Jackpot: Pony Excess

As the “30 for 30” series winds to a quasi-close, executives at the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports have many reasons to celebrate. ESPN Films’ unprecedented documentary series, which provided 30 different filmmakers with carte blanche to explore their own sports fascinations from the past three decades, has been remarkably successful, turning out at least two highly engaging films for each clunker, with only one outright flop. At its best, the series has observed the point in which the athletic world and the real world collide (June 17, 1994 and The Two Escobars), probed into athletes’ troubled minds (Run, Ricky, Run and No Crossover), made us laugh (Winning Time), made us cry (Into the Wind), rejuvenated memories of fallen heroes (Guru of Go) and resuscitated bygone villains (The U). It has allowed us to look back on past events with perspective. Often, it has reminded us of how different things once were. But with its final* film, the “30 for 30” series looks back to the past to bring us to the present. Pony Excess is about the college football dominance of the pay-to-play Southern Methodist University Mustangs back in the early 1980s, and as chance would have it, the film premieres immediately following the ceremony in which Auburn University’s Cam Newton will almost certainly be awarded the Heisman Trophy as the nation’s most outstanding college football player in 2010. Over the 14 months that ESPN has been releasing these films, effort has been made to match the documentaries with the sports that are in season, but this is synergy of a whole other level. Bill Simmons and the series’ other creators must be high-fiving one another about the timing.

Unbreakable: The Best That Never Was

In trying to recount the skill of running back Marcus Dupree, no one minces words. One of his high school teammates says Dupree was “awesome” and could score whenever he wanted, “literally.” A Mississippi newspaper reporter says that watching Dupree running through and around his prep peers was like watching NFL great Jim Brown taking on teenagers. Oklahoma University legend Barry Switzer says that Dupree was the “most gifted player” he ever coached, “bar none.” And Lucious Selmon, who recruited Dupree to Oklahoma, says Dupree was the best athlete he ever saw and had the talent to be the best running back of all time. But of all the effusive assessments we encounter in Jonathan Hock’s documentary The Best That Never Was, the latest edition in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series, perhaps the most accurate one is provided by one of Dupree’s childhood friends, who matter-of-factly says, “We suspected he could do anything he wanted to do.” Wrapped up in that seemingly simple statement is the measure of Dupree’s enormous abilities and, ironically, the making of his downfall.

Marcus Dupree’s mixed blessing was that everyone who watched him play came away convinced that he was without limits. That’s why Dupree had his pick of any college in the country when he graduated from his high school in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and it’s also why Dupree’s college football career almost immediately became defined by all he didn’t do and everything he didn’t have. When Dupree set a still-standing Fiesta Bowl record by rushing for 239 yards (on just 17 carries!) in Oklahoma’s losing effort to Arizona State, Switzer didn’t praise his freshman running back, he threw him under the bus, reasoning that if Dupree had been in better shape he could have doubled his carries and doubled his yards and, in doing so, led the Sooners to victory. Dupree had been record-setting great and somehow not great enough. Not for Switzer, anyway, who was so determined to avoid giving Dupree anything he hadn’t earned that he went out of his way not to recognize the dominance that came to Depree so naturally. So it was that Dupree began wondering why the program that was so desperate to sign him in the first place withheld not just praise but also the (illegal) perks that other Sooners players were rumored to be enjoying. Influenced by family and friends who assumed that the football player who could do whatever he wanted on the field should get anything he wanted off of it, Dupree, too, started to judge his college experience according to oversized expectations. And so it came to be that instead of winning a Heisman trophy or leading Oklahoma to a national title, Dupree dropped out of Oklahoma before the end of his sophomore season. A lucrative contract with the USFL soon followed and, alas, just as quickly a devastating knee injury followed that. At the age of 20, Dupree’s football career was pronounced over.

Still Running: Marion Jones: Press Pause

“I took performance enhancing drugs, and I lied about it.” How many modern athletes have been too cowardly to utter those 10 simple words, even when confronted with evidence of their sins? Marion Jones says them with poise and confidence, her eyes looking directly into the camera. This clip from a 2010 public service announcement is the opening salvo in a barrage of admission and contrition that opens John Singleton’s documentary about the disgraced sprinter. From here we cut to the steps of a federal courthouse in 2007 where Jones stands before assembled cameras and microphones and says, “I have betrayed your trust,” “I am responsible fully for my actions,” “I have no one to blame but myself” and “I have been dishonest, and you have the right to be angry with me.” Her words sound premeditated but not rehearsed. She speaks not from a page and thus seemingly her heart. She allows a few tears to roll down her face, but she maintains her composure. In that moment and in several others this film, Marion Jones is everything we wish Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa would be: accountable. Too bad she couldn’t be honest, too.

In Marion Jones: Press Pause, Jones is forthcoming about her mistakes in the way that Michael Vick has been forthcoming about dog fighting, and Tiger Woods has been forthcoming about his extramarital sex and Brett Favre has been forthcoming about his extramarital voice messages: only as required. Did Jones lie to federal investigators? Yes. Did she deliberately mislead the public? Yes. Did she use performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs)? Yes. Those are things Jones willingly admits, because at this point she has no other choice than to do so; a federal investigation forced the truth out of her. But when it comes to how, when and why the five-time Olympic medalist took PEDs, Jones is glaringly mum, which makes all of her other admissions incomplete at best and misleading at worst. In this documentary, the latest installment in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series, Jones carries herself with the air of someone who is holding nothing back, but if you watch carefully you’ll notice that she admits to what she’s been found guilty of and absolutely nothing more. Expecting the whole truth and nothing but the truth from a serial liar, whose repeated public denials were so emphatic that Attitcus Finch would have gladly volunteered to represent her pro bono, is as foolish as expecting Olympic athletes to turn down the opportunity for multi-million-dollar success by just saying no to PEDs. (The system is broken.) But expecting a filmmaker profiling the rise and fall of Marion Jones to at least broach the subject of how she got mixed up in PEDs in the first place? That doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Man of the People: Fernando Nation

