Welcome to the Edge of Sports podcast. I'm Dave Ziron. This week we are talking to Tony Smith Thompson. Now, if that name sounds familiar, you might remember Tony Smith as a basketball

player at Manhattanville College, who in the 2002-2003 season turned her back to the flag

during the national anthem, creating a uproar, the likes of which was really a precursor,

a canary in the coal mine, to everything we saw with Colin Kaepernick in 2016.

Now, two decades later, after being really erased from the school's history and a race from popular history,

as this country so often does to rebels who are deemed to be before their time or prematurely anti-war, anti-imperial, anti-capitalists,

what have you.

She's been revived by Manhattanville.

Two decades later, the school gave Tony Smith an honorary doctorate, and she delivered

the commencement at Manhattanville College.

So we're going to talk to Tony Smith

Thompson about what that experience was like coming back to Manhattanville and actually getting

some glory after all these years of erasure. And I think that story is really important,

frankly, because, you know, we're living in times that aren't exactly inspiring and where a lot of people who put a lot of work into a lot of activism over the last 15 years are looking at this right-wing hellscape and wondering what it was all for.

And I like Tony's story because there's something in there about what it means to persevere and what it means to stand true to what you believe in and what it means when people finally catch up.

I've also got some choice words about where are the male athletes for Brittany Griner that I want to speak about.

And I also have a new segment called Topics with Jake.

All right.

We're working on a better title than that.

But Topics with Jake is where we start.

I think we're going to keep Jake's takes just for NFL picks.

But topics with Jake are just musings about certain things in the sports world.

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