Interview: Dave Zirin, Author of "The Kaepernick Effect"
In this episode, Amira Rose Davis interviews sportswriter Dave Zirin about his most recent book "The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee Changing the World," which tells the stories of athletes and teams across the country who contributed to rising tide of political action through sport. They also talk about what it has been like to write about sports and politics in this moment, the impact of celebrity and cultural capital, and the joy -- and pains -- of coaching your kid’s sports teams.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Amira: We are here today to talk about the 11th book from our friend, Dave Zirin, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World. I'm really excited for this for a few reasons, which I'll tell you about in a second, but first and foremost, can you tell us and our listeners what this book is about?
Dave: Yeah. You know, I've been asked that on a couple of other shows, but I'm going to say it differently for you, Amira, because you'll get it when I tell you the actual origin story for this book and what it's all about. You’ll get it in a way…Because I'm a big fan of your work. I'm a big fan of Burn It All Down. So it's nice to be in a space where I know that there's a high level of knowledge about the subject that we're so passionate about. So, one of my books I wrote was with John Carlos, the 1968 Olympian. It was his memoir, and we've stayed very close. And we were talking last about two years ago, and he said to me, one of the things that made the track world so mad at Tommie and me – talking of course about Tommie Smith – is that all these young people at track meets started just raising their fists all the time, all over the country.
And I did like a triple take because, you know, as me, someone who loves history and loves these like hidden histories and people's histories, I was like, well, what track meets? What people? Who were they? How did it affect their lives? Ahh! And like, ahh, this has been lost to the winds, you know? It’s 50 years later, how could we ever know? And you know, that was in my mind in a big way when I was trying to find a project at the start of the pandemic, because, you know, we've all seen these one-off stories about this school where people took a knee, that school where this team took a knee. But it was like, wait a minute, you know, this happened in so many different places and all across this country. I mean, I knew that just from following the story. You know, red states, blue states, small towns, big cities, You have young athletes, centrally young, Black and brown athletes, taking a knee.
And I was like, who really are these people? What do they think about what they did now? What's the story about all those folks who took a knee? What's the story of this thing that, in my mind, I was thinking of as “the Kaepernick effect,” like, people adopting this method of struggle that Colin Kaepernick sort of bequeathed to the sports world. Like, you can take a knee during the anthem as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, and that is something you can do just as easily as I can do it. So, I just started calling up these athletes, you know, I put out the word on social media: hey, do you know anybody who did this? I just made it very broad. And the only thing I really wanted to make sure there was in the book was some semblance of balance in terms of women athletes and men athletes, because women athletes are such a part of this, and there would be this tendency to cut them out of the narrative because that's how so much of history has operated.
So there was this big push to make sure, in my own mind, I was like, okay, other than that balance, I just want this to be a free for all. Whoever gets back to me, I'm going to talk to you and we're going to learn what we're going to learn. And so that was the whole point of the book, just like this modest effort to record these stories and find some common threads. But then that changed even bigger for me during the summer of 2020, after the police murder of George Floyd. You’ve got the largest protest in the history of the United States, and I went back and called the folks that I'd interviewed already. And I was like, so, what are you up to right now? What are you thinking about what's happening?
And they were all in the streets, without exception. They were all organizing people, without exception. And these were people who started off as these very, very nervous so-called athlete activists, you know, just taking a knee because they wanted to start a conversation. A few years later, they're confident street organizers. And that led me to think that, okay, you know, many roads may have led us to the summer of 2020 and the largest protest in US history, but one of those roads runs through the athletic fields of the United States.
Amira: I love it. And I think that one of the things that I'm so excited about is that it helps us capture and maintain these stories of, like you said, people who are otherwise often kind of pushed aside for a nice tight narrative when people return to the history, right? And this is how you get Tommie and John becoming the story, and you forget even Lee Evans or of course Tyus and women involved. But we just can't hold all of that. And so I was thrilled in particular because one of the stories that you talk about in this book is the Beaumont Bulls.
