Jason Kirk, "Hell Is A World Without You: A Novel" (SportsLit fan notes)
Kirk, of The Athletic and Shutdown Fullcast, has a novel that's about the 'complex' life of growing up evangelical, and how it relates to the world of a sports journalist.
Learning that Jason Kirk wrote a novel that delves into what it is like to come of age in a “facsimile world” of high-control religion was an attention-getter, to say the least.
Why is that? Hell Is A World Without You: A Novel, through the author’s lived experience, relates the effects of high-control religious environments on teenage minds into adulthood. A certain evangelicalism or fundamentalism draws into almost all aspects of public life, including sports, and especially electoral politics. Overall, it is a superb read, and timely for SportsLit during an American election year. (The episode was recorded on Oct. 28, eight days before you-know-what-happened.)
“One of the driving impulses, looking back, is I wanted to show how complex it is inside this world that not a lot of people don’t know a lot about,” Kirk says in conversation with SportsLit. “Everyone knows the influence what white Evangelicalism has over conservative politics, in America especially, but not just in America. It often completely gets missed what it is to grow up within that, and why people become the way they are.
“There is a weird thing where many people don’t talk about it — ever again — especially in general population. So I wanted to show, when me and my friends were in the world, we were every bit as rebelus as any other group of kids, while also having this constant fear of hell and shame and damnation hanging over us at all over times … The more I kept going, the more I realized I had never taken apart those beliefs instilled in me … The process of writing was finally reckoning with the scaffolding in my brain.”
A likely corollary between that realm and sports, AKA the perspiring arts, is about institutions getting big and trying to build self-containing universes. Around the one-hour mark, we talk about how a fan has to pitch around that.
“Sports and religion, it goes hand-in-hand,” Kirk adds. “In ways good and bad.”
Without too much further ado, here is the episode. The exposition is below, as necessary.
Introduction
3:00 More information about The Trevor Project is available here. Kirk wrote this week that part of his choice with how to release his novel was driven by a push to get “early proceeds in the Trevor Project’s hands before this election, not after.”
6:30 It is not too difficult to write to a public or university library system about acquisitions. I sent polite notes explaining the value the novel would have for readers of all ages. It might make their job easier to quote the ISBNs. For Hell Is A World Without You, those are 9781735492650 (hardcover), 9781735492629 (ebook), and 9781735492667 (audiobook). Publishing info: Shutdown Fullbooks, February 2024.
Also, visit Sportslit.ca for a link to buy the novel.
Interview
24:00 Preach! Also, somehow I did not cut in to say watching The Office on streaming services is why there is no That 2000s Show.
27:00 Write “guilty” with a Sharpie on a cocktail napkin for me. Vikings, Blue Jays, and Raptors fans all have persecution complexes to varying degrees.
34:00 “Perfection is the enemy of good” was a saying Michael Cobden (1941-2018) often uttered at the University of King’s College School of Journalism.1 One learns in behavioral therapy that perfectionism can be immobilizing. So, as an irreligious type, my heart just breaks for children who have what Kirk describes as ‘eternal judgement’ layered on top of their doubts.
The NCAA’s ‘Glasnost on ice’
40:00 This line from Kirk could apply to so, so much: “There’s a lot of just saying something that sounds legitimately crazy, but saying it with a straight face because it’s true.”
45:00 Again, this was recorded 10 days before news that the 4½-decade bun fight between the NCAA and Canadian Hockey League (CHL) is over. The latter is lifting its ban on players from the pro-format Ontario (OHL), Québec-Maritimes (QMJHL), and Western (WHL) leagues. The surest practical effect is that players get more options and dysfunctional teams have less control. Do we need to know any more?
The NCAA instigated it in the early 1980s to head off teams recruiting from the Ontario and Western leagues. Present-day Vegas Golden Knights GM Kelly McCrimmon, for instance, played for WHL Brandon and then the Michigan Wolverines.2 A forward named Bill Terry also went from OHL Sault Ste. Marie to a four-season run with Michigan Tech Huskies.
The NCAA closed that pipeline. The reasons were political. It did protect roster spots for Americans and for players who might not have been emotionally and physically ready for big-time hockey at age 16 or 17.
But I digress. This is not a hockey post.
Character development: ‘Pro wrestling is a great educator’
48:00 An NPC is videogame shorthand for non-playable character.
