SportsLit

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 roots.

It explores a rich and nuanced family tree filled with characters that can be turbulently interconnected.

Campbell is a CBC Sports senior contributor who spent close to two decades with the Toronto Star, the largest newspaper in Canada. He also performs boxing commentary, and was a boxing correspondent for The New York Times. His spouse, Perdita Felicien, was also a guest of SportsLit in 2021 (“My Mother’s Daughter,” S5E06).

Erik Kramer built an NFL career on precision, timing, and accuracy, but it was his greatest miss that led to him building a complete life.

Nothing is ever as good as it once was. That’s a lie —they improve, or more accurately, they evolve. Still, why not look back with a bit of wonder?

Like a hard foul in the paint, Cohen's prose will knock you down and stoke a hunger for more