And Beaumont's where I was born, where my siblings went to school; my family, we still have our house there. And I was like, nobody else is caring about what's happening in Beaumont! It just becomes another dot, another note, like, “this school did this,” right? And so for me, to see that have space along these other places was really impactful.
Dave: I mean, I use Beaumont usually as a go-to example when I've been speaking about the book precisely so people understand that, you know, this was a movement that absolutely transcended state, community…I mean, anywhere where people felt that there was injustice in their hearts and they played sports, they felt like they could do something.
Amira: Yeah.
Dave: That's the remarkable thing about what I'm just calling the Kaepernick effect, but that's the remarkable thing about people seeing what Colin Kaepernick did and saying, “I can do that too,” is that seems to have been adopted in all 50 states, like, literally comprising thousands of athletes. And yet, as you said, you've got that mainstream media focus that's just like, what team is Colin going to be on? Will he ever be re-signed? And, you know, it's not to say what's the NFL doing, and it's not to say that those aren't important or interesting questions. But it's just when it serves to obscure things that are frankly more dynamic and more interesting, I think that that's when we suffer for it in terms of historical memory.
Amira: Yeah. And there was also like levels to this, right? Because the other thing that I think it reminded me of is, at a time when the professional leagues were having this conversation of, does the knee mean the same thing, right? If it’s an agreed upon gesture that everybody's doing a minute before the game, is it the same as a kind of protest that we saw with Colin and with other people. And then at the same time as you have that very clear kind of critique on what kneeling looks like now on like the professional ranks, you have girls' basketball teams in Norman, Oklahoma, who are then being called the n-word and get, you know, announcers who are “low on blood sugar” or whatever.
And I was trying to hold both of those things together, and I think that one of the things this book also helps us do is wrestle with that scale, that sometimes the most visible stuff that gets the media attention and gets the bulk of our kind of analysis or conversation, it's doing work and there's stuff that's happening there, but the local, the regional, you know, what's happening there, it’s also having ripple effects that are harder to see. What was the thing that along those lines surprised you the most, or like jumped out at you, in documenting what's happening in some of these spaces?
Dave: Well, one of the things that surprised me is that a lot of times it felt like there was no rhyme or reason to some of the reactions with regards to how we conventionally think about politics. So, you've got football, softball, and soccer players at Garfield High School in liberal Seattle take a knee, and coaches are getting their tires slashed and death threats are being called into the school and people are being forced out of their jobs by the city. And you're thinking to yourself, wow, this is Seattle. That's really something. But then you have like this incredible woman who I interviewed from Louisiana, who took that chance and took that knee, and within a snap of the fingers, she, who had never spoken publicly in her life, is leading a school assembly, about what it really means in a predominantly white institution to be a young Black woman. And it's just like, the difference between institutional support and sometimes community violence, to me it was without regard to region, without regard…It reminded me of that – I'm going to butcher it, but that Malcolm X quote about, you know, the American south begins at the Canadian border?
Amira: Yeah, yeah.
Dave: That's what it felt like. You know, the same way these days, I mean, some students from very working class towns in upstate New York who were in the book talked to me about how people fly Confederate flags at their games. That’s upstate New York!
Amira: Exactly.
Dave: It’s just, I think that's one of the things that I learned. And something I didn't realize, but this was when I did a book event with Professor Eddie Glaude. He said, you know, one of the common themes in this book that you haven't raised, that's there if you read hard enough, is this specter of violence in every single case. And that didn't even occur to me in putting the book together. It's like, yeah, that's a common thread through everything, is that there's no such thing as just protesting, and particularly when you're in the high school age, there's no such thing as protesting and getting a rousing round of applause from the PTA. It doesn't work that way.
