Good Seats Still Available by Chris Connelly

For my 10th birthday, my parents took my friends and me to see Goal! World Cup 1966 at the Murray Hill Theatre on 34th Street in Manhattan. It featured some magnificent goals, about 10,000 shots of Pele being fouled, and, from the victorious England locker room, the first footage of a bare behind I’d ever seen onscreen. Let’s see: a soccer documentary dropped into a first-run movie house during the mid-‘60s …just a guess, but I’m figuring good seats were still available.

Forty years later, the sports doc is thriving – and so, for that matter, is the first person singular, which appears more often in the pages of this book than in a year’s worth of Glamour, and yet which indicates the individual perspectives through which these 30 fascinating stories will be told. Some of these docs will take behind-the-scenes snapshots of a current team or sport; some will cast a clear light on little-known or under-examined players; others will sort through the powerful, warring phenomena of passion and memory, trying to alter the way we look at games or athletes or moments from our sports past…moments that, right now, seem as certain and fixed to us as our own birthdate.

Besides, I had a feeling we’d all be working for Simmons someday.

But what I’m looking forward to the most is how these docs will each feature the unique viewpoint of its filmmaker. These days, the rat-a-tat-tat of adrenalized sports talk serves up shards of differing thoughts on every conceivable topic. It’s hard not to see the democratization of opinion now unleashed not just by the on-air experts’ panel, but by the chat room, the Twittering superstar, and the guy holding the sign behind Corso’s head as a healthy thing. But these documentaries will want to do something different, something the best movies have always done: to sit you down and tell you a story, employing many sources but giving a distinctive point of view, marshalling words and images to serve that particular perspective. In a sports universe of competing voices, each 30 For 30 will offer a single, compelling one.

In Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, a film executive tries to help out a blocked screenwriter by outlining an elaborate, deliciously enigmatic scenario. “What happens next?” the screenwriter asks. “I don’t know,” the executive says. “I was just making pictures.” In sports, not knowing what happens next – the final two weeks of any 21st century New York Mets regular season excluded – is pretty much why we watch in the first place. These documentaries will braid the uncertainty of the games, and our knowledge of that inherent uncertainty, with the satisfactions of a narrative, in which events seem to take place for a reason, a reason that gives us some greater understanding of who these players actually are. Or as Fitzgerald also wrote – to himself this time – Action Is Character.

Working for ESPN has always meant getting to tell some extraordinary stories…stories of great highs and lows, where so much is always at stake for everyone involved. As they embark on their docs, these 30 filmmakers – some of whom are working in the sports realm for the first time – will taste that unique storytelling energy. And when they’re done and ready to show you what they’ve done. Good seats will still be available…right in front of your television. Can’t promise anything about the bare-behind thing, though.