What are your favourite sports movies/documentaries?

[Dhoni Dakurri]

Love watching a good sports movie/documentary to pass the time on holidays.

One of my all time favourite movies (and books) is Moneyball, being a baseball tragic. Highly recommend it if you havent seen it. There is a really good documentary called The Battered Bastards of Baseball on Netflix about a ragtag team from Portland who smashed all these minor league teams for a season before being eaten up by corporates. Highly recommend this too.

Other movies I have enjoyed:
- Major League I and II (the scene with the players rocking up to spring training in ML 1 is hillarious, reminds me of Port Adelaide this year).
- 42: movie about the first black person to play Major League. Done very well. Jackie Robinson is played excellently.
- Bull Durham.
- Rush (F1 back in the 70's focusing on the rivalry of James Hunt and Niki Lauda - good story and the cars are amazing).
- 30 for 30: Catching Hell: about a fan who lent over the wall and caught a ball hit into the outfield at Wrigley Field and was unfairly blamed for costing the Chicago Cubs a World Series.
- Jerry McGuire

I am looking for recommendations of any other good sport movies out there.

 

[Gough]

This is great.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1606829/

The incredible story of the 1992 Lithuanian basketball team, whose athletes struggled under Soviet rule, became symbols of Lithuania's independence movement, and - with help from the Grateful Dead - triumphed at the Barcelona Olympics.

 

[Herne Hill Hammer]

Draft Day with Kevin Costner. He does know how to make or involve himself in a good sporting movie and this is my favourite of his. I like For The Love Of The Game a lot too which is another of his.

The actor who plays Jackie Robinson in 42 is the same actor who plays Vontae Mack in Draft Day.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

America's Game

 

[Dhoni Dakurri]

This is great.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1606829/

Awesome - will watch tonight!

 

[Herne Hill Hammer]

Trouble With The Curve - Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake is another recentish one that I like.

 

[SwampCreature]

If you haven’t seen Outsiders - the docco ostensibly about the dog’s 2014-16 seasons but really about the rise, fall and rerise of Bob Murphy - yet, you are a bad person and are missing out.

 

[Dhoni Dakurri]

Trouble With The Curve - Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake is another recentish one that I like.

I thought that was terrible to be honest.

 

[SwampCreature]

America's Game

Oh wow do you like NFL? I had no idea.

 

[blueboy25]

Rudy

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Oh wow do you like NFL? I had no idea.

salty

 

[Gough]

Awesome - will watch tonight!

I don't think you'll be disappointed. It's great story, the team seem like a very likeable bunch of fellows and it has a bit of Mickey Hart and Bill Walton thrown in for good measure.

 

[SwampCreature]

The one after the Perth Test this year wasn’t too bad I thought, although it suffered from being cut up for TV by 9.

I seem to recall a good Bodyline docco in that style from the late 90s/early 2000s too?

Best line from a cricket historian guy:

Man [to Jardine as the crowd jeered him off after a failure]: “I don’t think they like you, Douglas.”

DJ: “It’s ******* mutual.”

 

[SwampCreature]

salty

How... w... wait how is that sal

Do you know what the salt meme is in that context? Or any context?

 

[Gralin]

8 Men Out with John Cusack is good about the 1919 world series and bribery

on the baseball theme
Field of Dreams
The Natural
Moneyball

I liked Leatherheads about American Football looking to go pro

Hoop Dreams is an actual doco on Basketball, namely high school kids

He Got Game just for Denzel with a fro

 

[Herne Hill Hammer]

There's others that I can think of :

Field of Dreams
The Natural
8 Men Out
Miracle On Ice
Secretariat
Phar Lap
Seabiscuit
The Club
The Rocking Horse Winner

Adam Sandler ones like The Waterboy and Happy Gilmour

Tin Cup
Bagger Vance
Hoosiers
Any Given Sunday
The Blind Side
Friday Night Lights
Caddyshack
Rocky I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI and XII

 

[Gough]

White Men Can't Jump.

 

[Gough]

In the light of Cyrille Regis' death I thought of this doco. Hard to even imagine something like this taking place now.
https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...cantello-testimonial-1979-white-black-players

After 11 years in the first team and about 15 years after he moved down from Manchester to join West Bromwich Albion’s youth system, Len Cantello was granted a testimonial season in 1978-79. It ended with a game at The Hawthorns that is still talked about nearly four decades later, perhaps getting more attention now than it did at the time. It is the focus of a BBC documentary, to be screened on Sunday.

The continued interest has come as a considerable surprise to the former midfielder himself, now retired and living in Manchester, who recalls nothing particularly exceptional about his big afternoon. “I’d played in a few testimonials, and it was either you played against a local team – so for me it would be the Villa, Birmingham or Wolves – or you played an all-star XI,” he says. “It was just a case of sitting round with a committee and coming up with some ideas for what was the best way to do the game.

“I got talking to Cyrille Regis one day and it became a bit of a challenge match. I said: ‘You pick a team, I’ll pick a team and let’s see how we go.’ We didn’t think it was controversial.”

And so Regis put together a squad composed entirely of black players, and Cantello a team of white players. “In training we’d play five-a-side, old ones v young ones, English v rest of the world – it was just something to make training a bit different,” Cantello says. “It was just like that. Cyrille picked a team to play against my team, and basically that’s all it was.”

Bob Hazell, then at Wolves, was one of the players invited to join Regis’s side. “When the idea first went out I don’t think anybody really believed it was going to happen, but I was more than happy to take part,” he says. By the time the game came around it had assumed special significance for Hazell: “I grew up half a mile down the road, so I had a lot of people coming, a lot of friends who had never been to a football match before, but they made an effort to attend that. It was just a testimonial but they wouldn’t want to come to see us mess about and get hammered by a West Bromwich Albion team, which could very easily have happened if we didn’t apply ourselves correctly. So the game just meant perhaps a little bit more to us than it did to them.”

Hazell’s black friends were more typically put off from going to football matches by the level of racist abuse that they – and he, on the field – could expect to encounter once they got there. “Football grounds weren’t welcoming places for black people,” he says. “When there are hundreds or even thousands of fans chanting racist abuse, you’re not going to find a lot of black people entering the ground.
The match brought down the curtain on a memorable season for West Brom, much of which had been spent competing for the league title. At the turn of the year they were level with Liverpool at the top of the table, and it was only a run of five draws in six games in April that in effect ended their ambitions. They finished third, overtaken by Nottingham Forest after losing to them at home on the final day, with a team including Regis, the winger Laurie Cunningham and the defender Brendon Batson, three black players collectively dubbed the Three Degrees by their manager, Ron Atkinson.

“Our success was in a big part down to the three black lads that we had, three top players,” says Cantello. “We were chasing a very top Liverpool team but we weren’t far behind them. Laurie and Cyrille were outstanding. As a midfield player, they made life easy for you, and a hopeful pass ended up a good pass. We were a good bunch of lads. Our dressing room was great. You didn’t hear racism within the club.”

In Hazell and George Berry Wolves had two black players in their first-team squad but that did not keep racism out of their dressing room. “Relationships between team-mates were always fairly good but that wouldn’t stop one of my mates racially abusing another black player,” Hazell says. “I’ve been there. After one game one of my team-mates sheepishly comes to me and says: ‘I have to tell you Bob, I did give him a bit of racial abuse.’ What was I going to say? ‘That’s to be expected from a racist mother*er like you,’ I said. But I was smiling as I said it to him. The person I was speaking to was not one of those I had down as a racist. Some of them, you wouldn’t hear them using racist terms but you just knew that they would. And others, they wanted you to know it.





“People would take it in different ways. I was somebody who could handle myself. If people said things I didn’t like they’d get a smack and I’d deal with the consequences. The thing is, with football, it was always just a very, very hard school where nothing was sacred in the dressing rooms, whether it’s colour or what you wore or whatever, and you just had to find ways of dealing with it. If you can’t take it, there’s the door. Everybody had their own way, whether they smiled it off, pretended to ignore it, or smacked somebody on the nose. As a youngster, when I was about 17, I ended up smacking a senior, established player. And then everybody knew: ‘That’s where Bob is.’”

