Not by the Playbook

Do you ever find yourself thinking back to the good old days, whenever they were, and thinking about someone you've not seen for a while and wondering "What ever happened to" Well this week we hear from four former elite sport stars who are now enjoying a very different career to the one you knew them for!
First up a chat with an Australian about cricket, not that unusual you might think but this has nothing to do with wickets and wides. Zach Schubert grew up rural Southern Australia with a burning ambition, fuelled in part by seeing his cousin represent Australia playing hockey at the Olympics... But Zach had no idea just how arduous and tortuous his journey to get there would be! But get there he did, when in 2024 in Paris right in front of the Eiffel Tower he stepped on to the sand with team mate Tom Hodges to take part in the Beach volleyball. He tells us about that and now having retired about the cricket and cockroach farm he created.
Growing up Joe Balnton only had one goal, to make it to Baseball's big league. And he did, being drafted in 2003 to the Oakland A's. It started a life long love of California that is still a massive influence in his life, but before he could retire he had World Series to win! And he did that playing for the Philadelphia Phillies in 2008. He made history too because after pitching well in Game 4, it's what he did with the bat that he's be forever remembered. For the first time in his MLB career he hit a home run! It was the first home run scored by a pitcher in the World Series since 1974 and no one has repeated the feet since!
Joe continued to play at the highest level picking up a second World Series ring with Kansas City in 2015. Eventually though time was called on his career on the mound but Joe knew exactly what his next adventure would be! That's because he'd been honing his skills ahead of his next career pretty much from the moment he arrived in California over 20 years before... Speaking to us from his vineyard in the Napa Valley, he told us all about winning it all back then and how he's now crafting rather lovely Cabernet Sauvignon.
Josh Navidi is the rugby union player who despite having hung up his cleats, is still playing in front of a packed stadium on match day!? Born in Wales Josh lived his formative years in New Zealand before returning to the UK and eventually pulling on the red shirt of Wales. Despite a very pregnant pause between his first call up and his second cap, Josh had a hugely successful career, winning almost everything that the game has to offer. So how, despite having retired through injury can you still see him perform on matchdays. In fact when he spoke to us he was right outside the nation stadium preparing to wow the crowd again this time with his ability to get the party going with his DJing skills!
Faramarz Assef was one of Iran's most famous pop singers during the time of the Shah, but what most of his fans don't know is that he used to be an international athlete.
Photo: Wales player Josh Navidi faces the media during Wales Media access ahead of their match against the Australian Wallabies at the Hensol Castle on November 9, 2017 in Cardiff, Wales. (CREDIT: Stu Forster/Getty Images)

