the goal for tonight's talk is to do something that speaks to the diehard sports fan the casual sports fan and craig if i can do that that i'll know i did a decent job now i grew up an absolutely psychotic sports fan i grew up in new york city of the one nine hundred eighty s my room was a shrine to the stars of that time people like keith hernandez dwight gooden lawrence taylor darryl strawberry i didn't know at the time that they all had serious cocaine problems i just love them no seriously looking back to my room it was like the tony montana all stars it was like an anti just say no commercial a love those guys so much and i played sports i was  starting center for my schools basketball team seriously five ten on a good day we were the fighting quakers new york friends which i mean fighting quakers i didn't exactly bring fear into the hearts of our opponents especially when i went for the tip off but i didn't care because i love sports and i never frankly gave much of a damn about anything other than sports i certainly didn't think about the politics of sports i certainly didn't think about the messages that are pumped out through sports and that changed for me though very dramatically in one thousand nine hundred six when a basketball player by the name of mahmoud abdul rouse made the private decision that he wasn't going to come out for the national anthem before game it's now just show of hands of people who remember that moment know what i'm talking about ok some folks good to explain it raouf just made this decision he didn't tell anybody there was no twitter at the time or anything like that so he just stayed in the locker room and he wasn't coming out for the national anthem in a reporter got wind of it in denver  found him in the locker room for the game and said to him don't you realize that that flag is a symbol of freedom and democracy throughout the world and raw if you got to actually see the footage of this because it's amazing rove gets this kind of twinkle in his eye and he's kind of like should i say i think i'm going to see something and he says he says well it may be a symbol of freedom and democracy to some but it's a symbol of oppression and tyranny to others now when i said that i mean the sporting in those long ago days what we would do in college is we would all make sure we were in front of the dorm t v at seven pm so we could watch sports center so we can get the latest as far as what was happening with it you know there were no updates that we could access at a moment's notice and i'll never forget watching that being a big sports fan all the rest of it and hearing somebody say well raouf must see himself as one of those activist athletes like muhammad ali or billie jean king and i remember hearing that and being like what the hell is an activist athlete i had no idea what that was so i tried to research it there once again no google so you know i had to resort to not only micro film but also microfiche and trying to find out what is this thing called an activist athlete and what i found out is that some of the grand moments in u s history in so many respects can't be explained without sports which is why it's difficult to even understand the civil rights movement without understanding jackie robinson it's difficult to understand the one nine hundred sixty s without understanding mohammed ali it's difficult to understand the women's movement without understanding billie jean king it's difficult to understand the movement without understanding people like michael sam jason collins except for a and you see the way in history all of these times when mass social movements step up off the field they reverberate on the field with an electric intensity and that's what i've sort of set myself to try to study and understand because what you see far too often is particularly people who see themselves as being on the left or believing in resistance politics i mean they treat sports the way of the way a vegetarian would treat an all you can eat buffet at mcdonald's like they see sports is something disgusting to be pushed away something that's almost inherently reactionary and the reality is quite different in situ story i once went to a bookstore there i was doing a talk in a city i want to name the city artist philadelphia and i went and i went in there and i was doing a talk about a book goal and me and i went in there and i said hey here to talk about what's my name form dave's irony and this guy behind the counter he said but but you're white and i said last i checked it's an odd thing to say when someone comes into your store and he said but isn't that you on the cover of the book and this is one of those like lefty bookstores and and i remember looking around the bookstore and seeing like they're selling posters of emma goldman and malcolm x and dr king and like my goodness here's this lefty bookstore there's all of this resistance stuff everywhere and they don't know the most important and most famous war resister in the history of war and that's a history that we should reclaim and hold absolutely proudly because it is an absolute remarkable history and the more i studied it the more i saw that there is even a huge gap between the history that we're taught like the kind of very mainstream sports and politics history and the actual history as well which shouldn't be too surprising because anybody who's read your howard zinn knows you know that you've got your history and then you got the real story and said which i think sports is no exception to that and unfortunately and this is why i think so many young kids aren't interested in history the real story is so much more interesting than the history and so you take jackie robinson who i just mentioned the movie came out about him called forty  two i stopped counting the historical inaccuracy is in it at forty two as figure like to say it's getting too depressing and there are some good things about the movie but but so that you hear about jackie robinson but what you don't learn is that in the one nine hundred thirty s there was a mass movement to integrate baseball i mean people held marches in the streets of chicago in new york and they were organized through the efforts of