so what should we do? first of all, we do the right thing by trying to convince israel not to attack iran at this point. but we need to really get something going back to some alternative to a major attack. here it is. the best i can get a secretary shows approved of it. henry kissinger has a blurb on the back. he approves of the idea. i'd like to see the united states try it. in the meantime you for going do that, i really hope israel does not attack iran because that is going to lead to an ongoing dynamic of entity between these two countries. ..

>> we need to do more to really solve this problem. >> host: abraham sofaer, the fact that you're jewish, did that play any role when you were negotiating directly with the iranians? >> guest: well, i'm sure it did. i'm not just a jew, i'm a middle eastern jew. my heritage is iraqi and iranian and egyptian. i come from a family that probably left israel in, after the first revolt against rome, you know, when the temple was

destroyed the second time. or maybe the first time. maybe 500 b.c. and not 70 a.d. but we've been in the middle east for, you know, 2,000 years, and so my family, my mother's mother was egyptian. my mother's father was from kirkuk. my father's mother and father are from baghdad. and so -- and they all had relatives in iran. and my mother speaks some farsi. so, yeah, i think it did. i think it does have an influence. they know, they can tell immediately that i am culturally, i don't distinguish myself culturally from iranians or from egyptians or from iraqis. i grew up in a house where my parents spoke arabic, and we

were a relatively secular family, so we had belly dancing at parties and stuff. not exactly the religious type. but definitely culturally middle eastern. and so maybe that helped me, because, you know, when they would come in trying to sell something at a very, very steep price, it was something i'm pretty used to. [laughter] and i think that we are at a disadvantage if we send people to negotiate who are used to western-style, rational negotiation. their negotiating is definitely different. the end result is very often the same, the same principle of trust but verify applies. but the process is definitely different. definitely different. >> host: how close do you think iran is to acquiring nuclear

weapons? >> guest: i think they already have the ability to build a nuclear weapon, and there's no doubt about that in terms of the national security community in the united states. we have many very solid reports that have been written where each of the capacities that you need for a nuclear weapon are, have been found to exist by the inspections that we've had the ability to conduct thanks to iran. they've allowed these inspections. so i think they can do it. now, how long would it take them to do it if they made up their minds to do it? they have to enrich to over 90%. they've only enriched some uranium up to about 20%, and the rest of their uranium is under 5%. so there's a lot, there's quite a bit of work to do. but they are building better enrichment machinery. so if they want to break out and they want to do it fast, they

can certainly do it within a year. certainly within a year. >> host: "taking on iran" is the name of the book. indiana ham sofaer here at the hoover institution is the author. this is booktv on c-span2. >> you're watching booktv on c-span2, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. >> dave psi run, sports columnist for the nation, presents his thoughts on politics and sports next on booktv. the author's essays range from soccer riots in egypt and the 2012nfl lockout to the inner workings of the ncaa. >> it's great to be here. it's actually an honor to be at powells. i know there are binders full of writers who want to speak here,

so i'm very happy to be asked. i guess the mitt romney jokes are over. [laughter] okay, the book is called "game over: how politics has turned the sports world upside down." and before i start, i want to say something very brief about the passing of venezuelan president hugo chavez, seriously. because it actually speaks directly to the main theme in "game over." chavez is known, of course, for many things. his legacy is going to be debated for years. and yet one of the things that he did which is not discussed at all, i haven't seen it in any of the to obituaries, is that he ws probably if number one international thorn in the side of the owners of major league baseball. venezuela is second only to the dominican republic in terms of providing major league baseball players to the big leagues. people like miguel cabrera who just won the triple crown, felix hernandez, pablo sandoval, the world series mvp, all em

and yet hugo chavez, when he took power, he said to the people at major league baseball, you are not going to have an exploy thattive relationship with this country. you're not going to do to us what you've gone to the dominican republic which is to spend billions of dollars to build baseball academies that sign kids as young as 15 years old for just a couple of thousand dollars, and 99% of them are completely dispose disposable, and they're left kicked out of the academy, no contract, no prospects, no education. basically, just taking advantage of the country's both love of baseball and high poverty rates to treat the country like a sweat shop to produce major league baseball players. so chavez said, look, here's what you're going to do, you're going to have education at the baseball academies, provide some sort of job training, and also we're going to tax the holy hell out of you to pay for the social reforms we're trying to do in this country. now, major league's baseball

response -- baseball's response was twofold. there are 30 major league baseball teams, the number of academies since chavez has gone from 22 to 5. but that didn't stop them from recruiting and training venezuelan players. they signed them and whisked them off to the anyone can republic hundreds of miles away to put them in the dominican academies instead. but what's so interesting about it and what connects with the themes in my book is that the people at major league baseball, if you look at their complaints about chavez, what they said is he is trying to politicize our sport. he is trying to politicize major league baseball. how dare he mix sports and politics in such a way. and what's so ridiculous about this, of course, is that, first of all, it assumes that there's nothing political whatsoever about having free reign to go into a country and set up these kinds of baseball academies. no, that's not political at all. and what it reveals, and this is true for the whole history of

sports, is that it's not sports and politics that aren't supposed to mix, it's sports and a certain kind of politics that aren't supposed to mix. because politics have always been a part of sports. like if i asked you guys right now who was the first president to ever receive a professional team at the white house for a publicity opportunity, who might you say? let's throw out some names here. >> teddy roosevelt. >> that's a good answer. any other guesses? woodrow wilson, that's another one. the first president to ever receive a major league professional team, it was in the johnson administration. the andrew johnson administration. [laughter] 1867. the cincinnati red stockings. i mean, that -- basically, as long as we've had professional sports, there have been politicians trying to exploit professional sports for their own means and their own gains. and yet when athletes themselves have attempted to use

professional sports to speak about issues they care about, when fans have attempted to do that, well, that's when the hammer really does come down. and that's why i wrote this book, "game over," because i feel like since 2008 there has been a revolutionary change in the world of sports. revolutionary changes in terms of the way politics have shaped the sports that so many of us care about. yet you would never know that by reading the traditional sports media. i mean, if anything, you read the sports media, it reminds me of the old reporters who used to be on what was called the race beat for like "the new york times" in the 1950s, and they would go down and cover the civil rights movement in montgomery, alabama, and come back with the most insipid, juvenile, irrelevant stories about what they were seeing, like stories about the quality of dr. martin luther king's suits, for example. and say how can he be expected to wear a civic leader when he wears these baggy gray flannel suits that are so ill-fitting. and you read this and say,

