Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

September 10, 2017

The six degrees of separation between WBAI and Craig Carton

Filed under: radio,sports — louisproyect @ 7:58 pm

Craig Carton under arrest by FBI agents

When I found out on Thursday that Craig Carton, a shock jock who co-hosts a morning show on WFAN with Boomer Esiason, had been arrested for running a Ponzi scheme, that was a bigger shock than I ever got from any words coming out of his mouth. Boomer and Carton had been on the air since September 4th, 2007 when they replaced Don Imus, another shock jock. Imus’s show was focused on politics rather than sports but sprinkled with the kind of racist and pro-cop palaver that Boomer and Carton specialized in. Of course, it is never naked racism but typically bad-mouthing Colin Kaepernick or complaining about Black Lives Matter.

WFAN knew what they were getting when they hired Carton.Wiki reports that when he was a DJ in New Jersey, he and his co-host Ray Rossi allegedly made numerous hostile and racist remarks directed towards then Edison mayoral candidate, Jun Choi, as well as the Korean, Chinese and Indian populations of the Edison area. And just before coming to WFAN, he was confronted by a Polish Holocaust survivor Paweł Zenon Woś, for propagating anti-Polish stereotypes.

The time-spot opened up for Boomer and Carton because Don Imus had been fired for referring to the Rutgers woman’s basketball team as “nappy-headed ho’s”. His stooge Bernard McGuirk, an ex-Marine and passionate Trump supporter, chimed in, referring to them and an opposing team as “”jigaboos versus the wannabes”.

So, you might ask why I ever bothered to listen to Imus, Boomer and Carton or Howard Stern who pandered to the same backward white male audience. As it happens, my wife and I enjoy listening to shock jocks in the morning. 90 percent of it is innocent chatter about politics, sports or bowel movements but the 10 percent that is intolerable usually motivates me to turn to CNN. My preference would be for WBAI but the station lost its entertainment value about 20 years ago.

Ironically, it was WBAI that provided one of the inspirations for Howard Stern, who was arguably the father of shock jock radio. He is reported to have listened to Bob Fass religiously as a teenager. Fass and fellow Pacifica talk show host Larry Josephson were the first to begin exploring their psyches on the radio in a free association manner as if they were on a psychiatrist’s couch.

Stern was also a big Bob Grant fan. Grant, who died in 2013, was one of the first rightwing zealots on the radio. He likened Mayor Dinkins to a washroom attendant and was finally fired from WABC, the fountainhead of rightwing talk radio, for telling listeners that he hoped that Ron Brown, the African-American Commerce Secretary in the Clinton administration, wouldn’t have been a survivor in a plane crash. (He wasn’t.)

On a good day, Boomer and Carton can be very entertaining especially when they are interviewing sports figures. Like Howard Stern, Carton is an excellent interviewer not afraid to ask what might seem to be tactless question. Here’s an example of Carton at his most likeable.

Seinfeld, who is a big-time sports fan like me, was honing in on Carton’s problem—an inability to accept the responsibilities of fatherhood. If you listen to his anecdotes on the show about going to Las Vegas or having bromance type dinners with sports celebrities, you get little sense that he is the father of four children.

Apparently, Carton loved going to Las Vegas because he had a gambling addiction. He had racked up $2 million in gambling debts and was desperate to find a solution. Like Bernie Madoff, he ran a Ponzi scheme but one based on the resale of concert tickets for A-list performers like Beyonce. He and his two partners told a hedge fund in NYC that they had access to huge blocks of tickets for such concerts direct from the promoters that could be resold online for a huge profit. Typically what happens is something like this. A ticket to a Beyonce concert might cost $100 but on the secondary market it can go up to a $1000. Carton never had such tickets and conned the hedge fund guys into fronting him millions of dollars that he used to pay off his debts.

They say that he faces up to 45 years for breaking various laws. As tempting as it would be to feel schadenfreude for Carton, I felt nothing but sadness. He has four young children who will likely be damaged by his absence both materially and psychologically. If you’ve seen the excellent biopic of Bernie Madoff on HBO that starred Robert DeNiro in one of his best performances in years, you’ll realize how much of a tragedy it was for him and his family. (One son hung himself in shame and likely fear that he too would be arrested eventually.)

A little bit of this has a personal resonance. One of my closest friends growing up had a gambling addiction just like Carton. I used to go with him to the Monticello Raceway where he would bet hundreds of dollars on harness races. He worked as a waiter in his father’s hotel and blew away all his money every summer. On occasion I’d have to loan him money just to pay his tuition in a local community college.

Last September Scientific American published an article titled “How the Brain Gets Addicted to Gambling” that identifies gambling as an addiction rather than a compulsion.

Research to date shows that pathological gamblers and drug addicts share many of the same genetic predispositions for impulsivity and reward seeking. Just as substance addicts require increasingly strong hits to get high, compulsive gamblers pursue ever riskier ventures. Likewise, both drug addicts and problem gamblers endure symptoms of withdrawal when separated from the chemical or thrill they desire. And a few studies suggest that some people are especially vulnerable to both drug addiction and compulsive gambling because their reward circuitry is inherently underactive—which may partially explain why they seek big thrills in the first place.

Even more compelling, neuroscientists have learned that drugs and gambling alter many of the same brain circuits in similar ways. These insights come from studies of blood flow and electrical activity in people’s brains as they complete various tasks on computers that either mimic casino games or test their impulse control. In some experiments, virtual cards selected from different decks earn or lose a player money; other tasks challenge someone to respond quickly to certain images that flash on a screen but not to react to others.

A 2005 German study using such a card game suggests problem gamblers—like drug addicts—have lost sensitivity to their high: when winning, subjects had lower than typical electrical activity in a key region of the brain’s reward system. In a 2003 study at Yale University and a 2012 study at the University of Amsterdam, pathological gamblers taking tests that measured their impulsivity had unusually low levels of electrical activity in prefrontal brain regions that help people assess risks and suppress instincts. Drug addicts also often have a listless prefrontal cortex.

Further evidence that gambling and drugs change the brain in similar ways surfaced in an unexpected group of people: those with the neurodegenerative disorder Parkinson’s disease. Characterized by muscle stiffness and tremors, Parkinson’s is caused by the death of dopamine-producing neurons in a section of the midbrain. Over the decades researchers noticed that a remarkably high number of Parkinson’s patients—between 2 and 7 percent—are compulsive gamblers. Treatment for one disorder most likely contributes to another. To ease symptoms of Parkinson’s, some patients take levodopa and other drugs that increase dopamine levels. Researchers think that in some cases the resulting chemical influx modifies the brain in a way that makes risks and rewards—say, those in a game of poker—more appealing and rash decisions more difficult to resist.

Speaking only for myself, gambling couldn’t be less interesting. When I was at the race track with my friend, I’d bring along a book to read. I won’t even spend a dollar on a lottery ticket. Drugs are even less tempting, except if you consider alcohol a drug. After reading Marxist literature all day, nothing relaxes me more than glass of Famous Grouse, the scotch that most Scottish people prefer.

