Exploring ESPN's 30 for 30: Muhammad and Larry

Director: Albert Maysles
Psychiatry in Russia
Meet Marlon Brando
With Love From Truman
Primary
Salesman
Shine a Light

Synopsis
This documentary is a mix of two sets of film.  The first is footage shot prior to the 1980 bout between Larry Holmes and Muhammad Ali which Ali lost in the 10th round by TKO.  The footage was never used, as the directors explain, because none of the major networks wanted it.  It is paired with recent footage of Holmes, interviews with Ali's entourage, and sports writers of the time to provide perspective on the fight.

Exploring ESPN's 30 for 30: Small Potatoes

Director: Mike Tolin
Varsity Blues
Coach Carter
Big Fat Liar
Radio
One Tree Hill
All That
Keenan and Kell



Synopsis
The film follows the rise and fall of the USFL, an upstart spring football league which folded after trying to go head to head with the NFL in the fall.  The league appeared like a legitimate challenger to the NFL, signing Heisman trophy winners Herschel Walker, Doug Flutie, and Mike Rozier as well as future hall of famers such as Reggie White.  The USFL included 150 future NFL players and 15 pro-bowlers in its' ranks.  The piece pays particular attention to the impact of New Jersey Generals owner and celebrity icon Donald Trump, who spearheaded the move to the fall which ultimately doomed the USFL.  In 1986 the league won a key court decision against the NFL but were not awarded damages which would have kept the NFL afloat.  The league folded before it could play a single fall game.
 
Thoughts
 The film plays a brief interview with Donald Trump right off the bat.  Despite how short and really empty a lot of the interview is, this is the best part of the ocumentaryd.  This film identifies its' villain right away and the interview with Donald contains everything you want to cement the films' vision.  Unlike the first two films, which don't completely or correctly identify the bad guy, this one creates a big, Las Vegas style sign that points at him the entire film.  What's more, even though Trump really doesn't say much during the interview, his answers, his tone, his body language, everything makes you want to punch him in the face.  He is every bit the self centered, ego maniacal jerk the film wants him to be.

It is hard to cast a better villain in Donald Trump (though Peter Pocklington in King's Ransom certainly presents a more dynamic antagonist than the rather cliche inhumane rich guy we get with Trump) which is part of the reason this film succeeds.  The other reason is that there is no reason to question the wisdom of the late John Bassett.  The NFL has a notriously nasty history of crushing leagues which try to match against it and only one alternate football league has found some level of success against the NFL, and that was the AFL which was led by Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt who managed a merger with the older league (most teams in the AFC are old AFL teams).  Spring football was new but the early returns were promising.  In hindsight, if the USFL had grown alongside cable and if owners had the fortitude to withstand the massive early losses (which totaled over $160million when it folded) it might still exist.

The narrative spun by the film is pretty accurate and the stories are fantastic.  Rick Neuheisel's bit about racing his teammates across Texas highways to make sure their checks would clear is hilarious and does a fantastic job of demonstrating the financial realities several owners were facing.  The interviews are captivating and the variety of perspectives really paints a complete picture of the USFL.

My only complaint is this.  The film could have done more to flesh out the owners who sided with Trump.  He certainly wasn't alone in wanting to challenge the NFL (though he was the most vocal).  Eddie Einhorn, now a minority owner in the Chicago White Sox, was the owner of Chicago's USFL franchise and a vehement supporter of the Trump invective.  Where are those interviews?  We get Burt Reynolds, who co-owned the Tampa Bay Bandits with John Basset, but it would be really interesting to hear how the owners' side of this a little more.  This was, after all, a management decision, why not have more of their voice?

It is possible a lot of owners would be too embarrassed to go on camera to discuss what, in hindsight, looks like a major mistake, but we don't know that.

Also I need to mention that this film has by far the best Bonus Features of the first disk.  The extra interviews are fantastic and really do a great job of reinforcing the overarching theme of the film. 

Review
This is easily one of my favorite 30 for 30 films and it is easy to see why.  The facts in the documentary actually seem to fit the narrative the author puts over them which is a bit of a relief after the first two films.  I would like more on Trump's reasoning that the USFL was small potatoes.  As I said before, there were owners who sided with Trump and it is hard to believe everyone who fell in line the idea that they needed to challenge the NFL was just a lemming.  What exactly swayed them?  Was it really just Donald's overwhelming personality as the film suggests or was there something more?  The film manages the narrative well but leaves this part out in order to construct Donald Trump as the arrogant villain.