Amira: Right. All of this is demonstrating what you have been saying for years, that sports are telling a particular story and giving us such a powerful lens here to think through politics and power in American society and beyond. And this is themes that you've been working on for, I mean, obviously 11 books, but for a while. And I met you when I was a baby graduate student, I think we were doing a sports and race conference, and 42 had just come out – and rest in peace to Chadwick. And I remember we were talking there about visibility and about these narratives even then, and how freezing things in time can be so destructive, right? And I feel like one of the things you're doing with this book is making it harder to freeze Colin in 2016 and freeze the society in this one narrow narrative, and allows us to continue to see all the reverberations through, like you said, the playing fields of America, that give us lessons about things like violence. And I find that to be so impactful and powerful in terms of how we sharpen and continue our analysis of power, which is what we're talking about here. That wasn’t a question, but…
Dave: Wow. I've got nothing to say in response. That was beautifully put, and that is the goal. And especially in a kind of celebrity-obsessed society that we live in, which you see, you know, in the left, right, middle. I mean, as we're talking about this, a debate is raging across the political atmosphere over Nicki Minaj’s cousin's friend. [Amira laughs] I mean, but the only thing about that that I at all find interesting are the bedfellows that are developing on each side of it. And what it comes down to is this obsession really with celebrity. Otherwise, why would we be talking about it? And, you know, similarly, there is that culture of celebrity around Colin Kaepernick, a definite cult of personality thing. That really does exist. But that was one of the things why…I'm so glad, these young people just opened up to me about their motivations, because the name I heard a lot more than Colin Kaepernick's when they talked about their motivations was Trayvon Martin.
That was kind of deep to hear that, like, because putting myself in, trying to walk in their shoes a little bit and realizing that they're all 9, 10, 11, 12 years old when Trayvon was murdered, and the way that marked them, to see not only his murder but his murderer walk away. For them, it was an all-American trauma. That really made me think about Emmett Till in the 50s and that generation of civil rights activists. And that's important too, because then speaking to them, it's like, okay, so it was Trayvon that was in your heart. Where does Kaepernick come into it? And then it’s, oh, he gave us the method, right? Yeah. He gave us the how. And I think that's important because otherwise people will just drill it down to a ‘cult of Colin’ kind of argument, which doesn't really serve us. And it doesn't tell the truth.
Amira: Right. No, I think that's really important, because we know the activists of the classical civil rights era say Emmett Till, Emmett Till, Emmett Till, right? Even women athletes I write about like Willye White was in Money, Mississippi as a teenager when Emmett was killed, and that's what was like, no, I need to get the hell out of here. And that's what brings her to run track at Tennessee State and become a five-time Olympian, right? But then later she's dating Spencer Haywood in ’68 when he's considering these things for the first time. He'll say, she was in my ear. And the next year he's going to mount his lawsuit to talk about what equitable labor practices look like and get into the NBA and change that. And I think that there's a way that these connections and these inspirations are really important to understand, like you said, the effect of the Trayvon Martin generation as it's been called. And I think that so many of us are a part of that generation where that was so reverberating.
And then thinking about what you just said, the layering on of method is like, “What are the tools that we've developed? Where's our toolkit? And how is it getting disseminated to people?” becomes the next part of that equation. And I think seeing that and seeing that through the action of taking a knee has been so…It’s been like, okay, it's taking a knee and here's a fist and whatever, but like actually sitting with your book and unpacking it and thinking about it as a method I think really helps, because then we can also do this work as saying, okay, so what's next? Like, what tools do we continue to need? What have you seen, or are you continually in touch with those in your book, or what are you thinking of when you're looking around the sports landscape, of other methods or other tools that people seem to be trying on to continue in this kind of vein and work in this way?
Dave: That's a great question. I mean, I see a lot of individuals and leagues trying to figure out whether they're going to operate with an inside or an outside strategy, because the leagues are really trying to take this generation of players who are interested in movements for social justice and make sure that they're slotted in these very inoffensive parameters.
Amira: Yes.
Dave: Like, things that can actually end up burnishing the image of a league. So, you know, you care about no cash bail as an issue, they'll put you in a room with a police captain, so you can hash out your differences. And it's stunning, because…And then, you know, the hope is that that will either assuage or discourage the player from thinking that they're actually doing anything. Or it can serve as well as good PR for the team, like pictures of young Black athletes with old white police officers, and say look, look at us, we’re of the community and the like.
