The NFL recently announced it would pay out $765 million to settle a lawsuit from thousands of former players suffering from concussions and related brain trauma. A large sum, but a small percentage of the billions the football league and other professional sports franchises haul in for their owners. The vast gap between sports tycoons and the everyday fans who shell out hard-earned cash to watch their athlete heroes on the field is yet another reflection of the gross inequality between the one percent and the rest of society and another example of how inextricably linked sports and politics are in our lives.

"There's always so much happening in the world of sports and there's always so many different ways in which sports not just reflects our lives but shapes our lives," Zirin told Moyers.   "It shapes our understanding of things like racism, sexism, homophobia. It shapes our understanding of our country, it shapes our understanding of corporations and what's happening to our cities. In so many different ways sports stories are stories of American life in the 21st century."

Dave Zirin, The Nation magazine’s first ever sports writer, joins Bill Moyers on this week’s Moyers & Company. He’s been called the best sportswriter in the United States, a provocative reporter and social critic whose books include Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love, and his most, recent, Game Over: How Politics has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.

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