Stranger Than Fiction, Vol VI: Sportsball Edition

True Crime Campfire

True Crime, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If there’s one thing that gets people’s blood pumpin’, it’s sports. All over the world on any given day, you can find people getting into passionate arguments about whose team has a better chance of making the playoffs, or the finals, or the World Cup or whatever. Sometimes there are fisticuffs involved! There are pubs in Scotland where you’re not allowed to wear your football team colors, for fear of a brawl breaking out. In my hometown, when our college team won a big basketball game, people would celebrate by turning over cars and setting stuff on fire. Parents often treat their elementary school kids’ Little League games like the fate of the free world is at stake. My point is, people get INTENSE about this stuff. And things can get real, real weird. This week, we bring you two stories that exemplify that weirdness.

Case 1: The Wild Lies of Kevin Hart. Case 2: The Cleveland Ten-Cent Beer Night Riot.

Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets go on sale February 7: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRE

Sources:
https://www.espn.com/espn/eticket/story?page=kevinhart&redirected=true https://www.espn.com/college-sports/recruiting/football/story/_/id/7525340/kevin-hart-recruit-lied-california-golden-bears-sign-missouri-western-state
Cleveland Magazine Archives: https://clevelandmagazine.com/in-the-cle/terminal/articles/1974-cheap-beers-cause-mayhem
Cleveland Magazine: https://clevelandmagazine.com/in-the-cle/sports/articles/10-cent-beer-night-an-oral-history-of-cleveland-baseball's-most-infamous-night
New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5528679/2024/06/03/cleveland-10-cent-beer-night-50-anniversary/
YouTube Channel Kristian Crow, "The Absolute Chaos of Ten Cent Beer Night" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2ZTGtMFVT8

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. If there's one thing in this world that gets people's blood pumping, it's sports.
0:24.4	All over the world on any given day, you can find people getting into passionate arguments
0:28.4	about whose team has a better chance of making the playoffs or the finals or the World Cup or whatever.
0:33.8	Sometimes there are fisticuffs involved.
0:36.0	There are pubs in Scotland where you're not allowed to wear your football team colors for fear of a brawl breaking out.
0:42.1	In my hometown, when our college team won a big basketball game, people would celebrate by turning over cars and setting stuff on fire.
0:49.7	Parents often treat their elementary school kids little league games like the fate of the free world is at stake. My point is,
0:55.9	people get intense about this stuff,
0:58.4	and things can get real,
0:59.9	real weird. This week,
1:01.9	we bring you two stories that exemplify
1:03.8	that weirdness. This is
1:05.6	Stranger Than Fiction, Volume 6,
1:07.7	Sports Ball Edition. in volume 6, sportsball edition.
1:23.0	Case 1. Runaway Train, the Wild Lies of Kevin Hart.
1:31.5	So, campers, for this one, we're in Fernley, Nevada, a small town in the middle of a whole lot of dry nothing about 30 miles east of Reno.
1:40.4	Anyone who grew up in a small town will know that there's no shortage of normal human dramas and wonders, but something really big hardly ever happens.
1:43.8	When it does, people will talk about it for decades. In Fernley, the big thing happened in
1:46.7	February of 2008, when an enormous high school senior named Kevin Hart announced he'd just
1:52.3	been recruited to play football for UC Berkeley. For our listeners who might be more familiar with
1:58.1	the round ball kind of football, this was a huge deal. Cal are a
2:02.3	division one team and play in front of 63,000 people. Winning a chance to compete for them would be a
	...

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