There’s a sports melodrama unfolding in Los Angeles right now that’s so epically sordid, so potentially monumental that I’m half surprised ESPN hasn’t already rebranded its “30 for 30” series as “Thirtysomething for Thirtysomething” just to have the chance to chronicle it with a feature-length documentary. It’s a story of greed, selfishness, corruption and the downfall of a once dominant superpower – the kind of thing that could be directed by Charles Ferguson and aptly titled Inside Job or No End In Sight. It’s the story of the “Dodger Divorce” – the dissolution of the marriage between Frank and Jamie McCourt, for now the co-owners of the Dodgers, whose custody battle for the team has resulted in the public disclosure of their lavish spending at a time when they are also raising the ticket prices of lower-income fans. Fernando Nation, the latest actual entry in the ESPN Films documentary series, isn’t about the “Dodger Divorce” in any specific respect, but in a way it’s an unintentional prologue to it. Because in Cruz Angeles’ profile of the influential career of Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, we witness the birth of the very fan base that might not survive the monetary demands of the current regime. To understand what might be lost in the decade ahead, you must understand what came to be three decades ago. You must understand “Fernandomania.”

If you’re unfamiliar with the movement, “Fernandomania” was a craze roughly similar to the one that baseball fans experienced this past season in relation to Washington Nationals phenom Stephen Strasburg, albeit with several significant differences: (1) Fernando Valenzuela made a mostly anonymous debut prior to his official rookie campaign, whereas Strasburg made a highly-anticipated debut as a mid-season call-up; (2) Valenzuela dominated throughout the 1981 season en route to Rookie of the Year and Cy Young honors, whereas Strasburg lasted 12 starts in 2010 before his rookie year was cut short by injury; (3) Valenzuela joined a Dodgers team that wound up winning the 1981 World Series, whereas Strasburg joined a pitiful Nationals team that finished last in the National League East (again) and called it progress; and (4) Valenzuela was signed by the Dodgers to attract a very specific kind of fan, whereas Strasburg was signed by the Nats to attract any ticket-buyer whatsoever. Of all those differences, it’s that last point that’s most noteworthy, because while it’s easy to assume that the Dodgers have always had a sizable Hispanic fan base, given the large Mexican-American population in and around L.A., Fernando Nation proves otherwise: Before the Dodgers attracted Mexican-American fans, it displaced them – bulldozing their community of modest homes in Chavez Ravine so that Dodger Stadium could be erected there instead. The very franchise that broke the color barrier years earlier by signing Jackie Robinson inspired Mexican-Americans to band together to “Remember Chavez Ravine.” And remember they did. Until Fernando helped them move on.

Days of Thunder: Tim Richmond: To the Limit

“I’m more afraid of being nothing than I am of being hurt.” Officially, those are the words of Cole Trickle, as written by Robert Towne and as delivered by Tom Cruise in the auto racing flick Days of Thunder. In spirit, though, they are the words of Tim Richmond. A fearless driver who became one of the best racers on the NASCAR circuit under the guidance of a crusty crew chief, Richmond was the flamboyant real-life character upon which Cruise’s Trickle was loosely based. But Days of Thunder isn’t Richmond’s story. Not by a long shot. Richmond was confident, talented and brash, and, appropriately enough, he had a Hollywood icon’s sense of the spotlight, but his life wasn’t blessed with the stereotypical Hollywood ending. Just when Richmond was beginning to show his potential for legendary greatness, he died at the age of 34. What killed him wasn’t overconfidence on the racetrack but ignorance off of it. Richmond fell victim to something he didn’t think he needed to fear: sex.

Tim Richmond died of AIDS. And in the impressive documentary Tim Richmond: To the Limit, the latest release in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series, we see the way Richmond lived, the way he died and, most important of all, the way he lived en route to dying. Because what’s really notable about Tim Richmond isn’t that he died of AIDS but when he died of AIDS: 1989. That’s five years pre-Real World: San Francisco, four years pre-Philadelphia, three years pre-Arthur Ashe and two years pre-Magic Johnson. For most of America, 1989 was the dark age of HIV/AIDS awareness – a time when there was just enough light to spot something to fear and not enough light to understand what we should really be afraid of. In the late ‘80s, AIDS was widely considered to be a “gay cancer,” and the great hypocrisy was that some of the same folks who thought only homosexuals got AIDS were also the ones who feared they could contract the disease through casual contact with someone who had it. It wasn’t an environment in which most anyone would feel comfortable living publicly with HIV/AIDS, least of all a NASCAR racer who had already been held at arm’s length by the sport’s “good ol’ boy” establishment just for having an apartment in New York, just for not being one of them.

The Ties That Bind: Once Brothers

Sports uniforms are powerful things. They take people of different races, nationalities, religions, economic backgrounds and political viewpoints and unify them as if members of one harmonious family. They convince fans to cheer for despicable people (Michael Vick in Philadelphia, Barry Bonds in San Francisco, etc.) and to embrace athletes they once despised (Brett Favre in Minnesota). They let Americans know who to care about every Olympics or World Cup. They even create a genuine camaraderie among otherwise dissimilar fans who root for the same set of laundry. But for all the times that uniforms bring people together in previously unthinkable ways (think: Jackie Robinson and the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers), there’s a limit to a uniform’s bond. Once Brothers, the latest installment in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” documentary series, is the story of men who were first united by the blue and white jerseys of Yugoslavia’s national basketball team, only to be torn apart by that country’s civil war.

