From 1979 to 1991, the Los Angeles Lakers would become a dominant force in the world of professional basketball and in American culture more broadly. Led by coach Pat Riley and star players Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the “Showtime” era of the Lakers is still, in many ways, the standard by which other sports dynasties are measured today. On the court, in the locker room, and beyond, the legendary Lakers franchise was both a reflection and a driver of a culture, a sport, and a country undergoing seismic changes, and the HBO dramatized series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty tells the story of the the larger-than-life personalities and politics that defined the Showtime era.
This week on Edge of Sports, host Dave Zirin speaks with actor Solomon Hughes about Winning Time, which is debuting its second season on August 6, and about stepping into the role of playing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar himself. Later in this episode, Zirin shares some choice words on the Oakland A’s and Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred; then, in “Ask a Sports Scholar,” we talk with Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas-Austin, about her forthcoming book “Can’t Eat a Medal”: The Lives and Labors of Black Women Athletes in the Age of Jim Crow.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: David Hebden
Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Dave Zirin:
Welcome to Edge of Sports, the TV show only on the Real News Network. I’m Dave Zirin and we have an amazing show This week, my goosebumps have goosebumps allow me to explain. One of my favorite TV shows of the last year was HBO’s Winning Time. It was a dramatic reenactment of the wildly entertaining story behind the fast breaking, hard partying Los Angeles Lakers teams of the 1980s, the team of Magic Johnson, Pat Riley, and the Man in the Middle, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Now, the coaches, executives, and players from back then all hated Winning Time. They said that the warts and all drama was rife with exaggerations, caricatures, and untruths. But the public loved it, the critics loved it. And you know what? I loved it too. And the breakout star of the show was Solomon Hughes, who had the extremely difficult task of playing the iconic Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, portraying the very poker-faced, deeply intelligent Kareem would prove difficult for any actor.
But for Solomon Hughes, who played hoops for four years at Cal Berkeley while earning multiple degrees, it was also his first acting job. It is a wild story, and we have him here today on the Edge of Sports, but that’s not all. I also have some choice words about Oakland, the Oakland days, and the imminent move of this iconic, iconic baseball team to the great city of Oakland. And I’m talking to a frontline sports scholar, one of the best in the biz. Brilliant, brilliant stuff here, Dr. Amira Rose Davis. But first, let’s talk to the man in the middle, Solomon Hughes, Solomon Hughes. Thanks so much for joining us.
Solomon Hughes:
Thank you so much for having me, Dave.
Dave Zirin:
Oh my goodness. I have so many questions, and I’m going to start with the one I think probably my listeners are wondering right now, after that introduction I just gave you, sir, you never acted before. You have a PhD. How did you even hear they were casting for Winning Time? Did you think you’d get the part? How did this happen for you?
Solomon Hughes:
Man, we hear this from our parents and they talk about the power and importance of relationships, and it was two former teammates from Cal, one who has been acting for about 20 years. Robbie Jones and another who I was roommates with, Francisco Elon, who played with the Spurs, played endgame for a number of years, and now lives in the Netherlands. So Francisco, they’ve been doing a search for a number of months, and a casting agent reached out to him. Francisco wasn’t interested in auditioning, but he suggested me. And so Robbie calls me up and says, “Just so you know, since Francisco suggested you as someone who can audition for this part.” And so I did the self tape, and for me, it was just fun. It was a fun experience. I didn’t really think too much of it. I was like, “This is an HBO show. There’s no way this is going to work out, but I’m going to have fun digging in and recording these scenes.”
And so I sent in the self tape, and then about four days later, I found out that they were going to fly me down to LA do an person audition in front of all the producers and writers. And that was crazy, but it was one of those things where you’ve gone this far, just leave it all out there and see what happens. And then a week after that, I found out I got the part, and it was mind blowing for sure. So I tell people that I’ve, film and TV and theater have had a huge impact on me personally. And so I feel like I’ve always, I’ve had my eye on this industry just as a huge fan. And so I feel like getting the opportunity to step into it has just been an enormous blessing.
Dave Zirin:
Amazing. And I want to talk to you about acting about your process, but first, the question that sprung to my mind immediately when I learned about your academic background is, “Okay, here’s a guy who played center at the highest collegiate level. Here’s a guy with serious academic chops.” And before you ever heard of Winning Time, did anyone ever tell you that just by virtue of being a cerebral, academic, focused basketball player, the man in the middle, a center, did anyone ever say to you, “Wow, you’re kind of like a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?”
