At the end of the day, when you're talking about the owners, outside of actually the Rooney family and maybe one or two other owners, we're talking about, you know, 30 Trump clones.

That's what people have to understand.

So the same people picking the cabinet for, and repicking and repicking the cabinet for the United States of America are the same people doing the hiring

and hiring almost completely white GMs. And the few times I hire an African-American GM, they're

very successful like Ozzie Newsom or Jerry Reese, both who have brought Super Bowls. So it starts

from the top.

Welcome to the edge of sports podcast. I'm Dave Ziron. This week, we speak to Charles Modiano of the New York Daily News about the hiring practices of the National Football League. Are they racist? Or are they in fact, racist? We will discuss. Also, I've got some choice words about the case of Maori Davenport, which is a story you need to know about a high school basketball player in Alabama. I've also got Just Stand Up and Just Sit Your Ass Down Awards, but first, from the terrific recording studio of WPFW Pacifica here in Washington, D.C., we have Charles Modiano.

How you doing, sir?

Oh, I'm great.

How are you?

Well, you look like you're a little worse for where.

Are you feeling okay?

You can tell our audience the truth.

Oh, I've been a little under the weather the last few days, but if I could fill like one of Aton Thomas's shoes, then I'm going to be all right. Man, it might take both of us to fill one shoe in the literal sense, but in the intellectual sense and the sports sense, I think

Aton Thomas would agree with me when I say you are absolutely hand in glove when it comes to

the collision and the way we talk about sports. So we're very happy to have you here. Well, I appreciate

you've been doing this for a long time. So, you know, everybody else who's been writing from a

progressive point of view really appreciates your work for a very long time. Incidentally, back when Tintan Thomas was unable to find an outlet to write about the fact that he was against the Iraq War, and I know that you were able to provide that outlet. So we've come a long way. Good gracious. It has come a long way, hasn't it? I used to joke around that talking about the connection between sports and politics, I used to joke around and say, this was like my sort of stand-in joke. That, yeah, all of us who write about that stuff, we're going to have our convention meeting in a phone booth. Right. That was my little joke. And now it's like you've got this whole generation of writers, websites, all kinds of things that do it.

And sometimes I do feel a little bit like Old Man River.

Like I just sort of look at it and say, wow, this is no longer a small pond.

But isn't that the point?

For me, that always was the point.

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