I suppose the only bet I took in life was revolutionary socialism. In some ways, that makes me a total loser. But I had fun doing it most of the time.

August 9, 2017

Colin Kaepernick and the national anthem

Filed under: jingoism,sports,war — louisproyect @ 8:28 pm

As someone who listens to a lot of sports talk radio, I have been struck by the steady drumbeat of all the white callers who make the same point, as if they were almost reading from a script. It goes something like this:

I understand that football players have free speech but when they are on the job, they have no right to go against their employer. It would be okay with me if Colin Kaepernick had called a press conference to speak about Black Lives Matter or anything else but when he is on company time, he had no right to kneel during the Star Spangled Banner.

The first thing you have to ask yourself is what kind of job requires you to sing the national anthem when the workday starts. People working for Walmart are expected to stock shelves, not stand at attention and sing the Star Spangled Banner so why would someone being paid to throw a football or hit a baseball go through a patriotic ritual before they begin working?

On March 12, 1996, Denver Nuggets point guard Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (neé Chris Jackson) refused to stand for the national anthem with his teammates. As a convert to Islam, this was counter to his religious beliefs. Additionally, he stated that the flag was a symbol of oppression. He was suspended by the NBA for one game but after a compromise worked out with the league, he agreed to stand but would also be permitted to recite a Muslim prayer instead of singing Francis Scott Key’s harmonically tortuous song that included a verse that condemned slaves fighting for the British in exchange for their freedom.

Unlike the NBA, the NFL has no rules about standing for the national anthem, and the Collective Bargaining Agreement does not mention it as well.

The roots of singing the anthem before sporting events go back to the 1918 World Series when WWI jingoism ruled. This was the same year that Debs made a speech denouncing American participation in World War I, which led to his conviction under the Sedition Act of 1918 and a 10 year prison term. The September 6, 1918 NY Times was clear about the nationalist impulse behind the singing of the anthem, which actually occurred during the 7th inning stretch rather than before the game started:

Far different from any incident that has ever occurred in the history of baseball was the great moment of the first world’s series game between the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox, which came at Comiskey Park this afternoon during the seventh-inning stretch. As the crowd of 10,274 spectators—the smallest that has witnessed the diamond classic in many years—stood up to take their afternoon yawn, that has been the privilege and custom of baseball fans for many generations, the band broke forth to the strains of ” The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The yawn was checked and heads were .bared as the ball players turned quickly about and faced the music. Jackie Fred Thomas of the U. S. Navy was at attention, as he stood erect, with his eyes set on the flag fluttering at the top of the lofty pole in right field. First the song was taken up by a few, then others joined, and when the final notes came, a great volume of melody rolled across the field. It was at the vary end that the onlookers exploded into thunderous applause and rent the air with a cheer that marked the highest point of the day’s enthusiasm.

The mind of the baseball fan was on the war. The patriotic outburst following the singing of the national anthem was far greater than the upheaval of emotion which greeted Babe Ruth, the Boston southpaw when he conquered Hippo Jim Vaughn and the Cubs in a seething flinging duel by a score of 1 to 0. The cheers for America’s stirring song were greater even than the demonstration offered Vaughn when he twice made the mighty Ruth whiff the air.

Nowadays, baseball owners are not content to have such a display before the game begins. During the seventh-inning stretch, the crowd is expected to sing “God Bless America” on various holidays like Fourth of July. Like 1918, it was an outburst of jingoism following September 11, 2001 that led to it being included as part of the nationalist drumbeat in baseball stadiums. It is only in Yankee Stadium and the Atlanta Braves stadium where “God Bless America” is sung at every game during the seventh-inning stretch.

Also like the “Star Spangled Banner” first being played in 1918, “God Bless America” was composed by Irving Berlin that same year as a way of rousing public opinion in favor of fighting in the trench wars “over there”. The USA suffered 116,708 casualties in WWI, which was 0.13% of the population. That’s a considerable figure considering the fact that the USA only entered the war on April 6, 1917. By comparison, American casualties totaled 58,209 in the Vietnam War, which was 0.0003% of the population.

Most of you are probably familiar with how the song usually starts: “God bless America, land that I love” but the lyrics that precede it will give you a better sense of Berlin’s intentions:

While the storm clouds gather far across the sea,
Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free.
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair,
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer:

Woody Guthrie hated the song, which was sung ceaselessly on the radio in the 1930s by Kate Smith. He decided to write “This Land is Your Land” as a way of answering Irving Berlin’s pro-war lyrics.

Norman Lear, who just turned down an invitation to be honored at the Kennedy Center because of his disgust with Donald Trump, created “All in the Family” in the early 70s as a way of protesting the Vietnam War and racism. Archie Bunker was the head of the family and about as ignorant and backward as Trump. His son Michael Stivic was a stand-in for people like me, although he never expressed anything remotely sounding like Trotskyism on the show. This argument between Archie and Michael was repeated a million times across America over dinner tables and sounds very much like the reaction to Colin Kaepernick:

July 19, 2017

The Fencer

Filed under: Film,sports,Stalinism — louisproyect @ 8:49 pm

Opening at Lincoln Plaza Cinema on Friday, “The Fencer” is an Estonian-language film made in 2015 by Finns that tells the story of a fencing instructor named Endel Nelis who led an underdog team of children to victory in a competition held in Leningrad in the early 50s. In doing so, he took considerable risks since he had been drafted into the Estonian contingent of the Nazi army after Hitler invaded Estonia. Torn between self-preservation and dedication to his students, he chooses them. There was a real person named Endel Nelis who died in 1993 but the film’s plot takes liberties with his story. There is no evidence that he was wanted by the KGB even though Estonians paid dearly for being dragooned into Hitler’s killing machine. While the film has a fictional narrative, there is a larger truth about the USSR and Estonia that I will address after saying a few words about this altogether stirring film.

As a genre, “The Fencer” has a lot in common with both documentary and narrative films I have seen about kids from poverty-stricken circumstances winning chess tournaments, especially “Dark Horse” that came out the same year as “The Fencer”. “Dark Horse”, a New Zealand film, was about a troubled Maori man named Genesis Potini who trained Maori children to compete and win in chess tournaments against children from elite schools. “The Fencer” will also remind you of “The Karate Kid” since fencing and karate are both one-on-one combat sports.

However, the focus is mostly on Endel Nelis (Märt Avandi) who has arrived in the poor and rural village of Haapsalu, Estonia from Leningrad in order to avoid detection by the Soviet police. He interviews with the principal of the local school for a sports instructor position that he hardly looks forward to. The gym lacks equipment and the children are not very athletic. In an early scene, 1 out of 5 boys run around vaulting equipment rather than leap over it. When Nelis decides to take them out skiing, the principal informs him that the skis are currently being used at a military base for training.

Missing the fencing competition he excelled at in Leningrad, he begins working out with a fencing foil on his own in the school’s gym in his spare time only to be discovered by a pre-teen girl named Marta who becomes totally fixated on his balletic moves.