But the advantage of that approach if you're a player – the only advantage, really – is that it's safe. And so if you're in a job, like a professional football player, and you're only going to play three and a half years, and you don’t have a guaranteed contract, that can look very attractive. But they're wrestling with, well, what's actually going to work? And how are we actually going to be able to start pushing it forward? So, yeah. I think a combination of that and the fact that I think in 2021 – and this just goes from some of the athletes I've spoken to – there's been a bit of a clamp down, you know?
Amira: Yes.
Dave: I've called it like a reassertion of hierarchy, because like, 2020, you know, as often historically in times of profound crisis and upheaval, social relationships can change pretty dramatically. And 2020, the year of the pandemic, all of a sudden the players have all the power because if they choose not to play, there's no television revenue and there's no nothing. You know, you might as well turn the light off in the store. And so the idea of them having the space to speak out was something that every league bent over backwards to say, well, we allow this, we're for this, we're on the side of this. And of course that came with its own white backlash. You know, sports is just a small part of that in a broader sense.
And so now in 2021, like, I talked to this one Major League Baseball player and he's like, “This is different,” you know? “I feel much more like management is trying to hear what I'm trying to say to people. Players are less interested in hearing what I have to say. I feel like everybody here is brainwashed!” You know, we've all had that feeling sometimes. But just a real change in attitude and tone in the locker rooms in terms of what is considered acceptable speech, conversation, et cetera. And so that's the strategic point, like, well, what do you do in the face of that? I mean, you can't just fold the tent. You got to figure out then, okay, what's the best strategy for dealing with this new scenario?
Amira: Yeah. And then the other thing that happens is that for the places who are giving lip service or even some investment, right? It feels like the line has moved, but there’s still a line. And so you can talk about voting or police brutality, but don’t you dare talk about Palestine, right? Like, don’t you dare talk about…Like, even you can talk about voter suppression, but we can't have robust conversations about like other facets of the system that seem kind of off limits still. And I think you put this beautifully in a piece you wrote about the NBA and talking about a comparison to Ali and whatnot. And you said it stops at the border, right? It stops at the edge of the nation.
And I think that in a time where we've been more connected than ever via technology and social media, while also disconnected in person and through contact, where we're in this fuzzy way where there's a lot of awareness, right? But we're building with really fragile sticks. And I was thinking about that a lot this summer during the Olympics, because they're always awful, but this year felt like even more awful than usual. But what was interesting to me – and I talked to Jules about this a little bit, and you and Jules did such great work during the Olympics – is there's people who are usually not part of the conversation who suddenly were like, hey, the Olympics suck. Right? And even Olympic athletes were like, this is like really…I’m remembering destruction in Rio differently now, right?
And I think that there's at once this way that people are genuinely seeing things differently, and then also I'm really interested to see like what happens next when we think globally, right? When you think about what you just described in terms of how are people trying to navigate this moment. But like, the Olympics made me think about all the things that are now on the table that people are talking about, but are running into structures that are unyielding and very kind of grounded in a domestic politics only, that prevents some of this other conversation on corruption, on abuse, on abuses globally.
Dave: As you were saying that, I was thinking of something that Morgan Campbell, Canadian sports journalists and opinionist, what he said. He said, you know, we speak about the Olympics as if they're too big to fail, but what if they're too big to succeed? And I felt like that was more than a very good turn of phrase. It also to me reflected a much broader move of the people with whom I was speaking, people who formerly were big Olympic boosters, even people who'd been broadcasters at the Olympics and paid a great deal of money to be Olympic boosters. You know, they're starting to ask structural questions precisely because of the illogic of this past year. Because, you know, these are globally traveled folks, the people in the Olympic circles and the broadcast circles. They’ve been to Tokyo. They know this is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. And it just happens to have a very, very low vaccination rate. And this is where you're going to put the Olympics?
