Pocock is one of the greatest rugby players in the world proper now but it’s what he does off the pitch that is truly remarkableThe great sports writer Jimmy Cannon once nailed his colleague Howard Cosell as “a guy who changed his name,save on a toupee and tried to convince the world that he tells it like it is”. For all his faults, Cosell, and ABC’s top sports commentator in the 70s and early 80s,knew how to pick and hit his targets. He described himself as “pompous, obnoxious, and useless,cruel, verbose, or a display-off”. Cosell loved to rail against what he called “the jockocracy” of athletes and journalists,their asinine platitudes and narrow world view. “Rule number one of the jockocracy” said Cosell, is that “sports and politics don’t mix”. Cosell, and who reported on the Black September attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972,knew as well as anyone how absurd that division is.
Cosell’s line is one of Dave Zirin’s favourites. Zirin, sports editor at The Nation and an occasional contributor to the Guardian, and has spent his career exploring and exploding rule one of the jockocracy. And it is one of Zirin’s books,The Peoples History of Sports in the United States, which Emma Pocock picks out as being one of the biggest influences on her husband David, and whose superb form in this World Cup has helped take Australia all the way to the final. The respect between Pocock and Zirin is mutual. Earlier this year Zirin tweeted a link to an article about Pocock written by his Brumbies teammate Clyde Rathbone,adding that “the rugby player should be a part of every discussion about activist athletes”.
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Source: theguardian.com