Can you teach me to do that, she asks. Finally discovering something that might motivate his students, Nelis begins a fencing class that starts out on the most elementary basis. The children are lined up like they were recruits in basic training and put through the abc’s of fencing—except without a weapon. Once he realizes that they are determined to become fencers, he takes them into a nearby forest where they cut down branches that are the length of a fencing foil and equips them with an ersatz handle.

The film includes a romance between Nelis and the school librarian who stands behind his work, even though that puts her at odds with the principal who regards fencing as “feudal”. In a PTA type meeting, he urges the parents to support his decision to drop the program using Stalinist rhetoric about the “needs of the proletariat”. The grandfather of Nelis’s star student stands up to remind him that Karl Marx was a fencer when young.

“The Fencer” is an old-fashioned film with a script that borders on the melodramatic. What makes it compelling is the performances by the leading characters and enough of the actual art of fencing to carry you along. In plucky underdog films such as this, you can surely expect a happy ending.

As someone who had just finished a survey on the films of Andrzej Wajda, I found myself wondering about the historical backdrop for the film. As I had mentioned in my review of “Katyn”, how was it possible for the USSR to organize the execution of 22,000 Polish officers for the crime of being officers? By the same token, what kind of justice is it to put men in concentration camps who had been forced to fight on the side of the Nazis? In a key scene between Nelis and his librarian lover, he tells her that he managed to flee from the army not long after being drafted without being caught. The other men in the unit, who were friends and neighbors from Estonia, were not so lucky. They were apprehended and killed.

According to Wikipedia, the majority of Estonian men volunteered to join the Nazi military and comprised a 70,000 strong force. An Estonian Legion was led by Franz Augsberger, a high-ranking German SS commander. In a key battle between Soviet and Nazi forces in the Battle of Narwa in January, 1944, Estonian soldiers were key to holding off the Red Army. Soviet scorched earth tactics helped to keep Estonia in the Nazi camp. Two months later, Soviet bombers attacked the capital city of Tallinn and left 40 percent of the homes burned to the ground.

If your knowledge of Estonia is based on these bare facts, you would tend to regard its citizens as a reactionary mob despite what is depicted in “The Fencer”. Indeed, whenever I heard about Estonia in the 1960s, it was always written off as hotbed of fascism in the same way as Ukraine, another Nazi ally supposedly. But like Ukraine, Estonia was not reflexively predisposed to anti-Communism. In some ways, writing Estonians off as “bad seeds” reminds me of Daniel Goldhagen’s argument that Germans were innately anti-Semitic.

Like Poland, Estonia was ceded to the Soviet Union as part of the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. After forcing the Estonian government to accept Soviet military bases and 25,000 soldiers on its soil, the country quickly came under total Soviet control when an additional 90,000 Soviet soldiers were sent in as reinforcements. A puppet government was installed and a Red flag replaced the Estonian flag over the nation’s capital. Shortly afterwards, tribunals were set up to try “enemies of the people” against a backdrop of demonstration elections that recorded a 92.8% preference for the Communist Party, the only one on the ballot of course. Economically, the country was transformed overnight. Everything, including small shops, was nationalized and trade with the West came to an end.

During the first year of Soviet occupation over 8,000 people, including most of the country’s leading politicians and military officers, were arrested and 2,200 of those arrested were executed on the spot in Estonia. The rest were sent to prison camps in the USSR, from which very few returned. 8,000 doesn’t sound like very much but in 1939 Estonia had a population of 1,122,000, just a bit larger than San Jose, California. Can you imagine the trauma suffered by such a city if 8,000 of its residents were killed for no other reasons than being “enemies of the people”? Or think of it this way, if Estonia had a population as large as that of the USA’s today, the proportionate number of victims would have been 2,400,000.

Considering the fact that the Nazis had never killed a single Estonian until it invaded the country on its way to the USSR, it is understandable why many young men who were politically naïve might have seen them as the lesser evil.

Last Thursday, RT.com published an article titled “‘Perversion of history’: Russian officials blast NATO film glorifying Nazi collaborators” that attacked an 8-minute film produced by NATO about the Forest Brothers, a Baltic-wide guerrilla movement that fought alongside the Nazis against the Red Army. Russian Foreign Minister Maria Zakharova wrote: “Don’t remain indifferent, this is a perversion of history that NATO knowingly spreads in order to undermine the outcome of the Nuremberg Tribunal and it must be cut short!” She also correctly stated that many of the Forest Brothers were former Nazi collaborators and members of the Baltic Waffen SS.

The problem with much of RT.com reporting is that it operates in a time-tunnel that begins with, for example, Nazi alliances with Estonian nationalists but not with the secret protocols that gave the USSR free rein to seize control of Estonia and murder tens of thousands of its citizens only because it saw that as necessary for securing a buffer against the West, which at that time did not include Adolf Hitler.

As difficult as it is for some people on the left to understand, the best defense of the USSR was working-class solidarity across borders, not the Metternichian foreign policy of Stalin in the past and of Putin’s Russia today. After WWII, Stalin retained control of the Baltic States with the full approval of the USA but as the Cold War began, they began to be courted by the CIA as possible allies. Instead of maintaining its domination of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, the Kremlin should have granted them the right to self-determination and offered them total political and economic support as independent states. That, in fact, was the original policy of the Soviet Union even though it is virtually unknown to people who rely on RT.com.

It is quite natural that in such circumstances the “freedom to secede from the union” by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.

–V.I. Lenin, The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation”

 

 

August 25, 2016

The Business of Amateurs; At All Costs

Filed under: sports — louisproyect @ 1:28 am

That first Olympic marathon caught the public’s imagination to a startling degree, especially in Greece itself. Incentives included clothing, wine, a vast amount of chocolate and free haircuts for life at local barbers.

–David Arscott, “The Olympics”

What you read above is the solution to last Sunday’s NY Times acrostic, something that echoes what David Wallechinsky said in the must-see documentary “The Business of Amateurs” that opens as VOD, including ITunes, on Friday, August 26th. Wallechinsky, the president of The International Society of Olympic Historians, points out that even the original Olympics were hardly an amateur affair. The participants were supported substantially by patrons and lived a life of comfort.

Amateurism, to put it bluntly, was an innovation of the British upper crust that sought to keep the working class riffraff out of sports in the late 1800s. It included many different incentives to the wealthy boys who took part in sports, especially crew. A typical award might be a silver cup that was equivalent to a year’s wage for a factory worker.

“The Business of Amateurs” addresses all of the major crises facing collegiate sports today, including the corporate greed of the NCAA, the hardships faced by football and basketball players—the big ticket gladiators—whose scholarships are mere crumbs compared to the profits they generate, and most critically the risks that football players take in a violent sport that can lead to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), the damage to the brain that can lead to early onset of dementia, Lew Gehrig’s Disease (ALS), Parkinson’s, and depression so deep that it can force men to kill themselves as linebacker Junior Seau did.

