"If he did it, hang him!" This is what ESPN radio host John Seibel (filling in on the Dan Patrick show) said about Barry Bonds.

The right-wing media hordes, in a mad dash to deflect attention from Dick Cheney’s shooting spree, may have found their target of mass distraction: Bryant Gumbel.

Detroit -- and there is no soft way to put this -- is a city on the edge of the abyss.

Anyone searching for job security shouldn't look for a career in NFL coaching. A full one-quarter of coaches have been canned including Oakland’s Norv Turner, New Orleans’ Jim Haslett, and a myriad of Mikes...

Last December I wrote the following: "2004 should be remembered as a year when the hermetically sealed divide between sports and society frayed for the first time in a generation... I cannot wait to see what 2005 has in store.

This March's "World Series of Baseball" was supposed to celebrate the explosion of diversity that has forever altered the Major Leagues. Teams from the Dominican Republic, Japan, Puerto Rico, and the little seen but highly regarded Cuban national team were going to play the United States in an unprecedented contest to redefine the slogan "America's Pastime."

The Bush administration’s anti-Cuba policy has reached an absurd new low. The New York Times reported this past week that Major League Baseball officials are planning to fight a Bush administration prohibition on the Cuban national baseball team playing in the first World Baseball Classic in the US next March.

Trepidation should be our first impulse when we hear that radical heroes are to be immortalized in fixed poses of bloodless nostalgia. There is something very wrong with seeing the toothy, grinning face of Paul Robeson staring back at us from a stamped envelope. Or the wry expression the US Postal service affixed on Malcolm X - harmless, wry, inviting, and by extension slanderous.

1968. There was never a year when the worlds of sports and politics collided so breathlessly, without mercy or respite. It was the year Muhammad Ali, stripped of his heavyweight title for resisting the draft, spoke on 200 college campuses and asked the question, "Can they take my title without me being whupped?"

A close compatriot of President Bush squats in a scandal so malodorous it led news shows from coast to coast. It's a scandal that some say is too hot for Bush to comment on. But there was the President, speaking without a stammer or stutter on this issue of pressing national concern.

To all the haters that don’t think cycling is a sport, and the Tour De France ranks just below watching an apple turn brown, let’s be clear: Lance Armstrong has earned the love. The cancer-surviving cyclist ended his career with a record seventh straight Tour De France victory.

What could Richard Williams(father of Venus & Serena) have uttered to ...“overshadow” – as the announcers put it – Venus’ performance.. ? Five simple words: “Racism has hurt my daughters.”...Williams has consistently been a public target partly because he has been a booming voice against racism in the country club, white cotton world of pro tennis.

The bribes have been spent. The pimps paid off. The "escorts" shuttled home. Now it's sweat-time for local fat cats, anxiously tapping their uncalloused fingers, as they wait to see if "their" city will be chosen Wednesday as host for the 2012 Summer Olympics. The motley Montgomery Burns's of New York, Moscow, London, and Paris already have the champagne on ice, in expectation of feeding at the trough of Olympic slop.

Note: "This column is 200 words shorter than usual because Billy Hunter lost 25% of it in the NBA’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement...The Stern Agenda of a sanitized, 21st century NBA loved and supported by alums of both Bob Jones University and the Belmont Street Projects alike, is a Park Avenue pipe dream, and something we should oppose."

"We are an island in the state," [Javier Diaz,75-year-old retired guidance counselor in El Paso Public Schools] says. "El Paso is a proud blue collar town, but we are promoted as being little more than low wages, cheap labor, and not worth giving a damn about. We have a political elite in Texas that wants to just strangle common people like us that live in Segundo Barrio. That's why Basketball in the Barrio is so important..."

... heroes don’t always rise to the level of heroism. This was seen last week when Ronaldo traveled to Palestine in his official capacity as Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations He inaugurated a youth center in Ramallah and announced to a crowd of 1,500 people that his visit was part of a campaign for Middle East peace

Sports should be a patriotism-free zone.
Dave Zirin’s new book What’s My Name Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States will be in stores in June 2005.

By electing Steve Nash the NBA’s Most Valuable Player, the pro basketball media made the day of everyone who plays hoops on Friday and protests the US war machine on Saturday.

Like a gaggle of smitten schoolgirls at a Ryan Cabrera concert, the US Congress swooned this past week in the presence of the National Football League.

It was like mainlining adrenaline cut with Mello Yello. If you came of age in the 1980’s and liked sports, the NCAA basketball tournament pushed a combination of suspense and drama that was impossible to resist.