52:00 Kirk’s discussion about wrestling and character development, and how it needs to “crystal-clear, from the person watching on TV to the person in the last row (of a live show)”, brings up a related read. Elamin Abdelmahmoud, the CBC Radio host, has a chapter about his wrestling fandom in his memoir Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir In Pieces.
Abdelmahmoud also first tried live radio in Kingston, Ont., so talk about small worlds. And world-building.
58:00 Using a minority group to smear a political opponent is dishonest and dangerous, and social poison. It needs to be stopped.
Like Kirk says, the Republican presidential campaign and pro-Trump political action committees (PACs) probably ended up spending well over US$100 million to attack people who are transgender, who make up 1.14 percent of the U.S. population.3 Those sickening ads were everywhere, and they were constantly aired on college football telecasts, so it was appropriate for SportsLit.
I mention Bekett Noble, a student who died by suicide at Redeemer University in Hamilton, Ont., in November 2022. Local municipal government is reviewing its contracts with Redeemed, a private Reformed Christian school. That review was set back by a ransomware attack on the city’s website in late February 2024.4
A sports corollary: ‘They don’t own the lessons’
1:02:00 This is my favourite part of the conversation, far and away.
The reference to the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons being interested in quarterback Deshaun Watson dates from 2021 or ’22. Watson has settled 20 claims of sexual misconduct, and the Cleveland Browns gave him a fully guaranteed US$230-mil contract. Well, hey, it is not your money.
Anyway, the Falcons currently have Kirk Cousins behind centre, and they are in a better place in their division than the Cleveland Browns are in theirs.
1:06:30 Kirk is referring to the 1990 Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, who were co-national champions after an 11-0-1 season. Tech started that season unranked and just refused to lose while college football bluebloods and upstarts cancelled out each other. As Kirk has pointed out, the other co-champion, the Colorado Buffaloes, did lose twice.
Kirk’s alma mater team is the Kennesaw State Owls, a first-year team in the Sun Belt Conference. Their first win in the top level was against the Liberty Flames on Oct. 23.
Finally, some football, sort of
1:09:00 This “perfect midpoint between investment and incompetence” encapsulates college football. Other stuff in this section:
The effect of the College Football Playoff expanding to 12 teams;
The significance of “opposite of Ohio State” Indiana Hoosiers (now 9-0!) being in the running;
Whether one of those first-round games on the third Saturday in December will look like a snow globe
And why the Bishop’s Gaiters are probably a Fullcast-worthy team in the Vanier Cup / conference playoffs structure. Bishop’s is 9-0 this season, and their team moniker is perfectly wry and silly. One, a school in Eastern Townships of Québec decided to name its team after a non-native species, alligators, and then misspelled it to represent an “article of ecclesiastical clothing which covered part of the wearer’s shoes and lower legs.”
Yeah, that was too much about the Queen’s Gaels.
Afterword
You and I are not alone in deep sadness about the bad night the United States of America, and northern neighbour Canada and the Western world had on Nov. 5. Whatever the combination of manufactured consent and popular sanction, billionaires juked the system to install the Leopards Who Eat Faces Party and Project 2025 fascism in the White House. And Canada is the mouse next to the elephant.
This comes in an “absolutely horrendous year for incumbents around the world” and we are up against an “increasingly postliterate media economy”5 controlled by those billionaires. Raging at the Democratic Party is beside the point, frankly.
Remember, you are still the person you were that morning, and you can keep making small changes. Please stay safe and be kind — especially to yourselves.
And, of course, I will have links over in Notes.
Feb. 21-Nov. 7, 2024
Hamilton, Ont. : traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas
“King’s Remembers Michael Cobden,” ukings.ca, Jan. 2, 2018.
See McCrimmon’s HockeyDB page. Of course, he ended up being head coach, general manager, and chairman of the Wheat Kings.
“From Oct. 7 to Oct. 20, Trump’s campaign and pro-Trump groups spent an estimated $95 million on ads, more than 41 percent of which were anti-trans.” Source: “Why anti-transgender political ads are dominating the airwaves this election,” PBS Newshour, Nov. 2.
Bobby Hristova, “City reviewing contracts with Redeemer University after trans student's death on campus,” CBC Hamilton, Feb. 24, 2023. More recent information obtained independently.
Matt Pearce, “Lessons on media policy at the slaughter-bench of history,” Nov. 6.