I am mixed on my opinion of the director's decision to introduce himself into the film.  On one hand it shows some gumption and some honesty to admit his bias at the outset and to show how that he has a personal connection to the subjects who were interviewed in the story.  On the other hand it gets a little over bearing at times and the only real scene where it is tangible is him handing the check for $3 which constituted the entire sum of the damages  the USFL received from its lawsuit against the NFL to Reynolds and Trump.  I like some of it but I could do without the constant personal pronoun references.

Exploring ESPN's 303 for 30: THe Band That Wouldn't Die

 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mBuAMwBogdM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Director: Barry Levinson
Rain Man
Bugsy
The Natural
Good Morning Vietnam
Avalon
Diner


Synopsis
The film follows the leaders of the Baltimore Colts Band (currently Baltimore's Marching Ravens) during and after the the 1984 departure of the Baltimore Colts NFL team to Indianapolis.  On a dark night in March, moving vans emptied all of the Colts equipment from Memorial Stadium and shipped the franchise to Indianapolis, leaving the city in shock.  The film cites former Colts owner Robert Irsay as the leading decision maker behind the move.  The all volunteer Colts Band remained behind and continued to perform on a shoestring budget, representing the hope of the people of Baltimore who wanted nothing more than their own NFL franchise.  The band was adopted by the Baltimore Ravens (formerly the Cleveland Browns) when the franchise moved to Baltimore in 1996.

Thoughts
The Band that wouldn't die has two elements that I really love. The first is the collection of band related anecdotes which really show how close the operation came to failing but also why the people within the band were dedicated enough to will their mission of bringing football back to Baltimore to success. Stories like hiding the band uniforms in a mausoleum and getting the ball which was used on the winning play of the 1958 NFL Championship Game smuggled back to Baltimore inside a bass drum. Perhaps my favorite is that of the Baltimore Colts band standing on the statehouse steps to show that the people of Baltimore had support for bringing an NFL franchise back to the city. If you listen to the commentary on Ocean's Eleven, part of the screen writing involved constantly creating situations where it appeared things wouldn't work, as if the plan all of a sudden hit a brick wall and the team had to find a new way around it.  This kind of action is present in the documentary and it is not only entertaining, but also drives the narrative extremely well.

The second thing I like about the film is the perspective it gives on just how much the band meant to the city of Baltimore.  Seeing a grown man cry when discussing a fight song may seem silly, but consider how many people play their alma mater's fight song at funerals and weddings.  What we know about fan psychology tells us that people tend to value themselves based on the teams success.  The teams we follow become an extension of ourselves and our self worth.  Traditions become a part of our heritage and they bring back memories of all the moments when the teams, and ourselves, found success.  Fight songs elicit pride and bring us back to those moments when we felt the best about ourselves.  When I hear the strains of On Iowa or that long horn blast before the Victory Polka, I get that rush.  Seeing the film portray the emotions with that was perfect and it really drove home why the band, the keepers of the fight song, were so important to Baltimore.  The film raises some interesting question as to the political economy and psychological impact of marching bands that I think warrants some serious study (ok, as serious as a study about marching bands can be).

This film has one, major flaw.  Robert Irsay is the villain, the man who stole the beloved Colts from Baltimore.  Except that isn't the whole story.  Irsay left because of financial difficulties with the franchise which came over a decade.  Furthermore, an attempt to upgrade Baltimore's Memorial Stadium to include revenue generating luxury boxes and better facilities for the team and management was killed by the Baltimore Orioles, who were sharing the stadium at the time, and more importantly the state legislature who refused to fund several rebuilding projects.  Furthermore, Irsay was being constantly berated in the press, causing even further resentment between the owner and the city (this isn't exactly hard to find information either).

When you take all of this in totality, it must have seemed like, to Mr.Irsay, that the legislature, the city, and the Baltimore Orioles were preventing him from making the same amount of money other NFL franchises were getting from luxury boxes and other sales while the Baltimore press was simultaneously casting him as the villain in all of this.  One parallel to this is the recent stadium woes of the Minnesota Vikings.  A very popular small market team that, for a long time, was fighting with sharing facilities with the Twins and a lack of commitment from the local government when it came to building a new stadium.  The press sided with the Vikings, pressured the local government to keep the franchise, and now it seems like they will get a new stadium and remain in Minnesota.  One wonders if the same would have worked with the Baltimore Colts.