god, you don't see what's happening before your very eyes. that's so much of sports journalism today. before i talk about some of the revolutionary changes i think have happened in sports since roughly 2008, i do want to talk a little bit about sports journalism. because i do think most sports journalism, it falls roughly in three categories. the first category is just, you could call it the us weekly of sports. who's the athlete dating, what kind of cars are they driving. you don't know where the kardashians kardashians and the nba exists. it's like this horrifying human sent period. and -- centipede. and there's so much coverage to it, it doesn't matter how famous the player is. you're a lot were better off ben some way connected to the kardashian family than taking a stand. the most famous basketball player on earth right now has to be lebron james. last year lebron james and histo

over their heads, and i actually start the book with this story, in solidarity with the family of trayvon martin after the 17-year-old was killed by george zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watch leader for, basically, the crime of wearing a hooded sweatshirt in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time. so all of the miami heat, they posed at the same time with hoods on, and it's an amazing site and an a-- sight, and an amazing story. not just lebron james and dwayne wade, the two stars, you had mike miller, you had yeah won howard who's so old he might have marched in the first march on washington, and yet you had all these guys together as one saying we stand with trayvon martin. there are 70 times more stories, according to a lexus nexus search about who the kardashians are dating than there are about to show what the miami heat did to show solidarity with trayvon

martin. a factor of 70. so that's one problem with sports journalism. the second problem is this hyperobsession on statistics. some people call them advanced statistics, it's a form of sports writing where you look at numbers in new and different and creative ways. there's a lot about this that i love, actually, i like a lot of the advanced statistics and the articles about it, different ways to use numbers to understand athletic performance and success. and one of the reasons that i like it is it seems to upset all the right people. people like skip bay less on espn hates the statistics. and they say things that, you just hear them, and ask you're like in my day we valued things like stick to itiveness and moxie, not these things like numbers. and a player, if they had a good cut of their jib and were the right height and the right weight -- they don't say the right skin color, but it's right there underneath it, then that's the kind of player you wanted to see. now, that makes the statistics

stuff a lot of fun. it upsets all the right people. but op the flip side of it, this hyperfocus on statistics also means sometimes people miss the human stories that are going on in sports all around us. i was justraziln september because they're about to have both the world cup and the olympics back to back in 2014, 2016. and i was down there interviewing a bunch of folks. and there was this old professor, old marxist professor who i was interviewing in rio. and i said to him what do you say about the statistical arguments that show that neoliberal reforms may be bringing some people in brazil out of poverty? and -- because he's against, you know, liberal reforms. he said to me, he said do you know what a mankini is? and i said, no, what is? you might call it a speedo, it's what we wear on the beach here in brazil. yes, i have seen those, yes. quite a few. and he says statistics, they are

like the mankini, they show so much, but they thet part. [laughter] and i think that's, that's very true. now, the third time of sports journalism that is probably the most prevalent is what bob lipsite, the great sports writer for "the new york times" called the godding up of athletes. this idea that you take athletes, and you turn them into these unbelievably infallible creatures who we're supposed to drop to our knees to these folks. that can cause a lot of problems because some of the people who have been godded up over the years include joe paterno, lance armstrong, oscar pistorius. and there's no journalism that says who really are these people? how did they amass this power, this following? instead, you don't know where the sports journalist ends and where the sort of corporate pr release begins. and you can see great evidence of this just down the road in

beaverton, oregon, at the nike facility. i think we could possibly take a moment to pity the poor people at nike or not, but we could, because in the last year they've had to change the name of their lance armstrong fitness facility, they've had to change the name of their joe paterno child care center -- [laughter] >> that's true. and they've also had to take down from their web site their oscar pistorius commercial which, if you know about it, was oscar pistorius looking at the camera saying i am the bullet in the gun, and then him bursting forward. and this is the problem, though, it's like you build people up without any sort of regard for who they are politically, who they are socially, what, in fact, they represent. and then you end up with these stories where the next news cycle is how hard can we actually jump on these people and jump on them and demonize them and all the rest of it. and, you know, with some people like joe and cost car and lance armstrong, they deserve to be jumped on and criticized and all the rest of it.

but the fact that they were built up so high in the first place should definitely give us pause. and it also gives us stories like manti, the e'o as well. making up a girlfriend because he was the devout mormon kid who didn't want to tell his teammates that he'd never actually met her before. and yet his price for that since then, it looks like not only is it going to cost him millions of dollars in terms of getting drafted, but he has to endure a series of interviews with nfl executives who are asking him the question are you gay, do you like girls, which, by the way, is illegal, but it's apparently what they're asking him which does reveal the homophobia in the national football league. and he hasn't helped himself, because when he was of interviewed by katie couric, she asked him, you know, are you gay. and, to me, there are only four good answers to that question, you know? [laughter] there's, yes, no, it's none of

your business or on weekends. [laughter] that, to me, is a good way to answer that. but his response was to say, like do a little chuckle, like the macho chuckle, you know, the guy you hated in high school, i'm far from gay. which, to me, just sounds like a horrible new sitcom starring kirk cameron on the trinity broadcasting network or something. [laughter] but this is who he is attempting to be. and the more you try to fit in this box, the more difficult it is, the more you keep the story alive, etc., etc. so this is the problem with sports journalism. and the problem with it is that it's actually shielded us from some absolutely amazing things that have happened since 2008. politics shaping sports like we've never seen before. and i think there are four main ways that politics has changed sports since 2008, and i'm just going to go through them real quick, and then we could do some q&a here. the first thing that happened

which was in 2008 was the election of barack obama as the first african-american president. now, whatever people here might think about barack obama, apparently this week we learned he has the right to kill us without a trial, but whatever we might think about him, the fact that, you know, with the centrality of african-american athletes in sports, electing the first african-american president had a huge effect on the confidence of athletes to speak about politics. you had people like brandon roy of the portland trailblazers show up to games wearing obama gear from head to toe, kevin garnett wearing political slogans on his sneakers. my favorite was carmelo anthony who said he was going to score 42 points in honor of the 42nd president. he only scored 28 which was like his woodrow wilson tribute -- [laughter] but still a moment where sports and politics really did come together. so that in and of itself started to open the door to this question of sports and politics. the second thing that happened

