ENTERTAINMENT

PLAYTHE GAMEThe best ‘30 for 30’ documentaries on ESPN PlusPHIL ROSENTHAL | Chicago Tribune

R ather than go cold turkey on sports, you’re probably looking for programming to stream. I mined the ESPN Plus subscription service’s library of documentaries, focusing on the 25 best long-form documentaries. The following are the 25 best

‘30 for 30’ documentaries streaming on ESPN Plus:

1 ‘O.J.: Made in America’Ezra Edelman’s epic 2016 Os-

car-winning miniseries ostensibly is about the rise and fall of O.J. Simpson. But rather than simply retrace a famil-iar narrative, Edelman delivers a forceful meditation on race, class and celebrity in America that’s both entertaining and eye-opening.

2 ‘Hillsborough’More than 90 fans were trampled to

death and nearly 800 injured during a Liv-erpool-Nottingham Forest FA Cup semi-final match on April 15, 1989, at Hillsbor-ough Stadium in Sheffield, England. Daniel Gordon’s 2014 film pushes past the party line blaming the tragedy on hooliganism to expose how negligence, mismanaged crowd control and poor stadium design made the human toll virtually inevitable.

3 ‘June 17, 1994’Using nothing but archival materi-

als, Brett Morgen offers a look back at this seminal Friday almost 26 years ago. The day is remembered for the slow-speed police pursuit and eventual arrest of O.J. Simpson. But the surreal chase of the one-time athlete, actor and TV analyst was just one of many sports threads that day. Morgen’s 2010 documentary tog-gles between the World Cup’s opening ceremony in Chicago, the end of Arnold Palmer’s U.S. Open career, a Stanley Cup parade in New York, the NBA Finals and more.

4 ‘Elway to Marino’Six quarterbacks were selected in

the first round of the 1983 NFL draft. Hall of Famer John Elway was first overall. The sixth, Hall of Famer Dan Marino, was selected with the 27th and penultimate pick. But it’s all the drama in between Ken Rodgers seizes upon in his 2013 retelling.

5 ‘Once Brothers’Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic —

a Serb and Croat, respectively — were ri-val NBA players. They once had been great friends, teammates on the Yugoslavian national team. But war in their homeland drove a wedge between them. Petrovic’s 1993 death in a car crash left Divac with grief and regret. Michael Tolajian’s 2010 documentary captures all of it.

6 ‘No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson’

Steve James, best known for “Hoop Dreams,” lends a personal perspective to this 2010 story of how Allen Iverson’s basketball future nearly was derailed by an assault charge while he was a high school student in Hampton, Va., where both Iverson and James grew up. It’s an examination of racial perspectives, how difficult it is to shake a reputation once someone has been tagged and so much more.

7 ‘Venus Vs.’Ava DuVernay delivered this 2013

piece on tennis star Venus Williams that was part of ESPN’s “Nine for IX” series celebrating the 1972 enactment of Title IX equal opportunity in education leg-islation. Like “No Crossover,” it pairs a filmmaker and athlete who grew up in the same community (Compton, Calif., in this case). “Venus Vs.” isn’t just about Wil-liams’ play but the rise of female athletes and her role in the fight for pay equity.

25 ‘Bad Boys’The sharp-elbowed Pistons of the

late 1980s and early ’90s get their due from Zak Levitt.

24 ‘The Price of Gold’Nanette Burstein recalls the 1994

Olympic figure skating shenanigans in-volving Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Hard-ing, an irresistible tale both then and now and probably forever.

23 ‘Celtics/Lakers: Best of Enemies’

The decades-long Boston-Los Ange-les rivalry is an oft-told story, but Jim Podhoretz doesn’t just make clear it’s a major piece of NBA history. He ensures it’s entertaining.

22 ‘The ’99ers’A high point in “Let Them Wear

Towels” comes when female sports writ-ers converge on the packed Rose Bowl to cover the 1999 Women’s World Cup soc-cer championship. Erin Leyden looks back at the U.S. team that took the gold and what it represented in the ongoing fight to advance women’s sports.

21 ‘Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?’

