SportsLit

The lead-up to Father’s Day is a fitting time to release our latest episode.  That’s because when David Jr. Machado became a dad for the first time, it drove him to fill a void in the children’s book market, not with any grand illusions of riches, but because he wanted a specific sport to be the theme of what he read to his son. The result? Zachary Plays Golf.

Range is a great indicator of talent.  In Canadian broadcasting, the versatility of Rod Black is hard to touch.  For over forty years, from the early 1980s till present day, he has done it all, from play-by-play for niche sports to mainstream staples, hosting local nightly broadcasts and later, the Olympics….and his talents have served multiple national networks. Since 2021 when Black and TSN part...

A hook is not ideal in golf, but it is essential for most sports books. In the publishing industry’s present chapter, telling your life story needs an extra layer to get sold.  That lies perfectly for Canadian golfer Richard Zokol. A veteran of 412 PGA tournaments over three decades on tour from the early 1980s to 2000s, Zokol shares his application for mental mastery developed over time on the te...

As one of the greatest NBA players of all-time, Larry Bird’s life has been covered extensively. Out of common roots in midwestern basketball and out of a passion for regional history, Randy Mills (Retd. Prof. Oakland City University) mines Larry Legend’s origin story. In doing so, he presents the fervent foundation for the sport that existed in Bird’s home state of Indiana, using it as a base to f...

Don Cherry’s Coach's Corner segment on Hockey Night in Canada ended abruptly in 2019. Was it ever going to happen any other way? Controversial and entertaining, Cherry spoke his mind to the country for 37 years in the aforementioned first intermission segment. On Nov. 9, 2019, going over the top met with the times at hand and the contemporary media landscape.  Cherry was fired by Sportsnet in what...

There is an unending well of culture to draw from when it comes to hockey in Canada. Ronnie Shuker's bucket is full after driving across the country, 30,000 miles (or roughly 50,000 kilometres for you hosers!) in all. After traversing the "true north", Shuker (Editor-at-Large, The Hockey News) emptied his experiences over 244 pages giving further contemporary context to a game that exists in the b...

The business of women’s sports has never had this much momentum. So what is it building on? Jane McManus provides a real-time snapshot of where we currently are and how we got here in Fast Track: The Surging Business of Women’s Sports. McManus has spent a career covering sports for major outlets such as the New York Daily News and was a founding columnist for espnW. Now an Adjunct Professor at NYU...

The story, and history of Maple Leaf Gardens is well documented. It has been described as having religious significance, there is reverence and well earned-lore. A loathsome thread exists too.  Without question it is one of the most significant buildings ever constructed in Canada and a big part of its legend is that it was completed during the early years of the Great Depression. But what was Tor...

Hakeem Olajuwon left Lagos, Nigeria in 1980 and barely a year after taking up basketball, he blossomed into the game’s first international star in Houston, first collegiately with the Cougars and then with the NBA’s Rockets.  In an 18-season career he was a nine-time NBA all-star and two-time league champion.  He played his last season with the Toronto Raptors.  Olajuwon was inducted into the Bask...

Every hockey fan knows how it always ends for the Vancouver Canucks — no Stanley Cup — but Ed Willes digs in the corners to poke at the why, with a wry perspective. The veteran journalist (Regina Leader-Post, The Province) presents a case study, with novelistic detail, about the West Coast NHL franchise. Weaving a thread — one of instability at the top — through the history (and prehistory) of the...

Atiba Hutchinson finally has space to contemplate the inner strength it takes to chase goals that were often, and understandably, hard to define. In “The Beautiful Dream,” the retired captain of the Canadian men’s national soccer team (CMNT) lets fans and readers in on a footballer’s journey. Now retired as a player, Hutchinson delves into his early life as a first-generation Canadian growing up i...

In his début novel, sports journalist Jason Kirk gives readers a rigorous and referentially tight portrait of growing up in an evangelical world. “Hell Is a World Without You” plunges readers into the world of early-2000s teen Isaac Siena Jr., his youth group friends, widowed mother Katherine, and intense big brother Eli. Its themes delve through faith, the lingering effects of being raised with “...

Mike Keenan is a madman. Mike Keenan has a method. All things considered, both descriptions are part and parcel of a coaching career in which he angered many, and accomplished a great deal. 30 years ago he won the Stanley Cup and then abruptly parted with the New York Rangers, the team he led to the title. Iron Mike addresses career defining events such as this and covers much more in his life’s j...

Relying on a near half-century of deep research and reflection, Melissa Ludtke recounts her landmark federal case in “Locker Room Talk.” In 1977 and ’78, as a Sports Illustrated reporter, Ludtke was the winning plaintiff in Ludtke v. Kuhn, a U.S. federal case that Time Inc. and lawyer Fritz Schwarz Jr. brought against Major League Baseball. In the courtroom, Justice Constance Baker Motley — a civi...

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 youn...

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 durin...

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 fin...

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...

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 responsibi...

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 Secon...

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, Can...

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 du...

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 an...

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,” futur...

Morgan Campbell’s debut memoir, “My Fighting Family: Borders and Bloodlines and the Battles That Made Us” is more than a sports book — but sport is a through line.  Campbell, whose parents and a set of grandparents decamped from Chicago for Toronto during the sociopolitically turbulent late 1960s, shares much about growing up Black and learning his way in Canada when holding trenchant American roo...