the sportswriter of the communist party's newspaper the daily worker now when say the first reaction is wait a minute the daily worker had a sports writer it's like yeah they did as they was lester rodney and he lived to be ninety six years old sharp as a tack and i got to interview him a lot before he passed on about eight years ago and i'll never forget talking to him and asking him all these questions and he had these amazing stories about things they would do like the yankees for example would would hold open tryouts at the stadium and it would be like a p r stunt in the one nine hundred thirty s and they would show up with like ten black players and be like all right we're here let's do open tryout and the yankees would have to do the open tryout or another story he told where they were interviewing in the locker room a young rookie by the name of joe dimaggio and they asked joe dimaggio hey joe like these are all like the regular it's writers who's the toughest pitcher you've ever faced and joe dimaggio who wasn't necessarily a political person just an anonymous young kid from an immigrant family in san francisco he just thought he said i think the toughest pitch i ever faced was   was hitler's favorite boxer joe lewis was the hero in the depression era not just of black america but also a very left wing radicalizing white working class and there would be a mass of events where people would listen to the fight on radio he nappies covering the fight live but he told me stories of like in birmingham alabama there was a communist party that would had that had a thousand people in a room all listening to the radio broadcast of this fight and it was armed on the outside of people who were like making sure that no one would would try to break it up with violence and hear these amazing stories and at one point lester stopped his really modest guy who lived in a one bedroom home in a place outside of oakland and he said to me why are you even asking me this stuff why do you think anybody cares and i said well i think people care because it's a hidden history and everybody loves sports and it's also kind of like this etiological trojan horse or we can tell teach people the radical history of america and do it by talking about sports we can do that lester and lester looked at me and he said to be eighty again which was and he was he's an awesome guy and amazing human being but jackie robinson is just the tip of the iceberg i mean so much of this history there's there's this undercurrent like muhammad ali we have today i mean the closest thing we have to a walking saint probably in this country although i think it says something very damning about this country that he was only embraced once he lost the power of speech but i think one of the things that is only now being resuscitated is just how radical and how dangerous he was in the one nine hundred sixty s just a quick that he said things like that he is the most famous athlete on earth standing up tall and saying things like the real enemy of my people is here i will not discuss my people my faith or my family by traveling five thousand miles to dominate other darker people of the world at the behest of the white slave masters i mean and this is like the most famous athlete on earth saying this and they say if i have to go to jail that's fine you know my people have been in jail for three hundred years or so and people would just be like oh my god we actually have to print this now they printed it by calling him caches clay because even the so called liberal new york times had a policy to not call him mohammed ali until one nine hundred seventy six years after he changed his name but he wasn't scared to actually speak truth to power even though it cost him dearly and one little ali tidbit like once again something that's cut out of the history is when martin luther king very famously in one thousand nine hundred sixty seven he came out against the war in vietnam he did so against the advice of many of his top advisors he was pilloried by the media for daring to bring together the issues of the war abroad and the war at home he spoke about the brutal solidarity that white and black soldiers fighting together to kill brown people in south vietnam when they were unable to live on the same street in the south of the united states and is advisor said don't say it don't say it friends of his in the press said don't say it don't say it and the day of king's riverside speech in one thousand nine hundred sixty seven where he fully articulated his reasons for opposing the war in vietnam he was asked the question why are you doing this and king said well it's like muhammad ali teaches us all these issues are connected so dr king brady i mean that's an amazing sports politics connection and it  wasn't just muhammad ali who did that a stain on king for one second we did some some research into speakers requests in southern branches of the in the late one nine hundred fifty s and their number one most requested speaker who southern branches wanted to come and speak to them was jackie robinson and number two was martin luther king and that's hilarious if you think about it because imagine people planning a meeting and being like all right can we get jackie robinson he's busy damn are it will get dr king got i can't believe we've got to settle for dr king but that's like the power of sport and dr king would have had no problem with that because as he once said about jackie robinson he said you he was a sit in or before sit ins a freedom rider before freedom rides and which is true because he broke the color line in one thousand nine hundred seventy years before the start of the formal civil rights movement he did that when when mike king as martin luther king was known was playing pool in boston university getting his dead his doctorate and so it's just like his whole world was existing where people were using sports as a platform to stand up and speak out and try to make nonviolent change in a very violent world and all of the but the question that i've been wrestling with recently a great deal and this is something i hope we can even talk about tonight is the question why like why does it matter so much why does