More specifically, the film is about Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic, who were strangers, who became teammates, who became roommates, who became friends, who became standout NBA players, who became estranged. Once brothers, then enemies – their unity through the Yugoslavian national team and their immigrant experiences in America shattered by a war that redefined them according to their Serbian and Croatian roots. It’s a heartbreaking story, one that feels as if it should have been preventable at the same time that it seems utterly unavoidable, and it’s a credit to the filmmaker that we leave the documentary understanding and respecting the emotions and actions of both men. Once Brothers is directed by Michael Tolajian, but it comes from the heart of Divac, who narrates the film while retracing his steps from the quiet Serbian town where he was born, to the gym where the Yugoslavian national team trained, to the hotel in Los Angeles that was his first American home, to the streets of downtown Zagreb in Croatia, where Divac hadn’t set foot since before war broke out in 1991. Other documentaries in the “30 for 30” series have felt deeply personal to the people making them (perhaps most notably The Band That Wouldn’t Die and No Crossover), but no “30 for 30” film does a better job of personalizing the story from the perspective of one of its principal subjects. We don’t just understand Divac’s story, we experience it through him.

The Curse: Four Days In October

One frame. While watching Four Days in October, the latest entry in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” documentary series, that’s how far I got before I rolled my eyes. The trigger for my annoyance was a pair of words that flashed up on the screen in blood red: “The Curse.” No, this isn’t a film about menstruation. It’s about the 2004 American League Championship Series. Which of course means that “The Curse” refers to “The Curse of the Bambino,” which of course refers to the sale of Babe Ruth by the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees prior to the 1920 season, the sacrilege of which was so great that it haunted the Red Sox for decades as they went in doomed pursuit of their first World Series title since 1918. Or so the lore goes. The problem with “The Curse,” and the reason it irritates me, is that it’s utter bullshit – less because it fails to accurately explain why the Red Sox went 86 years without a World Series title than because it creates the illusion that Red Sox fans are an especially tortured lot. Hardly. Yes, in a spring-to-autumn race that produces only one big winner each year, the Red Sox were losers for almost nine decades. But in the meantime they did a hell of a lot of winning. Since 1936, for example, the Red Sox have had only 18 losing seasons. In contrast, last Sunday the Pittsburgh Pirates wrapped up their 18th losing season of the past 18 years. That, sports fans, is the kind of suckitude that truly tortured fan bases are made of.

Having said that, there’s no denying that misery and despair were integral components of a Sawks’ fan’s identity circa 2004, back before the Red Sox vanquished their Yankee rivals en route to becoming the very kind of cocky, big-spending franchise that their fans had so long despised. And so it only makes sense that “The Curse” is mentioned as part of the backdrop of the 2004 ALCS, because if any group of sports fans expected to have their hearts broken in the most excruciating fashion possible, it was the one in Boston (and in many other parts of the country where Red Sox fandom was suddenly chic). In baseball’s long history, only one team has ever come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a seven-game playoff series, and thus Boston’s four straight wins were an incredible feat all on their own. But part of what made the unprecedented comeback such magical theater was its larger context: 86 years without a title; Red Sox vs. Yankees; Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium; the franchise that always lost and the one that always seemed to win. Director Gary Waksman clearly understands the importance of that context, or else he wouldn’t have opened his film with those two annoying words, but because a 50-minute film provides scant opportunity for prologue, that’s about the extent of Waksman’s ability to set the stage, and so he takes it on faith that these teams and their rivalry need no introduction. Furthermore, he takes it for granted that we’ve heard this story before.

Running Down a Dream: Into the Wind

As if sports weren’t inherently dramatic enough, the language we use when discussing them is often bloody with consequence. Teams facing elimination from the playoffs are said to be in “do or die” situations. NFL games that are tied after four quarters go into “sudden death” overtime. And fans who allow their happiness be dictated by the success of their favorite team are said to be “diehards.” It’s all overstatement, provided that no one has made a bet they can’t afford to lose, but it’s harmless. (Working in the NFL when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, I was puzzled by the insistence of some writers that it was now inappropriate to refer to a team’s draft-day strategy room as the “war room.” Were these people similarly uncomfortable with the football terms “blitz” and “gunner”? And, in our post-9/11 climate, where was the objection to the baseball terms “sacrifice fly” and “suicide squeeze”? But I digress.) Poetic enhancement is a sports tradition. Still, every now and then something comes along and reminds us of just how foolish these inflated terms really are, and of just how dramatic sports can be on their own. Into the Wind is that kind of reality check.

The first must-see entry in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” documentary series since The Two Escobars debuted in June, Into the Wind tells the story of Terry Fox, who in 1980 set out to do the unthinkable: run all the way across his native Canada at a rate of approximately 26 miles (one marathon) each day. A formidable task in its own right, Fox’s expedition was made all the more challenging because he was without the better part of his right leg, which had been amputated six inches above the knee three years earlier, after Fox had been diagnosed with bone cancer. Fox’s goal wasn’t just to cover the distance but to raise money for cancer research and to raise the spirits of cancer patients at the same time. He called his run the “Marathon of Hope,” and in doing so he not only grossly undersold the length of his journey but also the emotions it would stir in those who witnessed it. Directed by NBA guard (and fellow Canadian) Steve Nash and Ezra Holland, Into the Wind gracefully combines modern interviews, archival footage and narrated excerpts from Fox’s journal to bring to life the heroic quest of a 21-year-old man who in the true spirit of sports wanted to test himself, and who in the true spirit of life wanted to do before he died.

Death of a Statesman: The House of Steinbrenner

Most owners of professional sports franchises are fairly anonymous figures. They sign checks, they raise ticket prices and, if they’re lucky, at some point they raise a championship trophy just long enough to hand it over to their team’s coach or star player. George Steinbrenner was an exception. Like Jerry Jones of the NFL and Mark Cuban of the NBA after him, Steinbrenner wasn’t just a Major League Baseball team owner, he was a team icon, as intrinsic to the New York Yankees’ identity as the team’s famous pinstripe uniforms. From 1973 until roughly 2005, when he faded from view, people were free to loath Steinbrenner or to romanticize him, but they couldn’t ignore him. He was the face of the franchise – and happily so. Steinbrenner didn’t just own his team, he ruled over it, which is why when a deteriorating Steinbrenner handed over primary control to his son Hal, in 2008, it felt less like a business transaction than a political regime change. Sure, the Yankees stayed in the Steinbrenner family, just like Cuba is still under the direction of a Castro. But for all that might remain the same, the ceding of power by a notoriously impulsive, ironfisted overseer would leave the empire he built forever changed. Just like there can only be one Comandante, there could only be one Boss.

