SportsLit 2024 wrapped: a 6-pack of episodes (Part 2)
About every third episode, the podcast confronted gender inequality or sports gambling, which is on-brand for this year.
Oftentimes, SportsLit ends up being topical, although the content is meant to be evergreen.
When an issue flares in the sports world, chances are the pod has engaged with an author or sportsperson whose book goes deeper and wider than the fast-churn sports media. The ’sodes Neil Acharya and I make are about slaking the thirst to connect with people, know the world through sports.
The more one knows the more perspective they have not to get drawn into arguments on social media. You can spot other fair-minded people and see where they are coming from, and who should only be taken seriously to the extent you are willing to take them seriously. And that creates so much more time to waste on the distractions you love; you do you. I provide this since, to quote Max Blum from Happy Endings, I’m not a point in my life where I can be taken seriously.
One case in point. This week, Netflix anted to get the rights to the next two FIFA Women’s World Cup tournaments in 2027 and ’31. Well, that connects to the episode from two years ago with Suzy Wrack, author of A Woman’s Game: The Rise, Fall and Rise Again, of Women’s Soccer. ‘WoSo’ flourished in early nineteen-twenties Britain, did you know that?
And, well, there is quite a juxtapose! going on in the culture. Everyone watches women’s sports now, and sportswomen are drawing unprecedented levels of investment. We also see patriarchal models of leadership, so-called, coming back with a vengeance even though we cannot afford those systems if there is any hope of building climate resiliency.
Not sorry; I do not ungroup those concerns from my love of sports, sports, sports; sporty sports sports. Anyway, this batch of episodes touches on that. There is also content pertaining to a bestselling biography of a baseball legend who died in 2024, and that also extends to another scourge, the way-too-easy access to sports gambling.
Enjoy! The rest of the wrap-up will be posted on Monday.
Melissa Ludtke, Locker Room Talk: A Women’s Struggle To Get Inside
Laws and rights protect all people, and that truth is far too often massaged in the name of comfort or profit margins.
Melissa Ludtke and her counsel Fritz Schwarz Jr. proved that in 1978 with her landmark case, Ludtke v. Kuhn, against major-league baseball. It was a thrill to cover as much ground as possible with a pioneering woman in sports media, whose book is a combination of legal thriller, social history, and memoir where the reader just aches for someone who was taking on a major American institution at the age of 27.
Connecting with Ludtke was a thrill, and you should visit her ’Stack, Let’s Row Together.
Katie Steele and Dr. Tiffany Brown, The Price She Pays: Confronting the Hidden Mental Health Crisis in Women's Sports ― from the Schoolyard to the Stadium
When you see that Caitlin Clark made the cover of TIME, or that the Northern Super League or the Professional Women’s Hockey League has a new official doo-dad, please keep in mind you are not seeing the whole story and struggle for female-identified sportspeople. There is still an unevenness in entry points and supports, and Dr. Brown, Steele, and their collaborating author Erin Strout quantify that in a book that does not feel academic.
Here, I hope the episode does justice to The Price She Pays. It is a timely and thoughtful look, and it really goes to town on the NCAA. Some readers might enjoy that.
Keith O’Brien, Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball
Baseball great Pete Rose (1941-2024) had that dog in him, but Cincinnati’s most notorious son also surely had a demon — gambling use disorder. No reminder is needed of how it played out — Rose was banned from Major League Baseball for life for gambling activity and eventually admitted he bet on the Cincinnati Reds while he was their manager.
O’Brien spent upwards of 20 hours with Rose, and dug deep to place Rose in proper context. On the day he spoke with SportsLit, the biography had just achieved The New York Times best-seller status, and it has also earned recognition as a New Yorker Baseball Book of the Year. You don’t have to read it to wade into into the Pete Rose Baseball Hall of Fame debate, but it will help you bring something fresh to the party.
The reckoning over state and provincial legislatures — including Ontario’s governing making sports gambling a ubiquitous $100-billion industry is coming. It is fine to above-board a vice for consenting and discerning adults. However, here I will steer you to an interview that author Michael Lewis (The Big Short, Moneyball) did with NPR Weekend Edition in November where he pointed to a study that showed 60 percent of male U.S. college students gambled. Lewis also covered sports gambling by young people on his Against The Rules podcast.
“The young male brain… is very overconfident — it doesn’t understand markets,” Lewis said on NPR.1
“(Sports gambling) is an addictive product that is being delivered on an addictive device (smartphones),” Lewis added. “I’m not making an argument for prohibition — I am arguing for making it harder. The question is how long (regulation) takes … with opioids it took 25 years, with tobacco it took 30 years.”
I know; I am no fun. However, I have a fixation with a weird idea: it is bad to destroy lives for the sake of accumulating more rich people’s boat money. There is a gambling-related suicide every nine days in Canada — that is from all forms of gambling, not just sports — and there is little to no pushback.2
Atiba Hutchinson, The Beautiful Dream: A Memoir (with Dan Robson)
Hutchinson is the only Canadian subject in this group of episodes, which is rather on-brand for a footballer who took on a sport that sometimes looks more at the passport than the playing ability. Starting in the early 2000s, before MLS in Canada was a thing, he set out to prove there was more talent where he came from.
It was quite a ride to hear Hutchinson recount his path from pursuing soccer as a first-gen Canadian in Brampton to being national team captain at age 39 for a successful World Cup campaign. I hope I do not have to beseech you to listen, and you don’t have to be a Beşiktaş fan to get something out of this one.
Noah Gittell, Baseball: The Movie
Fais-moi confiance, the writing of Noah Gittell will be a slump-buster for the baseball movie. Someone is working on that script.
It was great fun to spend an evening in May talking with the author and film critic about his book that examines how the baseball movie has played into the development of American identity.
There is one blockbuster in baseball that does track back to Gittell. He is a New York Mets fan, and they just lined up that 15-season contract with the über-discerning destroyer of baseballs Juan Soto.
Jacob Pomrenke, Joe Jackson vs. Chicago American League Baseball Club: Never Before Seen Trial Transcript
This week, Sammy Sosa gave a groveling, kind-of-forced apology to the Chicago Cubs over his doping. As if it was all on him, and not an “institutional scandal,” to life from the deep perspective of Jacob Pomrenke, director of editorial content at the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).
The work Pomrenke discusses another Chicago slugger from a century ago, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and what happened when he went to court against his team after his banishment from baseball. Well worth the time, I hope!
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. 21, 2024
Hamilton, Ont. : on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.
Steve Simon, “The journalist behind ‘The Big Short’ turns focus to sports gambling in new podcast,” NPR Weekend Edition, Nov. 16, 2024.
Rob Csernyik, “Dying to win: Canadian provinces are expanding legal gambling despite one death every nine days,” Ricochet, Dec. 17.