Introduction

These are high times for the sports documentary—a subgenre whose roots can arguably be traced back to cinema’s first moments, when Eadward Muybridge endeavored to discover whether a galloping racehorse’s hooves went airborne simultaneously. Muybridge’s later studies of human locomotion featured prominently sporting bodies—fencers, boxers, and runners. Along these lines, Thomas Edison’s early productions include boxing matches and football games.¹ Documentaries that take sport as their topic compose some of the genre’s most infamous (Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi-funded Olympia [1938]), celebrated (Steve James’s Hoop Dreams [1994]), enduring (Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer [1966]), and inventive (Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21^st Century Portrait [2006]) titles.

And the subgenre’s stock continues to rise. Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s Undefeated (2011) won the 2012 Academy Award for “Best Documentary Feature.” It was the first time since The Man Who Skied Down Everest (1975) that a sports-centered production received the accolade. A growing collection of sports television outlets searching for content that might attract a crossover audience, possess longer shelf life than live broadcasts, and help to fashion a brand identity in an increasingly crowded media marketplace have turned their attention and resources to documentary. Moreover, a collection of documentary-centered sports film festivals have recently emerged to celebrate mainstream and independent titles, such as the Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival, the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival’s offshoot SXsports, and the Canadian Sport Film Festival, which North American Society for Sport History’s very own Russell Field directs.

Beyond its pervasiveness and currency, the sports documentary produces history and broaches questions that have preoccupied sport historians for decades:

• • How does sport’s mediation impact the construction of sport history?

• • How do historiography’s formal contours and inclinations shape the texts it generates?

• • What economic, cultural, and ideological factors affect how sport history is packaged, consumed, circulated, and reimagined?

These are important questions to be sure. But there are unfortunately few scholarly resources available for those who want to probe them. Ian McDonald’s 2007 Journal of Sport & Social Issues essay, “Situating the Sports Documentary,” focuses only on cinematic documentaries and approaches them from a textual analytic approach.² My 2013 essay, “Chronicling Sport, Branding Institutions: The Television Sports Documentary from Broadcast to Cable,” examines the sports documentary’s televisual dimensions and investigates how media institutions use documentary’s relatively refined social meaning to vie for market share and combat sports television’s stereotypical position as an exceptionally barren alcove of the media landscape Federal Communication Commission chairperson Newton Minow famously decried a “vast wasteland.”³ But these works are not enough to do justice to the sports documentary’s diversity, problems, and potential. That is where this forum comes in. Its contributions consider how sports documentaries define sport history; the commercial, industrial, and institutional purposes they serve; the guiding myths that drive their representations; how they are deployed in transnational contexts; how independent productions differ from corporate creations; and their generic boundaries. This forum begins to ask these questions. And if we have done our job, it ought to provoke some more.

The forum begins with my consideration of ESPN’s 1999 series SportsCentury—the media outlet’s first major foray into original documentary productions. My analysis uses SportsCentury to demonstrate how the self-named “Worldwide Leader in Sports” employs the documentary genre to situate itself as an authority on sport’s history. SportsCentury paved the way for ESPN’s 2008 development of the documentary-driven subsidiary, ESPN Films, that Joshua Malitsky uses to examine the contemporary sports documentary’s dominant textual features and ESPN’s role in constituting them. Tom Oates investigates how a pair of recent ESPN Films documentaries reimagines one of the sports documentary’s most entrenched myths—-the triumphant underdog. Focusing on The Marinovich Project (2011) and The Best That Never Was (2010), Oates considers the representation of sporting failure and points out its gendered and racial dynamics. Juan Carlos Rodriguez’ consideration of Santiago Álvarez’ ¿Perdedores? (1991) also examines how sports documentaries mediate failure. But much different from ESPN’s U...