sports have such an impact and it's a question that i think about a great deal because you understand why someone like jack johnson or jackie robinson had such an impact because there was such little opportunity in this country for black voices to actually be heard and to and so the way excellence and creativity i mean nature a vacuum sports was a place where that could be expressed and then that platform was used by people throughout the decades and today though it still matters so much even with a black president even with a black attorney general even with some black c e o s even with this infrastructure of black power it still matters a great deal and i think about why that is and i certainly have my own theories about why that is that i'm happy to share but i want to say one of the things that made me realize that it still matters and is still so important to something that i went through just last week i was in people who read my blog know this happened but people know i was in san antonio we go show hands if you knew i was in san antonio are to say to some of the folks out since it was pretty damn cool i was in san antonio with one thousand nine hundred sixty eight olympian john carlos one of the people who raised his fist on the medal stand in sixty eight and we were there at the behest of greg popovich to speak to the san antonio spurs and he was bringing john karr i was there to sort of give the intro and then it was really about john carlos there to speak to the team and i mean we're talking like it was the trippiest experience  my life because it's like you know me and john carlos are doing the talk and we're talking about racism war imperialism and it's like oh hey look tim duncan i mean it was a weird kind of experience i mean so it's like you do in the stock and like you know like tony parker is not care like he is he is a non giver of fox like he like he like like that day there was an article on e s p n says website about all the players he coached when he coached at a  different school in one nine hundred eighty and i asked him about it he had no clue about the existence of the article couldn't care less about it but then when he heard that i knew something about russian history he's like oh my god i studied the russian revolution at the air force academy we did soviet studies like what he would do you know and he like all you want to talk about russian history at that point more than he wanted to give a crap about what was happening in the n b a and say he's a cool and he really is someone who cares about the players and so he brought john carlos in and we said to pop i said what should we talk about and he said papa said well i watched you guys speak on some you tube stuff and he pointed john carlos and he said you know you talk a lot about the fact that in one thousand nine hundred sixty eight you didn't care if you won the gold medal what you cared about was using your position to make change i want to tell this team that they shouldn't care about winning a championship and i'm like what what what what you know you don't expect to hear that but that that's what he asked of us to do is and also he wanted us to speak about the about a very came up because we were all talking about this but he said to me what do you want to talk about what are some things about and so we said a million things i kept talking like diarrhea of the mouth and the one thing that he like grabbed on and said talk about that was i talked about the fact that like i've interviewed almost everybody who was on that one thousand nine hundred sixty eight olympic team and what's crazy is like some of the folks back then stood with john carlos and tommie smith and some didn't stand with john carlos and tommie smith and when you talk to the people who did there now seventy years old they are so proud of the fact that they stood with them now that they're old and grey in the rocking chair they are proud that they stood on the side of the people who are raising their fists in the one nine hundred sixty eight and the ones who didn't stand with them are sheepish and a little bit embarrassed and they don't really like talking about it too much and like i i interviewed george foreman about this he famously did not stand with them in one thousand nine hundred sixty eight and george was just like i mean he was a  kind of a fumbling presence about it like he didn't want to say that way you did what he did and and then at a nowhere he started singing bob dylan songs i mean it's just very weird but there's this true what like i said i said well why didn't he said to me the sixty's were just like that bob dylan song where they say they stone you when you try to do no good they stone you reply had a musket stone and then he said you see that to me dave is about what it's like when you're trying to make change and people are throwing stones at you and i said and i think it's about weed and he said he said no man everybody must get stoned means everybody must sacrifice and that day i wasn't ready to sacrifice but we all have our moment where we have to get stoned and i'm like it's i think it's about we georg not the most politically coherent of conversations to put to put it mildly but that's then but that's what then when greg popular he pops says that he asked me to say that to the team like like and so i told that story and i talked about black lives matter and what was really strong about it is they just signed a player named david west and david west has been very outspoken about black lives matter he took about one fifth of what he could have gotten to stay with the pacers to go to this team and i learned that the spurs are kind of like this magnet for people who are willing to take less money to not be around the assholes like it's like it's like just this group of people who really want to be there is crazy  doing p r for the spurs which was not my intent at all but it but one of the i said was like look you might have teammates who stand black lives matter there are several people in this room tweeted about it this issue is not going anywhere remember that example from one thousand nine hundred sixty eight because if you don't stand with your teammates on this issue just like