In The House of Steinbrenner, Barbara Kopple captures this familial transfer of sports authority with a historian’s sense of scope and a prophet’s sense of consequence. Two months removed from Steinbrenner’s death and less than two years since the Boss officially handed over the reins to his son Hal, these events might be too timely to fully appreciate in the present, but Kopple documents them as if anticipating their future significance, aware that whatever successes or failures the Yankees have over the next 30 years will be traced back to this point. The latest in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series, The House of Steinbrenner is about the end of an era. In a less than two-year span, George yielded to his children, the “original” Yankee Stadium was replaced by “new” Yankee Stadium, hot dogs were joined by sushi in the Bronx and, across the street, one generation of construction workers tore down their fathers’ installations. Sports, with their seasonal schedules, are naturally full of beginnings and endings, but this was something different, something greater. At its best, Kopple’s film captures an organization and its fans in the midst of moving forward while consumed by all that they’re leaving behind.

Kind and Generous: Unmatched

It took 21 films for the “30 for 30” series to recognize the existence of females in sports, and now it’s as if Unmatched is trying to make up for lost time. Directed by Lisa Lax and Nancy Stern Winters, and produced by Hannah Storm, this documentary isn’t just by women or about women, it seems targeted for them, too. Unmatched mentions but isn’t really invested in the fierce on-court battles between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, just like it references but never evokes their incredible athletic dominance. Unmatched isn’t really interested in tennis, you see, it’s interested in Evert and Navratilova’s rivalry. And it’s interested in their rivalry because it’s fascinated by their friendship. Eschewing traditional talking heads and similar outsider analysis, Unmatched lets Evert and Navratilova tell their own story, in their own words, all from the confines of a picturesque New York beach house that’s right out of a Nancy Meyers movie. Whereas other filmmakers would have felt compelled to turn back the clock in order to delight in the exquisite precision of Evert and Navratilova’s volleys, Unmatched settles into a comfy chair in the here-and-now so that we can watch two of the best tennis players of all time trading memories.

The film isn’t without it’s charms, but it is decidedly low on testosterone. Catch this documentary while flipping through the channels and you’ll be forgiven for thinking you’ve landed on Lifetime, not ESPN. After all, when’s the last time “The Worldwide Leader in Sports” found occasion to play any Natalie Merchant song, never mind the same song, “Kind and Generous,” three times in less than an hour? With scenes that capture Evert and Navratilova reclining on big white deck chairs, or walking down the beach wearing complementary sweater-and-scarf outfits, Unmatched looks straight out of a Nicholas Sparks movie. And if you told me that these shots were conceived for a CBS special romanticizing the friendship of Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King, it would be tough to argue otherwise. (All that’s missing are dogs running up and down the surf.) The movie is so determined to convey Evert and Navratilova’s spiritual sisterhood that when the documentary ends with a shot of them driving off into the distance in a convertible, I breathed a sigh of relief that no canyon was in sight on the horizon.

Joined at the Fists: One Night in Vegas

Perhaps never before has such an eclectic group of talking heads been assembled as the one we find in One Night in Vegas, the latest entry in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series, which features interviews with the likes of Mike Tyson, Mickey Rourke, Suge Knight and Maya Angelou. Put another way, this documentary brings together a former heavyweight champion who served time in prison for rape and once bit off the ear of an opponent, an actor turned boxer turned actor with a history of substance abuse, a record producer who is widely rumored to be linked to the murder of Notorious B.I.G. (and myriad other crimes) and, last but not least, a Pulitzer Prize nominated writer who recited a poem at the inauguration of President Clinton. Wrap your head around that for a second. These seemingly unconnected individuals are brought together here because of the events of September 7, 1996, the titular subject of the film, when two things occurred that, likewise, might not seem to be related at first glance: Mike Tyson defeated Bruce Seldon to win the WBA title and then, after getting into a brawl of is own, rapper Tupac Shakur was assassinated on his way to a post-fight party. One Night in Vegas suggests that the proximity of these events might not be entirely coincidental. Of course if you’ve watched previous “30 for 30” pictures The U and Straight Outta L.A. and witnessed the strong cultural bond between sports and rap, you suspected that already.

One Night in Vegas touches on themes similar to those two films, but it never comes off as repetitive or otherwise tired in large part because it exhibits a style as diverse as those talking heads. Directed by Reggie Rock Bythewood, the documentary opens with spoken word artists Joshua Brandon Bennett and Rahleek “B. Yung” Johnson standing in a boxing ring as they set the stage like a Greek chorus: “In mere seconds, drinks transformed into drive-bys, shots of Patron became shots in passenger’s side windows, and what should have been a lifelong bond was guillotined by gunfire. … On September 7, 1996, there was more bloodshed outside of the ring than inside of it.” From there, the film employs its other unusual flourish: illustrations by Steve (Flameboy) Beaumont that depict Tyson and Shakur as comic book heroes, one of them triumphing and the other being gunned down. It’s a seemingly random artistic choice, but it’s also a refreshing break from the documentary norm, and a needed one, considering that the rest of the film is mostly a parade of talking heads yapping away in front of bland interview backdrops. Some of these interviewees give eyewitness accounts of that fateful night in September, some give us a historian’s overview (thank you, Chris Connelly) and some outline the similarities of Tyson and Shakur – two men who were celebrated and yet feared and whose primal, menacing antics belied their intelligence. But the film’s most entertaining interviews are the ones that, journalistically speaking, probably don’t need to be there, like Angelou’s typically eloquent account of preventing Shakur from getting into fight on the set of Poetic Justice (and then lecturing him about African-American history to boot), and Rourke’s equally unsurprising barely-coherent account of an incident in which he and Tyson almost joined forces in beating the crap out of someone at a club.