Solomon Hughes:
There’s at least I can remember two occasions. One was when I was playing because I shot a jump hook, which is not nearly as graceful as the sky hook, but it is very, very effective. And I led the PAC 12 and field goal percentage specifically because I was shooting the shot. And so I think I’d hear people kind of make that comparison there, but I also think my dad is someone who was a huge fan of Kareem’s and really influenced by Kareem as well. And so I think essentially trying to emulate my father, I was in a lot of ways emulating the legacy that Kareem has left for so many of us.
Dave Zirin:
What was your Kareem knowledge base before getting this role?
Solomon Hughes:
So I thought I knew just about everything growing up in Southern California, watching the Lakers in the ’80s, I really thought I knew just about everything. His autobiography was one of the first big books that I read growing up and-
Dave Zirin:
Oh, me too.
Solomon Hughes:
Yeah. It was so great. But he’s written a few books about himself. He had that beautiful documentary Minority of One. So getting into those, I just feel like it just really blew open the doors in terms of there was so much more about his life. I mean, what I found, what I really enjoyed learning about was just his time in New York, all of the different things that influenced him, music, civil rights, black American rights, et cetera, all of those things, just his passion around journalism, those things were incredibly fun to uncover and learn about. So I would say that my knowledge base was bigger than the average fan, but Kareem is an ocean, so I feel like there’s just, I’ve only just dipped my toes. And the great thing about him is his legacy continues. He’s still writing books, he’s still producing, putting out media that brings history into the conversation in a really entertaining and engaging way.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. How familiar were you with that history of the 1960s of the activist athlete? And Sure. In that tone, I got to ask, there’s some amazing books by your bedside as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Winning Time, you got Huey Newton. You’ve got the Quran, you’ve got other books that are so strongly of the moment. So how much of that history did you walk in, “Okay, I’m going to play this because I’m familiar with that moment.”
Solomon Hughes:
Yeah, yeah. Similarly, so my father grew up in the south, and at a pretty young age, he moved to California. But just having a legacy of family or from the South who experienced Jim Crow segregation. And then when they came to California, experienced a different kind of racism where it’s not all the markings of what you experienced in the South, but it was definitely present. And so I think my dad was very intentional about making sure that his kids were aware of our history, were aware of the struggles, the sacrifices.
And so I think growing up as a kid, I was just really intrigued by history and in particular the journey of African Americans. And so I was pretty familiar, but again, it’s fun to go back. I went back and reread his books to go back and read Huey Newton to go back and read Assata Shakur, read these books that you read in college, or you read when you’re in high school, but now you’re bringing it together with life experience. That was when I was 20 years old. Now I’m over 40. And to revisit those things, especially when we’re in this time where we’re still having a lot of the same conversations, it is really compelling.
Dave Zirin:
So you went to Berkeley. You majored in sociology. Did you Were a hooper. So where my head goes immediately is the great sports sociologist who was at Berkeley for so many decades, the legendary Dr. Harry Edwards. Did your paths ever cross?
Solomon Hughes:
Yeah. So I believe it was my freshman year, he had stopped teaching sociology of sport. And up to that point, everyone was like, “If you take one class at Berkeley, it has to be sociology of sport with Dr. Edwards.” And I got there. He was no longer teaching it. I still took the class. It was a great faculty member who did teach it, but he did teach a course on slave history, enslaved person’s history. And David, it was, it’s one of those things where it’s every day you’re pinching yourself. You’re in this classroom. I know myself and a couple of my teammates were lucky enough to get into the class. And so much of it is a performance, right? You’re talking about this brilliant individual who embodies so much of the journey of African Americans, and I remember it being a classroom experience where you could hear a pin drop. Everybody was just totally captured by everything he was saying. So it was an incredible experience for sure. And his book, his experiences, et cetera, obviously were very influential on just the way I think about the world.
Dave Zirin:
Adam McKay, the director and the mind behind Winning Time, I spoke to him before this interview. He described you as a great actor, a natural, brilliant. This is Adam McKay we’re talking about, dude puts out movies like, I eat potato chips. So is this something that you want to do going forwardly, or is this for you, the part, and then it’s back to the classroom?
Solomon Hughes:
No, I would love to pursue acting. This realm, when I think of how much I’ve been influenced by film, TV, theater, et cetera, I’m eager to pursue a role in this space to pay back a lot of what I’ve benefited from. So when I hear people talk about they’ve been touched by my performance, that means everything. That means everything. And I think it makes me want to work harder, learn more. I’ve been really blessed because I’ve been able to work with a number of incredibly talented acting coaches. But beyond that, being on the set of Winning Time for two years, I’m around master actors, masters of the crew, the cast, et cetera. Everybody is exceptional with what they do. And again, you’re working with the mind of Adam McKay. I tell people, when I did my in-person audition after I was done and I was leaving, I stopped and I just thanked them for the opportunity.
