Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love

I'm a big fan of Dave Zirin's columns, and his dedication to injecting radical political analysis into the coverage of sports. I was more interested in reading What's My Name, Fool? or A People's History of Sports, but read this one instead when I found that this was the only book by Zirin the UMass library had available at the moment.

Ultimately, I found it disappointing. The book reads like a collection of columns, even though it isn't. While the stories Zirin spins about owners like Donald Sterling, George Steinbrenner, James Dolan, Clay Bennett, and more might be unfamiliar to those who only watch scoreboards and not headlines, as someone who follows the behind the scenes of sports, I was disappointed that Zirin added almost nothing new to the stories he tells, and often covers them in significantly less depth than other sources. In fact, he spends so much of the book discussing the way public money is being used to finance sports stadiums that it made me wonder why I wasn't reading Field of Schemes instead.

Zirin does bring up an important question: to what degree should sports teams belong to the communities they're a part of, versus often craven, profit-seeking owners who would happily extort those communities or ditch them entirely? If he had approached the book much more strongly from that perspective, it would have been much more interesting, rather than reading him make tired jokes about Eddy Curry that Bill Simmons told better years ago.