Like, for a lot of folks, that made…You said it really well. That made them think about Rio in a different way. Like, wow. If we're doing this in Tokyo, what does that say about what happened to the east end of London in 2012? What does it say about that? And then, you know, ticking through the previous Olympiads and all the different ways this debt, this displacement and hyper-militarization takes root in these different places. There's a potential, and I felt this potential for 10 years and it hasn't quite come to pass. So, we'll see. But there's this potential for these movements against these mega events to have a global currency and create a real global movement – you know, not global discussions or conferences or…
Amira: Task forces.
Dave: Task forces. Yeah. Or WhatsApp threads, not that! But like really concrete boots on the ground people saying that, you know, these…Using sports as an instrument of exploitation is not going to be tolerated.
Amira: I know for me, the last few years have been kind of weird. I feel like there's just lie a little weird…To see what we've been talking about and working on, right? What you've been writing for so long explode into public discourse in this way. How has it been navigating that? Has it been like energizing? Are there days where you're like, great! Are there days where you're like, okay, we need to reset the terms of the conversation. Or you're like, great, everybody, now that you're here, here's something else! How has it been?
Dave: I feel like a fly who landed on the back of a bucking Bronco. [Amira laughs] And I have to constantly constantly remind myself that I am not in fact steering this horse. I am not riding this horse. I'm just hanging on for dear life. Because it has been pretty damn jarring. And I haven't really spoken about this with folks, or if people ask, I'm just like, oh, it's great. It's wonderful that there's a larger ocean of folks doing this work and–
Amira: I'm fucking tired. I don't know about you. [laughs]
Dave: That's what I'm saying. Like, it's in turn exhausting. It can at times be exhilarating for sure. It can be sometimes monumentally…I don't want to say depressing, but just like you wanna throw something against a wall because you feel like people are making the same arguments that have already been made and that we thought we had conquered and now we're having to go after it again. But in the broad sense, you know, there is something terrific about the fact that…Like, I used to – and this is like 2003, 2004 – I once wrote a whole column about a tattoo on the back of a mixed martial artist because he had over his huge 50 inch back, the 50 little fish, or the hundred little fish who all come together to eat the big fish, that famous union poster. And it says “organize” underneath.
© 1980 Bill Dobbs
And I wrote a whole column about his tattoo and what it says that that's in the world of mixed martial arts. In other words, it was a pretty thin gruel. [Amira laughs] There wasn't a lot to write about. [laughs] Or if there were things to write about, I mean, it was always historic.
I mean, that's how I met John Carlos, is when I was working for a small newspaper, and it completely changed my life. It was because there was really nothing to write about. And it was like the 34th anniversary of 1968 and I used that as an excuse to track him down. And he was shocked anybody wanted to talk to him. He was sitting in his office at a public high school in Palm Springs, California, where he was a guidance counselor. He just picked up the phone and was like, hello? And I'm like, hi, is John Carlos there? He was like, “This is Carlos, who's this?” It was just like, oh my goodness. You know, he's just…And I hear kids yelling in the background. He's like, “Hey! I'm on the phone!” Just at work, doing his thing!
And, you know, so it's not just about me. It's like, here's this John Carlos, who nobody wants to talk to, in this high school in Palm Springs, California. I'm at this small Black-owned newspaper in Prince George's County, Maryland where I get my little sports column that I get to write, that can be sports and politics. And in return, I'll do all the crappy things around the office, but I get this little bit of space in the paper to write my sports and politics column. And it was just not a lot to write about. But the benefit, as I guess I was just alluding to, is it forced me to really learn a ton about the history, because there wasn't a lot in the present. So it's like, let me try to learn this stuff in a way that's deep, not just wide. So, this last period, I mean, in some respect, it feels amazing. In another respect, it feels exhausting.
