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 focus specifically on the machinations of his high school basketball playing days for the Spring Valley Blackhawks from 1972-1974. 

Utilizing archived stories from local reporters and tapping into a lived experience with the subject matter, Mills arrives at his latest release in a line of publications that study the midwestern United States.

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 is known as “Poppygate”.

Is there more to this story? Is there more to Grapes than most care to know?

His late daughter decided she wanted to confront this matter and also the descriptions she so often heard and read about her dad.

The result is The Don Cherry Story, by his Daughter, Cindy Cherry. It’s a book that exists in two parts, the first deals with the front facing persona of her father, and the second which focuses on his life, on and off the ice.

This episode is a conversation with Cindy’s brother and Don’s son, Tim Cherry, about the book and about his family.

*Cindy Cherry passed away in July 2024.

**This was recorded one week prior to Cherry’s sign off from "The Don Cherry's Grapevine Podcast" on Sunday, June 22.

There is an unending well of culture to draw from when it comes to hockey in Canada.

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 bones of this nation. 

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 at the Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport, she has published a book that examines the business of women's sport, focusing on the peaks that have occured during her lifetime, from 1970s till present day.

Tracing a line through the origins of the WTA to the leagues emerging today, there is lots to learn in this rapidly developing movement that rides an undulating past into its next sustainable breakthrough.

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 Toronto Maple Leafs’ owner Conn Smythe’s intent?  Why did he build it where he did? What crowd did he want to attract and how do those spectators compare to what our notions of them would be? How did this venerated structure meet the times it evolved from?

These are questions that Russell Field (Associate Professor, Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management, the University of Manitoba) examines in A Night at the Gardens: Class, Gender, and Respectability in 1930s Toronto.

Explore the origin and early days of Maple Leaf Gardens through an academic lense. 

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 Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013 and is a member of the NBA's 75th anniversary team.

In “Dream: The Life and Legacy of Hakeem Olajuwon,” biographer Mirin Fader draws on some 250 interviews to present a silent sports star who experienced a religious metamorphosis.  A fiery competitor who led by example in all aspects of his life, paying it forward with teammates and current NBA stars through the type of mentorship he benefited from early in his career.  She also utilizes her extensive research to debunk myths surrounding Hakeem’s life and career.

Fader is a senior writer with The Ringer. Her début book, “Giannis: The Improbable Rise of an NBA MVP,” reached The New York Times best-seller list.  

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 team, Willes explains why the Canucks have fallen short of winning the Stanley Cup, but have never been boring across five-plus decades of torment.

Relying on firsthand research and contemporary accounts from fellow Vancouver sports journalists, Willes provides painstaking details about the life-arcs of stars such as Henrik Sedin, Daniel Sedin, Pavel Bure, Markus Näslund, and Todd Bertuzzi. The author also playfully teases out the franchise’s many what-ifs.

Willes is also author of “The Rebel League: The Short and Unruly Life of the World Hockey Association” (2005) and “End Zones and Border Wars: The Era of American Expansion in the CFL” (2013).

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 in Brampton, Ont. in the 1980s, and ’90s and how he navigated the uncertain path to professional success in Europe during the days when a true domestic league hardly existed.

That perseverance led to a 20-season pro career that included championships, adulation, and celebrity outside Canada. And, after several frustrating World Cup cycles, Hutchinson was the 39-year-old captain when Canada broke through to qualify for the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.

Hutchinson joined us from his home in Turkey to discuss his life story. He joins Dwayne De Rosario as the second CMNT alumnus to appear on SportsLit.

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 “constant fear of hell, and shame, and damnation,” and being in a world where “youth pastors dress like Stifler.”

Kirk, who calls himself a “lazy Christian pantheist,” is a senior editor at The Athletic and part of the long-running Shutdown Fullcast (“the internet’s only college football podcast.”). An Atlanta native, he and his wife Emily Kirk have also had a pod called Vacation Bible School.

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 journey through hockey.

The 1985 Jack Adams Award winner (NHL Coach of the Year) joined SportsLit to discuss his exploits behind the bench, the front office, and off the ice.

If he was do it all again, would he do it any differently?  Find out.