Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

Fitz: '30 for 30' docs true to sports

Buddy Ryan was a jerk, and the 1985 Chicago Bears, at least on the defensive side of the ball, were a reflection of their brash coordinator.

Buddy Ryan was a jerk, and the 1985 Chicago Bears, at least on the defensive side of the ball, were a reflection of their brash coordinator.

That's what I'd always believed. So a recent ESPN documentary on both was a surprise.

Touching, funny, engrossing, and most of all revealing of the characters hidden behind the caricatures, The '85 Bears was an example of how a talented filmmaker can transform a subject of limited interest into a work of art.

It was, like most of ESPN's "30 for 30" films, so good you could almost forgive the network for having made SportsCenter nearly unwatchable.

So many of the entries in this brilliantly realized documentary series, like Into the Wind, Once Brothers, Catching Hell, Benji, Of Miracles and Men, and Angry Sky, skillfully highlight sport's humanity, its enduring appeal, its hard truths.

They are, in other words, everything most Hollywood sports films are not.

Why the difference?

What do these TV sports documentaries possess that's lacking in most Disneyfied movie versions of real athletes and real events?

Perhaps it's that the network provides these filmmakers a freedom that profit-driven studios won't surrender. Maybe, given ESPN's immersion in sports, the directors it hires are better attuned to subtle truths that get lost in the mass-market derivatives. Or could it simply be that reality almost always gets mortally wounded whenever it's translated into stylized film?

Whatever the reason, sports films as a genre hang low on the artistic tree, often struggling to rise to the level of Adam Sandler movies.

Hollywood knows how to do crime, romance, fantasy, horror, and westerns. But there's some ineffable quality to sports that it's rarely been able to capture well or consistently.

Fictional sports films are bad enough. Those that tackle true "30 for 30"-like topics tend to be worse, in large part because they're so dishonest and manipulative.

Over the years, the worst of these films have turned gold medals into dross, inspiring victories into insincerity, emotional moments into melodrama.

The phrase "based on a True Story" allows these movie makers to couch their deceit. It gives them license to substitute schlock for substance, to dull the story's sharp edges, to disregard unpleasant truths, to dumb down subject matter.

Appealing topics that the ESPN filmmakers put to such good use often become, in these mass-audience products, appeals to the lowest-common denominator. Facts are twisted, eliminated, even manufactured to fit marketing strategies. Characters who never existed are introduced, as are events that never happened.

The strategy seems to be that with enough stirring music and slow-motion footage, no one will notice.

Have you ever seen The Babe Ruth Story? The Babe? Radio? Fear Strikes Out? The Ben Hogan Story? Pride of the Yankees? I could go on. And on.

The Ruth films are good examples of this disparity. Compare them with HBO's splendid Ruth documentary. There is no more interesting character in American sports history, yet what we saw on the big screen was a cartoonish, buffoonish distortion of the man.

There are some wonderful exceptions, of course. Raging Bull, Hoosiers, and Rocky come immediately to mind. But even in those, the physical qualities of sports are seldom accurately represented.

Recently, in theaters and on TV, trailers for the new movie Race have been commonplace. In them, "The Incredible True Story of Gold-Medal Champion Jesse Owens" looks as if it could be little more than The Blind Side on cinders.

For me, even without having seen Race, I'm certain it will be less interesting, less accurate, and less entertaining than an "American Experience" documentary on Owens and his accomplishments at Hitler's '36 Olympics.

The new movie undoubtedly will add much for the sake of commerce, but add little to the cause of history.

Maybe, when it comes to Hollywood's mostly lame attempts to capture the reality of sports, I've got a chip on my shoulder.

A decade or so ago, some well-connected movie people wanted to make a film from a book I'd written on Texas Western's historic and socially significant basketball victory over Kentucky in the 1966 NCAA title game.

Negotiations were progressing well until one of the most powerful figures in film, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, decided he wanted to do the same.

Bruckheimer purchased the rights to the lives of TW coach Don Haskins and two of his players. That was all he needed to elbow the other project aside.

"Bruckheimer is the 600-pound gorilla in Hollywood," I was told. "It's impossible to fight him."

The result was Glory Road, a hokey, sanitized, historically inaccurate version of what, in my selfish eyes at least, had been a story filled with grit.

What The '85 Bears did so well was to humanize Ryan and the defensive stars who loved him, men such as Mike Singletary, Steve McMichael, and Otis Wilson.

The real story of their championship season, of the highs and lows that shaped it and them, both then and now, was plainly visible.

It was visible in their tears and in faces that even the best makeup artists and the best actors will never re-create.

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz