sports fan. My room was like a shrine to the sports stars of the day, people like Daryl Strawberry, remember Daryl? Dwight Gooden, Keith Hernandez, Lawrence Taylor. Those were the people on my walls growing up. I didn't know at the time they all had serious cocaine problems, but. Looking back, it was like the Tony Montana Allstars on the wall of my room, but I loved those guys. These incredibly charismatic athletic figures. I absolutely loved them. I played sports throughout high school. 

I played baseball. I was the starting center for my school's basketball team. We really sucked. But I loved doing it. This was when politics really interfered with my sort of happy go lucky sporting lifestyle. And this is what got me started to think about politics and sports together. This time was 1991. It was a crazy time back then, you can't imagine. There was this war in Iraq. This guy, Bush, was president. 

It was just unbelievable to live through those days. I had a friend on the team who is still one of my best friends. His name's Ari. He's from Iran. He cut out of practice one day to go to an anti-war protest. And I still remember taking him aside and being like, "What are you doing? Where are your priorities? You need to go to practice!" That's kind of embarrassing, but true. And he said, "Look, no, this is just something I have to do." 

And he went to the protest. He got into a terrible confrontation with a New York City police officer, where he was hit across the leg with a nightstick. And it was a really shocking thing to have happen. He was put out of commission because he was at a protest. And I'd never even thought about the Gulf War or anything. And all of a sudden, my friend was hurt. And as I was trying to clear my head and think about this, I went to a basketball game in New York between St. Johns and Indiana at Madison Square Garden. And the halftime show involved somebody in an Arab costume at half-court, getting beat up by one of the mascots, while the Jumbo-Tron said, "USA, USA, USA." Pretty soon, you had 20,000 people, literally, chanting for the bashing of somebody dressed in a stereotypical Arab, white robes, and whatnot. 

I was watching all of this, my 16 or 17-year-old self, and I'm thinking, wow, sports is wrong. Sports is terrible. Sports is awful. I absolutely swore off sports at that moment. I go this whole life of being this huge sports fan, and I walked away from it, because I thought to myself-- The problem is our society. This is a sick society. This is a sick system. The best thing to do is to devote yourself to actually fighting that system, and not worrying about sports. If you ever know anybody who became a vegetarian, and overnight, they're just like, you know, bringing their own pots to your house, because they won't eat off your pots. That's what I was like with sports. 

I was like a militant, anti-sportist. That's the way I stayed for most of the 1990s, very busy, just trying to think of words that rhymed with Clinton or Gingrich for chants at various protests. In 1996, that all kind of flipped when there was a basketball player by the name of Mamoud Abdul-Rauf, who made the very personal decision that he wasn't going to come out for the National Anthem before games. He played for the Denver Nuggets in the NBA. Rauf kept this to himself. But then a reporter went in the locker room and asked him about it. And the reporter asked him why he didn't go out there. Rauf said "Well, look, it's just not something I'm comfortable with. I just converted to Islam, and I don't want to be saluting a flag. It just makes me uncomfortable." 

The reporter's response to him was to say, but don't you realize that that flag is a symbol of freedom and democracy throughout the world. Rauf's response was that it may be a symbol of freedom and democracy to some, but it's a symbol of oppression and tyranny to others. When he said that, it was like the sporting -- hit the fan. ESPN would do shows like, "Rauf spits on the flag, booyah!" That was like-- It was well off the sports page and onto the front page. So I started to follow it, my political non-sports-watching self. And on one of the shows, one person said, very insultingly, about Rauf, he said, well, he probably sees himself in the tradition of people like Muhammad Ali, or Tommie Smith, John Carlos, you know, those activist athlete types. When I heard this, I was like, wait a minute, tradition? Activist athletes? And I was like, oh, my God, I've got to learn about this. 

All those old synapses, those sporting synapses started to just explode in my head. I was like, I need to learn what this tradition is. I tried to find a book that actually charted the tradition of the activist athlete, charted the tradition of people who dared use sports as a way to speak out about radical politics. But the problem was that the book didn't exist. So that's when I first started thinking of this, and that's why I wrote this book. 
(applause)

 Oh, thank you. I don't know if I have time to say a quick thing about the book. I'm looking at David, who's not looking at me. Do I have time to talk a little more? 

