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.

Something stinks in Cleveland, and it ain’t the Richie Sambora wing of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

“A theater of the absurd.” This is how Rep. Tom Lantos described Thursday’s “steroid hearings” on Capital Hill. The description is apt. Viewers, as CSPAN and ESPN joined forces, witnessed hearings as pointless as they were, admittedly, riveting.

I admit that I have been a baseball fan longer than I have been consciously anything else – a Dodger fan from the South Bronx since the Summer of 1951.

For baseball diehards, the name Joe McCarthy has always meant the New York Yankee manager of the 1930s. Now a very different Joe McCarthy stalks the National Pastime.

Three billion dollars. This was the offer put on the table by a coterie of Boston based businessmen to buy the entire National Hockey League puck, stick, and barrel.

Temple University basketball coach John Chaney is this week's sports antichrist, following the broken arm heard 'round the world.

There's nothing left but the autopsy and it doesn't take William Peterson - or even David Caruso - to decipher who killed the National Hockey League.