Mike Tollin’s 2009 search for why the USFL failed as an alternative to the NFL eventually zeroes in on an ill-considered attempt to move its season from spring to fall, as advocated by a team owner named Donald Trump. A fair criticism? Watch and decide.

20 ‘Survive and Advance’This Jonathan Hock effort recalls

another improbable title run, the late Jimmy Valvano’s North Carolina State Wolfpack winning the 1983 NCAA men’s basketball championship.

19 ‘Of Miracles and Men’There have been plenty of retellings

of Team USA’s improbable hockey gold medal at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. Jonathan Hock’s version is from the per-spective of the Soviets they upset. Team USA celebrates their 4-3 victory over the Soviet Union in the semifinal Men’s Ice Hockey event at the Winter Olym-pic Games in Lake Placid, New York on February 22, 1980. The game was dubbed “the Miracle on Ice.” The USA went on to win the gold medal by defeating Finland 4-2 in the final game.

18 ‘Unmatched’The rivalry and friendship of ten-

nis greats Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert is the focus of this work from Lisa Lax and Nancy Stern Winters with Han-nah Storm.

8 ‘The U’Billy Corben, who’s from Miami,

recalls the 1980s and ’90s “Miami Vice”-era rogue heyday of the University of Mi-ami football program in this 2009 film. Rules and laws are afterthoughts. You also might enjoy Corben’s 2014 “The U Part 2” and Patrick Creadon’s 2016 “Catholics vs. Convicts,” which recalls Miami’s 1988 game against Notre Dame.

9 ‘Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. the New York Knicks’

It’s the Pacers’ Reggie Miller versus the mid-1990s Knicks, but it’s also Miller ver-sus Knicks superfan Spike Lee in this 2010 documentary from Dan Klores about how a player can get under the skin of a franchise and everyone close to it.

10 ‘Catching Hell’A lot of people were upset upon

hearing Alex Gibney was dredging up the story of the 2003 Cubs collapse and fan Steve Bartman. What they didn’t know was Gibney’s finished product, largely a discussion of societal scapegoating, would be both sympathetic and exon-erating when it came to the guy who no doubt once thought himself lucky to have first-row seats for a playoff game at Wrig-ley Field.

11 ‘Let Them Wear Towels’Neanderthals such as Hall of Fame

MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and former Cubs slugger Dave Kingman are rightly hung out to dry for their opposi-tion to allowing credentialed reporters to do their job, regardless of gender. Doc-umentary makers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg leave no uncertainty about who’s truly heroic. It’s Claire Smith, Lesley Visser, Christine Brennan, Jane Gross, Melissa Ludtke, Michele Himmel-berg, Robin Herman, Lisa Olson and other female sports writers who pushed doors open and stood their ground.

12 ‘The Best That Never Was’Marcus Dupree’s trajectory from

hotly pursued high school star to someone whose name might be vaguely familiar at best is a 2010 cautionary tale that Jona-than Hock tells with great empathy.

13 ‘Pony Excess’Thaddeus D. Matula looks back

at the Southern Methodist University football scandal that introduced the term “death penalty” to NCAA rule enforce-ment vernacular.

14 ‘The Two Escobars’Jeff and Michael Zimbalist tie a pair

of ill-fated Colombians named Escobar — soccer player Andres Escobar and drug lord Pablo Escobar — in a commentary on cultures going off the rails.

15 ‘You Don’t Know Bo’If you have forgotten just how great

former two-sport (and onetime White Sox) star Bo Jackson was and is, Michael Bonfiglio reminds you quite vividly.

16 ‘Without Bias’The shocking, sudden death of Uni-

versity of Maryland standout Len Bias from a cocaine-induced heart attack days after he was the second pick in the 1986 NBA draft is recalled along with the shock waves it set off. (If you like this, check out “Benji” about the 1984 murder of Chicago high school star Ben Wilson.)

17 ‘Jordan Rides the Bus’Ron Shelton, who’s responsible

for beloved sports films such as “Bull Durham” and “Tin Cup,” digs into Michael Jordan’s minor-league quest to become a baseball player. He comes away suggesting Jordan eventually might have made it work under different circumstances.

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TUESDAY, MARCH 31, 2020