Episodes
![SportsLit (Season 8, Episode 13) - Michael Cochrane (Partner - BT Legal) - Olympic Lyon: The Untold Story of the First Gold Medal of Golf](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/1773949/New_SL_300x300.jpg)
6 days ago
6 days ago
Michael Cochrane found an artifact of early Canadian golf great George S. Lyon hiding in plain sight one day — and set to bring him to life on the page, and on the links.
In “Olympic Lyon: The Untold Story of the First Gold Medal for Golf,” Cochrane digs deep to tell the story of the Toronto insurance salesman who captured Olympic glory in the early 20th century, to the delight of fans in the young nation of Canada. Lyon never got to defend his title, or congratulate his successor. But through deep research honed over decades as a lawyer, and a keen understanding of golf’s appeal the world over, Cochrane may have readers feel like they’re in George’s gallery following him around the course.
A resident of Burlington, Ont., Michael Cochrane is a partner at Brauti Thorning LLP in Toronto. He hosted the program “Strictly Legal” on Business News Network (BNN). He has penned two other novels, and also has made two holes in one.
![SportsLit (Season 8, Episode 12) - Jerry Grillo (Journalist) - Big Cat: The Life of Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Mize](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/1773949/New_SL_300x300.jpg)
Monday Jul 15, 2024
Monday Jul 15, 2024
Johnny Mize, a top home-run hitter in a turbulent time for baseball and North America, never got a complete biography in his lifetime.
Author Jerry Grillo, who lives in the same region of rural Georgia where Mize hailed from, has remedied that by examining Mize’s baseball life and his effect on the sport.
Mize (1913-1993, inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981) played in the majors during an era marked and marred by segregation, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. The lefty-hitting slugging first baseman won four league home run titles, still has some unmatched batting feats, and shares the record for most career three-home run games. And he was almost forgotten by the keepers of baseball history.
Grillo began researching a Mize bio in 2000. It is his second book, following, “The Music and Mythocracy of Col. Bruce Hampton: A Basically True Biography.”
![SportsLit (Season 8, Episode 11) - Tiffany Brown, Erin Strout, Katie Steele - The Price She Pays](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/1773949/New_SL_300x300.jpg)
Thursday Jul 11, 2024
Thursday Jul 11, 2024
New investment and enthusiasm are pouring into women’s sports.
In “The Price She Pays: Confronting the Hidden Mental Health Crisis in Women’s Sports— from the Schoolyard to the Stadium,” lead authors Dr. Tiffany Brown and Katie Steele call for changes to the athletic hierarchy women compete under. As lead authors, along with co-author Erin Strout, they propose that the expanding popularity and financial clout of women’s sports must be commensurate with an athlete-centred mental health approach
The book is a candid guide to all stages of the sporting life, from introductory activities up to U.S. major-college athletics and the pros. It is unsparing of the traumas, but always optimistic, which meshes with 2024’s breakouts such as new leagues that are gaining traction, and the WNBA rookie class featuring the likes of Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Kingston, Ont., native Aaliyah Edwards. “The Price She Pays” is both timely, and telling about what fault lines need to be filled in.
Brown and Steele are both licensed marriage and family therapists based in Oregon. Strout, who has written and freelanced for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Runner’s World, Women Running, and ESPN-W, is based in Flagstaff, Arizona. “The Price She Pays” was released by Little, Brown, and Spark on June 18, 2024.
![SportsLit (Season 8, Episode 10) - Madeleine Orr (Asst. Prof., U of T) - Warming Up](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/1773949/New_SL_300x300.jpg)
Wednesday Jun 26, 2024
SportsLit (Season 8, Episode 10) - Madeleine Orr (Asst. Prof., U of T) - Warming Up
Wednesday Jun 26, 2024
Wednesday Jun 26, 2024
Sport ecologist Dr. Madeleine Orr is pitching a ‘green game plan’ for sports fans.
In “Warming Up,” Orr pairs her academic curiosity and storytelling to stir optimism (or “hopeium”) about using the power of sport to explain climate adaptation. The University of Toronto professor’s début book reminds readers sports are a bigger social connector than politics, arts, and pop culture — and the loss of them can have significant mental health effects.
As such, sports is a rallying point to push for a world that must burn about five times less fossil fuels to avert worst-case outcomes from climate change.
Whether it is children learning a new game, or globetrotting pros, athletes need breathable air, drinking water, and relief from the ‘big bad’ of extreme heat (and winter sport athletes need snow, too). Far from a doom-and-gloom finger-wag, Orr shows that many athletes and sports organizations are on Team Green, and outlines the next steps.
![SportsLit (Season 8, Episode 9) - Evanka Osmak (Anchor / Sportsnet Central) - Ali Hoops](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/1773949/New_SL_300x300.jpg)
Saturday Jun 08, 2024
Saturday Jun 08, 2024
In “Ali Hoops,” the début children’s book by sports anchor Evanka Osmak, the 10-year-old heroine just wants a place in the game.
Ali “daydreams about being a basketball star,” but frets about whether she can make her school team. Along the way, Ali learns lessons about who makes a true team off and on the floor — and illustrates how sports give a child a chance to build life skills and responsibility.
