30-for-30 Page index.xml - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

ESPN’s <i>Lance:</i> New Documentary, Same Glib Asshole
Lance Armstrong is a dick....

<em>The Last Dance</em>, <em>Lance</em>, And The Perils Of The Athlete Producer
Why would a celebrity athlete want to do a documentary? What’s in it for them? What do they have to prove? And why now?...

ESPN's <i>30 For 30</i> On Ric Flair Glorifies Decades Of Sexual Misconduct
On Tuesday night, ESPN premiered its latest 30 for 30 documentary, one the network had been developing and hyping for years: Nature Boy, the story of legendary pro wrestler Ric Flair, widely considered the greatest of all time. The film—which was, according to director Rory Karpf, in its third cut a...

ESPN Edited Curt Schilling Out Of An Airing Of The '04 Red Sox <i>30 For 30</i>, And People Are Mad
Four Days in October is an ESPN 30 for 30 series film that first aired in 2010. It aired again yesterday, in slightly edited format, and dopey Red Sox fans teamed up with dopey conservatives to form a coalition of derp in protesting what they believed to be a conspiracy against recently fired analys...

ESPN Shelves Its Kevin Johnson Documentary
Tickets to tonight’s showcase of the documentary Down In The Valley in Sacramento, Calif., just got collectable. It may be the only public viewing the ESPN-produced film, about how Kevin Johnson saved the local NBA franchise, ever gets. Mere hours before showtime for the local premiere at a downtown...

Police Video Shows Teen Girl Graphically Accusing Kevin Johnson Of Sexual Abuse
Today, Kevin Johnson is mayor of Sacramento, Calif., and Mandi Koba is a mother of three and an advocate for survivors of sexual abuse. Only they know what happened between them in the summer of 1995, when she was 16 and he was a star guard for the Phoenix Suns, and each has a different version of e...

Jalen Rose Calls Chris Webber "Delusional"
Four years ago ESPN released The Fab Five, a 30 for 30 documentary about the 1991 Michigan basketball recruiting class of Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King, and Ray Jackson. The group reached the NCAA championship game in both their freshman and sophomore seasons but never won it al...

Christian Laettner Is Still Sore About The Fab Five's Shit-Talking
One of the best parts of the Fab Five 30 for 30 documentary was seeing that Jalen Rose, Jimmy King, and Juwan Howard hated former Duke star Christian Laettner just as much as everyone else in America did. Well, Laettner's got his own 30 for 30 doc coming out soon, and he's been whining about the Fab...

We Live In The Golden Age Of Sports Documentaries
A piece in this week's SportsBusiness Journal is nominally about how HBO Sports has lost its preeminence in the sports documentary biz, and sure enough, it has gutted its in-house doc unit in recent years. But it's heartening to realize that even as the former biggest player scales back, the sports ...

Brian Scalabrine Gets His Own Fake <em>30 For 30</em> Trailer
OK, this fake trailer for "Brian" is well done, but if we're being serious for a second, people would definitely watch a 30 for 30 on Brian Scalabrine. ...

I'm Sports Filmmaker Mike Tollin. Got Any Questions For Me?
Mike Tollin is a filmmaker and the co-chairman of Mandalay Sports Media. He has directed and helped produce films in ESPN's 30 for 30 series, and is the producer of the Baron Davis comeback videos that have been airing on TNT. His latest project, Summer Dreams, chronicles life in the NBA summer lea...

This Fake <em>30 For 30</em> About Space Jam Is Actually Kind Of Funny
What if I told you that the greatest basketball player of all time retired in the middle of his prime, and that this retirement involved a trip to Looney Tune Land, where he would compete in the most important basketball game ever played? This is 30 for 30: The Space Jam Game....


Wilt Chamberlain: Borscht Belt Bellhop
Over at Grantland, dig this cool short film by Caroline Laskow and Ian Rosenberg on Wilt Chamberlain in the Catskills. ...

Welcome Back, "30 For 30": In Praise Of ESPN's Documentary Series
When Will Leitch started Deadspin, his guiding principal—beyond a belief that he could get the whole world to refer to the Arizona Cardinals as the Buzzsaw—was that sports, in the grand scheme of things, aren't that important. Yes, there's lots of money spent on them, and when your team wins the Wor...

Errol Morris's Short Film On Sports-Themed Funerals Is Morbidly Cool
One of the best things ESPN has ever commissioned is the fantastic 30 For 30 series, which is now available on Netflix Instant. There are more on the way this fall, but here's a short film done in that vein—directed by Oscar-winner Errol Morris (Mr. Death, The Fog of War, Standard Operating Proced...

ESPN's Going To Produce A Bunch More <em>30 For 30</em> Films
So, fantastic news. ESPN will announce at today's upfront that they will roll out a second series of sports documentaries under the 30 For 30 umbrella, even though it's no longer the network's 30th anniversary and there may not be 30 of them. The first one will premier this fall, and new films will ...

Why You Should All Be Watching HBO's Brilliant <em>On Freddie Roach</em> Docuseries
Sports documentaries tend to adhere to a certain formula: tremendous amounts of archival footage plus talking heads. If you're Ken Burns, you mix in some banjo music. Sometimes you get the subject to reminisce about a time in his life that is still of abiding interest to sports fans, and maybe, if...

30 Years. 30 Movies. 30 One-Sentence Reviews.
If you missed any of the films in ESPN's 30 for 30 series, this collection of on-point one-sentence reviews is a handy guide. (On Without Bias: "The Vitamin C of the 1980s did not prevent scurvy.") [Hellafied Gangsta Lean]...