30 for 30 running thread

Thought the Hillsborough doc was good, but I wish they went into the stadium construction/design more - or were able to find out why police and government were so invested in the cover up.
Obviously, things got out of hand quickly - but at some point you just shut the doors and don't let anyone in that entrance.
Clearly, there was a lot that had to go wrong for that to happen. Stadium selected, police official transferred, late-arriving crowd, existing seating standards, bad communication, emergency planning - the cover-up (and treatment of the victims and their families) though is what baffles me, and is probably the more horrendous than the initial tragedy.

 

The didn't shut the doors because there were still ticket-holders out there. Plus, they feared a riot and could've had a crush outside just as well as in.

Hillsborough was -- and it's not mentioned much by English fans, especially since there's a burgeoning nostalgia for it -- an indictment of standing culture and soccer itself.

The background factors that went into Hillsborough -- 100-year-old decrepit stadiums that weren't fit for standing fans, political apathy bordering on hostility, societal and economic factors which largely birthed hooliganism (including Liverpool fans, who had cemented their rep at Heysel four years earlier) -- are all important.

The Taylor Report -- which mandated that English stadia be all-seated in the top two divisions -- forced the English game into modernity, even if fans there bitch about it because it's lost its "passion". The formation of the Premier League in 1992-93 and the tsunami of money that came with it changed their game forever. The 1980s might as well be the 1880s in comparison.

The respectable English Premier League we have today is a far cry from how the sport was perceived in the UK until just recently. It was working class entertainment for the unwashed, was treated that way, and the police cover-up is a great example of that attitude.

 

I watched some of it, but it seemed the pens were set up to keep people from rival teams from fighting each other. Those and the inability to actually count the number of people who were down there from either switching seats or not being able to move people fast enough through the turnstiles was the root of the problem. Everything seemed to stem from that.

And the video of people doing CPR on people while on the pitch was the thing that really grabbed me.

 

Yeah, I was underwhelmed too. On a related note, SI reported last week the Silnas have come to some sort of settlement.

Saw the documentary on Spano for the first time last weekend. Seems absurd what he got away with. Good to see Milbury dropping expletives, even if they were bleeped out.

 

Hillsborough was exactly as the filmmaker described. It didn't dwell specifically on the past, but instead looked at the whole picture and how the case stands today. For as much as I've seen on the net about the emotional impact of the film, I think it played it fairly close to the vest in that department. This did not aim to purposely pull at heartstrings as other documentaries I have seen do over the years and it was certainly nowhere near the sob fest of what the excellent 1996 docudrama

was.

I think the filmmaker could have explained the conditions which led to this systematic failure a little better. Certainly other British football disasters (Ibrox and Valley Parade) could have hammered home the point that those in power did not care one bit about the safety of the working class at those antiquated stadiums. The police were rightly to blame for a great deal of heartache at Hillsborough, but stadium design and lack of government safety oversight were huge factors that were not really addressed by the filmmaker.

It would have been interesting to hear from a player or coach who was on the pitch that day, but I did like the perspective of the cops on hand. In the end, we're still a ways out from the definitive word on this disaster, but I suspect it will come within the next 5 to 10 years as the new inquest unfolds.

 

Yep.

... after lingering on its deathbed, the great golden goose of the sports world was finally killed off last month. The cause of death: a complex and confidential settlement agreement. The chief survivors, brothers Ozzie and Daniel Silna, surely mourn, but they must take solace knowing that their $1 million investment in a sports team that went out of business nearly 40 years ago turned into more than $1 billion.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/nba/news/20140409/silna-brothers-nba/

 

Only saw the final 30 minutes or so of Bad Boys this past weekend and noticed Cameron Stauth listed among the thanks in the closing credits. Was he interviewed earlier in the program?

Stauth's book "The Franchise" is still one of the best I've ever read.

 

Cool "30 for 30" short on Glenn Burke, who (along with Dusty Baker) is credited with inventing the high five and was allegedly traded by the Dodgers because he was gay:

http://grantland.com/features/30-for-30-shorts-high-five-invention-glenn-burke/

Not sure why this couldn't have been a full-length documentary, though.

 

He actually invented the question mark, and was traded because he accused chestnuts of being lazy.

 

The shorts I've seen have been good, particularly the one on Clint Malarchuk.

 

"Playing For the Mob," about the Boston College basketball point-shaving scandal was right in my wheelhouse. Not only a sports story, but direct ties to GoodFellas because it was Henry Hill who set the whole thing up. They even got Ray Liotta to narrate it.

Too bad Tom Davis and Rick Kuhn wouldn't talk for the film, but virtually everyone else did (including Hill before he died in 2012). And the identity of Jim Sweeney's roommate is an "oh wow" moment.

 

Looking forward to tonight's When The Garden Was Eden on The '69-'70 Knicks.