Cantello does not remember regularly hearing racist abuse during his playing career but admits to blocking out much of the noise that came from the stands. “I’m not saying it didn’t happen – obviously it did,” he says. “But I never heard a footballer insult another footballer because he was black. I never heard that. And as a footballer, you do have selective hearing. You hear insults when they’re aimed at you. The racist chanting, it wasn’t focused on me, so I never actually heard it.”

“If Len says he could hear when the crowd were negative towards him, you could amplify that 10 times where black players were concerned,” says Hazell. “And there were times when even if one person was chanting, it would hit you. I played at West Ham once and there was this one fella, he had the voice of a town crier. It was as if he drew it from the bottom of his boots. ‘fellow.’ That was one man. When you get hundreds singing: ‘fellow, lick my boots,’ you hear it. You feel it. Well, I did.”

The Guardian carried an article about the game in January 1979, four months before it was played, in which the chairman of Sandwell Community Relations Council said the proposed fixture was “most disturbing”, that it “could easily be used by certain sections of the community to make political capital”, that “there could well be trouble in the crowd” and that West Brom should “find a more tasteful way of making money for a long-serving player”. Batson, though, has said of the match that “none of us hesitated or felt uneasy about it for a second”, while Garth Crooks, who scored the winning goal, described it as “just a game of football played for a fellow professional”, adding he was “very proud to have been selected”.

Cantello remembers little of the controversy in the buildup to the game, which was watched by a crowd of 7,023 and won 3-2 by Regis’s side. “It was interesting to see what the reaction would be,” he says. “There was a lot of black people living in the Midlands then but there wasn’t a lot that went to watch West Bromwich Albion play, and you’re trying to get local people to come and watch the club. As I remember, we probably had more black people watching the game than normally. There was no trouble. It was a testimonial game and it should be played in the right spirit, and it was.”

Sadly the match was no watershed. Hazell played until 1990 but noticed little improvement regarding racism as his retirement approached. “Towards the end of my career I went down into the lower leagues and it was even worse there,” he says. “Those who were in charge, they didn’t care. When the changes started to happen, they started at the top and it takes time for things to filter down.

“But don’t get me wrong, I loved my football career. I had a very blessed life. People might think: ‘The way Bob talks it’s as if he’s scarred.’ I’m not scarred, far from it. I do get emotional speaking about it but it didn’t affect my day-to-day life. I wasn’t walking around feeling melancholy. I enjoyed playing football. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. If there was abuse, I didn’t take it home. As soon as I got off the pitch, those things were done. I’m not saying it didn’t leave an impression but I’m in no way scarred.”

Cantello had already decided to leave West Brom and within a fortnight of his testimonial he moved to Bolton. “It was an emotional game for me because it was my last game and I’m looking forward to seeing the documentary,” he says. “Hopefully it will show that times have changed for the best since then. The game was a celebration of my years at the club and I hope everyone who was there enjoyed it. We did, as players. We had a really nice evening. That’s what it was about.”

Whites vs Blacks: How Football Changed A Nation is on BBC Two on Sunday 27 November at 9pm

 

[Plugger35]

OJ: Made In America is one of the best sports docos I've seen, although it's really only Part 1 that's about OJ's sports career, the rest is about his off field life.

When We Were Kings about the Rumble in the Jungle fight between Ali and Foreman is another terrific sports doco.

 

[Spongebob]

Senna


Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056194/

Breaking Away
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078902/

 

[perthblue]

cool runnings

 

[Smoooothy]

I rather enjoyed remember the titans

30 for 30: Catching Hell

one of the best 30 for 30 docs they made IMO

 

[Procrastinator35]

For AFL it's hard to top this one.....Anything with Kennedy senior speaking in it, is always compulsory & compelling viewing.



And then of course, there's this one, for the pathos.

 

[Bunk Moreland]

All the 30 for 30 films are pretty good. I liked You Don’t Know Bo and The Greatest That Never Was especially.

 

[Gasometer]

Senna.