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A review by simplyb
Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love by Dave Zirin
4.0
As a sports writer for such publications as "The Nation," it should be no surprise that Mr. Zirin has a liberal and progressive bent when it comes to the subject of wealthy-beyond-belief professional sports owners. But you'd also be remiss to think that makes him a Cassandra on the subject, either...
The thesis is explicated well and in a very clear and entertaining fashion, and operates on a simple premise: private professional sports ownership in the United States if ruining the games we love. He goes on to provide ample examples of this happening, and for a variety of reasons. Most of it comes down to what he charitably calls the privitization of profit and the socialization of risk/cost that has stuffed the coffers of the few while punishing the collective of the city and the municipalities, but significant energy is spent on issues such as extorting stadiums out of municipalities when the billionaire owners could fund it on their own, the minimal input of fans (and sometimes even managers!) into the way the sports teams are run, the minimal investment into the community, the tendencies to pick up and move and abandon entire sport markets (the removal of the SuperSonics from Seattle gets Zirin's especial scorn), as well as the politicization and Christian conversion politics of many sports owners (such as Faith Days in baseball, most notoriously the Colorado Rockies). He does hold up one shining example of the way a professional team can be run, obviously a team near and dear to my heart.
Again, you can throw around political bias and rhetoric all you want. But for anybody on the spectrum of casual hometown fan to die-hard fanatic, can anybody make a compelling argument for the way most owners and league operators treat their sports teams and their fans? Is the extortion and proselytization and ability to get rich off of the taxpayers' backs truly a defensible position. Zirin would argue no, it isn't. And I would agree wholeheartedly.
The thesis is explicated well and in a very clear and entertaining fashion, and operates on a simple premise: private professional sports ownership in the United States if ruining the games we love. He goes on to provide ample examples of this happening, and for a variety of reasons. Most of it comes down to what he charitably calls the privitization of profit and the socialization of risk/cost that has stuffed the coffers of the few while punishing the collective of the city and the municipalities, but significant energy is spent on issues such as extorting stadiums out of municipalities when the billionaire owners could fund it on their own, the minimal input of fans (and sometimes even managers!) into the way the sports teams are run, the minimal investment into the community, the tendencies to pick up and move and abandon entire sport markets (the removal of the SuperSonics from Seattle gets Zirin's especial scorn), as well as the politicization and Christian conversion politics of many sports owners (such as Faith Days in baseball, most notoriously the Colorado Rockies). He does hold up one shining example of the way a professional team can be run, obviously a team near and dear to my heart.
Again, you can throw around political bias and rhetoric all you want. But for anybody on the spectrum of casual hometown fan to die-hard fanatic, can anybody make a compelling argument for the way most owners and league operators treat their sports teams and their fans? Is the extortion and proselytization and ability to get rich off of the taxpayers' backs truly a defensible position. Zirin would argue no, it isn't. And I would agree wholeheartedly.