Can I talk a little more? Yeah. You're not in charge? All right, real quick, 'cause I want to hear what you guys think, or whatever. One of the things I tried to do with the book, because it's actually fascinating. I don't know if there are any teachers here, or anything, whether professionally licensed or otherwise. A lot of us are teachers in our own way, without question. But it's a fascinating way to learn about the history of how people have struggled against depression in this country by looking at it through the window of sports. It's actually, I think, a way to reach people who otherwise would not or could not be reached. I mean, for example, one of the common threads that runs through the book is like the position of women, relative to sports in this country. 

And it's a remarkable history, because it's a history of struggle for access to the physical. And this idea of full citizenship, this idea of being a real person who can be physical, and be actually able to express yourself with your body, that was all bound up in every movement for women's liberation that's ever existed in this country, from the suffragettes through the women's liberation struggles in the 1970s. And what women had to go up against has been just an insanely official wall of politics, of science and religion, that said, you don't have the right to play. This official line about that. And if you look at some of the science that was produced, for example, about women and sports, it is shocking. Like respectable science that said if women play sports, they will become infertile. Their uteruses could implode. They could find themselves destitute and ruined, merely by playing sports. I mean, my God! It's sports, for goodness sakes. 

I have one example of it, right here. This is from the 1878 edition of the American Christian Review. It's the 12-step downfall for any woman who dares involve herself in the sinful world of croquet. 
(laughter)

 Twelve steps. Step one, a social party. Step two, social and play party. Step three, croquet party. Uh-oh! Step four, picnic and croquet party. 

Step five, picnic, croquet and dance. Step six, absence from church. 
(laughter)

 So busy with that croquet. Step seven, imprudent or immoral conduct. Step eight, exclusion from the church. Shoot, you're not going anyway. Step nine, poverty and discontent. Step ten-- This one's my favorite. More croquet. 
(laughter)

 I'm so poor and discontent, where's the croquet? Step 11, shame and disgrace. Step 12, ruin. You thought it was just croquet. Now on the flip side of that, you had the early suffragettes see sports and physical activity as something where they were taking a stand. This is what Susan B. Anthony said about the bicycle. She said, "Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. 

It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel, the picture of free untrammeled womanhood." And Elizabeth Cady Stanton who's of course one of the famous suffragettes, she would write articles, which if written today, I think would send many in the testosterone addled sports world into an absolute hissy fit. She would make very strong cases where she would say, why do people think men are inherently physically superior to women? Why do they think men are inherently better athletes than women. If women actually had equal access, as young girls, to unfettered play-- That's how she put it. I love that phrase, unfettered play, who's to say what women could be physically. I'm serious. If someone made that argument now, people on ESPN, there would be strokes a plenty on "Sports Center." This is what they were saying. 

It says something about struggle and about physicality. And that's the whole history of women in sports. I give a lot of examples of that. African American in sports, as well. It's a really, I think, important history to get at the real truth, because one thing that things like, again, ESPN or Walt Disney, they're actually have been a lot of movies and television programs about racism in sports. But oh, my God, they're so-- Is Disney-fied a word? We're going to make it one. It's so Disney-fied, it's shocking sometimes. They all follow the same narrative, whether they're talking about the Texas Western all-black basketball team in the mid-'60s to this new movie that's out right now about an African American football player, they all have the same narrative, which is segregation, integration, celebration! All right! 

We did it! And the real history is so much more interesting than that, because you've got this whole period in this country, actually after the Civil War, when sports are actually integrated. They were integrated in this country. Baseball was integrated at this time. Other sports, like horse racing, 1875, the first Kentucky Derby, 16 of the 17 jockeys were African American. So you have integration in this period. Where you have segregation in sports actually happens with the establishment of Jim Crow and the defeat of reconstruction in this country. And then you see the whitening of sports, not starting from time in memorial, but in the 1870s, as part of a political decision to separate both, to paraphrase Frederick Douglass, to conquer each. And sports was a part of that. The infamous laws in the south, the segregation Jim Crow laws, and I cite them in the book, they have sports as a central part of that. 

There was an actual concern about fraternization on the playing field, so they set down very strict markers. Like 1875, I told you about the Kentucky Derby, 16 of the 17 jockeys are Black. By 1890, it's all white. In baseball, African American players, they actually would have to escape from the field. Moses Walker brandished a gun on the field one day, because he was so scared of what was going to happen to him as he was physically removed from the sport. Now, the only sport that actually remained integrated in these times was boxing. And trust me, it didn't happen because the people who ran boxing were the Quakers, or anything like that. I mean, you wouldn't wipe these guys off your shoe. These were terrible people. They kept boxing integrated precisely so they could make a buck off racism in society. 