the social justice issue of our time like are we as a country going to be fine with the fact that there is a whole segment of society that sees the police and feels like they may not survive that  it's like are we ok with that are we not ok with that if we're not ok with that you're going to teammates who say they're not ok with it you may not feel like you can say that but are you going to stand with your teammates right to stand up and be heard are you going to stand with your teammates right to use that platform and then john carlos got up there and he spoke and it was amazing like people just like he just spoke for like a minute and then it was just questions and the questions were unbelievably sophisticated and deep but the thing about it that i'll remember the most is that afterwards they had practice and we w atched the practice and pop kept it very loose and players kept coming over to talk to john carlos and like see it like you know be standing with carlos for like forty five minutes just asking him questions about like cointelpro and like how do you mean as we it was like yeah it was very surreal that but but the thing about it that was so interesting to me is that it raises that question i said before which is like why do they care i mean these are millionaires that they're play for the spurs it's all this city of the champions here's john carlos he's seventy years old and he talked about how he didn't win a gold medal and that's what matters is making change and using your position like and they wanted to hear that and i really do think that what it comes down to at the end is the fact that we still live in a country that has a very very very unlevel playing field that you still have profound disadvantages in this country based on the color of your skin based on your gender based on your sexuality and yet sports is held up as this myth of the level playing field and if you're good enough you can play and so i think that's where sports is this place where a lot of this then gets worked out because well if if the idea if the ethos of america is if you're good enough you should be able to succeed but the reality is that there's tons of struck bigotry and prejudice that prevents that from happening then sports is a place oftentimes where a lot of that that is expose like well if anybody can play why isn't michael sam on an n f l team you know these questions then come up if anybody can play why is it that women athletes are faced with the choice of either objectifying their own bodies are finding themselves having no commercial outlets whatsoever if anybody can play why is it still news in two thousand and fifteen that jessica mendoza is the first woman to do a major league baseball playoff broadcast from e s p n how in two thousand and fifteen is this still news why are we still here why was the first ever female referee he just in the monday night football game that we just saw and speaking of which becky hammon i mean assistant coach on the spurs what a bad ass in seeing her coach the players was unbelievable in the respect they had for her and it was amazing to see but then also would ask the question why is this amazing to see because you cannot believe that this is the first woman with the capacity to coach men's players yet there it is two thousand and fifteen so we still live in a profoundly unequal country and a profoundly an equal playing field and i think it still matters because of the question of class because it may be true that you know you kava a black president a black attorney general what have you people who went to the best schools etc but we still are in a position where if you are poor or if you are a person of color if you are black you do not have the microphone you do not get to express your situation and sports represents this very unique space where people can be heard so when you have an athlete standing with the black lives matter movement it becomes something that actually has the power i call it the power to puncture privilege or the power to sever segregation because you're forcing people aka sports fans to hear things they might not necessarily want to hear like i'll never forget like i have a cousin he's a working class guy who spends most of the time in a car the salesperson wasn't thinking about black lives matter or anything of the sort and then all this things happened with n b a players wearing the i can't breathe shirts last fall and he's hearing this on sports radio and he got curious and he went home and he saw the video of the police killing eric garner and then he called me up and he said oh my god can you believe this is happening and i'm like yes absolutely does have is that we have to do something and people are doing something but he was like his eyes open for the first time but he had the privilege the choice the whatever language you want to use to not care about er garner until it invaded his space when he was just trying to chill and listen to sports radio that's i think the power of athletes speaking out and i feel like i'm telling people in seattle things they already know because you have a football team where a debate about the black lives matter movement just took place on the podium and i wanted to read a couple excerpts from it because it really is interesting because i saw it started with richard sherman and i won't give the  backstory on it but he was there and he was questioned about it's a long story it's like someone posted something under his name he said it wasn't him and he wanted to explain what he feels about black lives matter in this what richard servant said he said i dealt with a best friend getting killed it was two thirty five year old black man who did it wasn't no police officer involved wasn't anybody else and i didn't hear anybody shouting black lives matter then and i think that's the point we need to get to is that we need to deal with our own internal issues before we move forward and start pointing fingers and start attacking other people we need to solidify ourselves as people and deal with our issues because i think as long as we have black on black crime and one black man killing each other well if black lives matter then it should matter all the time that