Among the athletes interviewed by director and narrator Bob DeMars is Scott Ross, who played linebacker alongside Seau for the University of Southern California. Throughout the film, we hear from Ross who is battling the same kind of depression that Seau faced and for the same reasons. The only relief he can get from his symptoms is alcohol that can temporarily quiet the demons that plague him. Before the onset of the symptoms, he was making a good life as a businessman with a wife and kids. Toward the end of the film, we hear the message from Ross’s current girlfriend (his alcoholism had destroyed his marriage) that she had left on DeMars’s answering machine. He was found dead in a car next to a church, the result of a toxic mixture of alcohol and pain killers.

DeMars was uniquely qualified to make such a film since he was a defensive lineman at USC from 1997 to 2001. Not only has he the insider’s knowledge of how the NCAA exploits football players; he is concerned about the possibility that he too might be experiencing the consequences of one concussion too many. We see him talking to his psychiatrist about the panic attacks he had begun to experience. She replies that this could definitely be connected to brain damage.

DeMars is a big blonde bear of a man whose presence in the film has a Michael Moore quality. If Moore found it nearly impossible to meet with Roger Smith, the CEO of General Motors, DeMars has the same problem setting up an appointment with Mark Emmert, the president of the NCAA. A phone call does not get through after repeated tries and when DeMars goes into the lobby of their headquarters, they throw him out.

Compared to the NCAA, the NFL is practically saintly. Or maybe, it is just that it is more honest since it openly operates as a profit-making enterprise. If you get injured in a football game at the pro level, you will still be paid. If you get an injury playing for a big-time athletic program on the Division One level, you just might lose your scholarship. The football players are at the total mercy of the administration that despite all the blather about student-athletes considers them to be virtual slaves of the university. You get room and board and the adulation of fans but that hardly pays the bills. When one student tells a radio interviewer that he can’t pay for groceries, some good Samaritan leaves a bundle on his doorstop. That picayune gift got him thrown off the team.

Another athlete, a Black wrestler from Minnesota, puts up a rap video on Youtube complaining about exploitation. He is told to take it down by the school because his name belongs to them, not him. Years after a UCLA basketball player has retired from the game, he learns that the NCAA sold his image to a video game manufacturer without his permission. He files suit against the game maker and wins. Although everybody hates Johnny Manziel for obvious reasons, the documentary points out that he was outspokenly against the NCAA’s cartel control over his labor. Texas A&M made millions off of his stardom but he got in trouble for earning small change selling memorabilia with his signature.

Probably the most disgusting aspect of this big business pretending that it was a nonprofit is how it short shrifts poor black men from getting a decent education when they are at a place like the University of North Carolina that set up classes in African-American studies exclusively for their mainly Black athletes, some of whom were reading at a 3rd grade reading level. Through the connivance of various professors, they always got passing grades even though they were meaningless. One U. of North Carolina professor named Mary Willingham got fed up with the charade and went public. Needless to say, the school initially denied her charges just as they would deny any responsibility for CTE. In essence, the top administrators only cared about raking in the dough. Although the film did not get into the problem of athletes and sex crimes, Baylor University is a prime example of how administrators look the other way when athletes are guilty of crimes. As long as they are generating revenue, who cares if a coed gets raped. Ken Starr, who went after Bill Clinton for getting a blow job from Monica Lewinsky, was the president of Baylor college when the football team was acting practically like ISIS in a Yazidi village. Starr tried to keep the sex assaults a secret to protect the school’s revenue generating machine. The hypocrisy reaches biblical proportions.

Towards the end of the documentary, there’s a hopeful note about athletes forming a union that can stand up for their rights, something that got started at Northwestern University, which ironically has the highest graduation rate of any major school. In March 2014 the NLRB decided that the athletes were really employees of the university and gave them the green light. Unfortunately, the board reversed itself a year later. This was a unanimous overruling that included the members of the board appointed by Democratic presidents.

As it happens, I saw “The Business of Amateurs” the very day this same NLRB decided that Columbia graduate students had the right to unionize. Let’s hope they don’t change their mind a year from now. Not only is this a good thing for grad students. It might have ramifications for football players. Columbia might have a crappy football program but the initiatives taken by student activists might have the beneficial side-effect of helping our modern day gladiators.

If you’ve seen “Hoop Dreams”, “At All Costs” will seem familiar at first since it is focused on African-American high school basketball players competing to get an athletic scholarship. But unlike “Hoop Dreams”, the subjects of this worthy documentary that opens as VOD on September 20th are relatively middle-class. If the “Hoop Dream” players are desperately trying to find a way out of poverty, those in “At All Costs” are much more trying to achieve a dream that they have nourished since the age of six in some cases. Like trying to win “The American Idol” contest, landing a starting position as a point guard for the aforementioned University of North Carolina might lead to a multimillion dollar contract with an NBA team right after freshman year if the athlete takes his team to the NCAA final four.

In this instance, the players are competing in the AAU, which has become the primary audition spot for top players. Have you heard of the AAU? I hadn’t and I say that as someone who has sports talk radio on at least two hours a day. It stands for the Amateur Athletic Union that was formed in 1888 and that is much of a fiction when it comes to amateurism as the NCAA. Under the auspices of the AAU, companies like Nike and Adidas organize tournaments during the summer when stand-out players compete before the watchful eyes of people like Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, who coached the American professionals who trampled over the competition in the Brazil Olympics.

The film is focused on one AAU team called the Compton Magic that is coached by Etop Udo-Ema, a former Division One basketball player and quite open about his involvement in the AAU. It is all about the money. He gets all sorts of perks from Nike and Adidas and preaches to his players about doing well in the summer games in the AAU circuit. It is their big chance to get rich and famous. At least you can give Udo-Ema credit for being honest, as opposed to the bullshit artists running big-time basketball programs.

Among the players profiled in the film is Parker Jackson-Cartright, a soft-spoken and appealing personality whose father treats him in the same way someone might treat a racing thoroughbred. It is his ticket to success as well as his son’s.

The Jackson-Cartright family’s life revolves around the basketball programs in high school and the AAU. The dad attends all the games and is philosophical about his son continuing to compete after a bad foot injury. He muses, “We have to put it all on the line” even if putting it all on the line might mean a permanent injury.

For athletes like Parket Jackson-Cartright, school is simply a place where he can ply his trade. With every waking hour devoted to shooting hoops, there is not much time to spend on enjoying his youth or getting deep into his studies. If the injury to his foot would have kept him out of a top sports program, he would likely end up in a state school and in an uncompetitive position academically.

Even worse is that focusing every fiber of his being on basketball makes such players one-dimensional as Michael Connor, an African-American psychology professor at Cal State, Long Beach, points out in the film. Upon hearing this, I wondered if this was why Michael Jordan is so apolitical. If your body and soul are consumed by basketball, maybe you lose track of what they once called keeping your eyes on the prize.

It also made me wonder if Connor was referring to Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional-Man”, a book that was popular in the 1960s and influenced many young radicals including Angela Davis who was Marcuse’s student at Brandeis.

Have you read “One-Dimensional Man” that was written in 1964 and that can be read online? It holds up rather well.

