Full Description
Despite the increasing number of popular and celebrated sports documentaries in contemporary culture, such as ESPN's 30 for 30 series, there has been little scholarly engagement with this genre. Sports documentaries, like all films, do not merely showcase objective reality but rather construct specific versions of sporting culture that serve distinct economic, industrial, institutional, historical, and sociopolitical ends ripe for criticism, contextualization, and exploration.
Sporting Realities brings together a diverse group of scholars to probe the sports documentary's cultural meanings, aesthetic practices, industrial and commercial dimensions, and political contours across historical, social, medium-specific, and geographic contexts. It considers and critiques the sports documentary's visible and powerful position in contemporary culture and forges novel connections between the study of nonfiction media and sport.
Contents
Introduction
Samantha N. Sheppard and Travis Vogan
1. The Documentary as "Quality" Sports Television
Branden Buehler
2. Intersectionality in Venus Vs.
Aaron Baker
3. No Girls Allowed! Documenting Female Reporters as Threats in Let Them Wear Towels
Korryn D. Mozisek
4. Documenting Difference: Gay Athletes of Color, Binary Representation, and the Sports Documentary
Evan Brody
5. To the (Black) Athlete Dying Young: Documenting and Mythologizing Len Bias and Ben Wilson
Justin Hudson
6. Protest and Public Memory: Documenting the 1968 Summer Olympic Games
Emily Plec and Shaun M. Anderson
7. Of Friends and Foes: Remembering Yugoslavia in Sport Documentaries
Dario Brentin and David Brown
8. "Measuring Up": Fathers, Sons, and the Economy of Death in Mountain Film Documentaries
Ray Gamache
9. Sports Album's Replay: Newsreel Compilations, Early Television, and the Recirculation of Sport History
Alex Kupfer
10. HBO Sports: Docu-Branding Boxing's Past and Present
Travis Vogan
Contributors
Index