was richard sherman michael bennett the next day gets up to the podium keep in mind michael bennett was not asked what about richard sherman he said i have something to say before the questions and he said i was reading richard sherman's quotes yesterday i would like to say i disagree with what he said i think when people talk about black lives matter he is misinterpreting it black lives thing is more about the social injustice not about people killing within the community it's about the social injustice of the people that are supposed to protect them and building the community to resist them richards opinion is different from mine my opinion is i believe in the things that people are trying to do these things go all the way back to the one nine hundred fifty five to emmett till you got to think about it the last hanging in america was in the sixty's there's a lot of social injustice that's been going on for a while so i think probably a lot of folks you're familiar if you've been to any activist meeting or any public meeting you've heard this debate play out about black on black crime and why don't people talk about white on white crime and you've heard these kinds of debates go forth and back and forth i recommend if you're interested the show michelle alexander's writing on it is utterly brilliant about why black on black crime is a complete an canard that's held up by people who could not give two shits about black lives ninety nine percent of the time but what's so interesting about this case is that this is also a debate that most people let's be honest are going to the activists meetings and they aren't hearing these debates and so then they're hearing it because it's being talked about by these two players another thing that happened recently as people might know the case of fellowship just basically he was walking outside  nightclub last april and the new york city police department they all thought he wasn't walking fast enough away from a melee at a club so they broke his leg now confrontations between n b a players in the police have been going on as long as there have been n players and the police and there are basic reasons for this one has to do with the fact that police tend to target black people in expensive cars and clothes and n b a players tend not to like to be told by police officers what they should and should not do but usually when these things happen in their stories that people don't know about like i'm or chris webber when he was playing he got pepper sprayed in his car and gilbert arenas once got arrested for tapping a police officer on the shoulder when they were arresting one of his teammates like all kinds of bullshit happens all it seems like mutually this is bad publicity let's just push this away but this time it was different and back and he risked his own freedom by spite not taking the sweetheart deal by not settling out of court and actually putting his livelihood and his freedom on the line by taking it to court and he won the jury they they didn't even meet long enough for the free lunch they met for like forty five minutes came out and said yeah the police did this not guilty and i think like we asked why he did that  everything to with the climate and what's happening around us at the time and so that's what makes that so important so obviously i'm talking a lot about race but i think what the main thing the point i want to make is that the history that exists of people using this platform to speak out it's a weaponized history like it's a history that we can use and it still has profound resonance today and i want to say a little bit about there i could do whole talks about this that are just about women in sports  about people in sports but i want to say a little bit about women in sports because first of all two thousand and fifteen has been the year of women in sports i mean this is been the year of serena williams this is in the year of ronda rousey this is been the year of the women's world cup team this is been the year of sasha banks if you don't know who that is you can google or thank you that's a pro wrestler but amazing and it's so it's been the year of women and women in sports in so many different respects jen welter becky hammon  i think it's worth knowing though that they have the fight for women space in sports has always been a question of access and it's always been a social question like have you ever wondered why women's tennis is the best of three sets instead of best of five i mean it's weird right like a lot of people don't know that women's tennis like the first wimbledon tournament actually was the best of five but women played tennis in corsets and that was the uniform and women were passing out on the court because i don't know if you knew this but corset you can brief so the people who ran wimbledon this is true this is really history they met and they said what are we going to do about this someone's going to die on center court and they said what should we do should we get rid of the corsets no let's keep the corsets let's make a best of three sets instead of best of five and that continued to be the case into the one nine hundred twenty s when a woman named  wimbledon she was fifteen years old she had a corset exemption and she said that she pleaded with the wimbledon organizers and said the tournament would have been so much more challenging and interesting she said if my opponents had been allowed to breathe so that that yeah i mean how and it's like a it's been a social question from the beginning like the fight for basic access and what's so remarkable about it too is that this was something idea that women should not even play sports was something that was said by not just the church by government by society because for a very simple reason that sports were refashioned at the turn of the twentieth century as a way to build this new american century  basically refashioned and the turn of the century for imperialism for this idea that sports is going to breed a new generation of men white men with the ability to conquer the world and women were not to be trained in that so they were told not to play sports and they were told to wear corsets and they're very bodies were shaped