Sporting Realities

Samantha N. Sheppard is Mary Armstrong Meduski ’80 Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen and coeditor of From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry. Travis Vogan is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Department of American Studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television and ESPN: The Making of the Sports Media Empire.

"With its broad look at different examples from creative, aesthetic, industrial and geographical points of view, Sporting Realities aims to be a reference point in sports and television studies more generally by offering an anthology on the cultural dynamics of memory and sport’s representation within contemporary audiovisual systems."-Paolo Carelli, Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies “The contributions to this anthology offer a critical and methodologically varied take on sport documentaries’ industrial, aesthetic, and ideological potentials. They combine detailed textual analysis with pertinent theoretical and historical reflection. Thus, they give a convincing account of both the specific formal procedures of sports documentaries and their strong entanglement with much broader dynamics, be it memorial culture, intersectionality, or branding strategies.”-Markus Stauff, coeditor of Filmgenres: Sportfilm “This collection fills a void in sports studies and film studies. It represents a bridge between these two important fields at a moment when sports documentaries are taking up more and more cultural space. It represents an important scholarly intervention that will propel conversations about these specific films, about the broader genre, and about the narratives that circulate in and around these representations. At the same time, this book will be useful for classes, providing critical tools for discussing a diversity of sports documentary films.”-David J. Leonard, author of Playing While White: Privilege and Power on and off the Field

• IntroductionSamantha N. Sheppard and Travis Vogan1. The Documentary as “Quality” Sports TelevisionBranden Buehler2. Intersectionality in Venus Vs.Aaron Baker3. No Girls Allowed! Documenting Female Reporters as Threats in Let Them Wear TowelsKorryn D. Mozisek4. Documenting Difference: Gay Athletes of Color, Binary Representation, and the Sports DocumentaryEvan Brody5. To the (Black) Athlete Dying Young: Documenting and Mythologizing Len Bias and Ben WilsonJustin Hudson6. Protest and Public Memory: Documenting the 1968 Summer Olympic GamesEmily Plec and Shaun M. Anderson7. Of Friends and Foes: Remembering Yugoslavia in Sport DocumentariesDario Brentin and David Brown8. “Measuring Up”: Fathers, Sons, and the Economy of Death in Mountain Film DocumentariesRay Gamache9. Sports Album’s Replay: Newsreel Compilations, Early Television, and the Recirculation of Sport HistoryAlex Kupfer10. HBO Sports: Docu-Branding Boxing’s Past and PresentTravis VoganContributorsIndex