The society of total mobilization, which takes shape in the most advanced areas of industrial civilization, combines in productive union the features of the Welfare State and the Warfare State. Compared with its predecessors, it is indeed a “new society.” Traditional trouble spots are being cleaned out or isolated, disrupting elements taken in hand. The main trends are familiar: concentration of the national economy on the needs of the big corporations, with the government as a stimulating, supporting, and sometimes even controlling force; hitching of this economy to a world-wide system of military alliances, monetary arrangements, technical assistance and development schemes; gradual assimilation of blue-collar and white-collar population, of leadership types in business and labor, of leisure activities and aspirations in different social classes; fostering of a pre-established harmony between scholarship and the national purpose; invasion of the private household by the togetherness of public opinion; opening of the bedroom to the media of mass communication.

 

April 12, 2016

How the LA Times reported on UCLA athlete Jackie Robinson in 1939

Filed under: racism,sports — louisproyect @ 1:29 am

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(Hat tip to Ken Burns documentary that started this evening on PBS.)

April 8, 2016

Havana Motor Club

Filed under: cuba,sports — louisproyect @ 9:18 pm

“Havana Motor Club” is a vastly entertaining documentary about the underground drag racing scene in Cuba that is also about as informative a take on the social and economic reforms being pushed by Raul Castro as you can find anywhere. It opened at the Village East theater in NY today and is by far the best documentary I have seen thus far in 2016. (Also available on Amazon and ITunes.)

In 1959 the triumphant Cuban revolution declared that since automobile racing was decadent, it must be abolished along with prostitution, gambling and other vices associated with the Batista dictatorship. Even before the dictator was toppled, the rebels struck a blow against car racing by kidnapping and holding for ransom Juan Fangio, the Argentinian who was the greatest racer in the world and regarded by some as the greatest ever. When I was at Bard College, I was part of a circle that was heavily into racing and as such worshipped Juan Fangio. I remember the night in 1961 when we showed Juan Fangio racing films in the school gym where we burned Castrol motor oil, a British brand that was favored by professional racers. The distinctly pungent scent of the burning Castrol gave the film showing authenticity.

Fangio was in Cuba to compete in the 1958 Cuban Gran Prix. Because of the kidnapping, another driver substituted for him at the last minute. During the race a Cuban competitor skidded off the track and plowed into a crowd, killing 10 and injuring 40—an event that is seen in “Havana Motor Club”. So Fidel Castro had two reasons to ban auto racing. It was a plaything of the rich as well as dangerous. As for Fangio, he issued a statement after being released: “It was one more adventure. If what the rebels did was in a good cause, then I, as an Argentine, accept it.”

The film begins with a look at the racing scene in Cuba when director Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt arrived with his crew. There were no Ferraris, but merely the antique cars that dot Havana’s streets today but with an important difference. The engines were souped up in order to compete in illegal drag races on the Cuban back roads. In a drag race, two cars compete against each other with the goal of reaching the finish line first. In the USA drag racing is a highly popular sport in which speeds of over 300 mph can be reached under 5 seconds routinely down a quarter-mile track. In Cuba, it is doubtful that the fastest cars can reach speeds of more than 140 mph. Despite that, watching Cubans race a ‘55 Chevy or a ‘62 Ford can provide ten times more excitement than an American drag race, especially when you understand the challenges that faced them.

Not only was the sport illegal, it was difficult to get parts such as a supercharger that is essential for racing. One of the drivers featured in the film has a friend in Miami who comes to Cuba frequently to help his Porsche compete. It is not explained how a Cuban could have gotten his hands on a Porsche but we can assume that his friend had something to do with it. The film focuses on the competition between the Porsche that is equipped with an oversized Chevy engine and a highly modified 1955 Chevy that belongs to a garage-owner nicknamed “El Tito” and is driven by his son.

The ingenuity some drivers show in procuring parts is awe-inspiring. When a boat that was being used to smuggle people into Florida breaks apart near the beach in Havana, a scuba diver goes beneath to salvage the engine that is then used to soup up a ’51 Ford, one called the “Black Widow”. It is not hard to imagine that once the barriers to such items are lifted, the Cuban economy has the possibility of soaring to new heights. Maybe those possibilities have finally persuaded Jose Madera, the owner of the Black Widow, to finally remain in Cuba after 5 unsuccessful attempts to reach Florida by raft.

One racer, who competes with a ’56 Ford, is a perfect symbol of the Cuban revolution today. He resents the government’s refusal to lift the ban on drag racing but appreciates the benefits that socialism has brought, including the free medical care that allowed him to receive treatment for cancer that not only left him alive but capable of doing what he loved most—racing.

In the course of the film, the government lifts the ban on drag racing as part of the reforms being spearheaded by Raul Castro. Just before a big race is scheduled, it is suspended because the barricades necessary for crowd control (they remember the 1958 disaster) are being used for the Pope’s visit. When racers become discouraged, one remains hopeful. He says that the government will see its way to seeing the benefits of a sporting event that can go against the grain of capitalism that he admits is calling the shots everywhere in the world today. Cuba will take an institution that serves capitalism and show how it can be transformed into benefiting the people.

The film concludes with an official race sanctioned by the government that pits the Porsche against El Tito’s Chevy. I won’t tell you which car wins.

Despite his name, director Bent-Jurgen Perlmutt is a Brooklynite who became interested in Cuba as a college student. He enrolled in a study program there in the spring of 2000 just before the Elian Gonzalez custody battle took place. His take on that confrontation will give you a good understanding of how he was able to see Cuba in such a balanced fashion:

This incident piqued my interest even more in this “axis-of-evil” nation and its contentious relationship with the United States. In order to learn more about Cuba/U.S. relations from a Cuban perspective, I started taking research trips to Cuba on my own. This led me to develop several different film projects over the years, all focusing on how Americans live and survive in a country that (since recently) has been officially off-limits to most of them. HAVANA MOTOR CLUB is the culmination of all my work in Cuba over the years, and I intend it to shed light on the conflicting sides of the changes happening in Cuba today.

With Havana in a kind of timewarp, its streets looking like the year 1958 preserved in amber, there are obvious reasons why many people would enjoy returning to a less complicated time. We learn that as part of the reforms, the Cuban drag racers are now permitted to take tourists around town for a fee. If that’s the kind of capitalism that is overtaking Cuba today, I for one would be amenable to it especially since I was just another 13-year-old in 1958 with a passion for the same kinds of cars.

On a Friday night in the late 1950s after the movie let out in South Fallsburgh in upstate NY, we stood on the sidewalk in front of the Rialto Theater and took in the same kind of illegal drag racing you see in “Havana Motor Club”. The cars would not exactly compete with each other since it was a two-lane road heading out of town but they would line up in front of the traffic light and rev their engines until the light turned green. Watching a ’57 Chevy or Ford tearing up the street was a way to get the testosterone flowing.