I said, “Adam, no matter what happens, regardless of whether I get this job, I just want you to know I am an enormous fan of what you do for this world.” And that’s from the bottom of my heart. And so it’s funny because I felt like there was this moment where I had to really, as I was prepping for the audition, he was going to be in the room, and I was really excited about me meeting Adam McKay, but there was the work that had to be done. I had to really put myself out there. So yeah, I would love to pursue it because there’s so many stories. Dave, you know this. Again, and so talking about people that have influenced me, you are one of those people that has have deeply influenced me because the way you talk about sport, the way so you bring into the conversation, our history, our culture, et cetera, it’s just, you’re an incredible storyteller. And for me, that’s what acting is. It’s being a part of these powerful stories, these powerful narratives that can change people’s hearts and lives.
Dave Zirin:
To put it mildly, there’s so many stories that haven’t been told. I read them in nonfiction form and I ask myself, “Where’s the movie?” And the answer often has to do with both not taking sports seriously, it has to do with not taking movies that center black actors seriously. And I think if we are moving beyond that, and there are at least some signs, certainly in Winning Time as part of that, that we’re moving beyond that, I think there’s just potential for an absolute renaissance of tales from the world of athlete activism, but it’s going to take actors who know how to play some very challenging individuals. And that’s where I get to my next question for you, because I think it would be very hard for even a seasoned actor to play Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, because I’ve met Kareem, I’ve interviewed Kareem. His emotions and his thoughts are so deeply internalized. What has been your method been your thought process for expressing the internal life?
Solomon Hughes:
Yeah, so because of COVID, there was a delay in completing season one. So we filmed the pilot, and then we had a lot of time off before we came back to film. And up to that point, and again, I went back and read his books, but that additional time just really gave me the opportunity to even further immerse myself in not only what he’s written about himself, but the ecosystem that he came up in. So I wanted to learn more about Harlem. I was already a fan of jazz music, but that was the only thing I was listening to for a year and reading about artists, reading about their backgrounds, his spiritual journey. I started reading the Quran. I’m Christian, I have Muslim friends, had lots of conversations with him, and it was like I wanted to leave no stone unturned in terms of what are some of the things that potentially influenced this life, this greatly lived life.
The other thing is I think we really benefit from being in this YouTube era, because I got really good at changing up the search terms. And I would find these interviews from the sixties where he’s talking to reporters, and it was incredible. There’s so much content about him and seeing the person, essentially, his journey from his college years as to who he is now, there’s a lot of really, really interesting and compelling content out there. So I think it was… But even with that, Dave, I feel like I just approached it with an immense amount of humility because to your point, he’s going to go down as one of the most important Americans that’s ever lived. I don’t think there’s any… In the world. I don’t think there’s any debate about that. He’s just lived such a full and influential life.
And so with that said, there’s an immense amount of humility, even when I’m getting ready to step in front of camera that I obviously cannot perfectly portray this man, but I can just out of gratitude, put forth my best effort. I often tell people there, I know that he hasn’t been a big fan of the show, but I think the reality is this, I’m just one of a number of people over time that will step up to be a part of his story, because his story is so massive. Now I met a playwright a few years ago who was working on a play about Kareem, and so his stories, his stories are just so incredible. So I feel like I’m just one of a many I think over time that will have stepped up to try to play this role.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah. And how do you wrestle with that? I said in the introduction that of course, that I love the show that a lot of the former Lakers, not fans of the show, to put it mildly. And you’re playing somebody you so clearly admire who has publicly disavowed the show. I’d love to hear your thought process about how you get your head around all of that. And I’d love to know if there has been a subtle reach out from Kareem’s Camp just to give you dap for doing it so well.
Solomon Hughes:
No, no, subtle reach out. So, well, when Kareem, when he wrote about it was clear that he said he didn’t watch it. And so I think beyond the pilot. So I think there’s that, that’s just the reality, the hope is that he’ll give it a shot at some point. But I think the reality is there’s a lot of reverence, an immense amount of reverence for him. And so it is something to wrestle with for sure. It is. Every actor that I talk to, it’s tough playing somebody who’s still living for sure. And Spencer Haywood is another person whose story is immense. And he’s shown appreciation for it. And so that means a lot. I think especially when you look at his journey, where he came from and how pivotal that his decisions were in terms of changing the game of basketball, changing the NBA professional sports workers’ rights, et cetera.
So that was an immense blessing to know that he had watched it and he appreciated it because he really is a central figure when you talk about the history of the NBA. And so I think like anybody, the hope is that he would give it a chance and he’d watch it and maybe have, see our appreciation for him, but if he doesn’t, it is what it is. And it doesn’t change the fact that we’re all influenced by him. We’re all fans. And the other thing I think in terms of how you wrestle with it is I think it’s hard for us to see how impactful we are beyond ourselves. We have our own first person experience. So Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar changed the world. And so I think the idea that somebody would step up and try to tell their story, I’m like “Buckle up.”