Author Dagny Scott Barrios, once wrote “Every run is a work of art, a drawing on each day's canvas. Some runs are shouts and some runs are whispers. Some runs are eulogies and others celebrations. When you're angry, a run can be a sharp slap in the face. When happy, a run is your song". This week we go running towards hope and motivation whatever your level of fitness with inspirational runners from all over the world
Now I know you're busy, I know there are hundred and one things you have to do! Even if you wanted to go out for a run, you're just too busy! The thing is though, I'm not sure you're not as busy as Beatie Deutsch. If nothing else she's a mum of five. Ten years ago she was unfit and struggling under the stresses and strains of modern life when she sought an escape. That escape was running and within four years she was Israel's national champion and vying for a place at the Olympics. Not even being pregnant stopped her, completing the Tel Aviv Marathon seven months pregnant! Beatie is an Orthodox Jew, but for her, running isn’t separate from her religious beliefs, it’s sustained by it.
They say "it takes a village to raise a child" but that's also true of athletes too! And when the athlete is autistic, it's even more important to find the right people to support you. Being autistic does not mean you have an illness or disease. It just means your brain works in a different way from other people, but that can present challenges to what others might think of as daily activities. Adrienne Bunn is autistic but with the support of her family, including mum June, her coach Doug and many others too Adrienne has carved out a career in sport. In 2023 she became the youngest female to ever finish the IRONMAN World Championship in Kona, arguably the toughest competition in sport. We caught up with Doug, June and of course Adrienne just a day after she completed this year's Boston Marathon!
The thing about running is that it almost doesn't matter where you live, or how much money you have, you can probably just step out of your house and start moving. And the challenges that elite athletes face are by and large the same as you and I. So we thought we'd bring together two women who'd never met but who share one thing. A love of running. Lucy Charles Barkley has won multiple IRONMAN World Championships - running, cycling and swimming over distances in excess of a hundred kilometres. Jenny Mannion, is about to attempt her first ultra-marathon - the standard marathon and plenty more!
It's hard to believe hearing our stories today that it's only in the last forty or so years that women's have been allowed to compete over the Marathon distance. And that's thanks in no small part to pioneers like Nina Kuscsick. Back in 1972 six women staged a sit-down protest at the start of the New York Marathon demanding the right to run in the same race as the men. Nina, who organised that protest passed away last year, but back in 2019 she spoke to the BBC.
Photo: Life Time Miami Half Marathon women's winner Beatie Deutsch, 30, of Israel, crosses the finish line at 1:16:49 during the 18th annual Life Time Miami Marathon and Half Marathon in Miami, Fla. on Sunday, Feb. 9, 2020. (CREDIT: Daniel A. Varela/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

"It is never too late to be what you might have been" so wrote the Victorian author George Elliot. Having searched the globe for the best stories in sport we have found four people that might just force you to redefine what it is you think can still achieve in life!
First to Texas and the remarkable story of Mike Flynt. One so extraordinary that seems like the plot to a Hollywood movie, which is why I guess they did make it into a Hollywood movie! Mike's is not only a story of remarkable resilience, not to mention incredible fitness especially given his goal was to play college football at the age of FIFTY NINE! but at its heart, his is a story of redemption.
Living with pain is sadly all too common. It can affect people's ability to work, to provide for themselves or to enjoy any aspect of life especially sport, and when you have used being active to redefine your life and conquer the darkness of addiction, then it seems particularly cruel... That's was the fate that befell Meg Robson Austin... but she never allowed herself to think it was too late to win back her life and so she set about a journey that ended with her claiming the crown of the World's Strongest Woman.
Sometimes it can seem like it's too late, even before you get going. That the random chance of being born into specific circumstances can dictate large parts of your life. Arshay Cooper born and raised in Chicago's notorious West Side could easily have slipped into gang life and violence, but he carved a different path through sport, not in itself unusual , but when you find out that Arshay sporting journey was in a boat as a rower, well then you have the start of an understanding as to how remarkable his story is.
It's just over a year since the world lost "Big" George Forman, and whilst revered for his fights with Muhammad Ali, his Olympic gold in 1968 and of course his grills, it's his longevity and his "it's never too late" attitude we are focusing in on because back in 1994 George Foreman shocked everyone by winning a second world title at the age of FORTY FIVE!
Photo: NBC NEWS -- Pictured: Linebacker Mike Flynt, 59 year old Sul Ross State University football player in his first game of the year on October 13, 2007 (CREDIT: Al Henkel/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)

