I’m going to say something maybe a little controversial: most sports documentaries are really, really bad. It’s nobody’s fault in particular, and maybe I’m a little too exacting because I’m a writer who loves a well-told story, but it’s true nonetheless that while sports are chock-full of great stories at every level, the people who do sports aren’t particularly well-equipped to tell them. It’s kind of the natural conclusion when athletes and coaches are relentlessly trained to speak in sports cliches
and not show a lot of personality in front of the camera. I suspect that there’s a reason, for example, that the TV show All American purports to have been inspired by the real story of Spencer Paysinger but in reality used the bones of his story as a premise before promptly just being a CW show about football players.
A particularly unfortunate recent example, for me anyways, was the in-house “Why Not Us?” documentary released by the Hussman School of Journalism Media and UNC Women’s Soccer after the Tar Heels had won a championship. It’s worth a watch if only to relive that incredible season that broke the longest dry spell in program history, but the filmmakers’ choice to provide minimal narration and allow the interviewed players and coaches to drive the film, while noble, means the entire season gets described through a series of cliches we’ve all heard a thousand times before. I don’t doubt that some of them are true, but the issue with cliches isn’t that they’re necessarily inaccurate, but that they’re so broadly applicable that they lose meaning. So when, about 6 minutes in, the team recounts their first loss and you hear that “the loss was actually so pivotal for us because it taught us what we needed to work on,” without any elaboration, it’s expected, and weightless. It’s mostly the same throughout, and like I said, while the season itself is worth reliving, there’s not much more that the film adds to it despite what seems like ample opportunity.
There are a lot of reasons that The Last Dance was such a phenomenon when it dropped and endures as a touchpoint 6 years later, but the simplest one is just that it’s so very much not one of those — which is to say, that it was really, really good. It never feels media-trained, probably because everybody involved is looking back on their life 30 years ago and thus doesn’t have to worry about causing locker room distractions or anything like that, and that gave us near-soap opera level drama in the telling of a story that’s obviously one of the sport’s most enduring, with a simply titanic figure at the head of it. If anything, “it became personal with me” has become a new sports cliche because of how much it resonated with the viewing public.
Anyways, I was thinking about all this for two reasons: first, that the team behind The Last Dance will reportedly be trying to repeat that success with a feature-length documentary about Novak Djokovic this summer, and second (and closer to home/the point), that a documentary film about Terrence Brown’s journey to Chapel Hill is premiering today in Las Vegas. And I remember that the first time I saw that news, I thought it seemed out of left field — not that Brown isn’t deserving of having his story told, just the opposite — that there are so many stories in sports worth being told that it’s surprising that a full movie-length production is going to feature a subject that I’m invested in as a UNC fan.
All that preamble leads to my question: What UNC sports story would you most like to see a Last Dance-style documentary or series about? It could be a season, a person, a single game, or anything else you can think of. For me, the 2015 football team feels like it could be an interesting one: coming off such a dismal year, and then opening it with such a wet fart of a game against South Carolina that made it feel like nothing had changed before ripping off the best season UNC has had in a generation. A lot of ink and celluloid has been used to talk about the 2017 men’s basketball national champions, but I feel like the previous season is under-discussed as a result, usually just mentioned as a source of heartbreak. I’d love to see a full feature on that team — especially because I feel like on the strength of a whole season, they might have been a better basketball team than the 2017 champs (for what it’s worth, Kenpom’s adjusted efficiency agrees with me!). And while this is less possible just due to the reduced level of coverage for the sport, a full-career Last Dance for Erin Matson, the college field hockey GOAT, would be deserved, and I bet it’d be awesome.
I guess it shows my youth that nothing I chose is more than 11 years in the past. What about y’all?
