>We have few left sports heroes. Many come in with left sympathies, but
their >tax accountants generally move them to the right pretty fast.
>
>Dave Megassy was in my neighborhood food conspiracy, but he did not ever
become >a star. Reggie Jackson used to come down to KPFA, but he became a
>conservative. Bill Lee ran as
>the candidate for the Rhinoceros party. Tom Macmillan was a relatively
liberal >congressman. Bill Bradley, less so.
>
>Then we have the Jack Kemp, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Jim Bunning, Steve
Largent, >J.T. Watts crowd.
Michael,
No question, the vast majority of pro athletes are unthinking yahoos. Often their only connection with schooling up through college is as a place to develop athletic skills and get noticed for a pro career. Nowadays they're rich and isolated from common folk and their outlook reflects that.
Almost all athletes who try to milk their fame for a political career are conservatives. To me McMillan was merely an asskisser with no real principles. Bradley can actually put two thoughts together, but his enthusiastic support for NAFTA tells you most of what you need to know about him. Charles Barkley is next in the line of yahoo athletes (to run for Alabama gov., he says) Even Jackie Robinson, the ultimate sports revolutionary, was a Republican forchrissakes!
But you started me thinking, Michael. Off the top of my head a few athletes with at least some affinity with the left (I have to fudge a bit):
Pete Gent, who walked away from the Dallas Cowboys and wrote the novel North Dallas Forty, that exposed Landry's impersonal and brutal machine.
Jim Brown, the football great, who works with inner city groups
Bill Russell, loner, but deeply thoughtful, who knows where he came from, and understands racism
Jim Bouton, iconoclast, who wrote Ball Four, taking on the baseball establishment (but he may be a libertarian)
Tom Seavers' statement in '69: If the (Amazin') Mets can win the Series, why can't we get out of Vietnam
What about Muhammad Ali. A mixed bag, but you can't forget that he refused Army induction during Vietnam because he said he was against the war, and paid a penalty. He is revered in the third world, and I think, had he not contracted Parkinsons, would be doing some of the work that Jesse Jackson now does (and probably better)
And let's go way back for Paul Robeson, a great college athlete before pro sports were well developed, a communist, and agitator.
OK, It's a slim list.
Charles,
I don't think the baseball players union and their strikes have anything to do with being lefty. The supply of baseball labor power is artificially restricted because owners limit the number of pro teams. Capital and labor are partners in that; they both want it that way because it drives up both salaries and the revenue for individual teams. Moreover, baseball labor is unconnected to any other, even related, labor. You can be sure the players' union will not stop playing in support of a strike by vendors or stadium construction workers. In short, the player's union exists only for the purpose of maximizing player salaries. That ain't lefty in this circumstance, particularly as it is unconnected to the class struggle against capital.
In fact, the baseball players union is in some ways more conservative than the owners' consortium. An 18 person committee is due to offer recommendations in a few months about reorganizing baseball, some of which no doubt will require much more revenue sharing among teams. Besides the major capitalists like Murdock, Turner, Disney and Steinbrenner, who do you think will be the primary opponent of revenue sharing? Yep the players union because it will dampen salaries a bit. Actually it will hurt mostly the top salaries and probably *benefit* those players making less, and the union is *still* against it. The union will be in opposition to the small market owners, fans, and the best intererst of the game itself (with distinct haves and have nots, pennant races are currently a joke). How is that for being conservative? Donald Fehr has more in common with your local neoclassical apologist freemarket economist or Ayn Rand than he does with anything remotely lefty.