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Chapter 1: What stories does James Duthie share in his book 'Certified Beauties'?
That would be so impersonal right? the truth is that fans deeply care about the players and coaches their careers the narratives around teams rivalries the histories the records and that's not to mention the natural narratives that emerge within games with comebacks and costly mistakes and unlikely heroes adversity build up to big moments it's suspense and release
Sports are a battle for the athletes, but for fans, it's all narrative. And the book that we're talking about today scratches that sports narrative itch for me like nothing else. Certified Beauties, More of Hockey's Greatest Untold Stories is by Canadian sportscaster and author James Duthie.
It's a massive collection of hockey stories based on interviews with players and coaches that were directly involved. I demolished the audiobook in two days. It's a must read for anyone who follows hockey. James Duthie is on here to talk about it. This is Audiobook Cafe. I'm Jacob Schramansky.
Chapter 2: How does James Duthie narrate his own audiobook?
Certified Beauties is available on Libro.fm, Spotify, and Audible. It's about nine hours long and narrated by James Duthie himself. Here's a quick sample. The driver's door opens.
Connor McDavid steps out. We've been talking about it all week, but figured there was no way he'd actually play, says Luke Strickland, a dirty Mike and the boys forward. Then he gets out of the car and we realize we're about to play against the best player in the world.
Chapter 3: What challenges does Duthie face in recording his audiobook?
And then the passenger door opens and we're like, oh boy. Out the other side of the SUV comes Leon Dreisaitl. It's this instant mix of excitement and dread, Luke says. It's incredibly cool that you were about to share the ice with maybe the two best players on the planet. But we really want to win, and that seems unlikely now.
That was a sample of Certified Beauties by James Duffy. James, welcome to the show.
Thanks for making time. James Duffy It's not anymore, but it's strange in that capacity because I've never done an audio book before. And I'm sure if I listened, I haven't listened to it yet myself, and I'm sure I would cringe at different words that I wished I'd said a different way probably because it was much harder than I...
I thought it would be a guy who's done broadcasting his entire life to actually voice his own book. But it was strange.
Everybody who's a public figure and who does like public speaking, that sort of thing, who's put out an audiobook and narrated it themselves. And I've interviewed lots of people like this. They all have similar answers. Recording audiobooks is not easy. It's very different than doing your standard broadcasting.
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Chapter 4: What unique storytelling techniques are used in 'Certified Beauties'?
It obviously helps to have a broadcasting background, but it's not easy. The part that I struggled with...
was differentiating the quotes. Certified Beauties is full because I try whenever possible to let the people telling the story tell the story. So, you know, half of each chapter would be long quotes of whoever the central figure in the chapter may be telling part of the story. And then I'll slip in here and there.
know to fill in gaps and so the difficulty for me this the thing that you never do in broadcasting is try to speak in someone else's voice imitates people right i mean at that point you're acting and it's not easy to reenact uh bruce boudreaux uh mid-game right right well there was only i mean i didn't try to do people's voices or anything i don't think i'm nearly that talented enough one chapter that was the exception
was there's a chapter about Brian Kilray, who is a famous junior hockey coach, the winningest junior hockey coach of all time. People in Ottawa know him well. He's a legend.
Chapter 5: How does James Duthie choose which hockey stories to include in his book?
Maybe not as well in the rest of the hockey world, but he is in the Hall of Fame. And, you know, kind of the point of the story was Kevin Weeks is a junior hockey player looking to get a break and looking to get traded, and Killer calls him. to tell him that he's been traded to him and Killer bellows in this voice.
And it was the one part of the book where I said, I'm going to have to try to imitate Killer. You know, I'll do a disservice in an audio book if I don't try to do this Killer voice, which is this kind of voice like this, where Kevin, we've just traded for you. And so I found myself, that was the one chapter where I kind of tried to do an invitation.
I probably failed miserably, but I felt it was kind of necessary for the chapter to work. And that was one of my favorite chapters.
So it all worked out in the end. Can you give us an idea of the sorts of stories that people can hear if they pick up the book?
Yeah, so I'll backtrack a little to the concept. It's, as you mentioned off the top, I did a book called Beauties about six years ago. And it sort of came to me, my day job, of course, which is not really a day job, it's a night job, is to host panels and do intermissions and pregame shows.
And over the years, we've had a ton of ex-coaches or players, current players, ex-players who've guested on the panel with me. And they're always very relaxed. And you have a lot of downtime because you're watching the games. I don't do the play-by-play. I'm the guy who talks in the intermissions and before the game and after the game. And I would hear stories from guys.
And they would be, you know, hockey breeds great stories. And... And there came a point in time where I sort of said to myself, I have this great collection of stories that I've heard. And quite often they'll tell you stories that, you know, they wouldn't necessarily tell in an interview, right? So they'd never been sort of said publicly before.
And so I thought, what if I could do a book that was just great stories? It wasn't like a typical hockey autobiography where you'd get the entire person's life and you might get three or four really amazing stories in there, but the rest would all be details of his life and career. What if I could cut all that stuff out and just have the great stories? And so that's sort of what I set out to do.
I had some already in the back of my mind. I reached out to players and so on and so forth.
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Chapter 6: What makes coaches in hockey interesting characters?
My selling point would just be, could you just tell me one great story that if you were sitting around with teammates or your buddies in a bar after your career or during your career, just tell me one great story, the story that, you know, players tell each other that maybe they don't usually share with the media. And that was the idea. And there was no rules to it.