in 2008 which was a huge deal and got no attention in the mainstream press was a remarkable report that came out from an institution called the tucker center at the university of minnesota. it's the only full-time center devoted to the study of women's sports. and it was this incredible survey study where they interviewed tens of thousands of people led by their professor there who i've met, an amazing woman named mary jo cain. and what it was was they tried to answer the question which has always been a part of women's athletics which is, does it help or hurt women's sports when you have things like the women of to olympic issue of playboy, for example. or danica patrick posing for maxim magazine or all the ways that women's sports is sexualized or you could say is sexist. and it's always been this debate where you have people who say on the one hand this is incredibly sexist, it's misogynystic, it diminishes the achievements of these incredible women, and it

should have no place in our sports culture. that's one side. the other side is, hey, our society is what it is, you've got to find a way to get women on the front page, you've got to get people actually paying attention to women's sports. here is a way to do that. well, mary jo cain does this study, and she says we have to stop having this debate because what we learned is the more women's spor sexualized, the more women athletes are objectified, the less people are actually interested in women's sports. and there are reasons for that, because the two biggest consumers of women's sports are, first of all, women -- big surprise -- and men with daughters. because it's seen as a kind of space where men can bond with their daughters. now, we can talk about what's wrong with our culture that that's the only place where men feel like they can pond with their daughters -- bond with their daughters, that's maybe beyond my pay grade, but either way the studies showed definitively that everything like the fact that like women

athletes who now every year they pose in "sports illustrated"'s swim suit issue and you don't know where the models end and the actual athletes who pose in the same swim suits, these things actually hurt women's sports. they're destroying women's sports. and there's more hard data with that as well because you've seen this objectionification and sexist look at women's sports over the last 20 years. there is less coverage now than there was ten years ago, and there was less coverage ten years ago than there was the ten years before that. and you could actually link in very strong terms the existence of a thriving women's liberation movement in this country is and the existence of a women's athletic culture that actually prizes and values the achievements of women on the field of play as opposed to prizing just the way they look wearing as few clothes as possible. so this was another thing that i thought was a huge story, something that needed to be looked at, something that should have been part of the discussion every time you have these situations where you have the

objectionification of women athletes, but it wasn't there. the third thing that's happened since 2008 which is huge, huge is the presence of actual people inside sports, actual athletes who care about gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual rights. sports is one of the ways in which all these ideas are constructed at an early age, like how boys are supposed to act, how girls are supposed to act. and if you're gay, particularly a gay boy, that you have no role, no place if sports. the locker room is not a place for you. the locker room is a place where homophobia's accepted, and that's a part of women's athletics as well that's much less discussed, is the way homophobia operates as well to keep women athletes in line in the locker room despite a tradition of women's sports being a safe place for young lgbt kids to go and be able to feel safe. but since 2008 you've seen a big change. why has that change happened?

well, i think one of the reasons was things like the national equality march in washington, d.c. that drew 200,000 people, the increased activism after prop 8 passed in california. there's been a renewed consciousness about these different issues, and it has gotten into the world of sports. just one example of it was just this past year, like two weeks before the super bowl, what was the big story? there was a player for the baltimore ravens who said i am going to use the platform of the super bowl to talk about anti-bullying. both played key roles not just speaking out about the issue, but campaigning around state referendums in november. there were huge referendum victories in this maryland where i live that passed marriage equal the i and in minnesota where it was much trickier because it was called like the civil rights marriage freedom act, but if you voted yes, it

stopped gay people from getting married. chris clue by led the fight for the no vote, and that won as well in minnesota. and he was crisscrossing the state in between games and weathering the criticism of his coaches to do it. and yet on the flip side of that, you have tim tebow, and tim tebow, i mean, somebody who is still a quarterback yet cannot throw -- [laughter] and he is somebody who is able to get all this incredible attention way beyond his ability to actually perform when he does commercials for organizations like focus on the family which believes in gay repairtive therapy. recently, he had to actually cancel a speaking engagement at a church in texas which is like this brutally homophobic church by a reverend by the name of jeffers down there, one of the biggest dallas megachurches. he actually pulled back because of the criticism he got from it. but one of the things that jeffers also believes, if you're catholic, jewish, muslim, you're going to hell. so it's like an all-purpose

going to hell thing unless you believe what he does. so tebow pulled away from that. but now this week we learned that he's actually now on the gay repairtive therapy tour. that's once again particularly galling, he can't throw. i mean, my goodness. tim tebow quarterback, stop calling him that. cannot throw. so just a side issue. but just the mere fact that people are having these discussions is a huge deal. another thing since 2008, there's an organization that started called you can play. and it was started by the burke family in toronto, canada. if you've never heard of the burkes, they are like hockey royalty. the father was the longtime general manager of the toronto maple leafs, both of his sons were scouts, and one of his sons, brian, came out of the closet. and the family's reaction to him coming out of the closet was not just to say, well, we will tolerate you or we accept you out of the goodness of our

hearts, but it was like we are going to fight homophobia with you, and we are going to make hockey a safe space for lgbt kids, and they started this group called you can play. and they've done amazing work. and it's now led by patrick because brian, actually, he died in a car accident. and patrick took brian's death -- i'm sorry, brendan. brendan. as a way to move forward and start this group, you can play. and they really do amazing work, and people should go to their web site and check them out. and, actually, probably in the next several days they're going to have the first out gay player in the big sports, and it's going to be a hockey player. so look for that in the news. and the work of you can play is going to be cited for why that happened. the biggest thing in 2008 that's totally changed sports was the economic crisis of 2008. i mean, in and of itself it made the issue of economics central to how sports was going to operate for the simple reason that public subsidies dried up

