Welcome to Southpaw

A sports, politics, and culture newsletter from the Left

Dear Readers,

Welcome to Southpaw Report, a new weekly newsletter dedicated to exploring sports and culture from an unapologetically left-wing perspective.

Over the past two years, the two of us have become frustrated by the apoliticism of mainstream sports journalism and, more specifically, by the absence of a single outlet for serious left-wing sports commentary. The events of the past few months—both the explosion of anti-racist direct action by athletes and the numerous pandemic-related labor disputes that have hit amateur and professional sports leagues—have brought home the necessity of sports reporting that actually treats sports as a real arena for political struggle and cultural conflict. Though some major publications have begun to devote more coverage to the politics of sports, there still isn’t a single outlet dedicated to left-wing sportswriting.

There is nothing worse than members of the media (even extremely budding ones) complaining about a lack of media coverage on an issue, so we decided to do something about it.

Southpaw Report will be a weekly newsletter that will aggregate the best left-wing sports-related reporting and commentary from around the internet. It will also periodically feature our own original reporting on developments in the sports world and longer-form reflections on the relationship between politics and sports.

Subscribe now so you don’t miss our first newsletter on Sunday, September 27th.

And in the meantime, tell your friends!

Happy reading,

Calder McHugh and Ian Ward