Richard Brignall: 8 books

This is a history of black major league baseball players and the crumbling of the colour barrier in sport, and the story of how Fergie Jenkins rose to the top to become Canada's first inductee into the American Baseball Hall of Fame. Fergie Jenkins grew up in the era when Jackie Robinson became...

How did the Kenora Thistles become, against all odds, the smallest team and the smallest town ever to win the Stanley Cup? This famously scrappy hockey team was founded in the rough and tumble town of Kenora, Ontario, at the end of the 19th century. A decade later, playing far away from home,...

Lionel Conacher excelled at football, hockey, baseball, boxing, wrestling, and lacrosse. He taught himself how to play and he worked hard, and it paid off. He supported his struggling family, never giving up or letting people down. He was given the nickname Big Train because he was unstoppable on...

George Chuvalo only wanted one thing: to become a boxer. When Chuvalo stepped into the ring, he was fearless. In ninety-three professional fights between 1956 and 1979, boxing everyone from George Foreman to Muhammad Ali, he was never once knocked out. But this heavyweight boxing legend never had...

Normie Kwong's parents immigrated to Canada from China in the early 1900s. For them, and many other Asian immigrants, moving meant having to face both the government's anti-Asian policies and society's attitude of Chinese exclusion. But Normie overcame it all and, despite his small stature, in 1948...

Clara Hughes has won multiple medals in both summer and winter Olympic Games. As a cyclist and speed skater, Clara pushed through pain to get to the finish line, trying to have her best race every day. Few knew that the same determination and focus were also needed to fight her own personal battles....

It wasn't until Canadian teams started losing in international tournaments in the mid 1950s that an epic hockey rivalry between Canada and the Soviet Union began. Canadians believed hockey was "their game." So Canadians were in for a rude awakening when they lost Game One of the 1972 Summit...

On the night of June 23, 1990, teenage friends Kyle Unger and John Beckett made a last-minute decision to attend a music festival near Roseisle, Manitoba. They were loners, not the popular kids at school. But on this night they seemed to finally fit in. They had fun, played games, drank, and hung...