My car racing circle at Bard included a student named Paul Gommi who was the typical Bardian of that time, which is to say an atypical American youth. Paul used to compete in a drag races in a class that was designated for modified sports cars like MG’s or Triumphs, popular at the time for people on a budget. Reading the fine print in the regulations, Paul discovered that it would be possible for him to compete with a 1932 Ford Phaeton that he had equipped with a bored and stroked English Ford engine. Over the years he has developed versions of this combination that have earned him accolades. This is a recent example as featured in a Hot Rod Network magazine article:

His latest creation is this original American ’32 Ford DeLuxe V-8 Phaeton (only 974 produced). He set about improving its performance exactly like he would have in 1955, using all pre-’55 parts, materials, machinery, tools, and even methods.

According to Paul, “A hot rod is all about the engine. Modifying the engine is the greatest improvement you can make in performance.” He chose a ’37 Ford 221ci 21-stud Flathead engine. For performance, he took a ’49 S.Co.T. supercharger and adapted the 21 studder by designing and making all the pulleys, drive, and modifying the manifold with the help of his friend Tom Taros.

Paul was an art major whose 12 feet tall paintings of drag racers lined the walls of the dining commons in 1965, done to fulfill the Senior Project required of all Bardians for graduation. Paul told us that he was done with art at that point. It was ready to move on to full-time racing and car-building as a profession.

In 1989 Paul’s drag racing career came to an end as his car spun off the track and resulted in a serious accident that nearly cost his life.

All I can say is that when the film shows officials warning the crowds at Cuba’s first drag racing race to keep a safe distance from the track, they had ample reasons to stick to their guns. Unless the people stood back, the race would be suspended. They surely understood the dangers of a car hurdling toward a crowd at over 100 miles per hour can pose. The top man representing the Cuban government in this emerging new sport is 72 years old and had vivid memories of the 1958 bloodbath. Whatever flaws the Cuban government has, neglect of the safety and health of its citizens is not one of them.

October 24, 2014

Red Army; Wild Tales

Filed under: Film,Russia,sports — louisproyect @ 7:22 pm

The other day I saw a couple of films at the Sony screening room that were being released through Sony Picture Classics, an autonomous division catering to the “art-house” market. Both were very good.

“Red Army” is a documentary about the legendary Russian hockey team of the pre-Perestroika era that reflected the USSR at its best and worst. It consists mainly of interviews with Viacheslav “Slava” Fetisov, arguably one of the greatest hockey players of the past half-century as well as an extremely witty and insightful interviewee as deft before the camera as he was with a hockey stick.

Director Gabe Polsky was using the fate of Russia hockey as a symbol of Communism’s contradictions and how they were unsuccessfully resolved in the favor of capitalism. Clearly Polsky has learned from Werner Herzog, having served as his producer on the 2009 narrative film “The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans”. The two men obviously have the same off-kilter view of the world based on this new film for which Werner Herzog returned the favor, serving as co-producer. Like Herzog, Polsky includes some elements that guarantee that the audience will understand that something is being filmed, in his case showing some of his assistants setting up gear and including Fetisov’s admonitions to stop filming since he has to take a phone call. For documentaries, it is the equivalent of breaking through the “fourth wall”.

The film will appeal to people who are still trying to figure out what happened to the Soviet Union and the nature of Putin’s Russia today, as well as hockey fans. In fact the film, which opens on November 14 at the Empire 25 Theater in NY, will have a nationwide rollout in January that will be pitched to sports fans. It has been many years since I watched hockey but followed the NY Rangers in the early 70s when it was led by Rod Gilbert, a speedy forward who turned up as a fellow resident of my high-rise on the Upper East Side.

The film begins with Fetisov reflecting on the state of Soviet Russia when he was a 9-year-old boy trying out for the Russian Army youth team. He tells Polsky that 25 million of his countrymen were killed and that most of the country was destroyed. (Stock footage depicts the horror.) When the country began rebuilding, the new apartment buildings were barely sufficient. It was normal for 3 families to share a 400 square foot apartment. Despite that, Fetisov said that he was happy. There seemed to be enough food to eat, even if you had to stand on line. Of course, once markets were introduced the lines disappeared but hunger became widespread.

Fetisov was a protégé of Anatoli Tarasov, the coach of the Red Army hockey team and the man widely considered the father of Russian hockey. Fetisov joined the team in 1976 at the age of 19, playing defense and learning the skill of passing, something Tarasov saw as fundamental to the game. For Tarasov, hockey as a kind of chess game in which sharing the puck was fundamental.

Indeed, when he was demonstrating to his players how to move forward on the ice, he often illustrated with chess pieces. He was also convinced that ballet exercises could make his players more nimble on the ice, as the film demonstrates from archival footage. By the time that Fetisov began playing on the Red Army team, Tarasov had acquired a huge beer belly. Watching him demonstrating some steps to his team is like watching the hippopotamuses dancing in Walt Disney’s “Fantasia”.

Despite losing to an inferior American hockey team in the 1980 Winter Olympics, a loss that inspired the chauvinistic chant “USA, USA” that has tainted every game since including table tennis, the Red Army team rolled over every professional hockey team that they faced over the years. Tarasov’s goal-sharing methods were superior to the individualistic style of the West. Although the film is far too subtle and skeptical about socialism for that matter to point out that the collectivist culture might have something to do with that, you can’t help drawing such a conclusion.

After Perestroika, it became possible for Russian hockey players to turn professional in the West. Fetisov and other Red Army superstars took high-paying jobs but were not shown to their best advantage since the teams were all based on the individualist model.

It was only when the Detroit Red Wings recruited Fetisov and a cadre of ex-Red Army players that they were able to cash in, winning the Stanley Cub in 1997 and 1998.

I can’t recommend this film highly enough. It is a very sharp analysis of the Communist experience by a director who not only studied at Yale but also was on their hockey team. As the son of Russian immigrant parents, he has just the right background for drawing all the human drama out of the Red Army story. His statement in the press notes indicates the outlook that was clear to me but one that he did not want to beat over the audience’s head:

When I was at Yale, I studied politics and history and learned about the unusual role sport played in the Soviet Union. The Red Army team was designed as an instrument of propaganda to prove the superiority of the Soviet system. The country’s investment in the team’s success was massive. The demanding lifestyle and oppressive circumstances under which the players trained were a reflection of broader Soviet society. It became clear to me that the Red Army’s style of play, too, was significantly informed by the country’s ideology. Much like Communism, there was little emphasis on the individual. Those who became heroes earned as much money as teachers. Priority was placed on serving your teammates and your country, and expressing individuality or questioning authority was forbidden.

“Wild Tales” opens on February 8th. It is an Argentine narrative film directed by Damián Szifron that he described in the following terms:

I frequently think of Western capitalist society as a sort of transparent cage that reduces our sensitivity and distorts our bonds with others. Wild Tales presents a group of individuals who live within this cage without being aware of its existence. But at that point where most of us would repress – or get depressed – these people shift into gear.

Although I loved the film, I don’t think it had much to do with “Western capitalist society”. Basically it is a dark comedy about people going to extreme lengths to destroy each other in the fashion of classic Warner Brothers cartoons but without any hero like Bugs Bunny to cheer for. Instead it is like watching Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd trying to blow each other’s brains out with shotguns.