in such a way so they couldn't play and my favorite example of this and i love reading this because people are just like blown away by this is is in the eight hundred seventy eight edition of the american christian review which is it was a very actually popular magazine of the day i guess it was the entertainment weekly of its time and they diagrammed the twelve step downfall of any woman who dared engage in the sinful world of croquet and and it truly is a very slippery slope i got to suds redo the twelve steps here so if they go step one social party step to social and play party step three croquet party step for picnic and croquet party step five picnic croquet and dance step six absence from church step seven immoral conduct step eight exclusion from the church step nine this one's my favorite more  t you got all that non church time is i what else you going to do step ten poverty which to me is a hell of a leap hell of a leap like you just said playing croquet like to employ step eleven shame and disgrace and step twelve ruin and you thought it was just croquet and all of this fear was also extremely tied up in fears about women's sexuality and that's the other thing when you read like the journal of american medicine it's like they go back and forth about what will sports inspire women to be and it's some combination of of lesbian or prostitutes prost alleged to be in psych they had just like is like this complete women sexually comprehensible to the men who were defining what women's sexuality was and they saw sports as just being like this space because it was space that they felt like they couldn't necessarily control so they restricted it as much as possible if you've ever seen the early film films of women playing basketball where they're running around in hoop skirts then you see how they tried to restrict it in fear they feared the power that sports could unleash but there was a big challenge to this at the time that the american christian review in the journal of american medicine were telling women not to play sports and it was a new invention and that invention was the bicycle and it seems odd to say this now but the bicycle was revolutionary as far as women in sports because it meant the invention of the bicycle did more for women's liberation than i ever could lisbeth i think was elizabeth cady stand said that when we finally win the right to vote we're going to be going to the polls on a bicycle like the bicycle that cold pamphlets were written about why women should rise a political point should ride bicycles and in response to that the journal of american medicine they published a report saying that women who ride bicycles had several dangers before them one was that they could be subject to something called the bicycle face which was an actual medical term that if women rode bicycles too much their eyes would bug out their face would develop this strange expression and i swear to god that sounds like what your mom would tell you when you were five but they these doctors said it will freeze that way so basically they couldn't have known it at the time but they were saying ladies you look like a dick cheney if you ride a bicycle and the the other thing that they said was that if you wrong on a bicycle you will never be able to have children and it could actually lead to the implosion of the uterus like the uterus would collapse unto itself if riding a bicycle incorrectly and i'm still waiting for the for the women's punk band called imploding uterus i think it's anybody who wants to take up that project but what so what's so fascinating about it is the mark twain once said history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme this past year  there's a woman named unbelievably named joan of arc into who became the first woman from rwanda to ever compete in a first  international bicycle race and keep in mind bicycle riding in rwanda is like football in the united states on steroids like rwanda is a country of i think roughly eleven million people someone should look at it's in the low teens but the african academy and this woman named joan of arc just raced last last month in richmond virginia in front of seven hundred fifty thousand people came out to see this tour event first rwandan woman to ever do this and it's not just that she's this unbelievable talent it's not just that she's faster than most of the men in rwanda it's the fact that even to ride a bicycle in rwanda is to actually have to confront a lot of the same barriers that women in the united states confronted a century ago a lot of the same myths a lot of the same obstacles and the fact that she not only is confronting them but that she's returning home in a hero a hero and an example for everybody throughout the country is unbelievable and the other thing that it does is it has the power to put rwanda in people's imagination beyond just the horrific massacre and genocide that took place in one thousand nine hundred forty one thousand nine hundred five a genocide in which midst of which she was born in dire poverty i mean that's the power of the bicycle and it still remains to true to this day and all it says to me at the end is that what howard zinn once said is so incredibly true  i study history not because i care about the past i study history because i want to change the future so thank you very much i appreciate your time blackhawks it connects to the discussion we just had there is no such thing as a black box tribe there was a chief named black hawk and that chief named black hawk was captured in a war that abraham lincoln fought in to capture him and after he was captured they them up and down the east coast to show him off to show that as a warning that other native american should not be trifled with and one of the ways they tried to acculturate him is that they took him to blackface shows in baltimore is this whole crazy history of the effort to acculturate chief black hawk after they they caught him and i mean when you when you have a sport that that stands on this kind of dehumanization other issues of dehumanization don't feel like big leaps to me that's why that's why i mentioned black hawk look i think that wow i think the patrick kane case