DZ: Sports is something that has existed in
every human society once people have had the
ability to clothe themselves, to provide shelter
for themselves, and to feed themselves.
Sports becomes an outgrowth of a functioning
society.
You fast forward to 2020, we are not a functioning
society in the United States and you see that
reflected in the world of sports.
But the bigger picture is that sports reflects
whatever economic system it exists under,
whether feudalism, hunter gatherer societies,
and of course capitalism, to get to your question.
Under capitalism we've seen sports become
a big business.
The game is not just to be played, the game
is to be sold to as wide an audience as possible.
I think the people who first started sports,
as we developed as a capitalist society certainly
in the United States, in their wildest dreams
could not have envisioned the kind of global
leviathan that the sports world has become.
A trillion dollar entity that reaches into
every corner of the earth.
So sports is big business and because it's
big business all kinds of issues that exist
under capitalism, whether issues regarding
labor, social movements, struggle, fights
for equity, they all not just reflect themselves
in the world of sports, but the world of sports
then shapes those battles off the field and
in broader sectors of society.
So I think it does us a great disservice when
you try to de-link the big business of sports
from how capitalism is existing and developing
in our society.
Sports is capitalism and capitalism is sports.
RW: How do you feel about the argument that
making money, or profit, is somehow shaping
literally the sports we have, the sports contests,
the development of young people as they mature
into being athletes.
How do you see the impact of the business
side of it shaping the other sides of it?
DZ: I think it warps youth sports, to take
it through the line.
Youth sports, over the last generation, has
become a big business unto itself.
It's become a feeder system into the colleges
and into the pros, and this is a relatively
recent development, this idea of seeing youth
sports as a profit center, and not just a
place where young people gather to play.
We've seen the way capitalism has distorted
youth sports to a pretty profound degree.
One of the ways it distorts youth sports is
that it creates a value system that says only
people who can play should play.
And if you're not a good athlete, the best
you can be is a watcher, is a spectator, is
somebody who looks at the people who can play
play.
And it's hard to think of something more warped
than that, this idea when you take sports
and kids, which should be a site of fun and
fair play and community and developing friendship,
to see it become something that just mirrors
professional sports.
So that's the way it's warped youth sports.
And by the way, a statistic that I find very
troubling is that somewhere it's estimated
that somewhere between 60-70% of young kids
quit playing sports by the age of 13.
That's a terrible thing, I mean it relates
to young people's health, it relates to how
they're able to function during their teenage
years and it's all because of this value system
that's projected onto the world of sports.