It's amazing how many people are involved in anyone sporting endeavour... Of course the athletes are the stars of the show, but then there's coaches, physiotherapist and umpires. And beyond them there are cameramen, hot dog sellers and security staff. This week we spend some time with some of those people we don't think of as crucial to our enjoyment of sport, but without them we'd really miss them!
Benny Drawbars is a man who occupies an almost unique position in sport, one that straddles the very best "old timey" traditions of sport and the modern and exciting way we all now experience sport. How? Well each week Benjamin Wooley steps into the Climate Pledge Arena, home of NHL team Seattle Kraken, blows gently on his fingers, cracks his knuckles and morphs into Benny Drawbars, the demon organist! But is this most wonderful of traditions, heard mostly in the US at hockey and baseball games a dying art?
In some ways you could say Ken Calwell has had a career in pizza, but that would do him no justice! He has in fact he has headed up some of your favourite fast food companies, from Pizza Hut to Dominoes and now Papa Murphy... He even had a spell at Wendy's! So why would we want to chat to a man who has spent his life marketing pizza, how ever delicious that might sound!? Well he also created an advert you probably saw during the Super Bowl, the only one not "selling" a product! But first we chatted about his life before and after August 8th 1991 and what happened on that day that changed everything
To win a gold medal at the Summer Games or it's winter counterpart is a pretty amazing feet, but to win gold at BOTH, well that's the preserve of a very very few number of athletes. American Kendall Gretsch is one of them. Born with spina bifida which has severely limited the use of her legs, she won gold in the Para-triathlete in Tokyo in 2021 and has now won multiple Paralympic Winter golds, including just a few weeks ago in Milan Cortina, topping the podium in the cross-country skiing.
Imagine creating a swimsuit so good it would have to be banned?! That's what Jason Rance and his team at Speedo's research and development Aqualab did ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games in August 2008. Wearing the LZR Racer swimsuit, United States swimmer Michael Phelps won a record eight gold medals at the Water Cube. Athletes wearing the swimsuit would shatter 30 world records in the space of three months. The suit developed with space agency Nasa and the reduction in skin friction drag was so significant, some called it "technological doping".
Photo: The organist for the Chicago Blackhawks plays a tune during an NHL game with the Los Angeles Kings and Chicago Blackhawks circa 1978 at the Chicago Stadium in Chicago, Illinois. (CREDIT: B Bennett/Bruce Bennett Studios via Getty Images Studios/Getty Images)

Sometimes the daily grind can feel like climbing the sheer face of a mountain, and all that's keeping you hanging are the very tips of your fingers. This week, four inspirational female athletes tell us their secret to what has made the difference between clinging on and fulfilling their dreams and giving up and falling down.
A couple of months ago Sasha DiGiulian attempted the latest in a long line of extraordinary achievements. She wanted to become the first woman to "free climb" the toughest route of the infamous El Capitan in Yosemite. The Platinum route. An already-difficult task was made tougher a week or so into the climb when a storm hit... There was nothing left to do other than hunker down and cling on in her tiny 4ft x 6ft "portaledge", a specialised suspended shelter used for sleeping on big-wall climbs. Sasha has been telling me all about surviving and thriving her most audacious and frightening challenging to date.
In August the inaugural season of the Women's Pro Baseball League will get underway. The WPBL is the first professional baseball league for women for more than 70 years, and for one woman it will mark a significant staging post on the way to making her dream of a game truly available to all, come true. Justine Siegal was recently announced as the Commissioner of the WPBL a fitting position for the woman who has broken more barriers in the sport than anyone else. She became the first female coach of a professional men's baseball team, the first woman to throw batting practice to an MLB team, and first female coach employed by an MLB team, and like so many with a love for the game it started as a child, with grandpa in tow!
The Portuguese coastal town of Nazaré draws, siren-like, surfers from all over the world. Why? Well it's here that the largest recorded waves are produced and crash down. Lena Kenma is one of only a handful of women who can handle such an endeavour. Born in Germany she moved to Nazaré to pursue her dream of tackling all the Atlantic could throw at her. What she found was that it wasn't Mother Nature who provides the biggest challenge to success.
In 1982 Julie Moss made history when she crawled to the finish line, having collapsed just metres from the end of the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii. It was her first competitive triathlon and she came second, but as she explains to Not by the Playbook's Rebecca Kesby, that heroic fight for the line changed her life, and her attitude to the sport.
Photo: Rock climber, Sasha DiGiulian climbs to gold medal at the 2011 World Championships (Credit: Matt McClain for The Washington Post via Getty Images)