is unbelievably ugly and there are so many twists and turns people can read about it themselves that their spin so many ups and downs and twists and turns about what took place but yes specifically about how the blackhawks should handle it i mean i think that when players are accused of  rape or sexual assault which are two different things people look up the definitions i think that should suspend them with pay until we know what happened and i think that's part and i'm that's not a very popular position to say although that's you're saying they're guilty until proven innocent all the rest of it but i think that sexual assault is such a serious problem not just in society but particularly in sports and particularly in men's sports and the way women are  often held up as the spoils of being an athlete that it's about time we confronted it and we have to smash it and if that means this generation of players gets a bit of a of a raw deal what have you or feel like they're getting a raw deal well you know what so be it you know their father should have done a better job respecting women then you know tough shit and so i so i think it's like you suspend you suspended with pay and then and then if you're cleared great you're back on the ice and then if you're not cleared well least get the team didn't spend  months backing you up and i'll tell you something there is such hypocrisy in sports teams about superstars and non superstars on this issue the first time i was ever on e s p n i was saying about this the other day was in two thousand and six on outside the lines because what happened was there was a female player of the l a sparks who had been accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a party and this was all happening at the same time as the kobe bryant rape trial in colorado and the female player as soon as she was accused they they released her and cut her from the team and she was later found to be innocent charges withdrawn whatever and but she was found to be innocent and then she she was she had to find another job on another team the lakers were giving kobe bryant their plane to fly back and forth from colorado for the for that case and i think like we have to start thinking about the messages that sends to young athlete young male athletes in particular because one thing you see about about like rape culture has a home and sports a very comfortable home and sports and so it's not going to get confronted unless the powers that be institutionally show that they have  who then say the most massage horrific things you can imagine and if the team sent a message by saying we find these charges so absolutely out of bounds that we are going to wait until this is a before patrick kane takes the ice that then sends a message to those fans too that hey if you're mad about something target the team you know send your nasty to the team don't send them to women and men who are who stand with those women who are fed up about rape culture  and it's very sad like athletes are labor like you don't look at the salary you look at who's creating the wealth and if any athlete feels like they're being underpaid the only power that they have is to not play as this is to not play it's the only power it's the only thing that they can do to try to squeeze whatever they can out of a career that on average is only three and a half years that takes years off your life and that you're desperately trying to figure out way to set yourself up so that your family can be in good shape if god forbid when you're forty you have c t e and you don't you can't even pick up your own children at that point i mean so that like my friend dave megacity i quote him all the time he played in the n f l he said that and if the price of playing in the n f l is that you go straight from being a young man to being an old man there is no middle age and i think if for any player who wants to make sure that when they become an old man after they retire and can be set up i think labor should support that unconditionally unconditionally the problem is that and i'm going to link this to the problem with fantasy sports the problem is that so many fans now identify with management because a fantasy sports instead of players so their as they're sitting on their ass in their cubicle because that's the nature of so much work these days the dream is not being cam chancellor the dream is of being whoever the g m is the g m in seattle i forget yeah that's right the dream is being s really only is in the second year of his contract and and if they give him this raise what it's going to do is make other players feel that they could do the same thing for more money as well and i'm like who the fuck are you you're not the stand with the player be honest about it if you do stand with the players say hey whatever they have to do to feel comfortable on the field so be  concussion issue outside the lines don van natta fanaa brothers i mean this is like they did a league of denial i mean this is the the trendsetting and the n f l hates it that's why they give us pee and all the crappy monday night games and it's all the game so it's and the thing about simmons that i'll tell you i'll just say this about it that really really pissed off the journalist like he was he's not a popular guy among the actual journalists at e s p n because they all felt like geez here we are doing the actual work and then he just is a liar on a podcast and he gets to be the great martyr of e s p n and the great truth teller while we're actually doing the work that shows all the ways in which he had the the league is set up to  fail its own players so but i but at the same time i'll tell you this about e s p n they failed to topple sefolosha story tremendously it's awful and i spoke to people behind the scenes there i'm not going to name names but they told me straight up p d and so they were told not to talk about it in that upset a lot of people out speaking personally i mean i mean that would make me gargle with arsenic at the end of the day like it would be a miserable experience to be like oh my god this is a story have to talk about being told i couldn't defend cops i mean that would should make my head explode but it's like