Sporting Realities: Critical Readings of the Sports Documentary

245 Pages·2020·3.086 MB·English

by  Samantha N. Sheppard, Travis Vogan

SPORTING REALITIES
Series Editor
Arizona State University
Advisory Board
University of Maryland, College Park
University of Alabama
Cornell University
Columbia University
Middlebury College
Washington State University
Skidmore College
University of Tennessee
Edited by Samantha N. Sheppard
and Travis Vogan
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln
© 2020 by the Board of Regents of
the University of Nebraska
Chapter 3 was previously published as “No Girls
Allowed! Female Reporters as Threats to the Male
Domain of Sports,” Journal of Sports Media 10, no.
2 (Fall 2015): 17– 29. Published by the University
of Nebraska Press. Used with permission.
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Sheppard, Samantha N.,
editor. | Vogan, Travis, editor.
Title: Sporting realities: critical readings
of the sports documentary / edited by
Samantha N. Sheppard and Travis Vogan.
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, [2020] | Series: Sports, media, and society
| Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2019044482
isbn 9781496217578 (hardback)
isbn 9781496221797 (paperback)
isbn 9781496222459 (epub)
isbn 9781496222466 (mobi)
isbn 9781496222473 (pdf)
Subjects: lcsh: Television broadcasting of sports.
| Documentary television programs— History and
criticism. | Sports films— History and criticism.
| Documentary films— History and criticism.
Classification: lcc gv742.3 .s666
2020 | ddc 070.4/49796— dc23
lc record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044482
Set in Adobe Text by Laura Buis.
Designed by N. Putens.
Introduction 1
Samantha N. Sheppard and Travis Vogan
1. The Documentary as “Quality” Sports Television 11
Branden Buehler
2. Intersectionality in Venus Vs. 35
Aaron Baker
3. No Girls Allowed! Documenting Female Reporters as
Threats in Let Them Wear Towels 49
Korryn D. Mozisek
4. Documenting Difference: Gay Athletes of Color, Binary
Representation, and the Sports Documentary 63
Evan Brody
5. To the (Black) Athlete Dying Young: Documenting and
Mythologizing Len Bias and Ben Wilson 89
Justin Hudson
6. Protest and Public Memory: Documenting the 1968
Summer Olympic Games 111
Emily Plec and Shaun M. Anderson
7. Of Friends and Foes: Remembering Yugoslavia in Sport
Documentaries 135
Dario Brentin and David Brown
8. “Measuring Up”: Fathers, Sons, and the Economy of
Death in Mountain Film Documentaries 153
Ray Gamache
9. Sports Album’s Replay: Newsreel Compilations, Early
Television, and the Recirculation of Sport History 175
Alex Kupfer
10. hbo Sports: Docu- Branding Boxing’s Past and Present 193
Travis Vogan
Contributors 217
Index 219

Samantha N. Sheppard and Travis Vogan
Sports documentaries have never been more popular, prestigious, or visible.
Such films won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2017
(O.J.: Made in America, Ezra Edelman, 2016), 2018 (Icarus, Bryan Fogel,
2017), and 2019 (Free Solo, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi,
2018). Academy Awards, of course, are no necessary marker of artistic
quality. But the sudden concentration of lauded sports documentaries
suggests we are in something of a moment— one that various popular
commentators have dubbed a “golden age” for the genre.1
Like all documentaries, sports documentaries are allied with what Bill
Nichols calls the “discourses of sobriety” (law, science, and so forth), which
are principally concerned with making an argument about the world they
endeavor to reveal.2 But sports documentaries— unlike, say, educational
films about photosynthesis or hydroelectricity—t ake as their topic an unusu-
ally popular site of culture. As a result, they have the potential to attract
the outsize audience that comes along with sport—a nd the global brands
and celebrities that make it up. Moreover, they often (though certainly not
always) contrast the promotionally driven register through which sport is
commonly depicted via game broadcasts and advertisements. They can
therefore usefully reposition sport from a site of leisurely consumption
into an occasion to consider the cultural attitudes and intersecting forces
than inform them. Sports documentaries, for instance, offer some of pop-
ular culture’s most enduring investigations of identity politics. George
Butler’s Pumping Iron (1977) and Pumping Iron II: The Women (1985) use
1