The film consists of six chapters, each one set up as elegantly as an O. Henry short story and an ending that serves as poetic justice for the miscreant characters. In “Road to Hell”, road rage turns into an elemental battle for survival pitting an Audi-driving yuppie against a hulking rural bumpkin who refuses to allow his wreck of car to be passed on a mountainous road. Not long after the yuppie passes him by, making sure to curse him out as he passes, he gets a flat tire next to a bridge over a mountain stream. When the bumpkin catches up to him, all hell breaks loose, including him taking a dump on the Audi’s hood. As the violence escalates, you will not be able to keep your eyes off the action. It is akin to not being able to avert your eyes from a highway accident except one that is far more entertaining.

I will only add that the final chapter, titled “Till Death to Us Part”, is about a Jewish wedding party that will remind you of the great Michael Douglas-Kathleen Turner vehicle “War of the Roses” with bride drawing almost all the blood. It is obvious to me that the guests are Jews even though this is not a point made specifically. Since the director (and screenwriter) has a last name that is a dead giveaway for his Jewish origins, this is a conclusion I feel safe drawing.

Both films are worth putting down on your calendar.

October 13, 2014

Against football

Filed under: sports — louisproyect @ 6:06 pm

For the past few months, there has been a steady barrage of news reports on the moral failings of football players with a tendency to put the blame on those in positions of responsibility both in the professional and amateur realms. But as you might expect, there has been an utter failure to put football into a broader social and political context, something I hope to do in this essay.

In early September, Baltimore Raven running back Ray Rice knocked out his wife and then dragged her unconscious body from an elevator in an Atlantic City hotel:

Roger Goodell, the CEO of the National Football League, then suspended Rice for two games—a decision that led to widespread disgust with both Rice and himself. Goodell has to walk a tightrope in such cases and other cases involving NFL accountability, such as the widespread incidence of brain damage in veteran players. He has to convince the media and the fans that he is for the integrity of the sport while making sure that the cash keeps flowing into the owners’ pockets. Ultimately he is responsible to them and not to society.

Ironically this balancing act was not much different than the one carried out by his father Charles Goodell, a Republican Senator who understood that NYers would not vote for someone too far to the right.

Not long after the Ray Rice incident broke the news, another scandal involving a NFL running back took place. Adrian Peterson, a Minnesota Vikings superstar, was arrested for beating his four-year-old son with a branch he tore from a tree. Why, you ask? Apparently the kid pushed his brother while he was playing a video game. TMZ broke this story, just as it did when it published the Ray Rice video. Here’s the police photo of the child’s whipping marks.

Ray Rice was a star football player at Rutgers. This school was in the news a couple of years ago for the bullying behavior of its basketball coach who routinely called his players “faggots”, “motherfuckers”, etc. when he wasn’t throwing the ball at their head for mistakes made during practice. Apparently the football team had the same sort of culture. David Cohen, the defensive coordinator, was accused of bullying by defensive back Jevon Tyree who told the Daily News that Cohen called him a “pussy” and threatened to head-butt him.

I don’t know if there was much of a bullying problem at the University of Oklahoma but Adrian Peterson’s alma mater was host to a kind of Hells Angel clubhouse under coach Barry Switzer in the late 80s. In January 1989 cornerback Jerry Parks shot offensive lineman Zarak Peters in the chest during a drinking bout, only missing his heart by a couple of inches. When the players weren’t trying to kill each other, they were out terrorizing women. One week after the shooting sophomore running back Glen Bell, sophomore offensive tackle Nigel Clay and junior tight end Bernard Hall gang raped a woman on campus. Afterwards Switzer said on local television, “You can’t speak in general terms and say that these players are out of control. That’s totally ridiculous.”

This kind of behavior is fairly typical for the powerhouse football teams like the U. of Oklahoma and Florida State that got profiled in a long investigative piece that appeared in the NY Times on October 11th. Florida State first became part of the national dialogue on football criminality when its superstar quarterback Jameis Winston got kid gloves treatment by the local cops, their campus colleagues and the administration after a female student charged him with rape.

The Times article describes a widespread pattern of thuggish behavior sanctioned by the cops, who were major fans of the football team and benefited from part-time jobs at the arena, as well as malign neglect from the administration:

The cops received a 911 call in January:

“You just need to get someone out here right away because it is really bad,” the caller said, adding that the man was “punching” the mother and “grabbing the little baby around the arm.”

But when the cops discovered that the man was a member of the Seminole football team (a name that dishonors the indigenous peoples just as much as the Redskins), they decided the charge of domestic violence was “unfounded”.

In June the cops got another call. Jesus (Bobo) Wilson had stolen another student’s motor scooter that supposedly he had permission to ride but whose last name he did not know. The cop decided not to arrest him because “he cooperated, showed no signs of guilt and provided a plausible story that needs to be investigated.” A report surfaced today that cops are likely to kill a Black youth 21 times more frequently than a white. I guess the one way to avoid a bullet or an arrest is to get recruited to the Seminoles.

The team has a favorite form of recreation to relieve the stress that goes along with drills on the field and big-time games with other powerhouse teams. Players arm themselves with bb guns and ride around campus shooting at windows or students for target practice. When I was 11 years old or so I got shot in the leg with a bb gun. It won’t kill you but it hurts like hell. Also, you don’t want to get shot in the eye even if it amuses a jock.

The article also reported on how Jameis Winston is holding up to the rape charge:

Most recently, university officials suspended Mr. Winston for one game after he stood in a public place on campus and, playing off a running Internet gag, shouted a crude reference to a sex act. In a news conference afterward, his coach, Jimbo Fisher, said, “Our hope and belief is Jameis will learn from this and use better judgment and language and decision-making.”

A search of his public Instagram page would have turned up a similar display. Amid photos of himself with his coach, the comedian Will Ferrell and the former N.F.L. quarterback Archie Manning, Mr. Winston posted a video clip in February in which he and a teammate, mimicking a viral music video, jokingly sang a line from the song “On the Floor” by the rapper IceJJFish, which celebrates men not taking “no” for an answer from women:

“She said she wants to take it slow, I’m not that type of guy I’ll letcha know, when I see that red light all I know is go.”

If the NFL is at the top of the food chain and the college is in the middle, then high school is where the minnows can be found. In a scandal that has New Jersey and the northeast doing some soul-searching, seven members of the Sayreville high school football team were arrested for sexual assault as NJ.com reported:

It came without warning.

It would start with a howling noise from a senior football player at Sayreville War Memorial High School, and then the locker room lights were abruptly shut off.

In the darkness, a freshman football player would be pinned to the locker room floor, his arms and feet held down by multiple upperclassmen. Then, the victim would be lifted to his feet while a finger was forced into his rectum. Sometimes, the same finger was then shoved into the freshman player’s mouth.

Sayreville is one of the state’s football elites, sending players to Rutgers and other Division One colleges on a fairly regular basis. It is 67 percent white and a home to many working class ethnics who love their football. Commentators have asked, “Where were the authorities” when all this was going on. I strongly suspect that the coach knew about it and might have even encouraged it as a way of “toughening” up the players. Isn’t this in line with what happened to Miami Dolphin tackle Jonathan Martin? Richie Incognito might not have stuck his finger up his ass but he degraded him in other ways like calling him “my nigger” and warning him that he was going to go to his house and rape his sister.

