Everybody loves a good feel good sports movie where the team player or team that star sin the movie wins in the end. That isn’t how it always ends in real life though. Sports movies can be a lot of fun but there are a lot of great sports documentaries that look at the realistic side of sports.
10 Best Sports Documentaries: Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns
Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns was a nine part documentary from PBS Home Video. The documentary set is a great history lesson on the game of baseball that begins all the way back in 1840 and leads all the way up to 1994.
10 Best Sports Documentaries: Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos
In a town that is known for baseball, football and basketball there was a brief time in 1977 when the hottest ticket in town was actually the New York Cosmos. Once in a Lifetime tells the story of the professional soccer team that had a grip on the city of New York for a short time.
10 Best Sports Documentaries: Dogtown and Z-Boys
The Z-boys were a group of teenagers from broken homes that spent their time surfing in Venice, California. Jeff Ho saw something special in these boys and together they revolutionized the future of surfing.
10 Best Sports Documentaries: Beyond the Mat
Beyond the Mat is one of the most fascinating looks at what goes on behind the scenes. Beyond the Mat focuses on many professional wrestlers and what they are like when they aren’t portraying their character in the ring.
10 Best Sports Documentaries: Hoop Dreams
Hoop Dreams is one of the most critically acclaimed documentaries of any genre. Hoop Dreams follows basketball hopefuls Williams Gates and Arthur Agee for a period of five years. Over the years they face racism, peer pressure and predatory recruiters.
10 Best Sports Documentaries: Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows
Bret Hart was one of the most decorated and respected professional wrestlers in the world so it was surprising when Vince “screwed” him. This movie looks back at Hart’s time in the WWE leading up to the Montreal Screwjob where Vince McMahon forced Bret Hart to lose the title even though he was not scheduled to lose.
10 Best Sports Documentaries: When We Were Kings
“When We Were Kings” is the best account of one of the greatest boxing matches of all-time, the “Rumble in the Jumble” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.
10 Best Sports Documentaries: Bigger, Stronger Faster
Bigger, Stronger, Faster isn’t specifically about sports but is about a topic that is becoming increasingly a part of sports, steroids. Directory Christopher Bell examines his two brothers that became a part of the steroids subculture and raises many questions like the health risks of using steroids and the ethics involved in using them.
10 Best Sports Documentaries: King of Kong: A Fistful of Dollars
Maybe a video game competition is pushing it as far as “sport documentaries” but it’s my list so I’m going to include it. A documentary about the high score of a video game might sound boring but the documentary sets up the current record holder as this evil arcade czar and the challenger as a plucky underdog. The way the two people are portrayed makes the documentary completely compelling.
10 Best Sports Documentaries: Murderball
Murderball is a documentary about quadriplegics playing wheelchair rugby. Murderball probably had the lowest production budget of any documentary on this list and was arguably the best. The quality of the movie was not important because of how well the documentary captured the sports and its players.