for owners. i'm sure people in portland have no idea what that feels like, to have an opener try to hold you -- owner try to hold you up for public money. i'm sure you have no idea how terrible that feels. [laughter] yeah. but the thing that, first of all, just how it affected our sports, you've had four lockouts just in the last year in sports, the nba, the nfl, the nhl -- they almost lost the whole season -- and the referees for the national football league. in each of these cases, except for the referees which just seemed like it was more out of spite, the owners all said the same thing, we can't get the public subsidies, therefore, we need to keep our profitability levels up by extracting money from the salaries of players. yet what that leaves out, of course, also is when you lockout players and sports, you're also locking out everybody who works at the stadium, you're locking out everybody who picks up an extra shift at the bar across the street from the stadium, you're locking out everybody who is able to make a living through

the connection of the public subsidies. and yet these folks who are these private actors are effectively intervening in what was a public investment and keeping people from being able to earn their living. that, to me, is an incredibly political process. and this was global as well. this became a global phenomenal. one of the things that i've been able to do over the last couple years is visit places both right before and right after to olympics and the world cup have been there. so it's like i go there right when it's not fun which isn't very fun, but it's actually very interesting. because you get to see what happened to all the promises. i mean, first of all, going to greece one of the things that you see, i mean, greece, of course, is one of the main victims of the austerity cry is sis that happened after the 2008 economic crisis which took $34.4 trillion out of the global economy. you go to greece, and you see people live anything squatter camps in the old olympic facilities. like, everything that got paid for to make to olympics happen there in 2004 are now,

basically, these elaborate homeless shell ors -- shelters. so that's greece. or take a place like vancouver which had the winter games in 2010. i was up there right before the starts of the games, and on the front page of the newspaper, half of the paper was devoted to the fact that they were going to be cutting physical education programs throughout british columbia, and the other half was about how they were going to have to spend millions of dollars to fly snow to the top of mountains because they did not have enough snow for the skiing competition for the olympics. and so you get a little dash of global warming in there too at the same time. and another example was i was in south africa before the start of the world cup. billions of dollars spent on stadiums in south africa, and they were irrigating the stadiums 24 hours a day to make them look as green and as lush and as beautiful as possible. within a five minute walk from where they're doing these 24-hour irrigations of the stadiums, you have entire neighborhoods without drinking water, entire neighborhoods without water to clean

themselves and their children to the point of which where trucks would have to drive out in the middle of the night to bring jugs of water to families so they could survive. and, frankly, the fact that they had those trucks is actually better than what the situation is going to be like in new jersey next year when the super bowl takes place. because chris christie there, the governor there -- and this is when you're supposed to boo, okay -- chris christie, he has already said that, look, when the super bowl's happening, people might have to realize -- or even in the weeks, two weeks leading up to the super bowl, people might have to realize we're not going to have emergency services available for people in the areas around people who live within a certain distance of the stadium itself because they're so worried about being able to actually hold the super bowl in the context of, say, if it's zero degrees or if there's a snowstorm or something like that. so south africa got the trucks with the jugs of water, new jersey might not even get that during the super bowl. the other thing that they did in south africa was that the world cup,at

organizes it, they have the south african government trademark the words world, cup and 2010. so if you were trying to sell anything that said the words world, cup or 2010, it could be confiscated by the government which is a huge deal in south africa, because the informal economy was such a, actually, a big selling point. why they were saying we need to spend withs of dollars -- billions of dollars in state money to be able to put on the world cup. so then what happens right after the world cup is, basically, the public sector unions -- this is going to sound familiar -- were presented with the bill. hope you enjoyed the party, you guys are going to pay for it which led to a 1.3 million person public sector strike in south africa right afterwards. once again, not covered in the sports pages. okay, on to the next story with no sense of what was actually taking place was really like a neoliberal trojan horse or what

jules boy cough in portland calls the celebration of capitalism which i think is another great way to the think of it. this idea that people were accepting things they otherwise would not accept because it's wrapped in the guise of saying we're going to host to olympics, the world cup, and these really vicious free market reforms are pushed through. so this is what i'm writing about in the book. and just to close i want to say something about why this is particularly important. and for me like understanding sports through a different lens became important to me when i was reading about a player right now for the houston rockets named royce white. i don't know if people have heard of royce white. but he's 21 going on 22. he's a rookie in the nba. and he sat out the first half of this season because he was objecting to the way his team, the houston rockets, was handling his issues around mental health. he said, look, before he was drafted he told them i have mental health issues, it might

affect if i can fly, if i can practice, if i can play. you still want to draft me, go right ahead. they drafted him. they said to him we're still down with you needing help with your issues, but you have to use a psychiatrist that's employed by the team. he said, yeah, a psyche chi tryst who works for my boss, i don't think i want to do that. i think i want to actually have my own psychiatrist if that's okay. and they said no. so for the first half of the year he just sat out, and it looks like now they gave in on that, but the process of him fighting against them has actually increased his political confidence and changed the way he's looking not just at his own life, but the whole world. he was interviewed by chuck closerman, one of the writers at espn, and chuck is usually, like, a really good journalist, really good writer. i'm not just saying that because this is going to be on c-span. but the way he handled this interview was actually really atrocious. he started interviewing royce white, and royce says to him, you know, the issue that

nobody's talking about is that really it's not just about me being mentally ill. the majority of the npa is mentally -- nba is mentally ill. [laughter] and chuck says, what do you mean? he said, look, everybody knows how many players smoke weed after games, drink after games. they're not just doing that because they're having some fun and unwinding, they're doing it to actually manage their pain, managing their alienation, managing their isolation. and yet no one wants to talk about that. and you know what else nobody wants to talk about in? the majority of this country is mentally ill. [laughter] and chuck says why do you think we don't want to talk about that? and he says we don't want to talk about it because if we admit that, then we might actually have to devote resources to doing something about it. and this is what royce white said. he said if 60% of the country had cancer, there would have to be a massive public health effort to do something about that. but if the majority of us are mentally ill, then they're not going to -- they're going to ignore it so they don't have to supply universal mental health

coverage. but i am willing, this is what he said, i am willing to fight and die to get universal mental health coverage in the united states. 2% of the population controls all the wealth, and the rest of us are just fighting over the rest, and we're stressed out of our minds trying to figure out how we're going to make our way in the world, that's why we're mentally ill. then chuck writes in his article, he's like, okay, and then he writes: royce white sounds like a ninth grader who just wrote a term paper and now thinks he's the smartest person in the room. now, you think about everything that that does for the reader who's reading this. because i think for us it's safe to say that if we read that, we'd be like, right on, royce white. chuck, you're a jerk, man! how dare you say that. but for a lot of people reading it may might be like, whoa, whoa. and then chuck provides this thing where it's like, oh, no, you don't have to take him seriously because he's just this

