Sport Industrial Complex

Yesterday I was reading across a few texts on the business of sport, delving into issues like municipal subsidies to- and tax sheltering for- pro franchises. In reflecting on the flow of money to and from the ownership and players--i.e. where it goes and whom it impacts--I struck on the notion of the Sport Industrial Complex (SIC). I know some of the gritty details of the Military Industrial Complex and have written on the Prison Industrial Complex, but I'd never even considered applying this notion to sports. I need to look at this further, but I think the idea of the SIC may prove a useful concept to contextualize my study.

A quick google search and Dave Zirin popped up as somebody whose written on the subject. Zirin's book Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports explores, in his words, "how corporate interests have taken something beautiful -- sports -- and turned it into the athletic industrial complex -- a sprawling, overly influential industry that has impacted all of our lives," whether we like it or not. The book title refers to the New Orleans' Superdome, a "gruesome collision of sports and politics." Zirin was "sitting there with the rest of the country in 2005... seeing 20 to 30,000 of New Orleans’ poorest residents herded into the Louisiana Superdome, in conditions that I thought Jesse Jackson quite correctly likened to the hull of a slave ship, and seeing a New Orleans that did not have enough money for emergency shelter, that did not have enough money to even keep the levees upright, but did have enough money over the course of three decades to keep running the largest domed structure in the Western Hemisphere was something beyond compare. And when you consider that the folks herded into the Superdome never could have afforded a ticket, it just occurred to me that sports really is not sports anymore. It’s become an athletic industrial complex, that...impacts all of our lives" (Citation: Watch Dave talking about this book or read the interview transcript on Democracy Now).

As the title suggests it's not all about social pain and misery, but also about the promise (and potential) of sports. Zirin's writings have put a spotlight on activist athletes and coaches who have used the sports arena as a platform to struggle for social justice.