In fact this pattern of abuse between players, between coaches and their players, and the players and innocent bystanders walking to class, is absolutely fundamental. This is a sport based on aggression. It is no accident that every Super Bowl is a Nuremberg rally for the American military.

If we ever have a socialist revolution in the USA, the first thing that should happen after the nationalization of the banks and the commanding heights of industry is the abolition of football, both professional and amateur.

A couple of months ago, Steve Almond’s “Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto” was published. It includes a chapter “All Games Aspire to the Condition of War”—that should give you an idea of where he is coming from. I am not sure if I will have time to read Almond’s book but would if I did based on an article that Almond wrote for the Village Voice a while back, one of the few worth reading in this putrid newsweekly.

The irony, of course, is that sports — and football, in particular — is no longer simply a form of entertainment. It has become something closer to a national religion, a form of devotion that shapes the emotional lives of millions of men and women and unites us as no other cultural activity can.

It is my own view, as a fan, that football weds the essential American virtues (courage, strength, perseverance, sacrifice) to our darker national impulses (conformity, militarism, competitiveness, regenerative violence). It is a brilliantly engineered athletic drama that offers us narrative complexity and primal aggression.

At the same time, football has become the nation’s most prominent growth industry. Commissioner Goodell — a man paid nearly $30 million in 2011 — has made no secret of his financial ambitions. The NFL reported revenues of about $10 billion last year. Goodell’s stated goal for the league is to generate $25 billion annually by 2027, which would put the NFL in the company of global behemoths such as Nike and McDonald’s. College football has followed the same eye-popping trajectory, which has, in turn, led to the rampant commercialization of the high school game.

As might be expected, this popularity has been reflected in the volume of media coverage the sport attracts. In an era of dwindling resources for straight news, football has become a dependable cash cow and a driving force in the expansion of the ESPN brand and sports punditry, in general. The most popular radio programs are now broadcast live on television.

Read the full article: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2014/08/against_football_author_steve_almond.php

 

June 2, 2014

A Cuban Boxer’s Journey: Guillermo Rigondeaux, from Castro’s Traitor to American Champion

Filed under: cuba,sports — louisproyect @ 3:31 pm

In January 2013 I reported on an encounter with Brin-Jonathan Butler, a young writer and boxing trainer (a throwback to Hemingway) whose Salon.com article on a Cuban boxer named Guillermo Rigondeux triggered a reflex action on my part to spring to the Cuban government’s defense largely on the basis of Salon’s heading: “I came to Havana to film a documentary about a local boxer — and found a country by turns beautiful and terrifying.” After sending off a rude email to Butler, I learned that his views on Cuba were far more nuanced that I had given him credit for. After two or three email volleys, we decided to get together and exchange ideas.

In the course of our conversation, I learned that he was working on a book about Guillermo Rigondeux, who had defected to the U.S. in the expectations that the streets would be lined with gold. The goal of the book was to show that neither Cuba nor the U.S. could fulfill the hopes of an athlete who was forced to operate in one of the most exploitative sectors of professional sports. By comparison, the NFL is a paragon of virtue compared to the multiple boxing associations that view its gladiators as commodities to be exploited mercilessly. I was reminded of this by a poignant interview on WFAN with John Florio, the author of a new biography of Michael Spinks and his brother Leon who never received a penny of the $3.75 million he was supposed to receive for his rematch with Mohammed Ali. For his efforts, Ali was rewarded with Parkinson’s disease even if his earnings allowed him to enjoy a comfortable life. For Leon Spinks, the life after boxing included a job at McDonald’s and early dementia.

Last week I got word from Brin-Jonathan that “A Cuban Boxer’s Journey: Guillermo Rigondeaux, from Castro’s Traitor to American Champion” had finally become available. The early reviews are quite stunning:

Butler’s prose is “eviscerating… elegant… amusing” with “a storyteller’s ability to put these humanizing details into a bigger picture… Remarkable.”—The Ring magazine

“This is something very special.”—Leon Gast, Oscar-winning director for When We Were Kings

“A subtle and powerful examination of Cuba, as seen through the eyes of its most celebrated boxers. Filled with memorable characters caught in the middle of an existential struggle.”—Steve Fainaru, Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of The Duke of Havana: Baseball, Cuba, and the Search for the American Dream

“[A Cuban Boxer’s Journey] is a nuanced, deep, compassionate study of a subject too often boiled into simplicities, too often seen in black and white, too often used to forward agendas—left and right—that too often ignore the crushing human costs. Brin-Jonathan Butler’s story does just that by traveling, interviewing, and critically eyeing Cuba’s boxers at home and in the States, methodically unpacking the loss-imbued choice they all face. It is an invaluable document.”—S. L. Price, author of Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports

There’s an excerpt of “A Cuban Boxer’s Journey” at http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/77478026/cuba-boxer-guillermo-rigondeaux-journey-defection-fidel-castro that will give you an idea of Butler’s viewpoint. I found this paragraph particularly revealing:

Only a few months before, I had heard that the new captain of the Cuban national team, since Savon had stepped down, two-time Olympic gold medalist Guillermo Rigondeaux, had attempted to defect in Brazil with teammate Erislandy Lara and had been arrested. This amounted to the highest profile boxing defection in Cuban history, unavoidably symbolizing a massive turning point in not just Cuban sport, but Cuban society on the whole. Rigondeaux’s attempt at escape had become an international news item and a national soap opera regularly appearing on Cuban television. Castro himself had personally spoken out in the state newspaper calling Rigondeaux a traitor and “Judas” to his people. “They have reached a point of no return as members of a Cuban boxing team,” Castro wrote in Granma. “An athlete who abandons his team is like a soldier who abandons his fellow troops in the middle of combat.” Compounding the significance and ambiguity of Rigondeaux’s situation was boxing legend Teofilo Stevenson, probably the second most famous Cuban in the world for the fortune he turned down to leave, defending Rigondeaux. “They are not traitors,” Stevenson declared. “They slipped up. People will understand. They’ve repented. It is a victory that they have returned. Others did not.”

Brin-Jonathan Butler has published an EBook through Amazon.com that can be purchased for a mere $3.79. As you are probably aware, Amazon is locked in a battle with publishers, Hachette in particular, over the giant’s determination to low-ball them to the point of bankruptcy. As loath as I am to recommend purchasing anything from Amazon, I will continue to be a Prime account holder and to urge you to buy Butler’s book. If Guillermo Rigondeux would discover upon making it into the American Dream, it is much more of a nightmare. Someday the advanced technology of Amazon will be wedded to a society that produces for human needs rather than private profit. In that future world, people will be able to play baseball or box without worrying about where their next meal is coming from. Until then, we do what we do to survive—in essence the story Brin-Jonathan Butler has ably told.

May 11, 2014

Michael Sams reacts to being drafted by the St. Louis Rams

Filed under: Gay,sports — louisproyect @ 1:23 pm

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