Virtual Reality
Sports Illustrated senior writer Jack McCallum, whose story on sports
movies appears in the Feb. 6, 2001 issue of the magazine, says reality doesn't
always bite. Unlike the many works of cinematic fiction that center on athletes
or the games they play, these are the real deal: sports documentaries.
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Olympia (1938)
Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's famed film propagandist, used 40
photographers to shoot the '36 Berlin Summer Games for a documentary that was
decades ahead of its
time.
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The Endless Summer (1966)
Dude, 35 years after this surfing flick came out, it
still makes you want to wax your board and hang
ten.
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The Olympiad (1976)
Who cared about hammer throwers and pentathletes before Bud
Greenspan's somberly narrated 22-part
series?
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Pumping Iron (1977)
Catch the pre-Hollywood Arnold Schwarzenegger, at 29, when
the future action star was the swaggering, winsome Babe Ruth of
bodybuilding. |
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Hoop Dreams (1994)
No fictional account of urban basketball has ever come close
to this wrenching account of two Chicago
schoolboys.
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When We Were Kings (1996)
Who would want to watch a movie about a 27-year-old
prizefight? Everybody. It's Muhammad Ali-George Foreman in Zaire. Pull up a
chair. |
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The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (1998)
This film says as much about
America in the 1930s and '40s as it does about the Jewish slugger, and
that's the
point.
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