Fighting for Truth: The Tillman Story

Pat Tillman had the stare of a prizefighter, the inquisitiveness of an investigative journalist, the fearlessness of a stuntman, the protectiveness of a big brother, the self-awareness of a philosophy major, the devotion of a best friend and the mouth of a New Jersey auto mechanic. Or so I have been told. Having worked two years at Arizona State University and two years more in the NFL, I’ve come in contact with several people who were friends or at least friendly with Tillman, but I never met the man. I know Tillman only through the stories of those former friends and teammates, and through the tremendous features of Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith and the controversial book by Jon Krakauer. Now comes Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary, which through the accounts of those who knew Tillman best in life or were nearest to him at his death corroborates every description of Tillman that I’ve ever heard, revealing an individualistic, intelligent man of character who was also something of a rascal (that was his charm). But The Tillman Story is less about who Pat Tillman was than about who Pat Tillman wasn’t. If you’ve heard that Pat Tillman was a hero and a patriot, well, that’s true, by the most honorable definitions of those words. But Tillman wasn’t the quite hero that the military and the upper reaches of the Bush administration needed him to be. And so Tillman became in death the one thing that by all accounts he never was in life: someone else’s man.

This wasn’t Tillman’s doing. It was a crime done to him. Bar-Lev’s documentary attempts to set the record straight, to make Tillman’s story his own again. It’s a hard thing to do – to liberate a man from myth without spinning a brand new one – and it’s a task made harder still when those who knew the subject best are the ones most reluctant to describe him. In this film, Tillman’s wife, mother, father and youngest brother speak of Pat with a frankness and ease that suggests they trust their interviewer, but they are noticeably careful to avoid describing Pat with broad generalities, in part out of respect for a man who seemed to defy and detest oversimplified labels, and also because they’ve seen firsthand how such abstractions are building blocks for illusions. When Tillman walked away from a multi-million dollar NFL salary to enlist in the military and offered no explicit explanation as to why, the media filled in the gaps, writing the narrative they wanted to tell instead of the narrative they could validate. For them, Tillman was too good a story to pass up. Meantime, politicians latched on to Tillman’s enlistment as a sign of good old-fashioned American values and as a testament to the virtuousness of the military’s upcoming engagements. For them, Tillman was too famous to serve anonymously, even though his actions – Tillman refused all interviews and didn’t release a statement – made it clear that was his desire. Tillman was the best recruiting tool since Uncle Sam. His image was no longer his own to control. And the worst was yet to come.

Poetic Injustice: Little Big Men

Cody Webster stares into the camera like a man looking across an abyss of time for the soul he left behind. His shirt is as blue as the Atlantic Ocean. His eyes are as deep as the Pacific. His expression is mournful, like a Labrador retriever that’s been whipped with a fireplace poker by an intolerant master. As Webster speaks, the salt-and-pepper bristles of his goatee pierce the air like a thousand needles scraping at the skin of a balloon. All the while, Webster’s shoulders sag as if he spent his youth hunched over beneath the weight of enormous expectations, like Atlas holding up the world, and with good reason: Twenty-eight years ago, when he was 12, Webster was the star of a baseball team trying to win the Little League World Series and rescue the United States from a universal depression that wrapped around this country like a sticky vine. Today, at 40, Webster reminisces about those experiences in Little Big Men, a documentary that’s rife with the kind of overstatement and overwriting that you’ve been subjected to in this paragraph. My apologies.

Through 18 installments, ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series has ranged from engrossing and artful to interesting yet unremarkable, but it never delivered an outright flop until now. At its best, like when we look into the eyes of a thoughtful Webster, Little Big Men is casually engaging. Alas, at its worst it’s tragic, and in this case that’s the norm. The film is overlong and underfed; it has the skeleton of a story but no meat on its bones. Journalistically speaking, it either buries the lead or fails to detect it. Dramatically speaking, it makes the mistake of trying to be profound when it could have succeeded just by being personal. Cinematically speaking, it’s a crime, which is to say that it isn’t cinematic in the least. Although the straight-ahead, eyes-into-the-camera testimonials of Webster and some of his teammates from Kirkland, Washington’s 1982 Little League team recall the work of Errol Morris, the rest of the film is more akin to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion. It’s radio, and overly poetic radio at that, with enough pregnant pauses to make William Shatner impatient.

Missing in Action: Jordan Rides the Bus

When the greatest player of a sport retires, it’s memorable. When the greatest player of a sport retires at the height of his athletic abilities so that he can take a stab at another sport he hasn’t played since high school, it’s momentous. And yet somehow Michael Jordan’s one-year fling with professional baseball is practically forgotten, regarded 16 years later like some trivial footnote, like the deleted scene of a classic film, as if it didn’t count. But it did. So, in Jordan Rides the Bus, the latest entry in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series, Ron Shelton chronicles the impact of Jordan’s sudden and brief career switch on the NBA, on Nike, on the Birmingham Barons minor league baseball team, on a bus driver, on a real estate agent and on a bar owner. Meanwhile, Shelton charts the evolution of Jordan’s baseball skills, explores theories about the motivations for Jordan’s dalliance with the sport and brings in media talking-heads to reevaluate not just Jordan’s baseball skills but also their own coverage of his brief career. At 50 minutes, Jordan Rides the Bus is a thorough documentary. Alas, it’s as emotionless as a Wikipedia page. Because the one thing Shelton’s documentary doesn’t convey is what all of the above meant to Michael Jordan.

