Review: Bad Sports by Dave Zirin
Many words have been typed musing about how important (or unimportant) a sports team is to a particular region. Not economically, or in any measurable way, but from a morale standpoint. In Boston, where I live, the Red Sox tie generations together. I won’t bore you with another anecdote, but it’s fair to say that people’s affinity for the old town team goes beyond idle chat and water cooler talk and reaches something more profound. Elsewhere, stories are similar. But in the last few decades, a force has insinuated itself between fans and their teams: Profit and its agents, the team owners.
Imagine a public resource paid for with taxpayer money. Let’s say, oh, it’s a state-of-the-art park, where sometimes people play a game. The construction of this park gave some members of the community jobs, but once complete, few people work there and make a good living—the jobs available are menial and low-paying, such as sweeping pathways, cleaning the public restrooms, or selling parkgoers food. Even though this is a publicly funded facility, the park owner charges exorbitant admission to watch people play this game, and the fees for food and drinks are also outrageous. The owner even charges admission for members of the community to see the inside of the park during off-hours. The proponents of the park claim that it will draw people to its neighborhood and improve the area, giving money to local restaurants, but studies in other cities have proven that this effect is small, if it exists at all, and the money people spend in the neighborhood is money they would have otherwise spent in another neighborhood.
Of course the idea of charging admission for a public park is silly, but it’s not too difficult to see the analogy I’m making. Through taking advantage of people’s love of sports, and particularly their emotional and often irrational ties to their sports franchises—the same colors and history their parents and grandparents lived and breathed—a group of very rich white men (and it is nearly always that demographic who own sports teams) has managed to build similar facilities in nearly every major city in the country. Many of these owners don’t even build competitive teams, whether through their apathy or ineptitude. And it’s this absurd situation that Dave Zirin exposes, explains, and eviscerates in his newest book, Bad Sports.
Zirin takes his cue from Neil DaMause’s fantastic book Field of Schemes, which examines the “great stadium swindle,” and which any informed sports fan should read. In Bad Sports, Zirin examines not only stadium financing, but also other instances of bad ownership. He puts together an All-Star team of owners who both extorted free stadia from their regions and went on to mismanage their teams, eventually driving fans away even though they had various advantages, including the aforementioned state-of-the-art facilities, generations of built-in fan bases, and in many cases, a successful team already in place.
What separates Bad Sports from Zirin’s previous books is its cohesiveness. While his prior works were also punchy and iconoclastic, they lacked an overarching narrative and read more like a collection of his shorter articles for The Nation and his Edge of Sports blog, which, to be fair, they were to some extent. But in Bad Sports, Zirin puts forth a thesis and follows it through the entire book. I would have even preferred further exploration on some of the topics, but the book does a good job of being something you want to read the whole way through as opposed to just picking it up and reading it piecemeal.
Bad Sports is recommended reading not only for any sports fan who feels abused by their colors, but also for those interested in politics who may just have a casual interest in sports.
