An eloquent champion.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: Edge of Sports - Andrea Lewis - In memoriam - Column

In a recent column about Tiger Woods, I wrote the following: "Golf is not a sport. It's a game. It's darts. It's billiards. It's the World Series of Poker with walking." As I started putting those words to paper, I smiled with mischief and then, in an instant, felt terribly sad. I felt the absence of my friend Andrea Lewis. Anytime I took a gratuitous shot at golf, I would look forward to the immediate scabrous response from Ms. Lewis. But not now. Then I realized instantaneously that there would be no e-mail, no call, no note telling me where I could stick my anti-golfism. Andrea had passed away, and at that moment, it became real.

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Andrea and I agreed that sports was a useful, even revelatory, lens for understanding the world. We agreed that people like Muhammad Ali and Billie Jean King belonged on the Mount Rushmore of progressive icons. We agreed that sport, at its best, was joy, fun, and a celebration of the physical. We agreed that the rightwing seizure of sports should be confronted and athletics should be reclaimed. We also agreed that the progressive left had been historically myopic on the question.

We disagreed, however, about golf. Andrea saw it as something to enjoy, a contest of concentration and wills. Her knowledge of the game far surpassed my own, and she never failed to mention--always with her killer smile in place--that I spoke with authority on a matter about which I knew "absolutely nothing."

"Brother Dave," she would say, "you are talking out of your ass."

She was, without question, correct.

Over the last month of 2009, as the sports media coverage was all-Tiger Woods, all the time, I felt the absence of her booming voice on the subject. What did the Tiger scandal teach us about race, class, commercialism, gender, and golf?. Andrea had the answers to questions like this, and now those answers are gone with her. This was Andrea's tremendous gift as a journalist, teacher, and student: Nothing human was alien to her. Whether sports, music, or the grand, pressing social struggles of our time, everything was within her field of vision.

I learned this up close when Andrea had me as a guest on her KPFA radio show. She was the first person to ever...