It’s not for lack of effort. Shelton tries. Oh, how he tries! His documentary is heavy with archival Jordan interviews in which the sports icon insists he’s playing baseball to honor his murdered father and because he’s lost his motivation to play basketball, having run out of things to prove after winning three consecutive NBA titles. But these are all sound bites, mostly pulled from press conferences, spoken by an experienced interviewee. They are less revealing of a man in the moment than of a man under the spotlight who is used to the attention. These clips provide no sense of what Jordan thought privately. They provide no sense of what he thinks now. They don’t even provide a sense of what Jordan might have thought semi-recently. In Jordan Rides the Bus we hear a lot of Jordan’s voice thanks to interview and television commercial audio that’s repurposed as voiceover, but since the original sources aren’t cited, it’s hard to put Jordan’s words into context, hard to trust his accounts. Just because Jordan didn’t sit down for an exclusive interview doesn’t mean there should be such a void. After all, Steve James didn’t need an official sitdown with Allen Iverson to give us a glimpse of his subject’s soul in No Crossover. And so it is that Shelton’s film reminds more of two other basketball-related docs in the “30 for 30” series: Without Bias and Guru of Go. Jordan is so distant from this picture, it’s as if he’s dead.

What Goes Up …: The Birth of Big Air

As irritating as David Blaine has become in recent years due to his tedious, surprisingly lusterless stunt (un)spectaculars, whenever I’m flipping through the channels and stumble upon the 1996 documercial David Blaine: Street Magic, I put down the remote control. By now I’ve seen the Leonardo DiCaprio-hosted special enough times to know all the tricks, even if I can’t explain how they’re pulled off. And although I’m still impressed by Blaine’s skill (I’ve always loved magic), the pure excitement I get from watching him turn an Ace of Diamonds into a 6 of Spades has long since passed. Meanwhile, Blaine’s undoubtedly effective stage presence, from his monotone monologues to his dramatic exhaustion shtick, has become downright tiresome. Yet still I watch. The difference is that I no longer watch Blaine. The genius of Street Magic is that in addition to allowing us to observe Blaine’s sleight of hand, the film also – and sometimes exclusively – allows us to watch the awed faces of Blaine’s marks. No matter how many times I encounter Street Magic, the sight of people staring in absolute amazement as they try to process the apparent reality of the seemingly impossible is nothing short of thrilling.

Incredibly enough, that leads us to the latest documentary in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series, The Birth of Big Air, which has nothing whatsoever to do with street magic but nonetheless has similar charms. Profiling a BMX daredevil named Mat Hoffman, the 50-minute film is peppered with moments in which Jeff Tremaine’s camera stares into the dumbstruck faces of people trying to process stunts so incredible that they might as well be illusions. That some of the stunts happened as many as 24 years ago, and that many of the guys shaking their heads in amazement have performed numerous gravity-defying feats of their own, makes their present-day wonderment, captured in talking-head interviews, all the more poignant. It’s one thing for a stuntman to dazzle in the moment. It’s another thing to pull off tricks so incredible that a decade or two later people still get goosebumps remembering what it was like to discover photographs of the tricks in trade magazines. Mat Hoffman earned his fame, and served as a trailblazer for his sport, by doing things on a bike that no one else could. Hoffman earned his legend, however, by nailing tricks no one else even imagined.

Beyond the Game: The Two Escobars

If one of the things that June 17, 1994 reminded us is that we can’t watch professional athletes on the playing field and know what kind of people they are, The Two Escobars offers the equally important reminder that no amount of media coverage can provide us with a clear understanding of what these athletes are going through. The latest release in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series opens with shots of the Colombian soccer team looking less than enthusiastic as they walk onto the pitch in front of a passionate capacity crowd at the Rose Bowl for a crucial match against the United States in the 1994 World Cup. To most, the Colombians look as if they’re feeling the pressure of having been upset by Romania in their opening game, and they are. They also look as if they’re suffering an unfamiliar lack of confidence, and that’s probably right, too. But there’s something else there, something that’s more difficult to detect because it’s not something most of us expect to find at a soccer game. That something else is fear, real fear – the fear of losing something much more significant than a game. To spot that fear, you have to be able to crawl inside the minds of the Colombian players, to understand where they come from, what they’re playing for and what they stand to lose. To see that fear, you have to see beyond sports. That’s what The Two Escobars does so well.

Directed by Jeff and Michael Zimbalist, The Two Escobars is less a sports documentary than a gritty South American crime saga. It’s The Godfather by way of Che Guevara as written by Tom Clancy and adapted for the screen by David Simon. It’s packed with assassinations, government corruption, drug trafficking, money laundering, militia wars, kidnapping and terrorism. There’s enough here for a miniseries. Instead it’s a taut 100-minute powerhouse overflowing with so much compelling archival footage that you figure the Zimbalists grew up clipping newspaper articles and storing them in shoeboxes underneath their beds, just waiting for their chance to tell this story. The impressive density and complexity of The Two Escobars is occasionally overwhelming, particularly in the early going when we’re assaulted with overlapping narrative voices (in Spanish, with English subtitles) that have a habit of referring to names we’re still trying to associate with faces. But the longer we watch, the more it makes sense, both logically and emotionally. Watching this film is a little like staring at Picasso’s Guernica: The whole is impossible to comprehend at once, so instead we understand it in pieces until the big picture paints itself in our minds as some kind of subconscious panorama that we could never quite describe in words.

