Tuesday, March 19, 2013

When Sports and Politics Collide - with Dave Zirin

Dave Zirin, the sports editor of the Nation magazine (who you've probably seen on TV or heard on the radio at some point) joins Ibrahim Abdul-Matin and Fouad Pervez from the No Spoon team to discuss several recent sports events and the political issues underpinning them. In this episode, we discuss Florida Athletic University's decision to sell their stadium's naming rights to a private prison company, the problems with the NCAA as an institution, the role of big money in college sports, baseball academies as sweatshops in Latin America (arguably the most under-covered sports story in the past few weeks, related to Hugo Chavez's death), and the NCAA basketball tournament. Be sure to get Dave's new must-read book, "Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down", which recently received a glowing review in Sports Illustrated. We had technical issues (when taping, Dave's video was frozen and inverted in black and white, hence the references to Ghostface Zirin - YouTube apparently just gave him a blank screen in the final cut), but Google couldn't stop the latest No Spoon episode!