Pat Garrity reflects on the relationship between politics and sports by considering the phenomenon of Jesse Owens (via Jeremy Schaap’s Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and the Hitler Olympics). While everything Pat writes is sensible, I am struck, once again, by the story of Owens in Berlin, in front of Hitler. Real drama, the sort that only Shakespeare could devise. Real tragedy, even a wheel of fire back home, that only flawed human beings forgetting the things for which they stand, could devise. And Jesse Owens is the memory and the cause.