Bitter Reality (TV): June 17, 1994

We are a nation of ambulance chasers and rubberneckers. We are a society drawn to sensationalism. We are America. We take sports too seriously. We take life and death too lightly. All too often, we obsess over scoreboard points while missing the point. We are shameful but unashamed. We know our faults and tend to accept them, even celebrate them. We are Americans. In this context, Brett Morgen’s contribution to ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” documentary series is the embarrassing portrait of America that we shouldn’t need but that we wholly deserve. It’s titled June 17, 1994, after the date of the events it chronicles, but it’s as much a mirror to our present as it is a snapshot of our past. Catch a few minutes here or there and you’ll think Morgen’s film is about a crazy day in sports history in which the New York Rangers celebrated their Stanley Cup victory with a parade, and the Knicks took on the Rockets in the NBA Finals, and the World Cup kicked off in Chicago, and Arnold Palmer played his final round at a U.S. Open and, not to be outdone, O.J. Simpson led police (and transfixed Americans) in a low-speed chase down a Los Angeles freeway. But all of that is just the setting of June 17, 1994; its subject is something else. It’s the story of us.

Morgen’s documentary, which is easily one of the finest of the “30 for 30” series, is a condemnation of America’s confused value system cleverly disguised as a leisurely trip down memory lane. Its greatest strength is its gracefulness, challenging thoughtful viewers without resorting to didacticism or heavy-handedness. Preach? Morgen wouldn’t dream of it. His film is void of traditional narration and talking-head interviews. In their place is a vibrant collage of news footage from that fateful day 16 years ago – stuff that aired, like Tom Brokaw’s bewildered coverage of Simpson’s quasi-escape attempt, and stuff that didn’t, like the multitude of clips showing news personalities chatting with their producers and cameramen, feverously trying to determine what to make of Simpson’s apparent admission-by-flight and how to cover it. In individual snippets, this footage is familiar (the white Ford Bronco cruising down I-5) or unremarkable (a Rangers fan in Manhattan showing off his freshly-inked Stanley Cup tattoo). In sum, however, it’s sobering, clearly exposing the unhealthy significance we place on sports (“Now I can die in peace,” says a 10-or-so kid of the Rangers’ victory) and the flippancy we often exhibit in the face of real-life tragedy, as if it’s a gladiatorial event offered up for our entertainment (the sight of people cheering the Simpson motorcade was disturbing in 1994 and it’s even more disquieting now that we know exactly what Simpson was running from).

Raiders and Rap: Straight Outta L.A.

Twenty-two years ago, a fledgling hip-hop group from a Los Angeles suburb synonymous with gang violence preceded the title track of its second album with a declaration: “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge.” These words – part promise, part threat – defined not only “Straight Outta Compton,” and the album of same name, but the entire angle of approach for N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitudes), the self-described lyric-spitting “gang” whose insuppressible hits, also including “Fuck the Police” and “Gangsta Gangsta,” helped shape the genre we now call “gangsta rap.” Lyrically, Straight Outta Compton was defined by its glorification of gun-toting violence and its eye-for-an-eye rallying cry against police brutality. Visually, though, the album was branded by the rap group’s signature style: black men clad in nearly all-black attire that was nondescript save for headwear that often bore the emblem of the hometown NFL franchise with a conveniently complementary color scheme. So it was that the Los Angeles Raiders became married to a music revolution, until their logo came to stand for a cultural identity as much as an athletic team.

Straight Outta L.A. is a documentary that looks back on the ways the Raiders both shaped and were shaped by the gangsta rap movement. The film is directed by Ice Cube, who as a founding member of N.W.A. and a long-time Raiders fan is something of an authority on both subjects. In this, the 14th release of ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series, sports and culture get equal time. Ice Cube’s contribution to the series is a personal film, part The Band That Wouldn’t Die, in which Barry Levinson explores the relationship between an NFL team and its fanbase, and part The U, in which Billy Corben details how the University of Miami and rap group 2 Live Crew symbiotically developed their hard-core reputations. It’s always a bit surprising to encounter 52 minutes of ESPN programming with scant athletic highlights – Rod Martin’s fourth-down tackle of John Riggins and Marcus Allen’s subsequent 74-yard touchdown run in Super Bowl XVIII are the only times the documentary pauses long enough to enjoy football as football – but that’s what makes the “30 for 30” series so frequently compelling. Ice Cube takes the Raiders’ come-and-go relationship with Los Angeles, a series of events now remembered almost exclusively as an example of team owner Al Davis’ curious handling of the franchise, and he flips it over, revealing a much more compelling story underneath.

Seeing is Believing: The 16th Man

Toward the goal posts the oblong ball flies, turning end over end. Hanging in the balance of the drop kick is a rugby match, a World Cup title and maybe, just maybe, the ability for whites and blacks to coexist peacefully in South Africa. The year is 1995. The location is Johannesburg. The venue is Ellis Park. In attendance is Nelson Mandela, who in his second year as South Africa’s first black president seeks to unite his divided country through sport. Does the ball go through the goal posts? Almost 15 years later, Desmond Tutu closes his eyes, imagines the ball in flight and exclaims “Yeah!” As he does so, an expression of profound satisfaction washes over his face. Is Tutu, the 1984 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, rejoicing over the massive social and political impact of that game-winning kick? Or is he simply celebrating the goal itself, as great moment in sport? There’s no way of knowing. That’s what makes Tutu’s reaction, captured in the documentary The 16th Man, so poignant.

The 16th Man is the latest release in ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” series, and it has the blessing and the curse of chronicling the same story of nation-healing through rugby that was recently dramatized in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus. On the positive side, our familiarity with Mandela’s politically risky endorsement of the Springboks rugby team, and their subsequent World Cup title run, allows us to have an immediate emotional bond with the documentary’s principal players, enabling the film to affect more deeply than it might have otherwise. On the negative side, however, the still fresh memory of Morgan Freeman’s Oscar nominated performance as Nelson Mandela casts a shadow over The 16th Man that it never escapes. Director Clifford Bestall utilizes archival footage of Mandela wherever possible, but there’s not enough of it to erase the nagging feeling that the documentary is sorely lacking the personality of the one person most central to its story. Whereas Invictus thrives by making Mandela accessible through Freeman’s performance, The 16th Man winds up treating Mandela like a distant, mostly inaccessible historical figure. It’s not an improvement.