I feel like just get ready. This is when people learn more, because that’s the other thing about this so much fun is people will watch. So I didn’t know that, and I went and read, and I was blown away by that. That’s exactly right. So they were so influential and so many things that were maybe, I want to say, taken for granted in terms of what they started. I think I can only imagine that it’s hard to understand why someone would be that intrigued by your life. But the reality is, again, these men changed the world.
Dave Zirin:
Absolutely. And we do a favor for future generations when we show them with three dimensions. Otherwise, all you’re doing is saying to young people, “Look at this amazing person. You could never be them.” Instead of saying, “Look how amazing this person is, what can you learn from them?”
Solomon Hughes:
I think that’s exactly right. And I think the other thing is, I think if there is concern over someone who might look at these men in that phase of their lives and be judgmental, I mean, that’s the sanctimonious crowd that you’re never going to please anyway. You’re trying to please someone who is always going to be judgmental. I think when you look at this, and to your point, you see the three dimensions. You see, these are humans who are man pursuing incredibly high goals in the midst of incredibly challenging times. It’s an incredibly compelling story.
Dave Zirin:
It is. And for what it’s worth, the relationship between Kareem and Spencer Haywood. And in a way, there’s that kind of subtle generation gap between them and the younger players. They get it in a way, Magic’s crew not is one of my favorite parts about the show and one of the most richly evocative parts about the show, because that tension was always there with that Lakers team, the unsmiling Kareem with the ’60s backdrop and the new Jack Magic with the smile that could light up a room. I mean, that tension is part of what makes it so compelling.
Solomon Hughes:
Right. And the fact that they were able to sustain that for so long, and win five championships.
Dave Zirin:
Oh, with love and appreciation.
Solomon Hughes:
I know. I know.
Dave Zirin:
That’s the amazing part. Not trade me, but love and appreciation.
Solomon Hughes:
Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Dave Zirin:
Let’s get off Winning Time here for the rest of this. I have a couple questions. I know it’s a lot to talk Winning Time, but you played briefly for the Harlem Globe Trotters, and I’d love to hear about that in general, but you’re working on a script that brings together the modern issues of racism and policing that are so much a part of the current conversation with a historical moment involving the Harlem Globe Trotters, can you speak about that? Because I read a little bit of this, I thought it was brilliant. Please. Thank
Solomon Hughes:
You, Dave. Thank you. Yeah, right after college, I didn’t get drafted and I was kind of trying to figure out what was next. And the Globe Charterers, they used to have a team that was essentially comprised of former NBA players and former college players who were aspiring to play professionally. And you would play a series of games, I think it was 14 exhibition games against college teams. In a lot of ways you were basically touring the country and just making people aware that the team would be coming through with the generals later in the year.
And it’s three months. And some of the players I played with were really amazing people. So it wasn’t a long stint, but it was just enough for me to just really be intrigued by the organization, by the history of the organization. And I tell people in the courses that I’ve taught about sport and race, there’s always a component about the globe charterers, because when you think about the way that they were used by the United States as essentially this commercial to show the world everything is okay with black people, it an incredibly… You’re talking about men who… And this is before basketball had really, really taken off.
So this was like America’s team. And so the juxtaposition of being black American men in the ’40s, in the ’50s with so much celebrity, but still there are these realities about the lives that you live in America when you’re outside of your uniform. And so what I wanted to do, so I have a few projects in mind, but with this short film, it was capturing this incident that happened in 1983 where three members of the Globetrotters were in Santa Barbara, in between games, window shopping in downtown Santa Barbara, and they were racially profiled and held at gunpoint by the Santa Barbara Police, and I think it was Lou Dunbar, I think it was Lou Dunbar that said there was this moment where they were held at gunpoint and they were being ordered out of their taxi cab, and his flip flop fell off. And you realize, “If I reach back for that, I’m dead.”
And it’s just that story I tell people, the number of black men in my family that have been in similar situations with the police, where one false move has lethal consequences. Right. It’s really absurd. Right? It’s absurd. I think it’s two things. It’s absurd, but it’s also, it makes sense when you think about the history of this country, the history of race and policing, et cetera. So I’m essentially retelling it in a fictionalized way that kind of captures the sentiments of the ’80s of the Reagan era, because in the ’80s you had very influential black athletes who were supporting Ronald Reagan, and on his second term and the complications of, he presented this message of putting God first. And so I think that was strongly appealing to a lot of black folks who had connections to the church, et cetera. But I think when you look back and you look at his legacy, it’s all performative.