but that's the trade off of that is that you also get this exposure when you get to speak and so on you know i'll say this to the end of time like i think some of the best reporters working i think life changing in the world sports ok my god my god my idea of hell would be like trapped in an elevator with jason whitlock that would be very difficult ok because the n c double a has devoted tens of millions of dollars to making sure it's not a good place i mean when northwestern university one there n l r b ruling a year ago i mean it was electric it was like this is the big game changer and because immediately every private college in the country even during the peel had the capacity to organize and it's different labor boards for private colleges and public colleges it's where you immediately was so interesting like you had people like john k sick in ohio and  athletes basically at ohio state in wisconsin wouldn't be able to organize and union so there's like a real fear about it because i mean it is such i mean it's so different than it was like just to get one hundred years ago a knowledge of seventy years ago  south bend indiana was a textile community where there happened to be this small private school notre dame that played good football today south bend indiana is a company town and the company is notre dame football and everything operates around that and all of these college and tallahassee i mean people were so shocked that it was so that that you had the local police in tallahassee covering for jamison winston on when he was accused of raping and all these incredible conflicts of interest and it's like you know it makes a ton of sense i mean what overriding everything else is when florida state is doing well every game days ten million dollars into the economy tallahassee is a florida state based economy and so many of these small towns universities are everything are absolutely think i was just i live near baltimore i was there a ton during the baltimore insurrection everything that took place john hopkins university is the largest landowner in baltimore i mean it's  the university industrial complex or whatever but in a lot of these places it is football that's then the nucleus of that university industrial complex and that's what they don't want to give up and what's so crazy about is the position of athletes is what it's always been and w e b dubois talked about this one hundred years ago upton sinclair wrote about it eighty years ago and a lot of times people people just getting an education it doesn't matter but it's changed so much in the last twenty years so much urban meyer the coach there now his base salary is six million dollars a year and that doesn't include like use of a private plane so it was like where's the money going to come from it's like are you kidding me liquefy of the coaches not literally the coaches but but but liquefy their salaries and get and treat players like the campus employees that they are and it creates this incredibly i think distorted screwed up culture on college campuses where these young men are like half  gods and half chattel at the same time and i think if you could take it far enough to say it's almost like a form of i would say they're not children but i keep being of child abuse because what you're doing is you're taking eighteen year olds and putting this on  them in a situation that they're utterly not prepared to deal with and then people are shocked when they're scandal after scandal that results from these half god half chattel relationships and say why in place where you see this is people should do this if you really want to learn how gross this is go to the university of oregon otherwise known as nike university and it's a wild scene there because you go on campus and the buildings are just like falling apart they had to put secretaries on furlough last year because there's no money and then they have this athletic student study center that really looks like it could have the word trump on top of it like it's this it looks from the outside like a vegas casino and it's all this phil knight money and it's a it's a it's like this four story building and if you're a professor you're not allowed above the first floor so it's can you imagine that being on a campus and if you're a professor you're not allowed above the first floor and  was given being given a tour of it by you know a critic of these kinds of situations and we walk in there and he says to me you know you've got to go to the bathroom and i was kind of like no i really don't have to go to the bathroom that's a very weird thing to say to me and he said no seriously you gotta go to the bathroom it's part of the experience on like ok so i go to the bathroom i go inside the bathroom totally is nicer than my house i mean it's like black marble all this stuff i'm washing my hands and i look in the mirror and i look that like designed  very subtly in the marble behind me is a woman's face and i go out and i said there's incredible piece of art like this woman's face on the marble and i was like yeah that's that's phil knight's wife and i was like if so it's like this the system could not be more corrupt and could not be more twisted and the antidote for what ails it is union unions would immediately take all of this under the table crap and at the very least put it on the table so it could be negotiated and discussed it's like well how often are we going to have to travel this year what classes do i have the right to take all of these things actually then get to be mediated do i get health care if my leg gets knocked in five different places how long is my health care because right now it's just the wild west and they're taking advantage of the fact that a lot of these young men they come from homes where the idea of making it to the n f l even though the chances of it are microscopic just the dream of it will push them through and keep their heads down and keep i'm not talking the people at northwestern we're very brave to fight back against it and we need more players who are that brave because i'll tell you this it's not going to stop it can't stop because it's just that it's too much crisis and that crisis will absolutely continue