ESPN's 30 For 30

The Game Room
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It’s hard to believe that the station with what at first seemed like a really strange name has now been with us for 30 years. But it has and in that time ESPN has become an iconic fixture in many of our households, one of the better places to review highlights of the sports world and to find exposure to the opinions and perspectives of industry notables.

In celebration of this 30th birthday, ESPN presents 30 For 30, a compelling series of well told, interesting documentaries.

I’ve caught two so far. Small Potatoes: Who Killed The USFL by Mike Tollin. Many of us witnessed the attempt in '83 to introduce a second football league that would one day presume to challenge the NFL. This highlights its successes, heroes and the reasons it ultimately failed. Personally, I remembered many of the events, from Herschel Walker’s signing and debut to the anti-monopoly suit that reached the supreme court but this was the best chronological review of the events and their impact I’ve seen yet.

Muhammed and Larry by Albert Maysles. Late in his career, Muhammed began training for a title fight against Larry Holmes, his old sparring partner. From the middle of his camp you see the preparation of an aged, worn down, delusional Ali. Also shown though is that despite his decline, a deserving Holmes was still never able to emerge out from under the huge shadow of popularity and admiration that Ali cast worldwide. It’s a side of the boxing world rarely seen and makes for a very poignant story.

Any others you’ve seen or thoughts on these? I’m really looking forward to catching most every one of them. They’re quite well done.

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I really wish that we could get these documentaries in Canada. Some of them look outstanding…hopefully TSN will eventually pick them up.

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I have last night’s on my DVR and will get to it later this week, so I can’t say anything about that yet. I will say, though, that The Band That Wouldn’t Die was the best of the first three, even better than the interesting take on the USFL. Definitely try to catch it on one of the re-shows.

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That does look good, how the Colts snuck out of Baltimore, and directed by Barry Levinson no less.

There’s a link where Bill Simmons explains the evolution of the project, represented in part by this snip. *"We made a master list of potential stories that we wanted to see … and they had to be stories, not just a laundry list of “we’ll do Jordan, we’ll do Tyson, we’ll do Magic” and so on. We were especially attracted to stories that resonated at the time but were eventually forgotten for whatever reason. Like the unique connection between Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble. Like Tim Richmond taking NASCAR by storm, disappearing just as quickly because of an “illness” (later revealed to be AIDS), then having his story covered up and dismissed. Like O.J.’s car chase, Escobar’s own goal and Jimmy the Greek’s career imploding in just a few sentences. Like the 2004 Red Sox winning four incredible games in four nights against the Yankees; even if the big picture theme had been beaten to death, the small picture theme (every remarkable twist from Game 4 through Game 7) had never really been told. We wanted people to say, “Wow, I forgot how (fill in a word: great, amazing, poignant, crazy, depressing, unbelievable) that was” or “I can’t believe I never knew that whole story.” We didn’t want to check off a laundry list of the 30 biggest stories from 1979 to 2009. That’s what our viewers would expect from us. We wanted to surprise them.

While we were coming up with ideas, we made a list of respected filmmakers and celebrities who also happened to be sports fans. This list kept expanding as we kept learning things like, “Hey, did you know so-and-so has been a Knicks season ticket holder for 30 years?” and “Did you know that so-and-so has a crazy passion for NASCAR?” Then we made another list of filmmakers that we desperately wanted whether they liked sports or not, just because we respected them so much. (Important note: All copies of this list have been destroyed Oliver North-style and I now deny that it ever existed.) By the time we were done, it had turned into a mix-and-match game of those three lists, so we recruited John Dahl, Mike Tollin, Joan Lynch, Chris Connelly, and the ESPN Films group to help us find the 30 best matches between stories and filmmakers. If there was no fresh take on the O.J. Trial, the 1980 Olympic Hockey Team, Magic’s HIV-driven retirement or any other “iconic” story from that time, then screw it—we weren’t going to assign those topics just to have them in the series. We wanted the best 30 matches. Period.

We hoped to land a few respected names early for a “domino effect” of sort and only needed two or three names. Everyone else would get a sniff and want to be involved. That’s what we thought. We all started going out on meet and greets, and that’s when something crazy happened, something we never anticipated: these people had been waiting for us. They had stories to tell. They just never thought they’d have a chance to tell them."*