SLAM-DUNK STREAMING
Small screen sports to watch if your interests lean more to drama than athletics
While we would never in good faith recommend the CW series Riverdale beyond its first season, there is a line in the third so brilliantly absurd that it deserves recognition. Archie Andrews, who winds up in a juvenile detention centre, encounters another inmate who says he was forced to drop out of elementary school “to run drugs to support my nana.” After absorbing this information, our benevolent hero replies, “That means you haven’t known the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of high school football.”
Setting aside the mental gymnastics required to understand why this is how Archie chose to respond, there is some truth to the statement that anyone who has seen even the pilot of Friday Night Lights can vouch for. Depicted onscreen, it’s not just the physicality of sports that makes them “epic,” but the tension inherent to any form of competition. There’s a spectacle to everything involved, whether the tempestuous nature of the athletes themselves or the tomfoolery involved in their contract negotiations.
As professional games return in full force to television, here are several sports dramas readily available to stream if your interests lean more drama than sports.
HBO MAX CHARIOTS OF FIRE (1981)
This best picture Oscar winner is a classic example of how far-reaching sports dramas can be: “I have no interest in running and am not a partisan in the British class system,” Roger Ebert wrote in his fourstar review. “Then why should I have been so deeply moved by Chariots of Fire, a British film that has running and class as its subjects?” The movie, which also won an Academy Award for its memorable score, finds commonality in how a Christian Scot (Ian Charleson) and the Jewish son of a Lithuanian immigrant (Ben Cross, who passed away this week) triumph as athletes. FORD V FERRARI (2019)
This James Mangold film zooms through its 152-minute runtime, the bulk of which is spent dramatizing the joint efforts of American automotive designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and British driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) to design a new car for Ford Motor and defeat Enzo Ferrari’s team at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race in 1966.
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (2004)
“The best sports movie for years, as it’s not about sport at all,” reads Empire magazine’s review of Peter Berg’s book adaptation. Before our beloved Coach Taylor came Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton), a man in charge of leading a football-obsessed Texan town’s high school team to victory.
HE GOT GAME (1998)
This Spike Lee joint contains a strong performance from Denzel Washington as a man jailed for manslaughter who is offered a shortened sentence in exchange for successfully talking his son (Ray Allen), a top college basketball prospect, into signing with the governor’s alma mater.
On the film’s 20th anniversary, Vanity Fair’s K. Austin Collins wrote that it “combines prison melodrama, domestic soap opera, ESPN-esque hype reels, and the moneyed aspirationalism of ’90s hip-hop videos to bear on a plot that twines the moral redemption of a black American felon — and the reconciliation of a father and son — with a loaded racial critique of the commerce of basketball.” BALLERS (2015)
How about a TV show, to mix things up? Ballers is a dramedy, if you will, about a retired NFL player (Dwayne Johnson) who pivots to managing the finances of other football players. While the show suffers in some ways — take the plentiful comparisons to
Entourage to mean what you will — it thrives on the charisma of its performers.
NETFLIX HIGHFLYINGBIRD(2019)
Despite its title, High Flying Bird flew somewhat under the radar last year. That’s for shame, as the Steven Soderbergh film, his second shot on an iPhone, offers an incisive take on the business of basketball that also manages to convey the quick manoeuvring of sports agent Ray Burke (André Holland) through Soderbergh’s innovative filmmaking.
UNCUT GEMS (2019)
Yes, Uncut Gems is more likely to be classified as a crime thriller. But one of its many conflicts involves the inability of New York jeweller Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) to quit gambling on basketball, in this case pawning off Kevin Garnett’s NBA championship ring and betting thousands of dollars on how well he plays for the Boston Celtics. The Safdie brothers tell Howard’s story at lightning speed and somehow stretch the anxiety of a highstakes play to last the duration of a feature-length film.
AMAZON PRIME VIDEO A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN (1992)
There has never been a bad reason to revisit this Penny Marshall classic, but stressful times like these make comfort movies all the more appealing. The film depicts a fictionalized version of the all-American Girls Professional Baseball League, focusing on multiple players (Geena Davis, Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell) and a brash manager (Tom Hanks), who delivers the iconic line, “There’s no crying in baseball!”
CREED II (2018)
The Creed franchise all but cemented Michael B. Jordan’s stardom, which arguably began with his role in the later seasons of Friday Night Lights and picked up steam from there. The second instalment might not reach the stature of the first, which was directed and co-written by Ryan Coogler, but it appeals to our affinity for nostalgia by once again having Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) train Adonis Creed (Jordan), the son of his former rival — this time, to face off against the son of Rocky IV antagonist Ivan Drago.
DISNEY+ MIRACLE (2004)
Miracle stars Kurt Russell as Herb Brooks, head coach of the U.S. men’s ice hockey team that, against odds, beat the Soviets on their way to winning gold at the 1980 Winter Olympics. While some critics believed the film’s clichés held it back, The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday, praised the “terrific performances and dizzying action” that made it through. She added, “Reproducing every bruise, blow-up and bodycheck and getting right up on the ice and into the fray, the movie brings the audience back to 1980 with bone-crunching verisimilitude.”