I mean, putting God first looks a lot different then you’re talking when you’re putting God first, you’re talking about justice, you’re talking about equity, you’re talking about not abandoning cities, abandoning communities. So I think I have a couple goal, I have a couple visions in mind for the Globetrotter story because again, arguably America’s most important sports team and the men amount of labor that they put into this to sustain this very, very important American tradition, I think it’s a story that has to be told, and I’m looking forward to getting this short film up and running, and then I have some longer term feature ideas as well.
Dave Zirin:
Amazing. And you explore that contradiction really at the heart of the Globetrotters, which is that they’re this incredible expression of art and athleticism, and there’s also the expectation that they be all about Americana, that they entertain, that they smile in a country where they’re being mistreated at gunpoint in Santa Barbara. To explore that, I mean, is I think one of the great goals of fiction and nonfiction or the kind of fictionally nonfiction expression, biopic art that you’re becoming so accustomed to.
Solomon Hughes:
Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think, you said that their job was to smile and to entertain. And again, when you look back like YouTube again, YouTube has just been this great just archival resource. You find all of this footage where they’re playing in these different cities and they’re just delighting throngs of people, and then they get on the bus, drive to the next city, do it again. And it’s just talking about the labor and the contradictions of the realities that they were facing as black men in America. I think it’s… Yeah.
Dave Zirin:
Amazing. Solomon Hughes, you’ve been so generous with your time. How can people keep up with you and the, shall we say, giant steps you’ll be taking going forward?
Solomon Hughes:
Love that. So I’m on Instagram right now, but I am thinking about creating a website that kind of captures some more of my visions and my goals in terms of how I want to impact this space. But @SolomonYoungHughes is where people can find me online right now on Instagram.
Dave Zirin:
Amazing. Hey, thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Solomon Hughes:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Dave Zirin:
And should we call you Dr. Hughes? Can I call you Dr. Hughes?
Solomon Hughes:
Solomon is perfectly fine.
Dave Zirin:
All right. You got it. Thanks so much, Solomon.
Wow, that was Solomon Hughes, but now I got some choice words. Okay, look, in the early 1970s, the Oakland A’s were a dynasty winning three straight World series led by players like Reggie Jackson, Raleigh Fingers, and Jim Catfish Hunter. They also had a 12 year old kid from the streets of Oaktown who entertained the clubhouse with his dancing moves. This kid’s name was Stanley Burrell, and he had an uncanny resemblance to the great home run king “Hammerin’ Hank Hank Aaron. So they called him Hammer Stanley Burrell took that on as his dancing name, and 15 years later became known to the world as MC Hammer. I tell that story because it speaks to how woven this team is into our collective culture, but I also tell that story because it would not have happened if they were the Idaho A’s or the San Antonio A’s or Yes, the Las Vegas A’s because the Ballad of the funky head hunter, aka MC Hammer is not an A’s story.
It’s not even a baseball story, it’s an Oakland story. Hell, the unlikely start of Hammer’s career is an Oakland legend, as sure as Huey Newton and Bobby Seal putting out the first issue of the Black Panther speaks while listening to Bob Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man is an Oakland legend, a legend rooted in a truth that perhaps can only be found in Oaktown. And this is because of Oakland that this team, the A’s, has given us more legendary people and moments than we have had any right to expect.
The Bash brothers, Mark McGuire and Jose Canseco, the famous 20 game winning streak with one of the most inexpensive rosters in the sport and a World series in 1989 that literally cracked the earth open. But now because a billionaire franchise owner who made his fortune by inheriting a sweatshop empire as well as a major league baseball commissioner who really seems to hate the sport of baseball, the as are looking to be leaving Oakland to go to a publicly funded paradise in the Las Vegas desert, I’ve had much to say over the years about how these sweetheart stadium deals fleece taxpayers and the poor about how publicly funded arenas are nothing but monuments to corporate greed about how economists say you’d be better off dropping a billion dollars from a plane and letting people pick up the money and spend it than using the money for a sports complex.
This is not a debate, it’s a fact. And academics have been putting out the data that proves this for decades. But for the very powerful, these stadium deals are pure gold, a magical alchemy that takes public funds and after being laundered through sports becomes private profit. I have much to say about all of this and to the working people of Vegas, I am so sorry. I am sorry for your schools and hospitals and parks. I am sorry for what is about to happen to you, but I want to focus here not on the Oakland Franchise owner Gap clothing heir John Fisher. I’m not going to focus on the way he sold off every decent player on the team to drive down attendance and then cry poverty in order to facilitate this move. I’m not going to focus on him. He’s nothing. A garbage bag stuffed with spam doing exactly what he was told.
