Creatively speaking, sports is drama in real time, with hooks, inciting incidents, scene breaks, nail-biting moments, tragedy, triumph, the whole nine-yards. On that note, I LOVED making the 6-part HBO Canada documentary series Sports On Fire. It's now on CBC GEM. Thank you CBC—and I think you can watch at least an episode, if not all of them, for free. Each episode is a moment or time where sports and history collide. With a great team, I got to create episodes about the 1936 "Nazi" Olympics (the great Jesse Owens), the classic 1972 hockey series between Canada and the USSR (oh the nostalgia for this Canadian kid—and the greatest sports series of all time), the origins of NASCAR (booze related—corn whisky anyone?), the bias against women with gender testing in sports (so what else is new?), the blind-eye institutionalization of steroids in sports (it turns out, you make more money if you win) and a personal story about the terror at the Munich Olympics in '72 (we interview Ankie Spitzer, whose husband was killed in the tragedy). Whoa the people we got to talk to and the stories we heard...check it out. And oh all the other stories I wish we could have told! What are your favourite sports moments, with or without a historical connection?
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