One of the reasons I created my Deviate podcast was to occasionally explore cultural and intellectual themes that go beyond the travel issues I typically write about. Since I’ve been intrigued with sports since my preschool days on a summertime swim-team (and, later in my youth, soccer teams and running clubs) in Wichita, many Deviate episodes have touched on sports.
Here are my six favorite, thus far:
Triumph in the middle of nowhere: The most 1980s underdog story of the 1980s
This episode explores the iconic (yet largely forgotten) 1980s American sport of major-league professional indoor soccer — an arena spectacle that had been created at the end of the 1970s to compete with such winter pro-sports leagues as the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League.
What made the Major Indoor Soccer League special for me growing up was that my own provincial-industrial Kansas hometown had its own franchise — the Wichita Wings (which competed against teams from cities like New York and San Diego) — and I was enamored with the team. This episode recounts this classic 1980s sports story, using (among other sources) audio from a 2020 documentary film entitled God Save the Wings.
A Native American football team beat the 1927 NFL Giants: The story of John Levi
When I first learned that an all-Native American football team named the Hominy Indians played (and defeated) the NFL-champion New York Giants on a field in Oklahoma the day after Christmas in 1927, I was as intrigued by the name of the Indians’ star fullback — John Levi — as I was by the existence of the game itself. My junior high gym coach in Wichita had been named John Levi — and, as it turned out, he was the son of the great Native American football star (who was often compared to Jim Thorpe, another Native American sports hero).
Blending a phone interview with Coach Levi (who has well into his nineties when I talked to him) with archival research and found-audio from decades past, this episode recounts a peculiar — yet true — tale from an era when the National Football League was less than a decade old, and the indigenous Osage people were (thanks to the discovery of huge oil fields in their part of Oklahoma) some of the richest people per capita in the world.
The Epic One-Against-Five Foul-Out Basketball Game of 1964
This quirky-yet-true sports story was about as local as it can get for me. When a central-Kansas newspaper recounted the 50th anniversary of the night a 1964 Kipp High sophomore named Larry Breer had to play an opposing basketball team by himself after his teammates fouled out of the game, I realized the this was the same Larry Breer who stored his farm equipment in my family’s barn (which is visible from my office window).
This curious basketball game got a fair amount of news-of-the-weird press in the late twentieth century (including in a 1981 book called Encyclopedia Brown’s Second Record Book of Weird and Wonderful Facts), but Larry had never recounted the whole story of the game in audio form. This podcast episode does just that.
A personal history of being a lifelong pro-sports fan (Super Bowl special)
Early in 2020, when the Kansas City Chiefs returned to the Super Bowl for the first time in 50 years, I knew I had to mark the occasion with a podcast conversation about the NFL — in part because I grew up loving NFL football, yet the Chiefs (the closest I had to a hometown team as a kid) had not been in the Super Bowl since before I was born.
Part of my childhood fascination with the NFL was tied to a 1971 book called Championship: The NFL Title Games Plus Super Bowl, which, in that pre-internet era, was my main source of football lore dating back to the 1930s. Joining me in this conversation about the idiosyncrasies of childhood NFL fandom, was novelist Tod Goldberg, who had a similar relationship to the game growing up in California.
This is among my favorite Deviate episodes ever, less because it reports on a specific event or franchise, than for the fact that it goes down the whimsical rabbit-hole of childhood obsession.
On the road with the superstars of Negro League baseball, 100 years on
Follow the thematic threads of the episodes listed above, and you’ll find that they all have one geographical location — my home-state of Kansas — in common. This episode about the history of baseball’s segregation-era Negro Leagues is no exception, since the league was born in Kansas City, and its players regularly barnstormed through the small towns of the Great Plains. Joining me in the conversation is Kansas-based baseball historian Phil Dixon, a cofounder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.
The Olympics started out as a travel fest: All about the Ancient Greek games
This episode, which ran in tandem with the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2021, features a conversation with historian Tony Perrottet, whose 2004 book The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Greek Games is an engaging deep-dive into the original games as they existed in Ancient Greece.
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