loudmouth kid who thinks he knows everything. not only is that really foul, i think it blinds us to the fact that there are a lot of people coming up in sports, young people, who see the world a hell of a lot clearer than the 40-year-old, 50-year-old authors who have their journalism school degrees right now. because there's something very unique about being a professional athlete in this country where you tend to come from an incredibly impoverished background, you oftentimes are a person of color as well. and yet how many poor people of color have microphones in their face and are asked what do you think about the world? now, often times a lot of these athletes are told, well, you know, you've just got to be quiet, tow the line, don't say a word, don't say a thing because the most important thing is to be able to make money, support the people around you and sell something, and if it has a swoosh on it, all the better. but every once in a while you also get these athletes who say, you know what? i have this hyperexalted platform, i know where i come from, i know that there are pe looking up to , and i'm

going to do something with this to try to make the world a better place. and those are the people i think we really need to treasure and actually build movements around what they say. build movements around the fact that there's this tradition that sees jackie robinson as central to the civil rights movement, that sees muhammad ali as central to the 60s, as billie jean king as central to the women's movement. and that sees royce white and the athletes of the future as central to building a world that's free of exploitation and that's built on the basis of human cooperation and not greed and destroying people. so thank you very much. i appreciate your time. [applause] you know, i'm sorry, i was losing my voice there. but we're having questions, and let me just say that if you have a question, some folks from c-span are going to give you a microphone so it can bererded.

fn't say your name, but you will be on tv. also know that as well. so if you have any outstanding warrants -- [laughter] or things that you may be dealing with of a sketchy natureover if you don't want your boss to see that you're here, you might not want to ask a question. but otherwise please throw your hands up. >> i'd like to ask you two questions, actually, if it's okay. the first one is, um, what you thought about during the super bowl when chris culver from the 49ers had his homophobic comment, and all of san francisco came out in opposite support? so that was kind of really remarkable. >> uh-huh. >> most of the time people would have just said nothing. the second thing is then along the same lines of sports people who speak out because they have a platform, what do you think about michael jordan refusing to speak out as being criticized for that because all he wanted to do was play basketball, and he really didn't want to take a political stand about all the issues that people kept asking

him to take a stand on? >> uh-huh. terrific question -- what's your name? i'm sorry? can you say your name? or even just a fake name so i can address you as a human being? >> my name's fran. >> hey, fran. first of all, on chris culver, people who didn't hear about this, the super bowl has this thing, super bowl has this thing called media day where all kinds of people get to go in there and ask questions of the athletes. and one of the people who asked him a question was one of the spawn of howard stern, artie lang, living symbol of american declinism. and artie lang went up to chris culver and said how do you feel about having a g, -- gay teammate, and chris culver said he would not accept having a gay teammate. but it wasn't just chris culver, it was several of the san francisco players also rejected the idea that they'd ever been part of an actual video they did, and it gets better. dan savage's project against bullying, particularly bullying

of lgbt youth. and they actually said, no, we were never part of that, even though they were part of it. and that's actually the first and only time dan savage has taken a video down based on what the players said. and it was very ugly. and it would have been ugly no matter what team they played for, but playing for the san francisco 49ers and choosing to say homophobic things can never be seen as a good career move, i would say. [laughter] and it was very interesting. you know, they do ratings by city for the super bowl. number one this year, not too surprising, was baltimore, because the ravens were there in terms of percentage of people watching it. san francisco was not even in the top ten. and i think this is a way to understand that. it's a little hard to root for a team that's homophobic when you are a city that for decades has stood for an alternative way of looking at our, mr. -- lgbt brothers and sisters. that was a huge deal at the time, and it was good to see nfl in particular condemn the

comments, but then you might have seen the news this past week that teams are not just manti te'o, but teams are asking players questions like do you like girls, and are you harold, and who are you dating, who do you sleep with. once again, these questions are not only immoral, they're illegal. you can't ask people things like that. and i interviewed a couple of players who have come out of the closet since retirement, and they said like, no, the nfl's been asking this for decades. it's part of how they talk to you when you go in, and i think it's partly a way to dehumanize people as soon as they come into the interview room. so they realize like, you're ours now, and we control you. therefore, we have the right to know everything about you, and you will then, basically, be ours to mold and do what we say. so it's a good thing that players are really mistaking out and -- breaking out and telling the truth about what's going on in these interviews, but i think the nfl has a long way to go despite the immediate

condemnation of chris culver. they have a ways to go. michael jordan is an interesting character in all this because i've always been a believer that we should support athletes who want to be political, but we shouldn't be slamming athletes who choose not to be political. the main idea isn't the idea of freedom, of political freedom. that people should have the right to speak out if they want to and not worry about losing their job, and people should also have the right to not speak out if that's where they are. so there you go. with that as a starting point, michael jordan you have to say, also, is not your typical athlete. michael jordan is a fortune 500 company with legs. he runs a division of nike and what nike does in southeast asia would shame a nation of savages. so for michael jordan to say nothing when asked direct questions about things like sweat shops, that actually, that is political. that's a political choice that he is making. so i always take issue when people say that michael jordan

decided to not be political. well, no, he did decide to be political, but he decided to represent a certain kind of politics that has to do with walking in lockstep with the dictates of corporate america. so that, to me, makes him absolutely worthy of any criticism we want to throw at him. question over here. oh. and you in the back. do you want to -- we'll start there because -- there we go. >> thanks, dave. name's joel. question back to the gender issue. female journalists and how do you feel they're being treated and how that can be improved particularly, obviously, the nfl sideline one. how can their status in all sports be enhanced? >> i mean, we just passed the, i believe it was 25th anniversary of the first woman to ever broadcast an nfl game. her name was gayle searns. and by all accounts, the guy at

