SportsLit 2024 wrapped: a 6-pack of episodes (Part 3)
Whether it was touching memoirs, a team history, a biography, autobiography or a sportscaster launching a children's book series, a lot of pages were turned this year.
Here is hoping SportsLit lands properly, regardless of the listener’s engagement level with sports.
Focusing in on books is a way to sort of get into the circular relationship between sports as a culture, as an industry, and the effect on the human condition. And we get to talk to some thoughtful people, such as the six guests mentioned below.
Please remember, sportslit.ca has links to purchase any book we have featured since the pod’s creation in 2017.
Ken Dryden, The Class: A Memoir Of A Time, A Place, And Us
Ken Dryden, bar none, was probably the first Canadian writer whom Neil Acharya and I thought of when we landed on the idea for the podcast in 2017.
Getting him as a guest was no small dream come true. Can you think of any other person who is a Hockey Hall of Fame goalie, best-selling author, and one-time Canadian federal cabinet minister?
The Class is not a sports book per se, and its categorization defiance is one of its critical points. Dryden traces the lives of over 30 of his “all-rounder” classmates who were in a “brain class” at Etobicoke Collegiate Institute in the first half of the 1960s.1
It is an engrossing read, and public education advocates might want to digest it. The cultural assault on teachers that has gone on over the last 30 decades is sickening, so it was nice to know there was a time when school systems were aspirational.
Morgan Campbell, My Fighting Family: Borders and Bloodlines and the Battles That Made Us
Whatever happens to us, first of all, is what happens to our caregivers. Campbell, a senior contributor at CBC Sports, unwinds the stem of his family’s intergenerational saga. It’s a story of hurts held in, dashed dreams, and intergenerational traumas, tracking from 1930s Chicago to rapidly urbanizing 1980s and ’90s Mississauga, to contemporary Toronto. There are some sports, do not worry.
Campbell recently earned the Randy Starkman Award for Leadership in Sports Journalism at the Canadian Sport Awards.
Evanka Osmak, Ali Hoops
Osmak, the longtime Sportsnet Connected anchor, has big plans for 11-year-old hooping heroine Ali, a girl with a serious Basketball Jones. The inflows of investment in women’s sports have been welcome and wonderful, but one cannot lose sight that it is paramount to give children encouragement and support when they try a new activity. Osmak demonstrates that by putting is in the mind of a girl who is trying to get in the game, any way she can.
Jerry Grillo, Big Cat: The Life of Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Mize
A baseball bio slides into the cleanup spot. It was a treat to connect with Grillo about his labour of love to pen the first full-length bio of Johnny Mize, the fearsome Great Depression/Second World War-era slugger who nearly slipped through the cracks of baseball history. Mize was a kind of David Ortiz of the pre-television era, and Grillo digs deep to make his fellow northeast Georgia resident relatable to the present day.
Mike Keenan, Iron Mike: My Life Behind The Bench (with Scott Morrison)
Keenan, in his NHL bench boss heyday with the Flyers, Chicago, and Rangers, was at the vanguard of innovation. He’s probably in the all-time, top five of innovative elite men’s hockey coaches; Hap Day, Scotty Bowman, Anatoli Tarasov, and Roger Neilson come to mind for the other four. Keenan’s auto-bio gets into how his compulsion to win led him to search out any edge over the opponent — and often put him at odds with his players.
Neil Acharya handled this episode solo, on short notice, with utter aplomb. I had to scratch due to a health emergency on production day… but I am feeling much better now.
Ed Willes, Never Boring: The Up and Down History of the Vancouver Canucks
Two minutes for Eastern Time Zone bias by listing this ’sode sixth. (Seriously, I just choose at random.) Willes examines the “beautiful suffering” of following the West Coast NHL franchise that has come tantalizingly close to the Stanley Cup and has a claim on being hockey’s answer to the pre-2004 Boston Red Sox.
It is an illuminating study about how pieces must have to fall into place just so for a pro sports team to win the ultimate prize.
Friendly reminder
My marginalia on other topics are posted in Notes. Hopefully, this is enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.
Jan. 15- Dec. 23, 2024
Hamilton, Ont. : on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.
For American readers, public education in Ontario until about 1997 was modelled after the British system. One anomaly was that secondary school was five years for students intending to attend university. The fifth year, called Ontario Academic Credit (OAC) during my high school years, was eliminated in 2003.