ESPN has come out of nowhere, though, and legitimized the cinema of sports in their new 30-for-30 series, in which 30 directors were commissioned to make one-hour documentaries about sports. The films are exceptional, even when they’re mediocre (I think there’s a Woody Allen joke in there somewhere: “Even my worst orgasm was right on the money!”). These documentaries contain all of the inherent pathos and regret and drama of sport that is normally absent in sports movies. Some standouts that I’ve seen so far: Billy Corben’s The U (about the thuggish Miami Hurricanes football team of the late 80s), Without Bias (about Len Bias), Barry Levinson’s The Band That Wouldn’t Die (about the Baltimore Colt’s marching band), The Guru of Go (Paul Westhead and Hank Gathers), and Muhammad and Larry (the Maysles Brothers take on Muhammad Ali getting crushed by Larry Holmes).
The finest so far, however, is June 17, 1994, by The Kid Stays In the Picture director Brett Morgan. June 17 was the day that OJ Simpson took off in his white Bronco, but there were other momentous things going down as well: the ticker tape parade for the NY Rangers first Stanley Cup in 45 years, game 5 of the NBA finals, the beginning of the World Cup in Chicago, Arnold Palmer’s final round of golf ever, Ken Griffey Jr.’s 30th home run (the fastest to 30 ever) in what was to be a strike-shortened season).
June 17, 1994 cuts between all of these events as the day unfolds and the OJ Simpson drama gets more and more surreal. There are no interviews and no narration – it’s an editing exercise in some way, just a bunch of footage and an editor and a director putting it together. They have access to communication between the police and OJ that wasn’t admissible in court, and they show outtakes and off-air communication as the media tries to cope with this (Tom Brokow telling his producer that there is no way to elegantly segue from Game 5 of the finals to OJ’s narrative without it sounding “totally callous.”) It is a whole new kind of media circus, that prefigures TMZ and the Internet and Twitter.
The result is epic storytelling. “A modern tragedy and drama of Shakespearean proportions,” Brokaw says. It is a good feeling to see a movie this great! And even though the film isn't really about sports (even though it's ostensibly ONLY about sports), that's the right call because sports contain the seed of something unique in culture -- something combining athletics and battle and celebrity -- where the stakes of winning and losing are amplified and the biggest winners are all eventually cut down to size. The tragedy of losing escapes no champion if one waits long enough.