the time was rudy martsky, the sports tv writer for "usa today" and really determined whether you were going to be a success or failure in the industry. he gave her very high notices the next day. gayle was the first to ever do that, she was also the last. it's never happened since then. and you still have this setup where if you're a woman and you're going to be connected particularly with the nfl, then you're going to work on the sidelines. and we also still have a situation where it's crazy. like, for all the criticism espn gets, and i think it's -- you have to create asylum them when they're like the monolith, but they just came out with this gender study about sports journalists. and i wish i had the numbers off the top of my head, but it's really bad, it's something like 17% of sports journalists are women. but if you take out espn, it drops to like subterranean levels. and it says something about access. and i speak at sports journalism classes a lot when there aren it

to be sports journalists, they say that they would except they don't feel like they could. that the space just isn't open for them to be able to do it. so whether you're talking about broadcasting or whether you're talking about doing actual media and writing, it's very, very narrow. and the thing about it that's particularly frustrating is if you rook at, like -- look at, like, the sheer numbers of women who play sports which is incredible, i mean, since title ix was passed it's gone from 1 out of 34 young women to just under 1 out of 3. if you look at the number of women who watch sports, look at the number of women who buy sports apparel, if you look at all of these different factors, if you look at the fact that the number one rated college basketball game in the history of epspn was a women's game between connecticut and tennessee, you see there is money to be made here. and yet in the upper echelons of sports, it's like watching them in this death fight with themselves between the money

that they want to make and the sexist ideology that they want to promote. and they're like fighting with this, like, battle in their -- and it's like, oh, must, oppress women but want their money. [laughter] and the result is you get a month of nfl players wearing pink to show their allegiance to the susan g. komen foundation. that's the pretzel they've put themselves in, and that's, i think, the terrible situation. i really do think this is going to be the next upsurge if you want to talk about political upsurges in sports, are women athletes who say i have the right to play without thinking i need to be like danica patrick to be able to do it. and there's a question over here. >> my name's glenn burke, and i'm wondering what you would change about college sports. >> wow. [laughter] first of all, you are featured

very prominently in my book. not you in particular, but someone named glenn burke -- >> actually, i'm not glenn burke, but i used to play basketball with him. i didn't know if you'd know who he was. >> oh. really? you said that as kind of a cute little thing. >> thank you. >> on television. thank you. [laughter] glenn burke, a whole part of the book about glenn burke because there's a chapter about lgbt athlete, and glenn burke was someone who was in the 1970s was out of the closet to his teammates. he played baseball to the dodgers, credited with inventing the high-five. [laughter] and he, and he made the mistake of having a relationship with, um, the nature of that relationship is up for debate, but it was definitely a relationship with tommy lasorda's gay son while he was playing for the dodgers, and that got him quickly removed from the sport. so he was out to his teammates but never out in the media as an active player, and we still do

not have a male player in the four major sports who's ever been out in a public way. so i talk about glenn and his struggle and what he did in the book. but what was your question? >> what would you -- >> change about college sports? >> yeah. what would you change about college sports? >> starting point, i would figure out a way to absolutely blow the whole thing up and start over. as a starting point. figuratively blowing it up for what it's worth, but blow the whole thing up and start over. you ever want to have an experience? talk to somebody who's not from this country and just say to them, hey, you know, our institutions of higher learning are also our minor leagues for our nba and major league baseball and nfl franchise. they're like, wow, that's crazy. and it is absolutely crazy. and this was something that w.e.b. duboise was talking about a century ago. and it's actually almost kind of cute and quaint to read what duboise had to say. he was like it's an outrage that

the football team at yale gets seven times the money as the english department! and you're like, ah, that's so cute, seven times. [laughter] now it's like seven trillion times as much as your typical english department more or less. save a few zeros. but what duboise talked about was the corrosive effect of, as he put it, king football would have on a campus. and i think that's absolutely proven true. because what you have in college athletes are, effectively, campus workers with no rights and no pay. that's what they are. the whole word, i talk about this in the book, but the whole word, student athlete, that actually comes from a college football player who was paralyzed trying to sue the ncaa to get worker's compensation, and that was part of their defense to the supreme court was to say, no, they're not workers, they're student athletes. so it's a designation that should actually exempt from

caring about their health or having to compensate them if something horrible happens to them. so the whole thing is, to me, just corrupt down to the very bone of its existence. and it's not to say that there shouldn't be sports on a campus if people want to play them, but the professionalization of so-called amateur sports has turned it into this absolute moral access pool. and i -- cesspool. the thing about penn state and the fact that jerry sandusky was raping kids in the locker room of the football program, and it was covered up for years, the thing about that that was actually so shocking and scary to people inside the world of the ncaa was it was sort of like a look to how far you would go to protect the institution. because you already know, and we've known for years, that people will look the other way if players are paid under the table. people have looked the other way at institutions like notre dame and situations of sexual assault and rape.

and it's like we will also look the other way if small children are getting abused even in the showers of the football team. and why do they look the other way? is it because les this cabal of satanic, awful people? no, it's actually much more there's this banality of evil. thisit's this idea that says the football program supports so much on this campus, it's the central of the economic, social and psychological life of an entire region. and, therefore, we're going to do what we have to do to make sure the trains keep running on time no matter how monstrous what happens happens. so i would absolutely change college sports down to its very last compound. i guess -- and then we're going to make you work a little bit, sorry. go there and then back there. >> hey, dave. >> hi.

>> i'm katherine, and i am with a group called the campaign to end the new jim crow, so i was hoping you could talk a bit about, you know, the potential fight that's going on around the prison company that's trying to fund the stadium? i think it's in florida. i've only read little snippets, but i figured you'd know. >> yes. thank you so much for asking about that. the campaign to start the new jim crow, it's terrific that you're doing that. i assume its inspiration is michelle alexander's book, "the new jim crow," which i think is an indispensable piece of writing. i think it's like the most important anti-racist book since the autobiography of malcolm x. [applause] oh, cool. thanks. the new jim crow issue is now becoming a campus issue in a very serious way down in florida. there's a university there called florida atlantic university. and there is a private prison called geo group. they're the second largest private prison company in the

united states to cca, and they spent $6 million to rename the football stadium geo group stadium at florida atlantic university. this is horrible for so many reasons, you don't even know where to begin. it's horrible, first of all, because private prisons are these inherently immoral structures that actually spend tens of millions of dollars to lobby for things like three strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentencing because if there are less prisoners, they make less money. it's a very basic thing. they want to make sure that the incarceration rate is as high as possible because they're the people in cash-of strapped times who get these state contracts to build these private prisons. but geo group, even by the standards of private prisons, is particularly bad. i mean, a judge in mississippi -- and keep in mind, mississippi -- called geo group a cesspool of inhumanity based on how they treated their

