As long as there have been competitive sports, there have been scandals. From Shoeless Joe and the 1919 “Black Sox” to DeflateGate and the 2017 Houston Astros, crime and controversy have long gone hand in hand with athletics. In Bad Sport, a new series of six standalone documentaries debuting at once on Netflix, we get in-depth looks at a number of scandals that may have fallen under your radar, but ones that are no less shocking.
BAD SPORT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: There are the sports stories we remember, and the ones we forget, but just because we’ve forgotten them doesn’t mean the crimes are any smaller. Over the course of six standalone films, Netflix’s Bad Sport reveals stories that grabbed headlines in their day, but have largely slipped from the collective memory of sports fans. These slick, well-produced documentaries offer engrossing looks at shocking scandals, largely told by the people central to the stories. From basketball point-shaving to match-fixing, drug smuggling, horse-killing and ref-bribing, Bad Sport has something for everyone from the seedy underbelly of competitive sport.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The most obvious parallel is some of the more scandal-focused episodes of ESPN’s long-running 30 For 30 series, such as “The U” and “Pony Excess”, but Netflix’s made a strong push of their own in this vein lately, including the superb recent series UNTOLD, which Bad Sport (thankfully) almost feels like a continuation of.
Performance Worth Watching: There’s no performers here, per se, but—as we saw in the UNTOLD series—the strength of Netflix’s sports documentaries is in the access the filmmakers have gotten. Many of the central figures in these stories show up to tell their own side of things, including in many cases people who faced serious consequences for their past actions. Hearing it in their own words elevates these beyond mere retelling; we’re getting the inside look.
Memorable Dialogue: “He says to me, I’ll do this, but I don’t want to lose,” a major figure in a college basketball point-shaving scandal recalls of his conversation with a star player he’s bribing. “I say, man, you don’t have to lose. Just don’t win by more than I’m going to tell you to.” For his part, the player—Arizona State’s Stevin “Hedake” Smith—recalls thinking “Oh really? So you’re telling me, we can win the game, and I can make money? F**kin’ no-brainer.”
Sex and Skin: None. They’re not exactly family-friendly, given some of the crime and vice discussed, but sex isn’t a significant part of the stories.
Our Take: Have you ever wondered the best strategy for making money by fixing basketball games? Well, Joe Gagliano’s happy to explain it to you. The money isn’t in having favorites lose—that’s too obvious, and favorites don’t like to lose. The wisest strategy, the former bookie lays out, is to bet on the favorites to win by less than expected. It’s easy for the better team to control the game, and simple miscues—a bad pass, a missed free-throw late—are easy to discount as innocent, but can turn a 20-point victory into a 7-point one, and tens of thousands of dollars if you’ve happened to wager on such a thing happening.
This is explained early on in “Hoop Schemes”, the first installment of Netflix’s six-part documentary series, and it’s easy to see why they led off with it. The film, which exposes a 1994 point-shaving scandal that rocked the Arizona State Sun Devils’ men’s basketball program, makes what happened seem entirely understandable, at least from one angle. (That’s the angle without the benefit of hindsight, mind you.) Yes, it’s wildly illegal. Yes, both bookie and players ended up serving time in prison when the scheme was uncovered.
But to hear them tell it… well, it sure sounded like it was going to work.
Bringing in the key figures from lesser-known sports stories has been a hallmark of Netflix’s recent documentary work, and it’s where these six really sing: it might not be that interesting to hear about a 27-year-old college basketball scandal—especially now that we’re in an era where college players finally can get paid above the table—but it’s engrossing to hear about it from the people who made it happen.
While “Hoop Schemes” is the best of the bunch, there’s great stuff to be found in the whole six-film series, which also covers the stories of Randy Lanier, a professional race car driver turned drug smuggler; Luciano Moggi, the former director of Italian soccer powerhouse Juventus who pressured officials for favorable treatment; Marie-Reine Le Gougne, a French figure-skating judge who improperly judged a figure-skating competition in the 2002 Winter Olympics to favor the Russian competitors, Tommy “The Sandman” Burns, a man who killed show-horses at their owners’ behest for insurance fraud purposes, and Hansie Cronje, a South African cricket star who was eventually banned for life from the sport for fixing matches. They’re all engrossing, even if you’ve never given a second thought to equestrian sports or cricket, and each worth your time.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Netflix’s recent push into sports-focused programming has offered up some great, eminently-viewable content, and Bad Sport is a continuation of that trend. Let’s hope they keep it going this strong.
Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and internet user who lives in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife, two young children, and a small, loud dog.
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