I want to focus on the person pulling his strings, Major League baseball commissioner Rob Manfred. It was Manfred who did not want a privately funded deal to build a new stadium in Oakland. And it was Manfred who decided that Pilfer tax dollars from Vegas mattered more than decades of loyalty and support given by the people of Oakland to this franchise. I also want to focus on Manfred because this past week in an interview with my man Jun Lee over at ESPN, he exposed his character and it’s rotten to the core. He showed himself not only prepared to gut a great baseball town, but kick it in the teeth on the way out the door. Listen to these comments. The injury is bad enough, the insults far worse, and the lies unendurable. On the A’s relocation he said, “The real question is, what was Oakland prepared to do?”
There is no Oakland offer, okay? They never got to a point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site. And it’s not just on John Fisher. The community has to provide support. This as the Oakland Mayor’s Office pointed out immediately before that quote even hit the airwaves is simply not true. There were numerous plans on the table, just not one as a wash in public money as the Vegas plan. Manfred was also asked about a recent event where fans filled the stands in protest of the move to Vegas in what was being called a reverse boycott to that Manfred smirked and said, “I mean, it was great. It is great to see what is this year, almost an average major league baseball crowd in the facility for one night. That’s a great thing.” And when Jun Lee pointed out to Manfred that studies say that stadiums do not generate significant local economic growth, he shrugged it off with this pithy observation. “Academics can say whatever they want.”
Look, this isn’t a baseball commissioner, it’s a sports radio caller. It’s a YouTube commenter, and it’s more evidence that no one dislikes the game of baseball in all its pageantry and joy than Rob Manfred the Grinch of the national pastime. But comparing him to a Dr. Seuss character is too kind. He’s more like Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street. Greed is good, and anything that gets in the way of greed is inherently bad.
That movie came out in 1987, and if we’ve learned anything since then in this age of decay, it’s that greed isn’t good. Greed destroys communities, greed destroys small towns. Greed destroys I-95 and greed is destroying our cities. And publicly funded stadiums is one of the ways they do it. They take all the joy and community cohesion that baseball can create and use it like a club to attack and alienate the most vulnerable, the very people whose love has made the game everything it is. It’s obscene. Rob Manfred is killing this team. Its future will no longer be in the hearts of the Oakland faithful. Instead, they will be in the Vegas desert to be buried with the rest of the bodies.
And now we have the part of the show we call, Ask a Sports Scholar, where we ask someone from the world of sports research about what they have learned and what they can teach us. And I’m so proud this week to bring on Professor Amira Rose Davis. Now, we prerecorded this because in addition to being a brilliant scholar, I’m not sure anyone’s life is busier, but here she is. She made the time. She has much to teach Dr. Amira Rose Davis.
Our next scholar is University of Texas, professor Amira Rose Davis, and I’m so excited to have her on the show. Total Rockstar. Professor Davis is an assistant professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora studies at the University of Texas Austin, where she specializes in 20th century American history with an emphasis on race, gender, sports, and politics. She’s finishing up her first book, something that I have been waiting for for some time, Can’t Eat a Medal: the Lives and Labors of Black Women Athletes in the Age of Jim Crow. Amira Davis, thank you so much for joining us.
Amira Rose Davis:
Yeah, thank you. Happy to be here.
Dave Zirin:
Oh, I want you to start please by talking about the sports and the angle on those sports that’s your primary area of study.
Amira Rose Davis:
Yeah. So I really look at many sports. My primary focus is looking at the long history of black women’s athletic involvement. And so in my book for instance, it spans the beginning of the 20th century, right around the 19 hundreds, all the way up to the early days of Title IX and the 1970s. I also, of course, as you know, do contemporary work along the same themes, but because of that focus, I get to talk about so many sports because black women have played and continue to play a wide variety of sports. So tennis, golf, roller derby, many Olympic sports, especially track and field basketball, of course, boxing, bowling, baseball. So that’s one of the best things I like about my focus of study is if there’s a black woman somewhere playing it I get to kind of jump into that sport for a little while.
Dave Zirin:
As you speak I’m reminded of a line in Bill Rhoden’s book Forty Million Dollar Slaves, and I’m paraphrasing, but he said the most striking part about the history of black athletics with regards to women is how little of it has been recorded. How are you able to find the data to put together a book on this?
Amira Rose Davis:
Absolutely. I think that it was a topic and perhaps still remains today, that is assumed to have scarcity, assumed to have breadcrumbs. And a lot of that is because there’s not one dedicated archive, especially if you’re thinking about operating at a historian, going into archival spaces. There’s not a archive that’s like, “This is the history of black women in sports read here,” and that means you’re looking for breadcrumbs. But luckily, I was trained up and come from a lineage of black women historians who know how to get that history by searching broad and wide and in depth in certain places. So for me specifically, black newspapers have been a huge resource. The black print media long reported on black women in sports, they included their scores. There was fluff pieces, there was in-depth articles about them throughout the 20th century. So I used those.