prisoners and based on issues like sanitation, withholding medication, lack of clean beds, not doing laundry for the sheets. and once again, it's like what we were talking about with penn state, it's not because these are evil people, but it's because they're looking at their profit margins, and it's a lot them cheaper to not wash the sheets every day, to not make sure the toilets are clean. and yet the results, of course, are human rights violations of a repellant scale. and what's particularly scary about this is that right now all the private prison companies are totally psyched about immigration reform. and the idea of it pushing through. and i think immigration reform might be something people here would be in favor of for very good reason, you know, people not living in the shadows, path to citizenship and the like. but one of the things that immigration reform is going to do is it's going to make it open season on undocumented people in the country, and it's going to be like are, okay, now we can jail all these people. but the prison population in this country is two million,

it's the largest in the world. the number of undocumented people in florida alone is three million. so in florida alone three million potential prisoners. and geo group is vying for the state contract to jail all three million of those people. insanely lucrative for the company. so renaming the stadium geo group stadium is a form of branding to be able to just make their name more acceptable to the people and to get this wonderful pr. now, what's brilliant about this, though, is the students are fighting back. the team are called the owls, so the students have called -- started a group called stop owlcatraz. thai already occupied -- they've already occupied the president's office, and they're really raising hell. and for a lot of the students, the it's really personal to them because some of their parents,

they have spent time in geo group jails and had the experience of doing that because they're the children of immigrants, and they operate as detention centers. and they really do see themselves as being part of this fight against the new jim crow. and that's, i think, something that we should draw inspiration from, that it's now the largest movement that florida atlantic has seen from the vietnam war. and it all got started because they got greedy with this private prison and took their money. so that's a good thing. thank you for the question. appreciate it. >> yeah, i'm john. basically, kind of piggybacking on that a little bit, but the power of espn, the power of fox sports now having their own network to compete with espn and the huge, humongous network contracts with comcast cable and whoever, how is that going to

allow access to the underprivileged, the socioeconomic, you know, fault lines that fall below? how can -- how are they going to have access? like, when i grew up as a kid, i could turn on any radio, any tv, watch sports hero, i could watch women in sports, billie jean king, i could watch -- you name it, we had access to it. so if you're going to start showing gay athletes, if we're going to start seeing more women's sports, then you know what? we need to have access so our young people can see that and have inspiration. >> uh-huh. >> that's my point. >> no, i'm so glad you raise that because this is one of the other things that's happened in sports in recent years, and i talk about it in the book. but it goes further back than 2008, it goes back roughly 20 or 30 years. and that's the way like -- there's always been this very tight relationship between professional sports and working class communities in the united states. and that relationship has been severed dramatically in the last

generation. when my dad was growing up in the brooklyn, it was a thing where he would find milk bottles and hand them in for coins, and he could see a brooklyn dodgers' game. think about how many milk bottles you would need to get a ticket to see a major league baseball game. i spoke in fremont, california, it's an area of south central los angeles, and i asked a room of 50 kids how many of you have ever been to a dodgers game? one kid out of 50 in south central l.a. and it's become the sort of thing where if you are going to see a game, it's probably because you're selling beer for $7, $8 an hour, or you're directing people to their seats or working in concession stand. but sports themselves have become something just to be able to go to a sporting event. and you mentioned the issue of cable which is another very big deal, like the ability to watch a sporting event. >> [inaudible] >> yeah, that's sick.

.. >> in los angeles, for example, everybody's cable bill is going up because of paying for the dodgers' new cable deal. so everybody's subsidizing the

document dodgers. if you can afford cable your subsidizing the los angeles dodgers, and this collectivization of debt, privatization of profit, is something that sports has been doing for 40 years, and it primes us for the bank bailouts in this country. like this idea to accept it's our job as the public to bail out private capital. sports is one way that many people think, maybe that's what we're supposed to do but it's organized stuff and it's shameful that sports is a way to push that agenda through, and so that's -- i totally agree, and hear what you're saying. but it's like we have to fight for access. that's what it comes down to. people have to start looking at sports through a much more activist lens. not something that is just going to be there for us but something we have to fight to have access to, wssues of basic health

as one of the things on the line. >> i'm steve. with the whole lance armstrong doping affair that just took place, do you foresee that's a underreported story for other major league sports? i've been hearing about soccer in particular, that with all the running they do in soccer, and now with the kenyan marathoners, i've been hearing stories, do you think that's going to be a big story in the future, or is that going to be kept under wraps. >> i totally agree with you. david stern sat in front of congress as commissioner of the nba, i think in 2006, and she said nba players don't use performance-enhancing drugs because their lean body types ts and muscle mast.

not conducive to steroids, unlike football players who are big, and people in congress were like, wow, that's brilliant. well said, sir. but it's like, that hulking mass, lance armstrong? performance-enhancing drugs are for -- the number one thing they do is allow you to train longer and train harder, and that -- if you're an athlete, particularly an athlete who might come from a poor background and you know that taking this pill would be the difference you've having a longer career and making millions of more dollars. for a lot of athletes it's a no-brainer, and outside of baseball and cycling, it's largely unexplored because people don't want to know what the answer are. now, my own opinion about performance-enhancing drugs and the whole thing is, anybody who thinks the status quo, in terms of how they're regulated and talked about -- anybody who thinks that's a good thing to me is absolutely out of their minds. to me, the smartest people who talkbout thi are on the

extremes of the seeds -- sides of the issue and the answer is in the extremes. there's one set of arguments that says, we have to take it out of the shadows, out of the closet. this is a libertarian issue. should be about decriminalization. these are adults who want to da this, better it be out in the open and under the auspices of a doctor because every study shows that performance-enhancing drugs, the danger is not use but abuse. if you abuse them you can hurt yourself. i with a doctor you could be okay. they're grown people. they should be allowed to do what they want. the other side is to say, no, no, no we need to actually fight do whatever we have to, to get this out of the sports because we don't know about the long-term health repercussions. it's worker safety issue. not about records and being in the hall of fame. it's not playing sports and think they have to do damage their body to keep up with the next next to them, and we need