Amira: Yeah, yeah. Exhausting is a good word for how I also feel preemptively about Kaepernick's Netflix show, and mostly because as a transracial adoptee who studies, protests and politics in sports, it's like literally so much of…It’s like every theme of my life colliding in a show that I know people are going to be talking about. And I'm already tired about it. [laughs] And not of the discussion, but rather the expectation of participation in the discussion, and of all the things where I'm like, sometimes it has moved beyond…I don't know. It's out of even what many of us could imagine happening, right? Like, Netflix series, what? Like, we're talking about capital in a different way, right? We're talking about social capital in a different way. We're talking about money in a different way. And so I'm wrestling with that. And so how are you considering, you know, really hammering at the point that you're like, no, we're looking at all of the seeds that were planted, as Colin Kaepernick the celebrity is also charting his own path right now?
Dave: Yeah. I mean, these are two very different projects.
Amira: Yeah.
Dave: You know, I'm writing about a movement that was sparked because a lot of young, very, very upset athletes saw a method by which they could protest too. And the knee to me is in a lot of ways the least interesting part of their stories. It's the fallout, it's teammates, it's their coaches, it's their family members. It's how do you live life as a 17 year old when there are threats of violence coming to you over your social media? How do you function on a day-to-day basis? Like, those are the…One person said to me who read the book, that it's almost like a “What to expect when you’re protesting.” [laughter] And I was like, well, if that's what it is, then that's awesome. And Colin is of course taking a different route where he is really…What’s the word for it? Just nesting in his own history, and saying, you know, this is going to be my contribution. And I think that could be amazing. That could be absolutely amazing. And I think people are dying to hear from him. And I think that approach, it'll spawn a thousand dissertations.
Amira: Yes. [laughs]
Dave: So, it'll add to our collective intellectual currency. It also reflects something that's not just about Colin at all, but a much broader trend of people who are come through sports, but develop this incredible cultural capital and decide, you know, that the Ali’s of today don't need the Howard Cosells of the 1960s. And so it's like, we're going to create our own content. And let's be clear about this: this isn't entirely some kind of a rebellion as we might think of it.
Amira:
Dave: I mean, Tom, Brady's doing this.
Amira: Yes. Everybody has content.
Dave: Everybody's got their content production arm for what they're doing. And that's interesting too. I mean, there's a part of me that's like, well, sports writing has kind of blown this for decades. So, you know, you reap what you sow. [laughs] Like, sometimes I really feel that. You populated yourself with old conservative white dudes for decade after decade after decade, and shock, the young athlete, once they have enough financial capital, says, “I'm going to go around you,” you know? And that's great. I also though think that we as journalists still want to be part of what's happening, you know? Want to be part of the mix, want to tell the stories. And so I'm just curious about what's gonna happen going forward. I'm as curious about Colins' documentary as I am of how he's going to do press for the documentary.
Amira: Right, right.
Dave: It's all very interesting to me, the new media landscape.
Amira: Exactly. This is also why I find your book to be so important, because in many ways an absence of Colin's voice – though we've watched the moves he's made, right? So we know that he was blackballed and we know he sacrificed his job. We know he had Nike, right? We know he's been doing work with Know Your Rights. We know he's been working with publishing. We know we now have this documentary. We've seen things, even if we've not heard exactly from him. What we miss when we miss these little stories, these smaller stories, is that there's other people suffering consequences, right? That we don't follow through. We don't know. We don't know what happens to a team in Beaumont when this occurs. When thinking through that, is there a story in the book that immediately jumps out to you that resonates with you that really hangs on your heart in a way that you return to in your mind?
Dave: It's funny, because I didn't just interview these folks. I went back to them after George Floyd was murdered and we spoke again, and those discussions were a lot deeper. Then I wrote up my book, and for each and every one of the folks who was young…I didn't do this for Megan Rapinoe. I interviewed Megan Rapinoe in the book, Eric Reid. I didn't do this with them. But with the young people, I sent them what I wrote, and said, “It's important to me that you be comfortable with this.” And some of them sent it back and said, great. But a lot of them were like, ooh, can you make this point? And please give a shout out to my cheerleader sisters, because they stood by me every step of the way. Can you say that? And I was like, great. I don't care. Yeah, it's fantastic. And the other thing about it that was so important to me – and people who've read my other books and then read this, they'll notice a difference – is my voice, other than the intro, is not in this book.