I relied a lot on oral histories, both oral histories that had been recorded over the years, as well as oral history. I conducted myself over the last decade. In addition to those materials, I do a lot of textual analysis. So a lot of times, even if there’s not words describing black women’s history in sports, what there is a lot of pictures. And so analyzing pictures and sometimes moving video and cobbling together, all of these things, oftentimes, I’ll just leave this example on the table, there’ll be like a history of black women.
And if you look deeply and you ask the right questions, you realize there’s descriptions of their athletic careers in there, whether they were not necessarily elite athlete, they didn’t necessarily go to the Olympics. But part of what I was trying to is find in the book is what the larger landscape of black athletic participation on the women’s side looked like. And so sometimes it’s a neighborhood game or sometimes it’s somebody describing that they played volleyball for years and finding those scraps within larger stories or within papers of their brothers or their fathers or on the little box in the page that nobody’s caring to read is really how I found these voices, and I hope to place them at the center of my work.
Dave Zirin:
A counterintuitive question for you, did black women actually have more space and more freedom to play different sports in the early 20th century than white women may have had?
Amira Rose Davis:
Yeah, absolutely. And so one of the things… Well, some white women, so basically what you have-
Dave Zirin:
Some white women.
Amira Rose Davis:
… at the beginning of the 20th century is absolutely a expansion of opportunities for black girls and women that doesn’t look the same in terms of white women, especially if you’re looking at say, the seven sister schools, Smith College, the kind of prim and proper places. You might have golf, you might have tennis, but there was a concerted effort to focus on play days, calisthenics, things that weren’t too strenuous. And so we see a disruption to that mentality in white ethnic women. So it’s no surprise that some of our earliest track and field stars are Babe Dietrich sand from my hometown of Beaumont, Texas. For instance, German immigrant, Polish immigrant like Stella, Stella Walsh, right? These ethnic immigrants had enclaves that expanded athletic opportunities as well.
And for African-American women, it was no different. There was a feeling in the community that muscular assimilation, the idea that you could prove your fitness for citizenship, you could prove that you were equal to broad society through success, through that black excellence, and that extended to black women, especially if they were ever in competition with white women. And through that mentality, what we saw was the development of athletics at the neighborhood level as well as the school and the collegiate level. And so just a quick stat to kind of ground you with that, by the 1940s, about 85% of colleges for white women that served white women were opposed to varsity athletics, while 75% of black colleges encouraged or supported varsity athletics for black women. So you see there’s a huge disparity in institutionalized opportunities.
Dave Zirin:
You came at this subject with a real knowledge base. But what’s something you’ve learned through writing this book that’s really surprised you?
Amira Rose Davis:
Yeah, so I think that when I came at this, I was looking for stories and what I realized I was really doing is writing a labor history, particularly about symbol. What I’ve learned and what I’ve been particularly attuned to is the way that beyond just their athletic careers, black women athletes take on these broader cultural meanings as symbols that are kind of conduits for debates. We see this with Serena Williams. We know it in the contemporary sense. I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned and continue to learn from these stories in my project is just how long that history it is. Whether it’s a long history of their athletic activism or a long history of how their symbol, their personhood has been used for political, social, cultural means by other people. I don’t necessarily know if it was a surprise, but I think I’m constantly a student of the ways in which their bodies get projected on.
Dave Zirin:
I really want to teach the people watching this show something that maybe they didn’t know before, something very basic and straight up. Can you tell my watchers, my listeners, can you tell them who Roseanne Robinson was?
Amira Rose Davis:
Absolutely. Roseanne Robinson. Rose Robinson was a Chicago I multi-sport athlete actually. Her and her two sisters were dominant in track and fields and volleyball. Basketball, among other things. But Rose really rose to prominence through track and field, specifically as a high jumper at the 1959 Pan-American Games in Chicago. She refuses to stand for the anthem. She has a long career of using her athletic background to fuel activism. So actually as a member of CORE in Cleveland, she led efforts in a skating rink, a skate in, which is like a sit-in, but you’re skating to desegregate a place. And one of the reasons she was so effective is because she was so agile, she could evade capture as they were trying to desegregate a skating rink In Cleveland, what she’s perhaps most known for is a time in which making the national track and field team, she was asked along with many black athletes to tour the world in this kind of soft power propaganda effort from the US State Department.
