Robert Scoop Jackson - The Game Is Not a Game: The Power, Protest, and Politics of American Sports

Praise for The Game Is Not a Game

Only the legendary sports writer Robert Scoop Jackson could write The Game Is Not a Gamea book that bristles with bracing and brutal insights that take no tea for the fever and offer no discount on truth or justice. Because he is a master of deep theory (who else could translate Michel Foucaults notion that power doesnt just hibernate in places of legitimacy but breaks out everywhere between all folk and situations), because he flings street vernacular like a grammatical drug dealer, because he is a savant of the history of sports in America, this book is an instant classic that reckons with the factors that make sports possible, and at the same time wrestles with the forces that make protest in sports necessary. The Game Is Not a Game is intersectional cultural analysis at its best!

Michael Eric Dyson, author, What Truth Sounds Like

Ive long said that Scoop Jackson is the Coltrane of the sports page. With The Game Is Not a Game he takes his skillset to a level few sportswritersor any writerscan match. Scoop is that rarest of commodities: an original voice.

Dave Zirin, The Nation

Candid, riveting, informativeyet not surprising at all. This is Scoop Jackson were talking about, so I expected nothing less. If you care about the sports industry if you value a true, authentic, perspective on the world of sportsand about its participantsyouve come to the right place. This is a treat for anyone who loves sports.

Stephen A. Smith, ESPN First Take

This is the book weve been expecting from Scoop Jackson, one of the most insightful sports journalists of our generation. With humor and brutal honesty, Scoop pulls the covers off the sports industry and the blinders off those who enable its hypocrisy.

William C. Rhoden, author, Forty-Million-Dollar Slaves

To do this work of talking candidly about race and sports, you have to realize that its supposed to get a little messy. In a conversation with the author, journalist Jemele Hill hits on just the thing that makes The Game Is Not a Game so special: Scoop Jackson is never afraid to get messy. Jackson doesnt avoid the static, he steps into it, pushing even the most woke minds to dig deeper into and think more honestly about issues of race, gender, and politics. From the NCAA to LeBron James, Serena Williams to Colin Kaepernick, Jackson uses the biggest headlines of our day to reveal that the power of sports to change the world can only be realized if the powers that run sports allow it.

Sarah Spain, espnW.com columnist

Scoops contribution to sports journalism in the last three decades is unparalleled and incomparable. This leap into critical literature is not only welcomed, but crucial. Bobbito Garcia, author and filmmaker

2020 Robert Scoop Jackson

Published in 2020 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-64259-095-1

Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please call 773-583-7884 or email for more information.

Cover design by Eric Kerl.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

To Uncle Clif, Dr, Mr. Morris, Jaleen, Dedry,
and Rhude Boi. Until I get there

I learned from my enemies. Beat them at their own game.
Killmonger in Black Panther

INTRODUCTION

THE RACE TO THE FINISH

The game is the game.

Avon Barksdale, The Wire

Until it isnt. Sports has always meant many things to many people. For some theyre the greatest form of recreation and entertainment; for others, one of the worlds greatest sources of power; for still others, a generational saving grace. For most people, if we are being transparently honest, on some level, sports represents all three. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote in the Guardian in an August 2018 op-ed: To white America, the history of US sports is a rising graph of remarkable achievements of physical and mental strength. To black America, its that, but is also a consistent timeline of attempts to silence the voices of African Americans. Yeah, what he said.

Still, for me, over the course of a deep dive of more than twenty years into a career that has ended up being powered by sports, the responsibility exceeds the craft. I long ago chose the Spider-Man approach (Into the Spider-Verse version): Everything you say and do creates an impact. I simply inserted write (which I tend to do obsessively) in place of say, and treated typed words as such. Thus the journey began. And along the way I found a sense of so-called freedom.

Theres ambivalence, theres uncertainty, theres plausible deniability, theres cognitive and creative dissonance. Theres also a sense of mission, one that comes from an obsession with telling either a story or a side of a story that is not being told at all, or not being told truthfully or completely with all sides taken into full consideration. And thats when panic often sets in. That black panic that comes from being black while knowing how black stories so often get treated. Look, I never wanted any part of this book to be about me, because what I do and write is not about me. Its about a bigger picture always, the bigger picture. Its about the difference between Mark Emmert, Mark Cuban, and Mark Aguirre. Between John Skipper and John Wall, Whitlock and World Wide Wes. Without even mentioning their names.

Funny thing, as much as race is at the core of almost everything in the following pages, this book isnt about race. Youll just think it is. THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT POWER. About the people that dont have it versus the people who do; how that power manifests as entitlement and respect and an authoritarian mentality; and how the abuse of that power through sports impacts and affects humanity. Its about the way sports provides a platform to the people who dont have the power, allowing them to feel, act, and react.

There comes a time when it is time for resistance, time for renewal, time for reconstruction. In America it has become evident to millions that the time is now. And if history tells us anything, if history is an indicator of how the past will reflect the future, then sports will be a part ofand play a role in the resistance, renewal, and reconstruction of our time. But there remains a sense, a feeling, that people arent really ready to deal with race, people arent really ready to deal with power, people arent really ready to deal with change and challenge not on a direct, call-you-on-your-bullshit level. But people are always willing to deal with sports, or to deal with issues they arent comfortable dealing with through the prism of sports. As Rembert Browne put it, writing about Spike Leeand in this passage, about white Americas inability to deal with Spike Leefor TIME: