Some Drivel On...False Positive

If anyone outside Track and Field circles remembers Harry “Butch” Reynolds, it is likely not as the time one-time 400meter world record holder nor even as a 1988 Summer Olympic Gold and Silver Medalist but as the runner who in 1990 tested positive for anabolic steroids. It was a result he not only publicly protested but actively fought. The US Track and Field Congress exonerated him, but, in the byzantine world of the sport, the International Athletic Association did not, upholding a 2-year ban barring him from the 1992 Summer Olympics. His case against using steroids was more than compelling, really, it was virtually open and shut, and the new ESPN 30 for 30 documentary “False Positive” directed by Ismail Al-Amin lays it out in great detail, drawing from a range of interviews from Reynolds, lawyers, and coaches. In a sport where so many innocents are presumed guilty, one who really does seem to have been innocent, is still remembered for being guilty, a rich if wretched irony that “False Positive” notes without contrasting too harshly against myriad other presumed culpable athletes. And though “False Positive” does a good job telling the whole Butch Reynolds story, it is impossible not to come away thinking this isn’t just some overview but advocacy.

As a movie, “False Positive” mostly sticks to the house style of 30 for 30 documentaries, meaning a mixture of archival footage and myriad talking heads. Especially when it comes to the specifics of Reynolds’s case and what sure seems like his innocence, however, those talking heads become necessary; even with a few visual aids, there isn’t really a way to elucidate exactly what happened without telling you exactly what happened. But Al-Almin ultimately proves clever in his deployment of those talking heads. Everyone is either looking to the left or the right of the camera, save for Reynolds, who is positioned directly in front of it in close-up with a black backdrop, underlining the intensity, looking right at us and asking us to believe him. That becomes even more acute in the ending. If Reynolds cops to a dark night of the soul in the aftermath of the IAAF refusing to clear his name, he still manages to come around and lead a happy life, though that does not automatically engender a happy ending. “False Positive” ends with Reynolds on a track in the present day. He emerges from the starting blocks, runs a short way, and then stops, breaking the moment’s spell by looking right into the camera. And so, when a subsequent title card flashes up indicating the IAAF chose not to comment when reached by the director and producers, you can practically feel them looking away in shame.

They’re Not Going to Make a 30 for 30 About *That*

ESPN’s 30 for 30 series began in 2009 and, as its moniker suggests, intended to honor the sports network’s 30th anniversary by creating 30 athletics-inspired documentaries. As is the way of the modern world, 30 turned out not to be enough, what with so much televised air to fill. So a second volume was created. And then a third volume was created. There were also 30 for 30 shorts and 30 for 30 podcasts. 30 for 30 has become hundreds for 40 going on 41! And as the series has gone on and on, so too has it created its own catchphrase – They’re going to make a 30 for 30 about this.

If there is a crazy day in NBA free agency, someone will say they’re going to make a 30 for 30 about this. If baseball becomes mired in a wild & crazy cheating scandal, someone will say they’re going to make a 30 for 30 about this. In the literal midst of the worst Wednesday ever, March 11 2020, as the NBA season was postponed when an NBA player tested positive for COVID-19, suddenly rendering it inevitable that all sports would soon be postponed even as oddly, eerily, college basketball games  kept meaninglessly playing on before our confused eyes, every refresh of Twitter said the same thing – they’re going to make a 30 for 30 about this.

Fair enough. But we, of course, are Cinema Romantico. And that is not our brand. No, our brand, as always, is a marketing 180°. We are not interested in what they will make a 30 for 30 about, we are interested in what they will not make a 30 for 30 about.

They’re not going to make a 30 for 30 about…the Cherry Bowl. Who wants to see an entire documentary about a low-tier postseason college football from the mid-80s that only lasted two seasons and featured forgettable games played in cold weather Detroit in late December in a dome, since demolished, housing the NFL’s most moribund franchise? [Excitedly Raises Hand] [No One Else Raises Hand]

They’re not going to make a 30 for 30 about…Arizona’s 4-4-3 record in 1987. The greatest record line in sports history, college football or otherwise, who WOULDN’T want to see how they wound up there except for everybody?! That this record is superior to my home state Iowa Hawkeyes’ 6-4-3 record the ensuing season is partly because Arizona went out perfectly, poetically, with the ultra-rare walk-off draw, ‘crowning’ its achievement by tying their in-state Arizona State rival to end the season.

They’re not going to make a 30 for 30 about…Marshall Faulk’s game against Pacific in 1991. If 30 for 30s too often become basic career overviews and highlight reels pretending to be documentaries, we will go the other way, chronicling but a single game, Marshall Faulk’s first, when absolutely no one had any idea who he was, only getting on the field virtue of something akin to a Wally Pipp crossed with a Thurman Thomas and proceeding to the set the then-single game NCAA rushing record (386 yards). We will studiously examine not just all 7 (!) of his touchdowns but every single one of his 37 carries, reminding us that one game does not necessarily have to be folded into a whole career but can exist unto itself as this singular, wonderful thing and how, a la the late John Prine, sometimes the great ones, no matter how great they turn out to be, make their masterpiece the first time around. Who’s coming with me? [No one comes with me.]

They’re not going to make a 30 for 30 about…the Georgia Southern college football dynasty. Fine, fine. You HAVE to have another 30 for 30 about a dynasty. Then what about the Eagles of Statesboro who racked up four Division I-AA titles between 1985 & 1990 and- [Puts hand to earpiece.] Wait. I’m receiving word from the Voice In My Head that I’ve only given college football examples so far and I need to diversify.

They’re not going to make a 30 for 30 about…Denver’s Orange Crush uniforms. That’s it. A documentary about those uniforms and just those uniforms, those resplendent sartorial masterpieces of the gridiron. No history about Elway and the Super Bowls lost and the Super Bowls won, only the immaculate orange jerseys and that beautiful blue helmet with the big D. I mean, who cares about wins and losses when you look this good? No former players will be interviewed, just sports uniform consultants and fashion designers, all marveling at color coordination and helmet design so impeccable it was always destined to be undone by some inane bout of corporate reinvention masquerading as creativity. A plague on all your boardrooms. [ESPN hangs up.]

They’re not going to make a 30 for 30 about…Cookie-Cutter Baseball Stadiums. During the Pandemic, as we’ve both been working from home, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I have taken to watching old baseball games on the MLB Network at lunch, usually World Series showdowns, frequently from the 70s. And reader, from explosive facial hair that wasn’t ironic, just the way it was, to the umpires’ burgundy blazers, 70s baseball is an incredible aesthetic experience. Then again, if the uniforms clearly were superior, the ballparks were not, constructed in the multi-purpose stadium era, caverns housing both baseball and football teams. But if they were comprised of ghastly AstroTurf and hideous visual backdrops, they also, in their own unsightly way, emphasized the game more than the noveau bandboxes which accentuate the experience. Plus, the so-called cookie-cutter design was all about cost-effectiveness, meaning that in their economic attitudes toward both construction and design they were more akin to the common man than this modern fancy-pants malarkey. Let’s explore that, shall we? [We don’t.]

They’re not going to make a 30 for 30 about...Chucky Brown. In the run-up to ESPN’s 10-part documentary event about the end of the Chicago Bulls dynasty in the 90s, NBA writer Jackie MacMullan, on Zach Lowe’s podcast, said Michael Jordan still fascinated her so much because she is fascinated by extraordinary athletes. And I mean, yeah, sure, obviously. But while one might argue that any athlete who makes it professionally is extraordinary, what is more identifiable? Michael Jordan flying through the air or, say, Chucky Brown, consummate NBA journeyman, averaging 5.9 points per game for his career and playing for 12 teams over the course of a couple decades, from champs to dregs, and even briefly stopping off in the CBA, for the euphonious Yakima Sun Kings, no less, the kind of Basketball Reference page that looks like your LinkedIn account. Who thinks that doesn’t sound fascinating too?! [Hello? Is this on?]

Rodman: For Better or Worse

As someone who has read both “Bad As I Wanna Be” and “Walk on the Wild Side”, Dennis Rodman’s 1996 and 1997, respectively, books, recounting many of the same anecdotes and milestones proffered in the latest entry to ESPN’s never-ending “30 for 30” documentary series “Rodman: For Better or Worse”, I can confirm each of these literary forays was more style than substance, epitomized in the alternating fonts, types and sizes, an assortment of thoughts and feelings and list of nutty things he did, coming across more like a rock star, really, than a rebel. It’s not far from what Bob Costas said at the time, the idea that Rodman, in his endless on and off court antics, whether it was head-butting a referee or wearing a wedding dress to his first book launch, wasn’t really standing up to anything but just acting out for acting out’s sake. As Todd Boyd, a history professor, practically smirking, says of things like Rodman dabbling in a gay lifestyle while bragging about sleeping with Madonna, you can’t really reconcile his politics. And what most stood out to me watching “Rodman: For Better or Worse”, as it cycled through his lack of a father figure, his seeming unwillingness to even try to be a father to his own kids, his utter devotion to basketball and then being unable to function without it, the hangers-on taking advantage, etc., is how ordinary the story of Dennis Rodman is at its heart.

That perhaps inadvertent truth is evoked in director Todd Kapostasy’s attempts to spruce up the sports doc aesthetic, beginning with a semi-comic sleight of hand, showing waves washing up on the beach and then having narrator Jamie Foxx call attention to this visual cliché. Mostly, though, this visual pizazz just feels superficial, with imagined scenes behind a fictional Rodman’s head as he goes from place to place signifying nothing. Elsewhere, Kapostasy tries to evince the otherworldly brand of basketball Rodman played through animation set in space, a metaphor less useful than just showing us how and why his play was so unique, which the doc does not, falling back on a run-of-the-mill assemblage of Rodman Playing Basketball clips; his transcendent game deserved truer artistry. No, like so many latter day 30 for 30 docs, suggesting it might be time to stop churning these things out, “Rodman: For Better or Worse” mostly just checks off highlights and lowlights in order, complimenting them with talking heads and basic clips.

The most successful meta episode involves a parody, of sorts, of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s famed musical “Oklahoma!”, with a black character for the lead, suggesting Rodman who, as the documentary recounts in its best passage, fled north for the Sooner State from his home in Dallas after being kicked out by his tough-love mother, enrolled at Southeastern Oklahoma State where his athletic skill bloomed and he became surrogate son to the conservative, white Rich Family. A current Broadway production has put the whiteness of “Oklahoma!” under the microscope with a partially black cast, and the moment in “Rodman: For Better or Worse” when matriarch Pat Rich alternately expresses affection for Rodman even as she literally calls him the “n” word right there on camera is a simple and stunning evocation of how racism can so easily and innately be baked into people who likely will tell you that racism is just a media conspiracy.

Elements like this suggest “Rodman: For Better or Worse” as something akin to “O.J.: Made in America”, a meditation on race and celebrity, a uniquely American tragedy, particularly when Kapostasy spiritually connects the image of Rodman weeping after winning NBA Defensive Player of the Year in 1990 with an image of him weeping over a decade later on Celebrity Rehab. Yet as the documentary proceeds, the less it meditates on anything, just sort of sitting back in slack-jawed awe along with the audience, like its brief excursion into Rodman’s so-called Basketball Diplomacy, the sit-downs, or whatever the hell they are, with his self-professed “friend”, Kim Jong-un. Kapostasy, frankly, has no idea what to make of this material. At a certain point with this guy, what can you do, what can you think, what can you say? Rodman’s central interview cut to throughout is set on theatre stage, but it’s hard not to think it should have been a therapy couch. It’s emblematic that by the end all the self-conscious visual schtick has fallen away because “Rodman: For Better or Worse” has ceased to be anything like cinema; it’s just a cry for help.

30 for 30: This Was the XFL

We here at Cinema Romantico have all manner of reviews that get written and then, for one vague reason or another, never actually get posted and simply sit in the drafts folder, waiting to get the call at either the right or most dire moment. Well, our review for ESPN’s “This Was the XFL” has been sitting in the drafts folder for going on near 12 months now, considering it aired nearly a year ago, and it may never have seen the light of day if the XFL’s preeminent huckster Vince McMahon had not just threatened to dust off the ex-football league’s cobwebs and give that old pile of bleached bones another ill-advised go. As such, we dusted the cobwebs off our “This Was the XFL” review for your quasi-pleasure.

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“This Was the XFL” — No. 14 in Vol. 3 of ESPN’s apparently never-ending 30 for 30 series — was directed by Charlie Ebersol who is the son of Dick Ebersol who was the President of NBC Sports when it joined forces with professional wrestling impresario Vince McMahon to concoct a springtime football league called the XFL boasting radical changes to the NFL template. Alas, the league combusted, more or less, on arrival and was sacked after a year. And while Charlie Ebersol does not ignore the league’s myriad shortcomings, nor pull punches with his talking heads, allowing much air time for NBC Sports’ vocal, haughty opponent of the XFL (and of McMahon himself) Bob Costas, the director still can’t help but skew a little hagiographic, not unlike 30 for 30 entry “Jordan Rides the Bus” in which director Ron Shelton simply could not help but defer to his mighty subject, transforming the minor league baseball odyssey of Michael Jordan, His Airness, into a fable of redemption rather than a kitchen sink chronicle of disappointment. And yet, through his rose colored glasses, I swear, Charlie Ebersol still comes away with some gleaming insight that kind of unintentionally raises Vince McMahon, slime-ridden salesman, to inadvertent oracle.

The XFL, as the doc swiftly recounts in its prologue, came together because NBC had lost its NFL rights in the preceding years and yearned for gridiron programming. Why exactly McMahon, on the other hand, took up this challenge remains less clear, likely nothing more than ego, and he is shot through with ego as is made quickly clear at the infamous press conference “This Was the XFL” captures in all its vainglory where McMahon brayed about how his league would be bigger, bolder, and much more brutal than the boring, staid NFL. Of course, as “This Was the XFL” shows, the league did not in any tangible way exist as McMahon made these pronouncements, selling an entire business enterprise with nothing more than bluster, a recklessness foreshadowing the ensuing folly.

The XFL’s downfall correlated to nothing more, really, than the quality of the product amounting to sludgy mediocrity causing viewers to turn away in droves. Oh, the film half-pitches some inane theory that a particularly compelling game in the second week of the season that NBC was forced to cut away from due to a sudden stadium blackout for a far less compelling contest all alone could have altered the league’s fate, but Charlie Ebersol offers zero evidence that this one game was not merely an outlier. From there, the movie is principally an exercise in schadenfreude as we watch McMahon’s desperate attempts to inject a little sizzle by way of professional wrestling machinations into his gridiron debacle that only hastens the league’s demise. By the end, McMahon is telling Bob Costas in an HBO interview about how his players are competing with so much heart, resorting to the very clichés he boldly proclaimed he would subvert.

Bob Costas becomes something like the principal antagonist of the league, laughing in the face of McMahon in that infamous 2001 interview and laughingly deriding it in the present. He does not in any way conceal his disgust that the XFL would so unabashedly sexually exploit its cheerleaders and accentuate the sport’s already inherent violence in the name of marketing with its so-called innovations like no fair catches and a “human coin toss” that found two players chasing after a loose football and that generally resulted in injuries. The end of “This Was the XFL” takes great pleasure in pointing out how a few production tricks, like on-field cameras, were eventually adopted by the NFL, proof of the upstart league’s savvy. And fine, but what Costas, and everyone else in the doc seems to overlook, is how the XFL was, in all its misplaced braggadocio, unwittingly un-hypocritical. The NFL strikes myriad phony poses to present itself as what it’s not and distract you from what it is. The XFL, on the other hand, struck no poses. If anything in American society has ever actually earned the bromide It Is What It Is, it was the XFL, a morally vacuous garbage barge and proud of it. If they had played decent football, who knows, the sky might have been the limit.

30 for 30: What Carter Lost

“What Carter Lost”, the latest in ESPN’s never-ending 30 for 30 documentary series, is not just about football, says one talking head in the film’s prologue, because it’s never just about football in Texas. That’s true, in a way, though director Adam Hootnick takes care to begin “What Carter Lost” by explaining what Dallas Carter high school had to lose in the autumn of 1988 in the first place, which was a heullva football team, chock full of players who would earn full ride scholarships to top tier college football programs like Miami and Tennessee, that brought the city of Dallas its first high school football championship since 1950. That they did seemed, in the end, almost beside the point, which is true, though everything else that happened correlated almost directly to football and that is the one detail that cannot be forgotten.

The football team, as Hootnick documents, was an outgrowth of the changing demographics of the school and community, where white flight made way for a black community that, despite the unfortunate stereotypes going hand-in-hand with “inner city”, trended more prosperous. This discomfort with a successful black school, as several talking heads, including longtime Dallas sportscaster Dale Hansen, suggest, connected directly to the academic imbroglio that caused Carter to briefly be rendered ineligible from the 1988 state playoffs when an anonymous tip suggested that Carter’s Gary Edwards, in opposition to the rules, failed an algebra class.

The confusion over this grade is tied directly to a disagreement between Carter’s new principal, C.C. Russeau, and Edwards’s algebra teacher, Wilfred Bates, who, it is suggested, disagreed, as other teachers did, with the principal’s so called “Carter Plan”. The idea is floated that this Carter Plan artificially enhanced grades, which Bates objected to, though Bates is not interviewed and the movie never really follows up on this thread. Perhaps the film’s running time did not allow for a deep dive into the finer points of academia, but by examining it strictly from a football eligibility vantage point unintentionally frames academics entirely in athletic terms, which might be just as well, cosmically evocative of which one really comes first.

Though it is eventually determined that Edwards did pass in the context of the Carter Plan, it remains an issue all through the playoffs, and even after, as rival schools challenge the eligibility of Edwards in court, not that it prevented Carter from winning the state championship. And some of the documentary’s most incisive footage are post-championship game interviews in which the players sound less like high school students than professional players, underscored even further by the ensuing tales of their college recruitment, seen most acutely and garishly with one player signing his letter of intent from a hot tub. That shot can’t help but connect to the story’s next and most melancholy turn – that is, six of Carter’s players being arrested and eventually imprisoned for armed robberies.

Each of these six players, and a few of their parents, speak on camera where they are forthright and thoughtful, refusing to point fingers at anyone other than themselves, though you wonder if they should, and the aforementioned Hansen, in fact, does, citing the media as placing the players on a pedestal and then acting surprised when they fall off. That’s not to excuse their actions, of course, and there are many more players who did not participate, though some of those players interviewed suggest how easy it would have been for them to go along given the culture created and alluded to throughout where players talk flippantly about skipping classes and playing dice games for money out in the open of their high school hallway. The rules didn’t apply to them, in other words, quite literally, and the six take that to its semi-logical endpoint, underlined by how a couple of them went so far as to commit robberies without even wearing a mask, as if they really did think they were untouchable.
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On some level, “What Carter Lost” is intended as advocacy filmmaking, charting their progression from the top to the bottom and then making space for these players to evangelize about what’s right and what’s wrong. This is all well and good, and the doc concludes by noting none of the six were ever convicted of another crime and went on to lead upstanding lives. Yet the doc also concludes with some stock footage of a football crowd in the throes of cheers, part and parcel of the film’s reliance on thrilling game highlights and breathless proclamations, like that of Hall of Fame running back and Texas native LaDainian Tomlinson decreeing that 1988 Dallas Carter was the greatest high school football team “ever assembled”, which makes it sound less like kids at a school than a militaristic outfit put together just to win. Indeed, even as the movie makes sure to document what Carter lost, it accentuates the importance of victory, an inadvertent reminder that the two are perpetually linked.

30 for 30: Celtics/Lakers: Best of Enemies

Sportsmanship is all well and good, sure, at the youth level mostly, but once you reach the upper echelons of sportsball events, like, say, the National Basketball Association, chivalry and decorum is best put out to pasture, as the latest ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, the three-part “Best of Enemies”, goes to show. Even a fresh-faced hardwood novice could probably tell you the NBA’s most famous rivalry is Celtics v Lakers, so fabled is the level of antipathy between these two colossal franchises. The one moment in Jim Podhoretz’s film when a little mutual respect is shown by way of Boston’s legendary Larry Bird, in the aftermath of the Lakers usurping the Celtics for the 1987 championship, admitting that L.A.’s illustrious Magic Johnson got the best of him is not really applauded but met with disgust by a few of Bird’s teammates. There is a reason why the documentary ends not with a peace offering but with Magic declaring, for like the twelfth-hundred time, that he will always hate the Boston Celtics.

Such antagonism is given voice by dual narrators in the form of L.A. native Ice Cube for the Lakers and Boston native Donnie Wahlberg for the Celtics, tour guides for this expansive history lesson, reciting names and dates and scores, sure, but who throw significant cross-country shade throughout. Perhaps to an impartial viewer that will become grating, but in the spirit of the film it nevertheless feels just right. Rivalries are not about impartiality. They are about biases and paranoia, like the Lakers, fearful of their Gatorade being tampered with by Celtics personnel, bringing their own supply of the liquid energy replenishment to Boston Garden. They are less about facts, which theoretically should be irrefutable, like the Celtics have this many championships and the Lakers have this many, and more about fandom, which is why Jack Nicholson, L.A.’s #1 fan is something like a silent supporting character, constantly glimpsed throughout in archival footage.

That’s not to suggest that “Best of Enemies” fails to wrestle with the hard stuff, such as race, the age-old incendiary topic that, like it or not, informed this rivalry just as much as a James Worthy statue of liberty dunk or an obliquely angled Larry Bird jumper. It began early, as “Best of Enemies” shows, and while it often could, like the games themselves, be suggestive of the predominantly white Boston and the multicultural L.A., with the former populated by white players and the latter by blacks, it was rarely that simple. Some of the doc’s best footage is old interviews of the Celtics’ Bill Russell, and later the Lakers’ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, towering over small, bulky white reporters who are asking inane but simultaneously loaded questions. Russell and Abdul-Jabbar look like they want to go off, though, of course, they can’t, lest White America get uppity, and these interviews are juxtaposed against a later photo of a beaming Magic Johnson welcoming the white media surrounding him, as if he’d deduced how best to manipulate the media for his own benefit.

Red Auerbach, Celtics coach at the inception of their dynasty and then the team’s President during their 80s run, might have deduced it too. Talking head Bryant Gumbel floats the hypothesis that Auerbach drafted black players when no one would and white players when no would, suggesting race as something less than human classification and more like transactional worth, which is just as potentially disturbing in its own way. Of course, Gumbel’s thought is a product of having the whole picture, looking at all this through the prism of time, which is what “Best of Enemies” really brings home.

It only seems like in this era of the instantaneous that we are more than ever prone to hot takes. “Best of Enemies” remind us hot takes were always made to order, recounting how early Magic Johnson failures got him labeled “Tragic” Johnson and how after Game 1 of the 1985 NBA Finals Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was written off as over the hill before he woke up the echoes in Game 2. This sensation cuts even deeper when it is recounted how Boston’s Kevin McHale played in the 1987 Finals with a fractured foot, of the moment valor with far-reaching consequences, plaintively brought home in Larry Bird’s down-home dialect. He says of McHale: “He laid it on the line for us. But if you watch him now, he don’t walk very well.” Ugh.

But that merely underscores how big this rivalry was, lording every other aspect of the NBA and all of its other teams to such a degree that the Houston Rockets, who actually played Boston in the 1986 Finals, not the Lakers, are basically just written off in the documentary as interlopers, unworthy of the team they literally beat and the team that beat them for the championship. That is how romantically we view Celtic and Laker dominance now, from the safe space of 30 years away, which makes me wonder if all this handwringing over the present day dominance by the Cleveland Cavaliers and, especially, the Golden State Warriors will, 30 years from now, be devalued too, leaving us to remember the mid-twenty-tens NBA only as the best of times.

30 for 30: One and Not Done

Verily in the beginning collegiate sports were contradictory. In the first college football game ever contested on November 6, 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton the former earned victory with the aid of three players who were failing algebra, instantaneously rendering the relationship between students and athletics as volatile, a volatility that has never been quelled, with big time college sports always held up more as commercialized entertainment than an extension of a university’s academic intent, a rift that has only deepened over time, with enormous football and basketball stadiums towering over quaint academic halls and the recent NCAA Basketball Champion earning its crown while still mired in an academic imbroglio. We like to fashion sports into black/white narratives but more often they exist in murky moral middle grounds, and no one at present walks that middle ground with as much I-Don’t-Care-What-You-Think zeal as college basketball raconteur John Calipari, current head coach of Kentucky, former head coach of Massachusetts and Memphis.

Jonathan Hock’s documentary “One and Not Done”, the latest in ESPN’s never-ending 30 for 30 series, ably captures that middle ground, opening by establishing Calipari as the son of immigrants, tying the coach’s go-getter nature to his parents, and evoking its subject’s inherent contradiction in an early line in which Calipari says his family was “never embarrassed about where we came from because it was all about where you were going”, the latter seeming to be in direct opposition to the former. Hock just lets that lie there, but you sense in this line a mantra for Calipari as a coach, particularly as his star has risen and, on account of an NBA rule stipulating that prospective players can only declare for the league’s draft after one year in college or upon turning 19, he has turned his program into an NBA way station, bringing in many of the country’s top basketball recruits for a single season to win big and then send them to the pros to get paid. It’s all about where his kids are going.

That willingness to gleefully embrace a rule so frowned up on by so many of his peers sets Calipari apart even if, like any other coach, he yearns to win, a familiar sensation seen vividly during in-game moments where Hock has mic’d up Calipari to provide us a wonderful, unvarnished look at a coach’s sideline behavior, which I rather enjoyed because while many coaches like to play up their dignified air, these mic’d up scenes deliberately demonstrate no dignity whatsoever. He screams at referees and bellows at his own players, though in other moments we see the love he has for his players and the love they have for him, perhaps best epitomized in how Calipari brings a plethora of former players on stage with him for his Basketball Hall of Fame introduction ceremony.

If many coaches, like a certain faux General, often make it all about themselves, or while some, like Jim Calhoun, who is interviewed in “One and Not Done”, talk about the sanctity of “the game”, the Hall of Fame ceremony illustrates that Calipari, more than most, brings “the game” back to the reason it exists in the first place – the kids. The game is theirs. At the same time, Calipari is nothing if not a high-powered salesman, a fact repeated numerous times, often with variations of the old he could sell ice to eskimos line, and the documentary gives the distinct impression that Calipari is pitching us, the audience, trying to sell us on a more saintly vision of him.

Yet even if it skews sympathetic toward its subject, “One and Not Done” does not does not glide by the fact that both the Massachusetts and Memphis basketball programs were hit by NCAA sanctions retroactively under Calipari’s watch. Calipari, in fact does his best in the film, as he did in real life, to sort of deflect wrongdoing onto the kids, not so subtly calling into question his stance about it being all about the kids, also evoked in Calipari’s comments that his star-stacked Kentucky teams will only win championships when the kids decide they want to win championships badly enough, a pretty clever way of deflecting blame for his own losses. Even so, if any moment in Hock’s documentary most hit me, it was the revelation that Massachusetts star Marcus Camby, who accepted money and gifts from people outside the program, an NCAA no-no, which led to said sanctions, repaid Massachusetts what he took by donating money to the school. It left me thinking that even if Calipari is not necessarily the selfless mentor he might claim, he nonetheless seemed to have taught Camby right, a contradiction to the end.

30 for 30: Catholics vs. Convicts

“Catholics vs. Convicts”, the latest ESPN 30 for 30 documentary extravaganza, takes its name from the racially suggestive, socially oblivious colloquial term that sprang up in advance and hung around in the wake of the fabled 1988 college football contest between Notre Dame (catholics) and Miami (convicts), a tilt that concluded 31-30 in favor of the former and that I, an amateur college football semi-historian, would hyperbolically deem the best played during my lifetime. That’s a lot to live up to for a movie and “Catholics vs. Convicts” partially does, though not completely because while every stone does not necessarily lie unturned in the recalling of this seismic gridiron event, you sometimes wish director Patrick Creadon would have dug deeper, poked his subjects a lot harder and gone in for a bit more complexity rather than falling back on obvious, timeworn contrasts. If Creadon does not completely portray the Hurricanes as un-sympathetic hooligans and does push back on the Catholics ideal a little, well, rest assured any controversy of the Lou Holtz era at Notre Dame is brushed aside. The film takes place firmly in the shadow of Touchdown Jesus, not Under the Tarnished Dome.

This want for deeper insight makes it ironic that one of the documentary’s strongest aspects relates directly to an item of seeming frivolousness – namely, a tee shirt. Indeed, the unfortunate moniker “Catholics vs. Convicts” sprung directly from an underground tee shirt sold on the South Bend campus by Joe Frederick, a Notre Dame Basketball player, and Patrick Walsh, an undergraduate who was friends with the director. In one way, this tee shirt, given the NCAA’s ongoing insistence on profiting off its so-called student athletes, was a kookily radical act, an entirely rogue business model peddling tee shirts chock full of copyright infringement sticking it to the venerable Notre Dame bookstore.

At the same, however, the shirt was and is emblematic of the social connotations that fairly or unfairly permeated the game. That desire to cast things in black and white, often literally, was as relevant then as it is now, where continual acts of campus racism are often misguidedly shrugged off as acts of immaturity. Creadon has an exquisite set-up to unpack all this, but opts for only lightly pressing his interview subjects on subtext of the shirt they spawned and mostly leaving it at that. Catholics vs. Convicts was more than a tee shirt, but “Catholics vs. Convicts” might leave you wondering.

Then again, what ultimately most interests Creadon is the game itself, and in the back half of his doc he goes so far as to turn “Catholics vs. Convicts” into a mini “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.” The latter devoted what essentially amounted to its entire run time to the titular game, and while Creadon does not go that far, he does give the game itself plenty of due, foreshadowing the key players to come throughout in talking head interviews and then returning to them at their various moments of triumph or anguish, and allowing for myriad digressions on strategy, lingering in-game controversies and player reminiscences.

And as Creadon turns his film wholly over to the game, “Catholics vs. Convicts” becomes a wonderful anachronistic opportunity to time travel back to 1988, an era when you didn’t need a playoff because this game was the playoff and the national championship all rolled into one, decided not in some made-for-TV event but on a random October afternoon. It gladly re-lives all the game’s biggest moments on a micro level, so micro, in fact, that almost thirty years later, well, a few surprises might still be in store.

Creadon captures several people on camera stunned to realize, and I was stunned too, that the pass Miami’s Andre Brown caught to pull his team within a single point in the final minute before the do-or-die two conversion attempt…..might not have actually been a catch. I went a little haywire. I jumped up from the couch, kinda like I remember doing almost 30 years ago. For a second, it was real all over again.

30 for 30: Phi Slama Jama

“Phi Slama Jama” was the frat-like moniker coined by sportswriter Thomas Bonk to describe the Guy Lewis coached Houston college basketball teams of the early 1980s, squads that helped usher in the sport’s sped-up, shot clock era by running relentlessly up and down the court and making their infinitely entertaining dunks the point rather than a mere byproduct. But despite the title, director Chip Rives frames his story not through the team itself but through the search for one of its players – fabled eccentric Benny Anders, who we are introduced to through a daguerreotype-ish portrait, in which he wears a suit and stares semi-irreverently into the distance.

After the rise of Anders as slam-dunking savant off the Houston bench, however, he fell quick, literally vanishing. Literally literally. People penned odes to trying to find Anders, though even his closest family seemed unsure of his whereabouts. That search jumps in and out of an otherwise fairly standard sports documentary telling of those grand Cougar teams which reached three consecutive Final Fours but never won the championship, most famously falling short in 1983 when they were stunned in the last second by the heavy underdog North Carolina State Wolfpack.

Game clips and newspaper headlines alternate with a slew of rather uninformative talking heads, ranging from various sportscasters to the team members themselves, unbelievably managing to the mute the astonishing impact of all those dunks. “Phi Slama Jama” never puts into context what those dunks meant, other than people like the milquetoast Jim Nantz offering milquetoast observations like “they were a cultural phenomenon.” Okay, but why? We never see this from the culture’s perspective and we never see the old guard “critics” who lamented fancypants slams and jams that are so often referred to. Everyone tells us how revolutionary this team was and those simple statements of fact are supposed to suffice.

As a coach, Lewis was famous, or notorious, depending on whom you talk to, for allowing his players myriad individual freedom on the court. In other words, while basketball is theoretically a team game, Phi Slama Jama was composed of individuals, and so rather than trying to fit all these individuals into some rigid system, Lewis simply let those individuals be themselves, for a lot of good but for occasional bad. Yet we rarely get to see this movie from individual perspectives. A player’s nickname is often about all we get to try and comprehend his uniqueness. Even Hakeem (then Akeem) Olajuwon, a Nigerian immigrant with an incredible backstory, is limited to a few anecdotes and not much more. All except Benny, that is, whose legacy the doc returns to throughout.

Former Cougar captains Eric Davis and Lynden Rose follow Anders’s trail from Houston to Louisiana to Michigan. As they do, they discuss that championship game of 1983 and how Anders came but a fingertip away from engineering a steal in the last seconds that undoubtedly would have led to a dunk and to victory and to Anders being a hero. Davis and Rose postulate that had this played out, Anders life would have been completely different, a terribly depressing realization, that only sports heroes can succeed, not goats, though no one here, including the director, seems to really grasp that depression, which is extra depressing.

No one grasps it, that is, except Anders, who when he is finally found at film’s end and interviewed offers next to nothing in the way of explaining where he went and why he went there. I don’t owe anybody an explanation he says, and it’s true. He doesn’t. Still, in that explanation, I suspect, is the real story of Phi Slama Jama.

30 For 30: Believeland

In recounting the Cleveland Browns professional football franchise re-locating, at the behest of owner Art Modell, from its home city of 49 years to Baltimore in 1996, the team’s beloved running back Earnest Byner says that it was, for Cleveland, like a losing a member of the family. That is the sort of phrase that will prompt a fuss from the intellectually haughty about how people take sports too seriously, and so be it, because that, as ESPN’s latest 30 for 30 documentary “Believeland” points out again and again, is the city of Cleveland’s relationship to sports; they take it too seriously. That’s why Scott Raab, the doc’s preeminent talking head, wrote a book titled “The Whore of Akron” which referred to Ohio basketball hero LeBron James when he departed the Cleve for South Beach so infamously in 2010. The Whore of Akron? Yeah, that’s taking sports too seriously.

People don’t come to Cleveland, we are told; no, they start in Cleveland and stay there, or leave and come back. It’s not a city of transplants, in other words, it’s a city of Clevelanders, where the city’s fierce connection to its three sports franchises – the Browns, the Indians (baseball) and the Cavaliers (basketball) – is inestimable and inherited. This latter fact is translated in Raab’s interview at some unnamed diner, where he sits with his teenage son who hardly talks, just listening as his dad spins yarns of Cleveland sports misery, how no team has won a championship since 1964, and how each failure to do so seems more gut-wrenching than the last. It’s as moving an image as it is terrifying, an assimilation of fandom heartbreak.

The first half-hour of Andy Billman's film is its best, and some of the best material of any of the 30 for 30 documentaries, focusing on connecting the trajectory of Cleveland's up and downs as a city to the successes and failures of its sports teams. Author Wright Thompson explains this in swift detail, how the city boomed during its postwar manufacturing period of the 50’s, mirroring the glorious rise of Paul Brown’s Browns (which were named for him) before Brown was forced out and the team’s fortunes begin to collapse in the 60’s and on into the 70’s, just like the city’s gradual industrial decline. This is an intriguing connection ripe for being “Believeland’s” central subject, but Billman is oddly content with this informational appetizer rather than continuing to track the economic ebbs and flows of Cleveland in conjunction with the city’s fragile sports psyche.

Instead “Believeland” forsakes the tantalizing possibilities of fusing civics with sports to simply go the way of so many 30 for 30 docs by devolving into a glorified highlight reel - or, I should say, a lowlight reel, since most of what's shown here chronicles all of Cleveland’s athletic failures so infamous they generally go by individual, capitalized names like The Drive, The Fumble and The Shot. This is little more than a rolodex of pain, one content to settle for mostly banal observations from its interviewees that all essentially boil down to the chestnut “I Couldn’t Believe It”.

The doc gets its mojo back, a little, near the end, when it returns to the famous subject of LeBron James spurning Cleveland (in a horrific television special that was produced by ESPN which conspicuously goes unmentioned cuz Bristol, CT ain’t about the introspective state, see) only to return several years later and how that idea relates, as Wright Thompson puts it, to the daughters and sons saddled with guilt for leaving Cleveland too. But this is not really scrutinized, just suggested, raised and then moved aside for more reminiscences that, specific details aside, could, frankly, be about any team in any city. Cleveland, we are told, who is resolutely itself, and yet, by the end, Believeland could be Anytown USA.

Small Potatoes: Who Killed The USFL? – A Non Review

There’s a moment from this ESPN 30 for 30 documentary that I can’t stop thinking about. It was one of the first 30 for 30’s, way back in 2009, directed by Mike Tollin, chronicling the rise and fall of the 1980’s springtime professional football league, the USFL (United States Football League). It posed its central question in the title “Who Killed the USFL?” So, who did kill it? Well, the killer, Tollin reckons, was the megalomaniacal owner of the New Jersey Generals franchise – namely, one Donald Trump.

The present day Trump is interviewed on camera throughout, pressed on his innumerable egotistical antics, his desire to force a merger between the USFL and the NFL (National Football League), a merger that never happened and correlated directly to the USFL going bust. But the more questions asked, the more uncomfortable The Donald becomes, because being asked actual questions that demand specific answers as opposed to colorfully vacuous rhetoric is not The Donald’s style. Finally, Mr. Trump removes his mic and walks out of the room, but not without ensuring that he gets the last word because getting the last word is The Donald’s style. To Tollin he sums up the entire USFL experience thusly: “It was small potatoes.”

The documentary, of course, yearns to prove that the USFL wasn’t small potatoes, that it had a quaint je nei sais quoi, that it could have survived had the brand of Trump not swept in and started throwing around bronzed muscle. Indeed, even before Trump arrived the little league that possibly could showed some swagger all on its own. It played games in the spring, yes, but it established franchises in major cities, scored television contracts with both ABC and a then little britches ESPN and, most noteworthy of all, it signed primo players, like three consecutive Heisman Trophy winners right out of college, not to mention high quality talent such as quarterback Jim Kelly, who turned down the Buffalo Bills to sign with the Memphis Showboats (probably because Showboats is a better name than 85% of NFL monikers).

Tollin was sorta the Ed Sabol of the USFL, hired to document it, and at times he comes across too close to the material as well as armed with an agenda. Rather than explore the question of whether or not pro football was really designed to survive for the long haul in the spring and was therefore always destined to crash and burn, Tollin instead dumps the entire league’s undoing on Trump. That’s easy to do, and a whole host of others have done it in the ensuing years, and it’s virtually impossible to dispute ABC broadcaster Keith Jackson noting that Mr. Trump was merely interested in benefiting himself rather than the whole league. What else would you expect? Still, in seeking to determine who killed the USFL, Tollin also seems to try and assassinate the character of Donald Trump.

In spite of this obvious slant, however, it’s inarguable that He, Trump (coinage: Charles Pierce) did not swagger into the New Jersey Generals’ owner’s box absent the ancient idea of Go Big Or Go Home. It’s inarguable because Trump pretty much says it. And whether or not Going Big could potentially also bring about the league’s downfall as much as its coronation mattered little. All other interests were subordinate to the issues of The Donald. So he pushed hard to go right at the National Football League; to play a fall schedule; to even bring a lawsuit against the NFL for monopolization. Trump saw himself as a more charismatic Lamar Hunt, the man who founded the AFL, the upstart pro football league of the 1960’s that did eventually merge with the NFL.

There is a Sports Illustrated article by Robert H. Boyle from 1984 profiling Trump that opens with a bit of information so incredible I can’t even begin to fathom why the documentary failed to include it – namely, Trump wanted to christen the Galaxy Bowl. This Galaxy Bowl, in The Donald’s estimation, would have become the new Super Bowl, pitting NFL champion against USFL champion. In other words, Trump yearned to take the biggest sporting event on Earth and make it bigger. This is awe-inspiring; it’s as Trump-ian as it gets. Of course, you’ve never heard of the Galaxy Bowl because it didn’t happen, which runs counter to the article’s closing line which are Trump’s own words and go like this: “When I want something, I want victory, completeness, results.” In the USFL, he never got victory, completeness or results. The closest he got was the infamous $1 the league won in its anti-trust lawsuit. (“We had a great lawsuit,” Trump says.)

Maybe he really did kill the USFL with his impatient ego, but Trump clearly doesn’t see it that way. He sees a league that, in the end, couldn’t do what it needed to do to be the biggest and the best and the most beautiful, and so it was optimal for all involved that it just went belly-up. And that brings me back to the scene of an aggravated He, Trump getting up and walking out of the interview room.

What happens if Donald J. Trump, presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, really becomes President of the United States? What if he is made to realize that he can’t just throw up the wall overnight, that he can’t just get Congress together in a room and hash out deals, that he bans every Muslim from entering the country but a born and bred American blows something up anyway, that he cannot magically will his way with words? What does he do then? If “Who Killed The USFL?” proves anything, it proves that Trump wants what he wants now, and if he can’t have it, he’ll help run it into the ground and move onto something else.

Can’t you see him increasingly expressing frustration that America is bureaucracy rather than autocracy? Can’t you see him pointing fingers at the Founding Fathers for creating an “awful Head of State position, just the absolute worst”? Can’t you see him in early 2018 resigning the Presidency effective noon tomorrow and making a beeline for the door as a member of the White House Press calls after him “But what about America?”

Can’t you see Trump in the instant before disappearing beneath the exit sign replying “It was small potatoes”?

30 for 30: Fantastic Lies

The images of the idyllic Duke University campus in Durham, North Carolina that flint across "Fantastic Lies" as it opens, come, in the light that follows, to resemble the New England woods of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a sixty-three year old play which nonetheless retains great relevancy today, never more so than in the case of Duke Lacrosse players accused – strike that! – falsely accused of gang rape in 2006. It was a story sensationalized in the media that is smartly, necessarily told mostly without sensationalism in "Fantasic Lies", an especially pointed entry to ESPN's ongoing 30 for 30 documentary series.

On the night of March 13, 2006, the Duke Lacrosse team, several members shared a house, hired two female strippers. The next morning, one of the women would report a rape, and what ensued was essentially a trial and conviction that played out not in the courtroom but in public, one proffered by the District Attorney, Mike Nifong, who transformed himself into a crusader for justice even if behind the scenes his actions were so deplorable he would eventually be disbarred. Director Marina Zenovich was unable to interview either the accuser, Crystal Mangum, or Nifong, as well as the three players accused, and yet the absence of these prominent participants enhances – or perhaps directly influences – how she chooses to present this documentary.

One of the accused players' mothers is interviewed and she indicates that no one talked to her son then and no one has talked to her son since, which becomes a kind of damning confession of a public that was so desperate to say "You did it!" before they had even heard every side to the story. And in re-examining the case, one that was never actually brought to trial, Zenovich doesn’t so much seek the truth, since that’s already known, as re-prosecute those who rendered a verdict before all the facts were in. Its aim, in other words, is to indict a culture moving at warp speed, where judgment is rendered swiftly and harshly, in which events are too often politicized before they are even examined.

"Fantastic Lies" recounts the entire ordeal linearly, laying out the story with accompanying archival footage of then and innumerable talking heads now, eliciting the sensation of looking back on what happened rather than telling it anew. This tinges the entire story with an air of regret, never more so than with former newspaper columnist Ruth Sheehan who wrote an article in the aftermath of the initial accusation essentially ordering the Duke players to come forward and confess what they knew. In the end, of course, all they knew is that they were innocent, and as Zenovich has Sheehan re-read parts of that article on camera, the columnist’s shame seeps out. It wasn't just Sheehan, of course, as the doc makes clear, also interviewing a journalist Newsweek, referencing the New York Times and offering footage of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, as well as campus protesters, instantly decrying the incident. Essentially everyone was jumping to the same conclusion, a fuel that was fired by Nifong.

If there is a principal villain, Zenovich paints it less as Crystal Mangum, whose history of mental illness is mentioned if never really explored, and more as Mr. Nifong, who plunged ahead with the case even when it seemed to become apparent that Magnum's story in no way added up. We see him do interview after interview, transforming himself into a media star, seemingly to further his career and guarantee victory in his up-coming re-election. But that is primarily speculation. The most telling shot of Nifong is in the courtroom, from behind, showing only the back of his head, which seems to emblemize just how desperately we all wish we could probe his mind and figure out what a human acting so recklessly with other human lives could possibly be thinking.

If the evidence made obvious that the accuser's story was false, this has a way of framing the film as something of an underdog story, which, frankly, feels wrong-handed, one of the defense lawyers even going so far as to reference their case in terms of a sports movie. This is the biggest lacrosse game of your life, one of the fathers says he told his son, which, while I see the analogy he's attempting to draw, doesn't quite fly. The film's overriding argument is to view these matters from a cold-eyed vantage point, and such syrupy add-ons actually hinder that argument, if never near enough to harm the overall message.

Zenovich does not shy away from addressing the lacrosse's team culture of hard-partying and alienation of others on campus. There were, as is pointed out, racial taunts directed at the strippers, and even if the ghastly email regarding the incident that was leaked after the fact was, to those who got the reference, simply text taken from "American Psycho", well, the guy still chose to use those words. Most humor is underlaid with some modicum of truth. But these distinctions are important because it's a reminder that we have to put them away in the case of criminal accusations, that it is our duty to base our verdict solely upon the evidence, without prejudice or sympathy, a civic obligation that too often anymore, as "Fantastic Lies" makes clear, falls by the wayside.

30 for 30: The '85 Bears

Games in the National Football League, as some incisive announcer might tell you, are won on the football field, which is why teams like the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins and the multiple Super Bowl winning squads such as the Pittsburgh Steelers of the 70's, San Francisco 49ers of the 80's and modern day New England Patriots are considered the cream of the crop. And yet the '85 Chicago Bears, the subject of director Jason Hehir's documentary in ESPN's ongoing 30 for 30 series, arguably hold more cultural cache than any of the aforementioned teams put together even though that iconic Chicago squad did not achieve a perfect record and earned but a single Super Bowl title. And that's because the '85 Bears, more than their legendarily ferocious defense and record-setting Hall of Fame running back, were a team of towering personalities.

Fridge. Sweetness. Jimbo. L.A. Mike. Fencik, the guy whose name just sounded like a nickname. They had a punky quarterback with sunglasses who fired shots directly at the NFL commissioner with magic-markered headbands. A defensive coordinator, Buddy Ryan, who thought he was bigger than the coach and a coach so big they just called him Da Coach. Much like they called the '85 Bears Da Bears. Make no mistake, John Fox and Jay Cutler and Mike Brown, my beloved ex-Cornhusker from the non-glory days of Dick Jauron, were not Da Bears. The '85 Bears were Da Bears, then, now, forever. All this is why Hehir barely even bothers to discuss the on-field specifics of their historic Super Bowl thrashing of the Patriots. The game itself was subordinate to the team's compelling temperament.

Strangely, though, for a team of such brash pizzazz, Hehir's aesthetic conspicuously, disappointingly fails to honor that flamboyance. Like so many of the recent 30 for 30 docs he forgoes any kind of narrative ingenuity to chart the squad in basic narrative terms, its rise from a bungling outfit with a solid defense and no offense, beyond the astonishing late Walter Payton, to a championship behemoth to its eventual fall when those personalities finally went bust. He recounts this with a formidable series of talking heads and NFL Films-ish on-field field footage, but not a whole lot else. There are moments when Hehir serves behind the scenes footage, like McMahon drinking a can of Bud Light in a press conference right after being drafted by the Bears or Ditka sucking down a cigarette on the practice field, that don't come across cut and pasted from a hundred other sports documentaries, and you're desperate to see more of them.

Still, for all the formal blandness, these Bears, particularly McMahon and defensive tackle Steve McMichael, speak with an incredible candidness that leaves you wishing for more tell-it-like-it-is from today's athletes, though as is pointed out if players behaved now like the Bears did then they probably would have all been arrested. In other words, it's not simply the dominance that will never be replicated but the demeanor.

For all the echoes "The '85 Bears" is sure to awake, however, Hehir, to his credit, does not ignore cause and effect, addressing the reality of concussions, like the team's safety, Dave Duerson, who in 2011 took his own life and was consequently discovered to have CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). Linebacker Otis Wilson says he has no symptoms as of today, but also notes he has made preparations with his family if that changes, and his manner betrays a fear that it will change which I'm certain is applicable to nearly every player, former and current, too. Even so, Wilson, and all the others, make clear, as ex-players in pain so often do, that they would not do anything differently.

Films like this, for better and worse, are exercises in nostalgia. The sportswriter Joe Posnanski has written that baseball "will never stop being the game it was when you were 10 years old. That's the charm. That's the nostalgia. That's the trap." When I read that I immediately thought how I'm endlessly wishing that college football, my preferred sport, existed now exactly as it existed in 1987.....when I was 10 years old. And I feel fairly confident in thinking that all the players featured in this documentary, and that all the fans watching along at home, wish that in terms of the Chicago Bears it was still 1985. How could they not since that's when it was perfect. That's the charm. That's the nostalgia. That's the trap. You watch and wish player personalities could still be this outsized, concussion was a hazy word that meant nothing and Ditka was a Polish god who would not go on to trade every draft pick the New Orleans Saints had to acquire Ricky Williams.

Near the end McMichael summarizes that his "whole experience was about walking out that tunnel and hearing that crowd. That's when you're really alive, baby. And do you ever get back to that point once it's gone?" He answers his own query so quickly and pointedly that it wrecks your heart.

"I haven't," he says.

30 For 30: The Gospel According to Mac

“The Gospel According to Mac” is a title referring to Coach Bill McCartney who in the late 80’s and early 90’s took the long dismal Colorado Football program to the mountaintop even as his devout Christianity unleashed a myriad of battles with those who felt he was proselytizing in a place where it did not belong. Whether it did or not is of little concern to director Jim Podhoretz. Instead he puts the Coach on camera and has him proselytize at us, leaving each viewer to form his or her own opinion. McCartney incessantly tilts forward in his chair, like we are sitting directly across from him and he is so moved by what he wants to say that he wants to reach out and touch us, just like the word of God touched him. That’s McCartney’s origin story, the one he recounts with zest, becoming addicted to alcohol only to overcome it simply because “the Lord took it away.” From that point forward, he explains, he would forever wear his faith on his sleeve, and when he took the seemingly hopeless job at Colorado in 1984, he held true to his word, for much better and a whole lot worse.

At one point, McCartney trots out his recruiting philosophy, wherein he merely had to get potential players to see the majestic snow-capped Boulder campus and the place would sell itself. But that’s all just recruiting hokum, evinced by the many players on camera who don’t have much positive to say about the place. They do, however, heap superlatives on McCartney. Some have re-convened in his presence for the documentary, scenes in which they still seem to look at Coach like they’re his flock and he’s the shepherd. Indeed, if anything brought these young men to Boulder and kept them there, the film makes patently clear, it wasn’t the landscape, it was McCartney.

Family is a prominent theme. The players made clear they gained strength from being one and McCartney fostered this notion. The team’s significant success is rarely placed in a national context and you noticeably detect the players’ lack of proclaiming that success in the name of the university or community, and why would they? The portrait painted by “The Gospel According to Mac” shows the Boulder campus of the era as an unwelcoming environment, leaving the players’ isolated and out of place, enemies of the same people who would cheer them on the field, leading to tension and an assortment of arrests in which black players were always viewed as thugs and white students were always viewed as victims. (No mention, it must be said, is made of former McCartney players of this era, Miles Kusayanagi and Marcus Reliford, who were charged with rape. Nor is McCartney’s defense of their actions on account of not being, in his eyes, “violent” mentioned.)

Yet for all this familial rhetoric, McCartney often failed his actual family, brought home in the almost soap-operaish episode in which his daughter Kristi had a child with  team’s star quarterback, Sal Aunese (who would die, terribly, from stomach cancer in the fall of 1989). Kristi expresses genuine hurt on camera about her father neglect in offering full parental support. “I pray for my daughter every day,” McCartney says. “I’ve never missed a day.” Yet elsewhere in the documentary he confesses to his failings as a father, leaving us to deduce that, whether he grasps it or not, prayer alone is not enough.

“The Gospel According to Mac” lays bare its subject’s fascinating, if extraordinarily vexing, complications. He forms Promise Keepers, a Christian organization that ministers to men the need for traditional marriages, which McCartney himself violates by revealing an extra-marital affair. He speaks out against abortion and homosexuality, refusing to back down. And yet…for such a staunch conservative, McCartney’s attitudes on race, particularly in light of the current goings-on in Columbia, Missouri where acts of racist hate have unleashed a wave of protests, are rather quite progressive. He speaks now and he spoke then of white privilege. He argued for more black coaches, more black professors, more black community leaders.

Though the film does proffer on-field highlights during this period, particularly during the team’s national championship season of 1990, many of these memorable images Podhoretz acutely ties back to the Coach’s inner-nature. For instance, a game won against Missouri via an infamous fifth down was a lucky anomaly for which McCartney roundly refused to apologize. The documentary points out how some viewed that as his supposed Christian values being skewed. But if anything, it underlined McCartney’s tenets. For him, Christianity is not one foot in, one foot out; it’s all in, all the time, devoted and in your face. What he knows, he knows, and becomes readily apparent through his behavior and what he says that he has treated every aspect of his life with the same sort of rigid certainty.

Religion and football might not mix officially, as the ALCU declared of Mac’s program in the early days, and you might be able to eliminate the word of God from a coach’s lexicon, but “The Gospel According to Mac” makes plain that the zealotry and evangelism of Christianity still informs college football considerably. Look no further than the opening images, juxtaposing McCartney as he ministers and shots of McCartney paying homage to Colorado’s Folsom Field, and the line blurs and they blend together and you momentarily cannot help but recall how casually people refer to football stadiums as cathedrals.

30 For 30: Trojan War

Of all the talking heads in “Trojan War”, ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary chronicling the rise and semi-fall of the University of Southern California football dynasty of the aughts, none are as emblematic as Snoop Dogg, the venerable West Coast rapper and Trojan devotee. When he appears on camera, rhapsodizing about teams’ places in the pantheon, you want to put your hands on your head and shout “No!!! Can't you see what’s coming?! Didn't any of you see ‘The U?!’” “The U” was Billy Corben’s documentary chronicling the Miami Hurricanes of the mid-80’s to mid-90’s who dynastically ran roughshod over college football with an enticing mixture of impeccable talent and excessive illegalities. The latter was embodied in Luther Campbell, controversial front man of 2 Live Crew, who became something of a godfather to the program and an enabler of its players’ many misdeeds. Note to Media: rappers standing on sidelines with ID badges could indicate less “Isn’t That So Cool?” and more “Wait, Something Might Be Going On Here.”

Yet while “The U” was sprawling and imperfect, it was also much more willing to take a wide view, analyzing Miami’s wrongdoing, what they did and why, and what it wrought, for bad and for good. Aaron Rahsaan Thomas’s “Trojan War”, on the other hand, epitomizing Hollywood, which is represented by legendary producer Larry Turman who turns up as something of an all-purpose narrator, is much more content to declare “nothing to see here”, to focus on the good more than the bad, and stick to the field rather than the myriad of skeletons in the closet. “Trojan War” isn’t much more than a hagiographic highlight reel.

Granted, there are a number of incredible highlights from this period of USC Football. The program had three players take home Heisman Trophies while the team earned a cavalcade of conference titles and a couple national championships. The doc spends a good chunk of its time re-living these moments through footage of so many games and talking heads waking up the echoes. Nearly everyone is accounted for, from quarterback Matt Leinart to running back Lendale White to coach Pete Carroll. Everyone, that is, except for running back Reggie Bush, the man who won college football’s highest honor in 2005 and whose extra-curricular activities involving gifts worth a shitload of money that the NCAA frowns upon because it prefers no one earns money but itself unleashed the program’s downfall.

Perhaps his being MIA from the doc is poetically apropos; after all, in lieu of these NCAA violations wins during the Bush era have been “vacated” and his Heisman Trophy given back, officially suggesting he did not “win it” (even though he still very much officially did this). Others, though, were very much at fault, including Carroll, whose wide open practices, fawned over by the media then and now, very much created a culture where the people who approached Reggie Bush could approach Reggie Bush. This is pointed out, sort of, but hardly scrutinized, and even though Carroll is on camera repeatedly, he is never pressed about it, dodging the fray yet again just as he did when he got out of town ahead of the NCAA posse for the NFL.

The majority of what led to NCAA sanction-era football at USC, however, is back-loaded, tagged on at the ending as if for no other reason then it’s required. And yet...in this deliberate narrative oversight emerges the film’s most polarizing contention. It becomes clear in the “So What?” tone players and coaches and program ambassadors and fans take toward the wrongs done that they would not do nor wish anything would be done differently; that they would not go back in time and spruce up their reputation; that they would continue flouting the rules to maintain their memorable reign. It’s admirable in its honesty. This is college football. Winning really is all that matters.

30 for 30: The Billion Dollar Game

In March of 2012 on the (real) first day of the NCAA Tournament I gathered, as so many do, in March Madness™ fellowship at a neighborhood watering hole with a few friends over a smattering of pints. Soon we and everyone else in the establishment were enraptured as Lilliputian UNC Asheville took 40 year basketball titan Syracuse to the wire. Oh, was it riveting! And it would have marked the first time the tournament’s lowest seed – 16th – had vanquished a lordly #1. Alas, a dubious call helped prevent it, and we mourned by being gently unruly. Then, we drank more and watched more basketball into the wee hours of the night. How exactly did a Thursday in March become among the pre-eminent sports-watching days in America? How is that productivity in offices nationwide plunges to such obscene depths and companies cough up over a billion to advertise in its midst?

That question is at the heart of Nick Guthe’s marvelous ESPN 30 for 30 Short, “The Billion Dollar Game” (watch it here), which in thirteen scintillating minutes chronicles how 16th seeded Princeton’s narrow, theatrical, fabled one-point defeat to top seeded Georgetown at the apex of its considerable college basketball power in the 1989 NCAA Tournament in primetime on ESPN on St. Patrick’s Day turned a mom & pop of a sports event into a Wall Street behemoth. If you don’t know the history, it’s bound to fascinate. Even if you do, as I did, it will grip you voraciously, pinning you under the welcome weight of nostalgia even as you are forced to confront the horrific paradox of this immaculate college basketball game helping foster the NCAA-as-Corporation.

Guthe builds from the ground up, beginning with the origins of the game itself, the scrawny Ivy Leaguers facing off against the intimidating coach John Thompson and his daunting freshman Colossus, Alonzo Mourning. (It makes me feel old but if you weren’t there then you don’t understand how mythical Mourning was in an era when every single game wasn’t televised. His feats were passed along word-of-mouth and trumped up by purple scribes.) He doubles back to re-testify how the tournament itself was resting on a delicate precipice of all the Haves wanting to completely exclude the Have-Nots from the field of 64 because more Haves meant more wins for the Haves and more wins meant more money and it always comes back to money. And that’s why when the game quickly, incredibly revealed itself more than a mere formality, it proved ESPN’s decision to air it at a time when every contest in the tournament was not televised prophetic, gathering viewers in droves and subsequently prompting CBS to cough up a cool billion (“The Billion Dollar Game”) to broadcast the entire tournament, right down to UNC Asheville vs. Syracuse twenty-three years later.

To be sure, “The Billion Dollar Game” keeps to the sunny side of the street, as you do when you’re bankrolled by the blazers in Bristol, Connecticut. In a way, it’s showing how, as they say, the sausage gets made, yet showing it with a soft gaze, openly acknowledging how the players in this game sparked the staggering cash flow of which they and all the players that have followed them get no cut; it just has no cojones to push that viewpoint more fully or forcefully. Still, it’s difficult not to take away the clear juxtaposition even if it’s not explicitly addressed – that is, an unheralded, unwanted team the powers-that-be would have gladly brushed aside in the name of the almighty dollar being the foremost instigators of providing the powers-that-be with all the almighty dollars they could handle.

Yet beyond that, because it keeps so much focus on this one game itself, it’s nigh impossible, unless you’re the coldest of cynics, not to conclude that what the tournament really comes down to, aside from the billions, aside from the braying heads, aside from the gamblers and the day drinkers, is the players and their feats of strength. Are we not entertained?

30 for 30: I Hate Christian Laettner

Alexander Wolff, in recounting for Sports Illustrated perhaps the greatest college basketball game ever played, summarized the contest’s most important player, Duke’s Christian Laettner, this way: “the plot honored the cardinal rule of good storytelling – don't make the hero a one-dimensional character.” Laettner was the hero, yes, in so much as he sank the winning shot but he was also the villain, a designation earned by stomping on Kentucky’s Aminu Timberlake who was defenselessly sprawled on the floor. Laettner may have already been the most reviled player in the sport but this was the singular moment cementing his legendarily maleficent status, the stomp seen around the world. In the ensuing years, no matter what defense anyone raised for him, you could roll that clip and say “Yeah? So?”

In Rory Karpf’s inflammatorily titled “I Hate Christian Laettner”, the latest entry into ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary series, the titular subject says he stomped on Timberlake because he thought Timberlake had pushed him, only to realize later he’d singled out the wrong guy. That sounds like a roll-your-eyes justification. Except Karpf shows the moment to which Laettner is referring when, sure enough, a Kentucky player blindsides Laettner, shoving him out of bounds and to the floor. It is, if we’re all being honest with ourselves, more malicious than Laettner’s stomp. That’s not to excuse Laettner, of course. After all, it’s a classic case of Second Guy Gets Caught. Yet, it muddies the pictures, and it crystallizes the intent of “I Hate Christian Laettner”, which seeks not to exonerate the man for whom it’s named but add extra dimension to his story.

How did this one person come to carry so much of collective college basketball fandom’s animosity on his back? And while it might make sports stats geeks throw up in their mouths, Karpf ties it back to culture’s need to impose narrative on sports, to cast athletes as heroes and villains. It’s the populist viewpoint, and though Twitter autocrats like Jay Bilas view sports populism as “drivel”, well, his former pupil (Bilas was an assistant coach at Duke during that era) is proof positive that sports populism holds serious cultural cache. It’s why Karpf interviews wrestling heel Ric Flair and employs no less authority than Dr. Evil’s #2 as his narrator. And when interviewees speak of their Laettner hatred, they often resort to ancient storytelling archetypes, and the doc boils this eternal aversion down to “5 Points” – privilege, bullying, whiteness, looks, and plain greatness.

Some points Karpf backs up, like the bullying that was apparently born, in another storytelling archetype come true, from his big brother. Other points he is intent to refute, like the privilege, which went hand-in-hand more with Laettner’s scholarship to a prestigious university than his actual background. Michigan’s Jalen Rose smites Duke for recruiting players of affluence, yet Duke recruited Chris Webber, Rose's teammate, and Laettner's family life trends lower to middle class much more than hoity-toity. Yet the doc whiffs on more incendiary subject matter, like race. Rose and other black basketball players interviewed, such as UNLV’s Anderson Hunt, admit to pre-conceived suspicions about Laettner’s actual abilities before competing against him. It alludes to the origin of these doubts stemming from his “whiteness” but Karpf doesn’t have the cojones to press the matter. Nor does he follow up Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson’s theorizing that Laettner's style of aggressive, trash-talking play was “appropriating black styles of basketball projection but onto white bodies.” The film just lets this intriguing analysis lie there, feeling frustratingly incomplete, as if Karpf doesn’t want to wrestle with anything more significant than how Laettner kind of resembles Billy Zabka in “The Karate Kid.”

The real Christian Laettner, frankly, remains an enigma, and perhaps that’s the point. The doc’s overriding argument is less about the person than the person becoming the face of an institution viewed in general terms as “the establishment”. This effete school was already on its way to becoming the sport’s evil empire and Laettner turned out to be its timeless face. People still hate Christian Laettner because they still hate Duke, and vice-versa. Nevertheless, by portraying him as a symbol, the film shortchanges his psychological makeup. He claims only to care about what his friends and family think of him and comes across okay with his place as pop culture antihero, but it’s impossible not to be left with the sense of some motivational force left unearthed.

Early in the film we see home video of a game during Laettner’s prep school days when a fight between his team and another erupts. As it does, the camera catches Laettner evading harm’s way just as the event escalates to an out-and-out brawl, and you can’t help but wonder the question no one asks – did he incite it? Who knows? Like that fight, he spends the film in the open even as he’s subtly sliding right out of view.

30 For 30: Of Miracles and Men

After the hockey game at the Lake Placid Olympics in which the United States amateurs vanquished the mighty Soviet Union machine, the so-called Miracle on Ice which scored a metaphorical victory in the Cold War, ABC’s Al Michaels hollered the phrase that has stood the test of time, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” That’s how Jonathan Hock’s “Of Miracles and Men”starts, sure, of course it does, but it’s not just the same old-same old, an unimaginative director resorting to the most conventional footage of a massively-chronicled event. And this is because much later in the film he replays the footage with the accompanying Soviet broadcasters. They are glumly straightforward. “Team USA win over our hockey players,” they say before routinely signing off. Ah, miracles through the looking glass the other way.

“Of Miracles and Men” tells this semi-ancient tale to a Stateside audience entirely from the perspective of the hypothetical enemy with barely an American talking head to be found, and effortlessly earns such significant sympathy for its subjects, in fact, that by the time the Lake Placid game arrives to yet again finish 4-3 in favor of the Stars & Stripes that you, prospective apple pie baking Yankee, might just find yourself disappointed when Mike Euriozne’s slapshot finds its way into the back of the CCCP net. Well, unless you’re Ann Coulter. (The film also features raw footage of “Boycott Moscow” stickers slapped up all over Lake Placid, stickers, I must say, that were nowhere to be seen in the handsomely filtered “Miracle.”)

It is most effective in its earliest passages, illustrating not only the rise of Soviet hockey but its conception. It was constructed and funded and supported, of course, to demonstrate Soviet might to all those who opposed their way of living, yet another in a virtually un-ending line of examples that it’s not (retch) “just a game”. It was, however, constructed not as a mirror image of the hockey played by its Canadian founders but as an entirely new style of play, a style in which its architect, Anatoli Tarasov, “believed in freedom, respecting his players as individuals.” Those individuals functioned as a united collective, an utterly profound juxtaposition that simultaneously rejected and embraced its own nation’s ideals.

The Lake Placid loss was defined, in part, by Tarasov being reluctantly dismissed as coach and replaced by dictatorial Viktor Tikhonov, a man whose bizarre decision to remove goaltender Vladisav Tretiak from the Miracle on Ice game after giving up a couple goals contributed mightily in sealing his squad’s fate. On camera Tretiak is incredibly diplomatic regarding the decision, as are his teammates. They are diplomatic about the loss itself, resigned to their fate even as they continue to express dour disbelief over the outcome. The doc’s framework is great Soviet defenseman Slava Fetisov returning to the scene with his daughter in tow. She asks her father “Do you remember this?” His response may be monotone but, God, you can still feel the sting, palpably, across the decades. “I remember it,” he says.

If there is a villain to be found in “Of Miracles and Men” it is not the upstart Americans but the Red Army coach himself, Tikhonov. His replacing Tarasov was, it is said, akin to an artist being replaced by an accountant. Worse even, when considering the tight-lipped, closed-off regime Tikhonov implemented, one that kept his players away from home for 11 months a year. They stayed in army barracks but seemed even more like the KGB, the team, in a twist of irony so perfect it’s almost unbelievable, that Tikhonov coached before accepting management for the national squad.

Tikhonov’s empire becomes the symbol of the Soviet empire, summarized by Russian journalist Vitali Melik-Karamov when he explains that “revolutions give birth to romantics. The Soviet regime first appeared as a romantic notion. Then it transformed into fanaticism. Later...society became cynical. Tarasov was romantic but Tikhonov was a cynic.” That’s probably simplified, and a bit pollyannaish, but no less apt. Even as Soviet hockey success continued throughout the 80’s post-Lake Placid, the impetus for its downfall was already brewing from within. And the grand irony is that this downfall under the grip of Tikhonov inadvertently helped spur a revolution of its own, one that eventually saw its players – like Fetisov – become the first Soviet citizens to travel freely between the west and east, to become symbolic individuals in a society that sought to repress them. Their “game” aided change.

All due respect to Herb Brooks’ and his twenty players, but that’s a miracle.