It could be something that happened in a game. Could be about a trade like the Kevin Weeks kill race story. It could be something that happened in peewee or minor hockey. Could be something that happened on a road trip on an airplane. I don't care what it is. Just tell me a great story. And I think when you tell people that, it kind of frees them up to go places maybe they haven't been before.
And that's what the purpose of these books are.
And to give people an idea, like there are lots of stories in here. It's not like there's one story per chapter because some of these are, you call them like rapid fire chapters where you're cranking out these stories. There must be 50, 60, 70 stories in here, which makes the book so interesting.
digestible but also you're naming names like it's not anonymous stories from players for the most part like you hear about these actual characters that we know of if you're a big hockey fan so you reached out to a lot of people for these stories you know you combine it with everything that you hear just through your job how did you sort through all of these stories to compile the ones that ended up in the book like surely a lot of things you've heard did not make it into this book
Yeah, there definitely were a few, but you'd be surprised because I think people self-edit to an extent. You know, I'm not going to hear something triple X rated, nor do I necessarily want to share something like that anyway. I kind of wanted to write a book that...
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Chapter 7: How does Duthie get players to open up during interviews?
could be read by people of all ages. Now there are, I got a little bit scared. When I wrote the first Beauty's book, I got people writing me saying, hey, my six-year-old, I read them chapters of your book before bed. And I started to sweat going, there is some, you know, a little bit of inappropriate content or... somewhat adult content in some of these stories.
And so I started to get really nervous thinking about these children getting read these stories. And hopefully the parents were doing their own redactions. But for the most part, I think they're all great. And most people who tell me a story, they know it's going to be in a book. So there was a few that were... You know, I left on the editing room floor for sure.
Yeah, it was definitely a weird process because I also, when the only, I have no rules, but I do also want to have a mix. There's some that are really silly, you know, sort of immature hockey locker room type stories. A lot of pranks. But they're funny pranks. I was actually worried there was a few too many, a lot of guys told me prank stories.
And when I was finishing the book, I'm like, maybe I got a couple too many prank stories in here, but yeah. You know, I'm not going to throw – these were the stories the guys wanted to tell me, so so be it. But, you know, you want to have some that are more serious, you know, maybe heartwarming or motivational.
And you want to have some sort of mix in there that – when I read books, I like to open – you know, if it's a book like this where it's a compilation, I like to be surprised on every page and have something different. So that's the kind of way when I –
when I put together Certified Beauties that, you know, you might have something completely ridiculous and then the next chapter might make you cry. And that was, I think, the goal. It's funny. I'll tell you one little secret I've never told anybody.
Yeah.
It's always a struggle for me. I don't think about the order of the stories until I have all the stories done. And I'm so, this is probably the dumbest way to do it. There's probably a technology that I could have done this using AI or something, but I literally take a giant piece of paper and and I write the chapters and then I cut or rip out the papers.
So I have, let's say there was 60 chapters or 60 stories in this book and I have them written on a little slice piece of paper and I sit them down on like the kitchen table And I sit there and go, okay, this one, then this one, then this one, then this one. Oh, this one can't go with this one.
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Chapter 8: What is the process of fact-checking stories in 'Certified Beauties'?
I find that harder. I find it harder to write about yourself. Really? Because simply because... there's a fine line of, you know, I always can kind of remove myself from the story and am I making myself sound too good? Do I sound arrogant here? Do I sound too stupid here?
You're trying to tell the story as honestly as possible, but, you know, as time morphed my perspective on that story, whereas I find it easier to tell someone else's story because that's kind of what I've done my entire career is The reason I got into this business was to be a storyteller. Now, there's a different fashion. You'd be on a panel telling a story than certified beauties, obviously.
There are different kinds of stories and different ways you would tell them. But there are challenges, certainly, in finding the right voice for a story. Here's an example going back to kids reading the book. Some hockey players are hockey players and they swear every three words. And how do you tell a story properly in someone's voice when...
You know, if you take out all the F-bombs, you're not truly telling the story in their voice. But at the same time, if you put them all in, it just sounds ridiculous. And so what's that line of how many times I left the actual words that he said in there? he or she said and take them all out.
So you do definitely labor with things like that, but I do find it much easier, especially because the stories are good. And when the stories are really good, which I think a lot of them in this book are, I don't want to say they write themselves because that makes me sound like I do nothing whatsoever. But the really good stories, you basically can't screw up, I think, right?
Like sometimes I'll get it off the phone or, you know, go meet somebody for a beer and they'll tell me a story and – And as soon as it's done, I'm like, there's no way I can screw this up. I can't. It's just, it's too good a story for me. Even if I just, you know, wrote it in a heartbeat without even thinking about what I said, it's such a good story that you can't mess it up.
So that hopefully most of the stories in the book are good enough that I can't screw them up.
I mentioned earlier that one of my favorite stories was the one with the Ottawa 67s coach, Kele. There were a couple chapters about coaches that I felt like there was a particular amount of love put into those chapters. They were some of the longer ones, but they were just fantastic stories to me. Definitely some of the better ones.
Now, because I think coaches have a weird combination of great emotional intelligence, but also being really unhinged. Can you talk a little bit about coaches and what makes them interesting people? I've always been interested in coaches.
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