Review
There is a lot of entertainment value in The Band That Wouldn't Die, but I wonder if the perspective of the narrative truly captures the reality of the situation.  Irsay certainly had his personal problems, but focusing on them really doesn't do him any justice and misses the fact that the neglect of the legislature and pressure from the local media really pushed him out of Baltimore.  The film really does a disservice to the audience by neglecting this angle.  We spend the entire time talking about how people loved the Colts, but the filmmaker misses how the legislature seemed to have been denying it for decades.  Imagine the new emotional weight given to the scene on the courthouse steps.  The legislature had spent decades denying that the Colts were important enough to merit the funding that would have likely kept them in Baltimore, and now they were saying that nobody really cared about football in Baltimore anyway and they would not push to get a new club.  Adding the angle of the legislature would have really added to the impact of the film and it would have made that scene on the courthouse steps perhaps one of the greatest scenes in sports history.

No this isn't a story about the legislature, it is a story about a band.  However, neglecting the legislature's role in these events really paints a false picture of the band. Instead of a group who had been jilted by the NFL and Robert Irsay, the real story should have been how the band was really in a civic battle, trying to convince the leaders of Maryland and Baltimore that the pride and passion their citizens had for football was not something that should be dismissed as unimportant.  The story tells us that sports play an enormous role in municipalities and government in this country and the band is a vehicle for demonstrating our conviction that sports are not an unimportant part of our communities.

Still, the film does a nice job of several things.  The anecdotes and emotional value attached to the band really make this a solid piece of film making.  I just wish we got more perspective.

Also a side note, two distant relatives of mine have marched with the Marching Ravens.  I can't say this from personal perspective, but according to them, the nice band leader in the film is actually a jerk.  Not that it means anything but I laughed thinking about it when I watched the film.  Further evidence of ESPN trying to gerrymander their characters into specific archetypes I suppose.

Exploring ESPN's 303 for 30: King's Ransom

Director: Peter Berg
 The Rundown
Very Bad Things
Friday Night Lights (directed the movie, producer of the television series)
The Kingdom
Hancock

Synopsis
The film follows the trade of "the Great One", hockey's Wayne Gretzky, from the small market Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings.  Gretzky is easily the most recognizable figure in all of professional hockey with mind boggling statistics and perhaps one of the most impressive list of records of any athlete in any sport.  The film really tries to focus on the intricacies of the deal which was orchestrated by Oilers owner Peter Pocklington and Kings owner Bruce McNall.  The film also delves into some side plots including the pleas of Oilers coach Glen Sather and Gretzky's wife Janet. Gretzky, along with teammates Marty McSorley and Mike Krushelnyski, was traded on August 9th, 1988 for $15 million dollars,Jimmy Carson, Martin Gelinas, and Los Angeles' first round draft picks in 1989, 1991, and 1993. The move sparked a massive uproar in Edmonton where fans burned and hung Pocklington in effigy.  In Los Angeles, the move brought interest in NHL up to an unprecedented level and the film notes that California added two more franchises (Anaheim and San Jose) when the league expanded during the 1990s.


Thoughts
If you are still on the fence about Peter Pocklington after watching the film I suggest taking a look at his Wikipedia page.  There isn't a better example of the out of touch owner I can think of (Dan Guerrero at UCLA comes close).  Pocklington is dyslexic and quit high school to go into business.  This appears to have left a chip on his should because he makes several attempts to make himself seem more educated and intelligent than the fans he obviously does not seem to care for.  Perhaps my favorite moment in the film is Pocklington trying to use the phrase "a fate accompli" in one of his responses.  You can almost feel his tongue twisting in his mouth and his brain trying to squeeze out the phrase. The film is quiet on the financial pressures that made Pocklington keen to trade his most important player but a little digging shows a history of poor financial decisions and Pocklington notes in the film that a few of his business ventures were not doing so well.  If there is a better quote from Pocklington it has to be this bit taken from a 2011 Fox Sports article describing how the former Oilers owner pled guilty to hiding assets during a bankruptcy proceeding, "`Unfortunately the jury pool is not a jury of your peers; it's a jury of some of them unemployed, some of them that aren't particularly bright,' he said. `And of course with press and so on, and in this country and Canada they seem to hate anyone that has been successful..'"

Bruce McNall also deserves some credit for his part as the sleazy business owner for Los Angeles Kings. His interviews almost have a con man vibe to them, and it made me want to hear more from him.  His piece about letting Gretzky listen in on a phone call between him and Pocklington where the Oilers owner went off on his star player was probably one of the biggest points in the film.  McNall was found guilty of bilking several banks out of hundreds of millions of dollars years later, a move that left the Kings in serious financial straights for years.  Still, he has some great moments in the film and I wanted more play in the personality clash between him and Pocklington.