They never actually, though, let an African American person ascend to the Heavyweight Championship until a gentleman by the name of Jack Johnson in the early part of the 20th century. And I tell the story of Jack Johnson in the book because it's a great example of the way that sports and politics have always been together in this country. And so today, when they say sports and politics don't mix, I think about Jack Johnson and say really? Then why is it when he then fought the person who was called the Great White Hope, Jim Jeffries, did Jim say before their epic fight, "I'm going into this fight for one reason, and one reason only, and that's to prove that the white man is better than the negro." That's how the fight was set up. And Jack Johnson's response to the Dallas Morning News, I love this quote. Jack Johnson, he said, "The tap of the gong," meaning the start of the fight, "will be like music to me. I cannot wait to show the world that I am Jeffries' master." Think about this. This is only a few decades after the end of the Civil War. 

And the headline of the Dallas Morning News, which is hardly the socialist worker's newspaper. The headline was, "Johnson Says Will Be Jeffries' Master," in a big font. But it's after the fight that really shows where sports and politics can become so intertwined. In the aftermath of the fight, you have a situation where you had just rage among sectors of the white community, that Jeffries lost. They attempted to enter black communities, and they were actually fought back, much more urbanized, much more centralized black population than had existed in the previous century. This spread like wildfire throughout the country. There was actually the widest national racial uprising that this country had ever seen, or ever would see, until the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. After a boxing match that happened. So people can't say that sports and politics don't come together. 

I know my time is almost up. I could tell you a trillion stories like that throughout the 20th century. I guess I just want to end by saying my quick two cents about why we don't know this history today, why considering how sports obsessed this country is, why isn't the truth about the history of sports part of the general oxygen and atmosphere. And I think that there are three basic answers to that. The first is that sports are of course big business. The people who started the sports business 100 years ago never could have imagined that you would have this trillion dollar globalized athletic industrialized athletic complex. And there is such a pressure on athletes themselves to be blank slates, to be not human beings, but as they say among themselves, they say how do we become a brand. When you become a brand, there's something inherent in that goal that's about dehumanizing yourself and de-politicizing yourself. So part of it is about selling sports is the biggest business possible. But the other reason, which is I think as or more important is that the people who run sports, almost to a person, not all of them, but almost to a person, are far to the right of everybody else in society. 

I mean, think about this election cycle. One of the big stories was that Obama has so incredibly out-raised John McCain. And also another story is about how a lot of people who are part of sort of the financial class and wealthy class are actually supporting Obama, when more typically they might support the republican. But among sports owners, the money to McCain to Obama is a 6:1 ration. I would imagine there's nowhere else in society, save maybe the white citizen councils of the south, where there's a 6:1 ratio of financial support for the republican in this cycle. And yet, among owners, it's 6:1 for McCain. Just think about Sarah Palin dropping that puck, for example. That didn't happen because the NHL thought that Sarah Palin would be a brilliant marketing ploy. I mean, my God, she's about as popular as a sexually transmitted disease right now. There's no way that she would be somebody who would bring out people and increase the love of hockey. 

But the owner of the Flyers is a gentleman by the name of Ed Snyder. He gave $25,000 to the campaign. He, himself, has a political interest in trying to see them get elected. So, ownership is a reason. But then the last reason why I think history is taken from us, is because I think one of the goals of modern sports is to keep the consumer passive, to set up this really iron wall between spectator and participants. And us spectators are just supposed to be quiet and take it, and take it all in, and not actually demand for sports to change. And it's important that we know that there's actually a history of ordinary fans demanding, for example, that Muhammad Ali not have his title stripped in the late '60s, or demanding that baseball integrate, or demanding that women have equal access to sports, and things like Title 9 in this country. There is actually a history of ordinary people trying to reclaim, and fighting to reclaim sports. I think armed with that history, we can be a very powerful force in this country. I'll just end by quoting Howard Zinn himself. 

One of my favorite Zinn quotes is where he said, "I don't study history so I can learn about the past. I study history so I can change the future." Thank you very much. 
(applause)