She declined that offer very publicly saying she has no desire to be pawn in those political games. And about six months later, she was imprisoned on tax evasion charges. She was thrown in jail where she staged a hunger strike. You see pictures of her trial where she’s being carried in because she’s so emaciated from the hunger strike that she can’t walk. She writes about the hunger strike and saying her athletic training has prepared her for this. She looked at it like practice. She looked at it and drew upon the same resource that she does when she’s training her body for athletic events to prepare and sustain a hunger strike. This was over what’s basically $300 roughly today. And so that’s one of the ways we see her athletic activism intersecting with her peace activism, her work as somebody who’s trying to desegregate places. She would ride her bike up and down Route 40 to desegregate diners in her later years of life.
And it’s just one of these stories that sometimes we miss, but that helps us really understand not only the long history of athletic activism, but how her understanding, like her broader family, her, she had a sister who went to the 1948 Olympics, right? Her sister’s childhood flaunts on the schoolyard, all the opportunities they had to be the Robinson Sisters from Chicago who could beat you at every sport is not only indication of her athletic activism that would happen in later life, but those broad opportunities that we just discussed for black women to be involved in sports and have a platform in which to stand on to speak out.
Dave Zirin:
And I think that she’s also very important when we speak about Kaepernick today to say that, wait a minute, protesting during the anthem has a history that arises out of the contradictions of being a black athlete in the United States.
Amira Rose Davis:
Absolutely.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah. You’re great talking about your areas of study and you’ve educated so many people about a topic that we really need to know more about. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about the push in the Texas State House to eliminate tenure from UT and other public universities. What’s the stake of that fight right now and how does it affect you as a professor?
Amira Rose Davis:
Yeah, I mean, we’re living in scary times. It’s not just happening in Texas, although that’s capturing a lot of headlines, but we’re seeing this really assault on higher education across the country. Here in the Texas state as we’ve been down at the Capitol a lot. We had a testimony session on Monday that went into the wee hours of the morning. Everybody coming out opposed to Senate bill 18, which would eradicate tenure here. I’ve likened it to Texas and their weather grid and their ability to say, “Oh, we want an independent grid,” and then we all freeze seemingly once a year. That’s what this would do for the University of Texas and the rest of the higher education systems and colleges and university in the state eradicating tenure, which protects academic freedom, which allows time for innovative research to occur, which protects your right to do things like be critical of big athletic departments or be critical of international politics.
Those are the concerns on the table. I think one of the bigger concerns is that this was tied in with an anti DEI bill and a critical race theory bill. It’s very much Culture Wars 101, and the threat came because the faculty senate at the University of Texas, Austin affirmed the right of professors to have academic freedom to do their research and also to teach classes on race, on gender, on sexuality, et cetera. And the lieutenant governor didn’t like that and also saw a great opportunity to rile up constituents. And so literally when we’re talking about tenure, we can’t detach it from these broader kind of concerns about DEI because they’re very much being paired together. They want to eliminate tenure so that people who teach about race and gender and ethnicity and people who talk about the long history of power in this country and how it manifests and say words like white supremacy and say words like homophobia, transphobia, it’s very much a attack on that.
And so the stakes are really high, not only because it kind of severs us from the national higher education landscape, although like I said, this is something that’s happening across the country, but we’re already seeing a brain drain. It’s something that I’m proud to work at the University of Texas, Austin. I think that our departments are amazing. Some of the work being done here is so innovative. The students are phenomenal, and the diversity that is at the university is a credit to it. It’s why it’s so good. And so seeing efforts to attack that have been really disheartening and something that we are all kind of 10 toes on the ground fighting.
But you can call, you can help. You can post, you continue. And like I said, not only here if you live in Virginia looking at UVA, looking at UNC and in the North Carolina schools, Florida obviously. So just continuing to have that kind of national awareness, I always say is very easy for people up east to say, “Oh, that’s Texas. Oh, that’s Florida.” Or post a meme without seeding them out of the nation. But if it’s happening anywhere, it’s happening in this nation. And so understand that we’re fighting on the ground, but continuing to pay attention to what we’re doing and sending support is much needed.
Dave Zirin:
Absolutely. And if we haven’t figured out yet that state lines are no impediment to these laws spreading, then we have truly learned nothing. You see people, I told you she was a rockstar. Professor Davis, Amira Rose Davis, however you would like to be referred to. Thank you so much for appearing here on Edge of Sports.
Amira Rose Davis:
Yeah, thanks Dave. Great to see you, congrats on the show and in everything you do. It’s great to see you always
Dave Zirin:
Great to see you too. That was awesome. Thank you so much, professor Davis and thank you Solomon Hughes. Thank you everyone here at the Real News Network for this terrific program. Just wait until next week’s show, though. It’s going to make you get all the spell piece in your gonectica zoinks. I am excited already. Please stay frosty. We are out of here. Peace.
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