Well, the Olympics are giving us some great performances and amazing story lines, so we have dialed up an encore presentation of our 2020 conversation with a true grandson of Madison, Andrew Maraniss, about his award-winning book Games of Deception, the True Story of the First U.S. Olympic Basketball Team, and the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany.

You all know what basketball is, you all know what the Olympics are, you all know who Hitler was. So that part doesn’t need any more introduction.

As to Andrew Maraniss. First of all, he is, as you may have surmised, the son of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author David Maraniss and the pioneering environmentalist Linda Maraniss, born right here in Madison, now a resident of Brentwood, Tenn., with his wife Alison, and their two young children. David, of course, has also written a best-selling book about the Olympics, Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World. I interviewed David about that book when it came out in 2008, but no longer have access to the audio. David has also written a book about Andrew’s grandfather, the great journalist Elliott Maraniss, who I am proud to say   was also my former boss at the Capital Times. That interview, about David’s book A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father was the pilot episode of MBB in 2019. You see how this all comes around?

Like his father, Andrew is really good at telling historical and sports stories with a larger social message.  Games of Deception received the 2020 Association of Jewish Libraries Sydney Taylor Book Honors for middle grade readers and was named one of Amazon’s Top Books of 2019. His first book, the New York Times-bestseller Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South, received the 2015 Lillian Smith Book Award and the lone Special Recognition honor at the 2015 RFK Book Awards, the first sports-related book so honored. The Young Reader edition was named one of the Top 10 Biographies and Top 10 Sports Books of 2017 by the American Library Association and was selected as a Notable Social Studies Book for 2019 by the National Council for the Social Studies. And, of course, you’ll recall that Andrew was our guest in June for his new book about sports and society, Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke, the first gay ballplayer in major league baseball.

Andrew is a contributor to ESPN’s TheUndefeated.com. and Visiting Author at Vanderbilt University Athletics, where he was formerly the associate director of media relations – a lesson in the value of leaving a job on good terms. He was also the first-ever media relations manager for the Tampa Bay Rays. You can follow him on Twitter @trublu24 and visit his website at andrewmaraniss.com.