Like, this is a book that has been openly and proudly surrendered to the people that I'm speaking with, because what you said was something that weighed on my mind, because it's like, in the absence of Colins' voice, am I saying that my voice should be listened to? That seems inappropriate and problematic for a lot of different reasons. But what about the voices of the people who did what Colin did, who also sacrificed, who also faced repercussions, who also tried to build the movement? It's like, why shouldn't their voices be centered? You know, it doesn't have to be Colin's voice. This is an era of struggle, and he and the people around him should be incredibly proud that he's bequeathed this to this young generation of athletes. But, you know, their voice needs to matter also right now.
Amira: Yeah. I love that so much. It’s why I committed to doing oral histories for my historical work. But it's my favorite thing about sitting in the present and doing it. My favorite piece that I've written recently was my pre-Olympics piece for Slate which, again, it was just interviews with Black women on Team USA. And it was like getting out of the way, passing the mic. All I did was put them in conversation with each other, and then watch it kind of blossom. And so what you said really resonates in that way, and whose voices we get to hear from. A nd I'm so happy and so thankful for you to bring us these voices and these voices to the world. I don't want to leave without asking you also…We were just talking about joy and where we're finding joy, what we're looking forward to, self care, all of those things, right? What is sparking joy for you right now?
Dave: Well, the easy answer would for me to say reading your Slate article, because I loved that and passed that around to as many people as I could find. I thought that was just terrific, terrific work, and such incredible insight to the moment that we're in. But I got to say, I'm getting so much joy from just like…Oh man, that's such a crazy question. I'm getting ready to coach my son's rec basketball team.
Amira: Ahh! I love that.
Dave: You know, I love coaching rec ball. I love at least trying to be or aspiring to be the kind of coach that I like to write and say, “This is the kind of coaching we need!” And I've found that that's a lot easier to say than do sometimes.
Amira: Yeah. I already know this about myself. I can't go anywhere near my kids' sports stuff, because I'm like, ahh! What are you doing!? [laughs]
Dave: Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. And so it's like, I'll write some column about the coach trying to transform players and bring them together and turn them into adults and responsible people – who are of course also anti-patriarchal, against all forms of oppression through sports. And you know, I'm trying to think about that when I walk in and talk to the team. But then it's like, my god! Will you just hustle, please! You know? And then I'm like, oh gosh, that's not what I want to do! [laughter]
Amira: Right. Or do the work your way! Seize the means of production. [laughs] There you go. The field is yours!
Dave: Just rise up and kick me out of here.
Amira: Right, exactly. [laughs]
Dave: I’m trying.
Amira: Why haven't you started a revolution?
Dave: Yeah, what's going on? I'm so disappointed in you.
Amira: Right, right.
Dave: But that just brings me so much joy. And when I do something like go to a ball game with my kid or something like that, what it does is it allows me to see that sports can be better than what it is. And it's almost like a zen feeling or a feeling of great peace where I say to myself, I'd like to fight for a world where sports can speak just to the best angels of who we are and not the worst.
Amira: Which is why my joy is Ted Lasso. [laughs]
Dave: Yeah. That’ll do it.
Amira: I’m always like, “Believe!” But I love that. Thank you so much for joining me today. The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World. Out now! Get it wherever you get your books, indie bookstores. So, yes. Thank you so much.
Dave: I get to now check this off the proverbial bucket list. I've wanted to be on BIAD since jump.
Amira: Yes!
Dave: So I'm super excited right now. You asked me what brings me joy? This is going to keep my toes a-tapping for the rest of the weekend.
Amira: Awesome. Well, we are so happy to have you grace Burn It All Down. Friend of the show, friend of all of us. And it's just been a pleasure, Dave. Thanks.
Dave: Thank you.