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Professor Offers Popular Sports Podcast

April 15, 2014
Bruce Berglund

Bruce Berglund

Calvin College

Last year, Calvin College history professor Bruce Berglund’s increasingly popular New Books in Sports  podcast drew 6,000-10,000 downloads per month and visitors from 112 countries.

In three years of doing the podcast, he has interviewed 125 different writers, recording conversations with historians, economists, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers and a physicist who does research on sports.

His guests have also included journalists for The New York Times, The Sporting News, the BBC and sports media outlets in Canada, Australia and India.

He has spoken with writers about cricket in India, Australian-rules football, English rugby and baseball in Taiwan. 

Most recently, he spoke with Lincoln Harvey about his book, A Brief Theology of Sport.

Harvey is an English theologian linked with a group that promotes a conversation on faith and sport, led by Calvin kinesiology professors Brian Bolt and Julie Walton.

For those who want an introduction to the podcast, Berglund suggests his 2011 interview with German sports journalist Ronald Reng, on his book A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke. Reng had been friends with Enke, a goalkeeper on Germany’s national soccer team who committed suicide months before the World Cup in 2010.

“This book is about Enke’s battles with depression,” Berglund said. “It’s an amazing portrait, not only of an athlete, but of somebody struggling with depression. I would say that it’s the most moving and most gripping book that I’ve read.”

Listeners shouldn’t expect to find the latest bestseller featured on the podcast.

Berglund skirts books published by major trade presses in favor of those from university presses, which receive little attention in mainstream sports media.

“The books on the podcast are not player memoirs or the 100 Greatest Moments in Michigan Football or coffee-table books about the Red Wings,” he said.

New Books in Sports is part of a larger collection of podcasts called the New Books Network, which has podcasts on history, politics, religion, philosophy, East Asian studies and other subjects.

Berglund did graduate research work in sports history, and he’s taught a course at Calvin on sports in 20th-century Europe. This summer, he will be working with a McGregor summer research fellow on a research project in sports history.

“In recent years, I’ve developed more of a research interest in sports history,” Berglund said. A specialist in East European history, Berglund is interested in how fan loyalties are similar to national and religious identities, saying, “I’ve come to see that there are a lot of common elements to being a sports fan in other parts of the world.

“But there are a lot of cultural differences. That’s what fascinates me as a historian: Where do those differences come from?”