Lessons in Introspection: Run, Ricky, Run

Back in 1999, the New Orleans Saints made one of the most aggressive trades in the history of the NFL Draft for the purposes of acquiring running back Ricky Williams. Williams was leaving the University of Texas as the NCAA’s all-time leading rusher, and in him the Saints were getting an athlete who was determined, elusive and tough to tackle. In short, they were getting someone special, an athlete capable of doing the unusual routinely. The Saints drafted Williams to be their franchise player, but three years later Williams was no longer in a Saints uniform, and two years after that Williams wasn’t in any uniform at all. The blockbuster trade and, seemingly, Williams’ professional career had flopped. And yet the problem wasn’t that the Saints’ original scouting report was incorrect but that it was all too accurate. As it turned out, Williams really was determined, elusive and tough to tackle. He really was someone special, an athlete who did the unusual routinely. Trouble was, Williams met that description off the field as much as on it. Before too long it became clear that Williams was less interested in taking on uniformed opponents than in taking on himself.

Run, Ricky, Run is a documentary about this often inscrutable athlete who was first made famous by running within football and then made infamous by running away from it. The film is directed by Sean Pamphilon and Royce Toni, and it includes intimate, exclusive footage of Williams dating back to 2004, shortly after his (initial) departure from the NFL, the announcement of which came without warning just a few weeks before Williams was set to open training camp with the Miami Dolphins. Pamphilon’s rare access to Williams was thanks both to a friendship that was formed when Williams was still in college and to a request by Williams to seek the truth. (“Ninety-nine percent of the truth is a lie,” Williams had told Pamphilon.) And so Pamphilon started shooting, without any way of predicting all of what was to come. Like documentaries ranging from Woodstock (1970) to Capturing the Friedmans (2003), Run, Ricky, Run is defined in part by our awareness that the story had yet to be fully defined when shooting began. It’s organic. The historian’s retroactive approach is sometimes the only option available to a documentary filmmaker, but it’s inherently problematic – memories are flawed, and at some point legend tends to suffocate truth. Run, Ricky, Run is the all-too-rare documentary that unfolds mostly in the present tense, which is the only reasonable way to try to climb into the mind of a man who often seemed overcome by the moment.

The documentary has an effect similar to Michael Apted’s unparalleled Up series, albeit on a considerably smaller scale: Run, Ricky, Run charts Williams’ evolution through multiple present-tense examinations spaced out over time – a simple documentary formula in principle that is nonetheless exotic because of the breadth of footage that must be acquired to pull it off. Pamphilon didn’t start examining Williams’ life on camera until after Williams had fathered a third child by a third mother, until after he had admitted to suffering from social anxiety disorder, until after he failed a test for marijuana and fled the NFL to sleep in a tent during a soul-searching trek in Australia and until after sports media personalities lined up to psychoanalyze Williams in speculative 90-second rants. But the breadth of content is here just the same, thanks to interviews with Williams and those close to him that Pamphilon conducted from 2004-2009, during which time Williams spurned the NFL, returned to the NFL, violated the NFL’s substance abuse policy (again), enlisted in the Canadian Football League, schooled himself in holistic medicine, dedicated himself to yoga while accepting a spiritual leader, tested positive for marijuana (again) and revived his NFL career (again). It’s a narrative with more twists than a ratings-starved reality show, albeit without the bitter taste of shameful exploitation.

Throughout the film, Williams makes for a remarkably fascinating subject. He has an indescribable ability to be both forthright and elusive. He’s a deep thinker who sometimes seems to be without thought. He’s a man who comes off as alternately inspired and insane. Miami Herald columnist Dan LeBatard sums it up best when he reacts to Williams’ initial flight from football by saying, “I still don’t know as I sit here talking to you whether this is a product of him being bipolar or mentally ill, or it’s a product of him being the only sane person out there and the rest of us worshipping all the wrong things.” To watch Run, Ricky, Run is to get the sense that all the above might be true. Indeed, Williams might be suffering from one or a few medical disorders that by now might have woven together to the point of being indistinguishable from one another. Bipolar? Depression? Social anxiety? Addiction? Maybe. But you don’t need to make Williams into a sympathetic victim in order to recognize the viciousness of the societal monster around him. Through a montage of sports-media talking-heads performing various levels of character assassination on Williams, Pamphilon makes it crystal clear that the audience at the arena that Williams was so vilified for leaving didn’t give two shits about him. The money and fame that are so often considered the outlandish spoils of professional sports turn out also to be shackles meant to keep athletes in their place until we’re done watching them suffer for our own enjoyment. In this light, the moral outrage over Williams’ marijuana use was a sham. Underneath it all people weren’t outraged that Williams might prefer pot to professional football. People were outraged that anyone might prefer anything to wealth and stardom.

If you doubt that last analysis, pay attention to the segment of Williams’ 60 Minutes interview from 2004 that appears in this film. Sitting opposite Mike Wallace, Williams asks a very simple question: “When would it have been okay for me to stop playing football? When my knees went out? When my shoulders went out? When I had too many concussions? … I don’t understand. When is it okay to not play football anymore?” If the answer to that last question is anything other than, “It’s always okay to not play football anymore,” doesn’t that say something troubling about our society? And yet, if the answer is that simple, how do we explain the outrage heaped upon Ricky Williams – an outrage that might have remained to this day had he not “turned his life around,” as we like to say, by, in part, returning to the very place we always demanded that he exist: the football field? Run, Ricky, Run isn’t so didactic as to ask these questions, but it is dynamic enough to inspire them. It’s the most surprisingly thought-provoking entry in ESPN Film’s “30 for 30” series thus far.

Run, Ricky, Run premieres tonight on ESPN at 8 pm ET, and will rerun frequently thereafter. The Cooler will be reviewing each film in the “30 for 30” series upon its release.