Dave Zirin Welcomes You to the Terrordome

Dave Zirin reads from Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports on Wednesday, June 27, at 7:00 pm, at Brookline Booksmith.

At first, sports seems like a welcome escape from the day-to-day grind of politics. Most people would rather talk about their favorite team than the state of the war in Iraq. But, although the talking heads on ESPN rarely utter the word "politics," sports is nothing but politics – people rooting for teams, constant PR efforts, and the promise that things will get better later.

Dave Zirin writes a weekly column available at Edge of Sports that gets to the heart of the connection. For example, in one of his weekly columns, Zirin compares Jason Giambi to a whistleblower, noting "the reflexive response by Major League Baseball has been to treat him the way whistleblowers are often treated by elephantine institutions: to bury him." To Zirin, steroids is as much a team and business issue as it is an individual issue, perhaps more so.

In the Giambi piece, he uses the phrase "athletic industrial complex," which he explores at length in his latest book, Welcome to the Terrordome, which features an appropriate forward from the title's inspiration, rapper Chuck D.

Image from Amazon.