biological passports, regular blood testing, regular urine testing, and figure out a way to make sports chemical-free, and i think the answer needs to lie with one or two of those options, because the current way it operates, really is an absolute joke and does terrible harm to people. you think is someone is a professional athlete, when they're 60 and 70, should be the healthiest people in the world. and like the men should look like george clooney, and -- they're 60 and 70, and the women should all look like martina, but often times people are broken. one nfl player said the thing about playing football is you seem away your right to be middle image age and that's aboe

performance-enhancing drugs and what you put your body through in between games and on the field. if you're taking something artificial that makes you track longer than a human should, those chickens are going to come home to roost eventually. and we have a question up here? >> hi, dave. i'm sarah from portland. i was wondering, since you talked a lot about the power of the individual sports players have, if you could talk about the powers of sports fans, and particularly the -- i think they're in egypt and also what they're up to now. i know been cool things i antibeen -- how sports played notice arab spring. >> yeah. there's a whole chapter in the book bat this, about sports fan clubs, and the arab spring. this, to me, was like this brilliant brilliantly

underreported story, that when hosni mubarak's dictatorship fell, one of the central forces that made that happen were the fan clubs of the main soccer teams in egypt. this is for a very basic reason. for decades number mubarak's dictatorship, he -- they get extra rooms for soccer clubs to fight the police, to fight each other, to fight themselves, to set off pyro, always seep as an apolitical way to yet frustrated angry mail youth blow off steam, and better they've do that than be part of any revolutionary movement to take on the government. now, the thing that happened when the revolution started in egypt, the soccer clubs were the people who were most experienced at doing things like, fighting the police, setting up checkpoints, and all the rest. they came, like, ready-made, too a here square, you're doing this

wrong. met show you how to actually do this, and keep the police from coming in here and over time they played this incredible role in winning leadership, and that winning of revolutionary leadership continued after mubarak left power, because one of the things they continued to do was call for justice on the question of the people who the state police had killed. and this is the thing about the soccer clubs that made them so dangerous and still make them so dangerous to power and the status quo in egypt, is that their hatred has always been for the state apparatus and for state silence, always been their focus. they say, we don't care about whether it's the muslim brotherhood or whoever is actually in power. what we care about is whether people are held to account for those who died. and that is so powerful because one of the great broken promises of morsi, is seeking president

-- seeking justice for people who were killed on in the leadership, and he has totally backtracked on the promises, and that has made them a consistent street-fighting force in demanding this, and it's a story that is playing itself out and they have gotten more politically powerful since morsi took power, and as morsi disappointed people, and people say, what should we do? they're like hilarious and wonderful stories in the book about people in the soccer clubs. they hate the soccer clubs. they say, ahead mubarak bit i hate those guys from -- even more:. i'm not going near you.

by the end of this they're linking arms and fighting together. i quote this one guy part of the revolutionary socialists of egypt, and she said that i really felt like i would sooner see mubarak fall before i would ever see people from those two areas link arms. that's that's craziest thing i ever thought i'd if see in egypt, and this is something that was part of the arab spring. the first thing that gadhafi did was suspend all the soccer matches in libya, because it was a possible transmission belt among the struggle in one country to another. the other place where soccer in the middle east has assumed a huge role. on the gaza strip, and i write about that in the book as well, because there have been three players on the palestinian national team who has been

killed by the israeli government, and in the bombing of gaza last year, they headquarters of the palestinian football association was bombed. and as well as stadiums as well burt the actual offices were targeted with precision missiles and bombs. and telling that story and the story of a guy -- the palestinian soccer player who went on a hunger strike and he was released because of international movement, a huge movement being pushed by fifa as well, which is about as corrupt and decrepit a body on this planet, but like fifa speaking out for the rights of the palestinian soccer player is a moment where people thought i would sooner see ice cream emerge from urinals before i would see fifa say anything that was politically useful ever. but it's just a sign of the times. it truly is. and the story of palestinian

soccer is one that i talk about in the book and one that is well worth telling. we have five more minutes. let's -- yes, yam, -- yes, ma'a. >> i'm mary. i was wondering how your reporting is received by the a mainstream sports reporters? >> it's funny you ask that, because it's -- i'm a sensitive person. i like people to like me and stuff. but some people don't like me, and that hurts a little bit. but it's kind of like weird. you have some people who -- people like espn people, people who do the mainstream stuff, who reach out for to me and they're like, i like what you're doing, keep doing it. i'm like, you should do it, too? they're, no, i'm not going to. but we need you to keep doing

it. because that sort of helps create some more space for me to do something that is a little better. but people consciously reach out to me and say that. that's gratifying because it's okay, i'm not doing this in a vacuum but it is connected in some way, shape or form, to getting masses of people to see better coverage because they'll see it done by other people, because there's a little bit of a transmission belt there. so that's really good. the other side is that there are also people who just really, really -- like viscerally dislike me in a way that is hurtful. but they -- the reason they do is because i really do think that sports journalism is a political pursuit, like how you talk about people is political. how you choose to talk about women athletes is a political decision. how you choose or not choose to talk about racism is a political decision. and if you do something politically that i disagree with, i'm going to talk about it

or write about it, because it's a way of actually having a real political debate. but for a lot of people in sports journalisms, the concept of politics and debate? what are you talking about, dude? girls are silly. it's like the response they can't get why you think these issues actually matter, and that's where it can get kind of ugly sometimes. but, you know, you do what you got to love. the opposite of love is indifference. so, cool. >> i'd ask your thoughts on the idea of major league homophobia as a fig leaf to cover up homosexual latency in athletes.

>> in sports? >> in sports. >> i think that's huge. i mean, frankly, there are huge spectacles, more homo erotic than an nfl game if you look at it honestly. your don't want to say that but, dude, anytime you got tight ends bending over you're going to have questions, and curiosities, and i totally think that homophobia is an outgrowth, particularly in football -- like homophobia is an outgrowth of men touching and rolling around. the phrase, sissy, in our vernacular, one of its origins is teddy roosevelt because he was promoting football as a way to teach boys to be men and sissy is a way to define people who wouldn't play football. so goes back to its earliest days, leak this idea of football as manhoodan