SportsLit 2024 wrapped: a 6-pack of episodes (Part 1)
At SportsLit, every effort is made to cover the gamut of a publishing genre from A to C, sometimes even D or E. Here are highlights from a year in podcasting.
Two out of three is not bad. Sports are navigating and wrestling with the existential threats of neoliberal corporatocracy, climate change, and the rise of high-control religiosity in electoral politics.
Anticapitalism is a little hard to get into. All authors do publicity for book sales, even Kalle Lasn. The 2024 SportsLit catalog contains real talk about the latter two concerns. It seems best to kick off a year in review by shouting out topical titles.
Warming Up by sport ecologist Dr. Madeleine Orr walks readers through how climate catastrophe is in our sports. It is just a matter of when, perhaps within five years, the pro sports industry might have to scale down.
And, well, Jason Kirk, in Hell Is A World Without You: A Novel, shows the health harms that can occur from early-life religious indoctrination.
SportsLit has released 18 episodes so far in 2024, and Neil Acharya and/or I always read the entire book before we interview the guest(s). There is a little more in the hopper, but with the calendar year drawing down, it was a good time to share some of the catalog in three groups of six.
I’ll post some more on Saturday and Monday. Remember, sportslit.ca has links to buy any of the books that have been platformed on SportsLit over the past seven years.
Madeleine Orr, Warming Up: How Climate Change Is Changing Sport
Somehow, sports must go on even though the “supercharging of extreme weather by the climate crisis is already clear, with heatwaves of previously impossible intensity and frequency now striking around the world, along with fiercer storms and worse floods.”1
How is that going to happen? Orr has some ideas about how the pros, the Olympics, and community sports can adapt to something that is coming on fast. I hope you will listen, and understand there is an opportunity to build toward a more climate-comfortable future. Or keep driving everywhere and ripping out bike lanes.
Jason Kirk, Hell Is A World Without You: A Novel
It was timely post this episode the very week of the U.S. election, to say the least. Faith should foster comfort and joy, rather than cause angst and stress, and Kirk’s novel is unsparing in detailing what it was like to be an Evangelical kid in early-2000s North America.
And, of course, Kirk is one of the creators of the awesome Shutdown Fullcast (“the Internet’s only college football podcast”). College football has had some incredible scenes in 2024, and yes, that includes the 2023 Michigan Wolverines completing their 15-0 championship season.
Mary Ormsby, World’s Fastest Man*: The Incredible Life of Ben Johnson
Perhaps you had to be there for it, but there has never been a sports scandal in Canada with one athlete or group to rival the Ben Johnson drugs bust at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Canada Soccer’s drone spying was leagues and light-years away from generating the amount of anger, shock, and shame that rippled 36 years ago, and anyone who tried to compare the two should have known better.
It has a certain memory burn for Canadians above the age of 45 or so. Ormsby, who covered those ’88 Olympics, gives an unvarnished account of the “unprecedented attack on an amateur athlete” and the realpolitik leading up to Johnson being the first track-and-field winner who had to return his gold medal.
Erik Kramer, The Ultimate Comeback: Surviving a Suicide Attempt, Conquering Depression, and Living with a Purpose (with William Croyle)
For the first time, a National Football League alumnus joined Neil and me for an interview — alumni of the NBA, NHL, MLS, and MLB have come aboard. Kramer, a former quarterback known mostly for his time with the NFL’s Detroit Lions and Chicago Bears, has a remarkable story of perseverance and forgiveness.
The timing for the season-première interview worked out well. It was the day after the Lions had ended a 31-season playoff-win drought. Kramer had spent three decades-plus as the last quarterback to helm a winning Detroit effort in the NFL postseason.
Jack McCallum, The Real Hoosiers: Crispus Attucks High School, Oscar Robertson, and the Hidden History of Hoops
Love a good tale about a championship basketball team, especially one with an aspect of purloined glory. As one of the foremost hoops writers in North America, McCallum shows how the legendary “Big O” and his high school teammates dominated the super-competitive Indiana schoolboy basketball tournament, which was explicitly not designed with an all-Black team in mind.
As a longtime admirer of McCallum’s work in Sports Illustrated, it was brain candy to talk hoops history with him.
Michael Cochrane, Olympic Lyon: The Untold Story of the First Gold Medal for Golf
Really, if you enjoy golf writing, or anything picaresque, seek out Cochrane’s historical novel. It is so well-written and detailed there were long stretches I forgot this was a fictionalized account of George S. Lyon playing in the golf tournament at the 1904 Olympics. With his legal mind, and appreciation for what brings a golf course a cut above its counterparts, Cochrane crafts a character study and a social history of how golf gained traction in Southern Ontario.
Friendly reminder
My marginalia on other topics are posted in Notes. Hopefully, this is enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.
Jan. 1- Dec. 18, 2024
Hamilton, Ont. : on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.
Damian Carrington, “Climate crisis deepens with 2024 ‘certain’ to be hottest year on record,” The Guardian, Dec. 9.