That gets us to Gretzky.  It seems strange to hold off talking about the subject of this film until the third paragraph but I think it is because he is the least defined of the three major players.  A large part of this is that Gretzky's personality, which seems a little more mellow and quiet, is dwarfed by the far more outgoing and bombastic stylings of the two team owners.  Growing up in a small town in Canada has perhaps influenced Gretzky's demeanor since he seems more like the boy next door than a superstar athlete, something which no doubt influenced his connection to his legion of Canadian fans.  In the context of this film however it creates a problem since his interviews seem to fade to the background and we get less perspective on his thought process throughout the trade.

In one sense we get the Gretzky who loved playing for the local team, the hometown hero who had a real relationship with the fans.  I don't doubt he wanted to stay on with the Oilers, and it seems pretty evident that he would have chosen to stay in Edmonton had he not felt betrayed by Pocklington.   Still, Gretzky had multiple opportunities to put aside his differences with Pocklington and make things work.  He admits he was told by the management in Edmonton that he had the opportunity to call the trade off at the eleventh hour and that he now knows as an owner how his plan to hold out for the highest possible salary had put his owner in a bind.  The issue here is how much did wanting to be paid more factor in making these decisions?  Knowing that would be important since it would tell the audience a great deal about who Gretzky is.

No doubt Gretzky deserved to be paid what he was worth but there have been too many examples of players taking a smaller salary to stay with their franchises to believe Gretzky couldn't have struck a deal to stay in Edmonton.  The film seems to imply that money and feeling disrespected were the biggest factors in Gretzky's decision to go forward with the trade and the footage of the press conference where Gretzky is sobbing and unable to even say he is leaving for L.A. really seems to onvey his feelings about the city of Edmonton.  However there is still a question as to how Gretzky ould feel that way but still turn down what he admits were several opportunities offered to him by the management to stop the deal.  Was the relationship between him and the Oilers so strained at that point that he couldn't have found common ground or did not believe Edmonton would be able to pay him the salary he believed he deserved, or both?  We t don't get a very clear picture of what was going through his mind during this process.

Could he have gotten over his disputes with management?  Could he have accepted less to stay in the city he loved?  Hard to say, but it would perhaps have been easier to analyze the thought process of Gretzky's side of the decision had he not been moving between two very dynamic who drew much of the attention of the film away from the much quieter Gretzky. 

Statue of Wayne Gretzky hoisting the
Stanley Cup outside Rexall Place

Review
"King's Ransom" isn't the bang a series like 30 for 30 should start out on, but it does raise some interesting questions about one of the biggest trades in sports history.  The film focuses on the trade and misses some of the larger themes, in particular the shift from small market Edmonton to large market Los Angeles.  The director, a native of Chicago and resident of Los Angeles during the trade, seems ignorant of the sentiments of the small town fans and the level of anger big market teams poaching home town players can cause.  If it seems insignificant, ask anyone in Cleveland about LeBron James.  Also, while the piece mentions the expansion of the NHL into California after the trade, it is still pretty bare on the effect the trade had on the NHL.  When the league expanded in the 1990s it only added one franchise in Canada and several in the southern United States.  It is worth considering whether the trade had anything to do with the expansion of hockey into markets in the southeast like Nashville and Atlanta.

 The director also spends more time on Gretzky's wife than necessary.  While the intrigue into her possible involvement in the trade is a nice touch, it gets debunked pretty easily and it could have been time spent fleshing out the relationship between Gretzky and Pocklington.  Our opinion of Gretzky ultimately seems to hinge on how much of his choice was based on money and how much of it was based on Pocklington's oafishness, and the lack of time spent fleshing out their relationship leaves us in the dark as to what the choice ultimately came down to.  Does Gretzky openly admit he was naive about the financial side of his choice?  Yes, but that admission would mean more if we had a better understanding in the role money played compared to other factors.  If it really was all about the money then our picture of the fans who went after Pocklington changes dramatically, but the director seems more interested in laying out events and fleshing out rumors than providing perspective.

Overall it is an interesting story.  Unfortunately it is the only film covering hockey in the 30 for 30 arsenal, which is a bit surprising since hockey has a fairly devout following and is closer to the NBA than MLS in terms of popularity amongst Americans.  Despite leaving some questions unanswered and needing more perspective on the reasoning behind the trade, the film is entertaining and has enough interesting tidbits and footage to make it worth while.