Evanka Osmak is an anchor for Sportsnet Central. She is a mother of two and has been with Sportsnet since 2007.
![SportsLit (Season 8, Episode 8) - Noah Gittell (Author / Critic) - Baseball: The Movie](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/1773949/New_SL_300x300.jpg)
Wednesday May 15, 2024
SportsLit (Season 8, Episode 8) - Noah Gittell (Author / Critic) - Baseball: The Movie
Wednesday May 15, 2024
Wednesday May 15, 2024
Noah Gittell is here to get the baseball movie out of its big-screen slump.
In “Baseball: The Movie,” his first book, he advocates for the return of a sports movie niche that has faded since “Moneyball” and “42” were hits in the early ’10s. Drawing on insights from fellow writers and ballplayers, Gittell shows how the baseball movie, since the time of “The Pride of the Yankees” during the Second World War, has tapped into the essentials of the American soul and identity.
A longtime New York Mets fan, Gittell’s writing has graced The Atlantic, The Economist, Elle, Esquire The Guardian, GQ, and the LA Review of Books. He also keeps up a Substack, Good Eye: Movies and Baseball.
![SportsLit (Season 8, Episode 7) - Mary Ormsby (Journalist / Author) - World’s Fastest Man*: The Life of Ben Johnson](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/1773949/New_SL_300x300.jpg)
Saturday May 04, 2024
Saturday May 04, 2024
Whether Ben Johnson ever receives exoneration, the examination of the Canadian sprinter’s life and times by Mary Ormsby shows he got a raw deal.
Johnson became the first track-and-field Olympian to lose a gold medal for doping after a positive test at the 1988 Summer Olympics. In “World’s Fastest Man*: The Life of Ben Johnson,” Ormsby raises alarming questions about the reactions from the IOC, Canadian sports leaders, and the media — and double standards imposed on Johnson and other Black Canadian athletes at a time when steroid use was common in Olympic sports.
Ormsby, who had a three-decade career with the Toronto Star, also pairs investigative work with a character study of Johnson. His second life has involved training soccer great Diego Maradona, racing against a car for charity, and finding grace and resilience to keep running.
![SportsLit (Season 8, Episode 6) - Ken Dryden (Hockey Hall of Fame Goalie 1983 / Author) - The Class](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/1773949/New_SL_300x300.jpg)
Wednesday Apr 17, 2024
Wednesday Apr 17, 2024
In what might be his most ambitious work, author and hockey legend Ken Dryden affirms the value of finding our similarities.
At the start of the 2020s, Dryden sought out people with whom he shared a uniquely Canadian coming-of-age experience during an ambitious era. In the early 1960s, Dryden was part of the ‘Brain Class’ at Etobicoke C.I. — students who loved to learn. Through meetings on Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in person, Dryden learned the biographies of 34-of-35 classmates to produce, “The Class: A Memoir Of A Time, A Place, And Us.”
Dryden’s classmates have led rich lives, finding their own ‘Stanley Cup’ in unexpected places. And, of course, Dryden won the Stanley Cup six times with the Montréal Canadiens in the 1970s and was the winning goalie in the decisive Game 8 of the Canada-USSR Summit Series in 1972. “The Class” is his ninth book.
![SportsLit (Season 8, Episode 5) - Keith O'Brien (New York Times Best Selling Author) - Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/1773949/New_SL_300x300.jpg)
Sunday Apr 14, 2024
Sunday Apr 14, 2024
How Pete Rose became so polarizing spurred Keith O’Brien to get granular in “Charlie Hustle,” which has become an instant The New York Times bestseller.
In 1989, Major League Baseball’s hit king received a lifetime ban for betting on games in which he managed his hometown Cincinnati Reds. With reportorial digging, O’Brien reminds readers of everything Rose did between the lines of MLB ballparks and off the field, and why the scandal lingers into this era of legal sports gambling.
A Cincinnati native like Rose, O’Brien draws on some 27 hours of dialogue with the baseball legend, and extensive interviews with Rose’s family, inner circle, and former teammates. “Charlie Hustle” is his fourth book, and second about sports.
![SportsLit (Season 8, Episode 4) - Jack McCallum (Sports Illustrated) - The Real Hoosiers](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/1773949/New_SL_300x300.jpg)
Thursday Mar 14, 2024
Thursday Mar 14, 2024
Jack McCallum is on the case of the Crispus Attucks Tigers, a young Oscar Robertson, and purloined glory in the heartland of hoops.
In The Real Hoosiers, his 12th book, McCallum dives into why Indiana celebrates the 1954 Milan Miracle, and the film “Hoosiers,” more than Attucks. Repping a school community forced into existence in a “bewildering and openly racist big-city educational system,” future NBA assist king and players’ union leader Robertson and his teammates won back-to-back Indiana schoolboy titles barely a decade after the competition was opened to Black schools. It was the first time anywhere in America that a Black team had won ‘State,’ and that gets into some “freighted” history.
Best known as a longtime NBA writer at Sports Illustrated, McCallum’s basketball books include Dream Team, Golden Days, and Seven Seconds Or Less. He also detailed a personal health challenge in The Prostate Monologues.