Sports Hall of Weird

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Regular CBC Radio listeners will recognize Kevin Sylvester as the host
of “Morning Sports,” and his Sports Hall of Weird is certainly the
right book for all those middle-school male readers who love to dazzle
their friends with their knowledge of unusual and “useless” trivia,
especially when they can share the book’s opening segment of
bathroom-focused sports anecdotes.

Carrying through on the idea of the book’s contents being a
sports-hall-of-fame-gone-wrong, Sylvester sorts his collection of 82
sports oddities into 15 “galleries” that bear names such as “Fowl
Balls,” “Mischievous Mascots,” and “Great Swindles and
Cheats,” with the number of “exhibits” per section ranging from
four to 10. Normally, just a single event is presented on each page, and
the brief, readable text is accompanied by a decorative, black-and-white
cartoonlike illustration.

The entries deal with wacky happenings in such popular sports as
baseball, hockey, football, soccer, golf, and tennis, but some also are
drawn from lesser-known sports like extreme diving, steeplechase,
cricket, and sumo wrestling. Although most of the happenings are
undated, the majority did occur within the last century, but a few took
place as far back in time as the ancient Greeks or the Aztecs. The
behaviours of athletes are at the centre of most of the entries, but
sometimes the happenings also involve spectators or animals.

Sports Hall of Weird is a quick read that will appeal to reluctant
readers. Recommended.