HBO Max is likely the best streamer when it comes to sports content.
In fact, sports documentaries have become just as crucial to the platform’s success as its many prestige television shows. Exploring legends such as Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods and Magic Johnson, these docs feature human narratives that are truly cinematic.
This January, Watch With Us has added two excellent sports documentaries to its master list. First, LFG chronicles the fight for equal pay in women’s soccer.
You can also check out Being Serena, which takes a look at the life of the iconic tennis player.
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‘LFG’ (2021)
Three months before the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup, a lawsuit was leveled against the U.S. Soccer Federation by the players for pay discrimination. LFG (which stands for the US women’s soccer team’s rallying cry, “Let’s f–king go”) follows Megan Rapinoe, Jessica McDonald, Becky Sauerbrunn, Kelley O’Hara, Christen Press, Sam Mewis and Julie Foudy as they seek to gain equal pay, while the documentary interweaves their demanding and impressive athletic careers in addition to their record-breaking 2019 World Cup victory. However, these ladies have plenty of courage and resilience in addition to physical strength, and LFG explores what it’s like for them to be at the center of radical social change.
Whether you’re a soccer fan or you aren’t, LFG is a captivating documentary about a fascinating piece of modern sports history. The movie is as charismatic as the courageous women at the center of the narrative, and while the film careens towards an unavoidably frustrating conclusion, the path to getting there is riveting and invigorating. The film features exciting sports footage, news coverage and revealing interviews with the players themselves.
‘Being Serena’ (2018)
Serena Williams is a living legend on the tennis court, having won four Olympic gold medals, 39 Grand Slam titles and the most women’s singles matches in Grand Slam history. However, the celebrity athlete had managed to keep coverage around her private life relatively low-key until she announced the pregnancy of her first child in 2017 with then-fiancé Alex Ohanian. Thus, the five-part Being Serena gives viewers an intimate look at Williams like never before, exploring her pregnancy, motherhood and marriage, which she somehow manages to balance with being a sports icon and businesswoman.
Being Serena is an engrossing and refreshingly “warts and all” portrait of a star athlete learning to find herself again in her new identity. The film features intimate footage of Williams adapting to being a wife and mother after mounting an incredible career in sports. However, Being Serena is also honest about the immense struggles that Williams faced during her traumatic pregnancy, birth and postpartum, but ultimately she defied the odds and mounted a successful comeback merely ten months after the birth of her daughter, Alexis.
‘Alex vs. ARod’ (2025)
The polarizing career of baseball’s Alex Rodriguez is told in this riveting, three-part documentary comprised of intimate interviews with Rodriguez himself. At only 18 years old when he was drafted, Rodriguez soon seemed poised to take over the game of baseball when he hit the majors in 1994. He signed a record-high contract to join the Texas Rangers in 2000, but turned to steroids after he joined the Yankees in 2004. When it was discovered, he was exiled — though not without trying to lie his way out first.
A self-described “recovering narcissist,” Alex vs. ARod is a very honest interrogation of Rodriguez’s drug use and public deception as opposed to a sterling celebration of his career highlights. With the needling of director Gotham Chopra, Rodriguez ultimately gets refreshingly candid about his choices and where they stemmed from. Alex vs. ARod is a fascinating and illuminating look at failure and recovery.
‘Charlie Hustle and the Matter of Pete Rose’ (2024)
Baseball player Pete Rose was banned from Major League Baseball in 1989, when it was discovered he was betting on games while he was the manager for the Cincinnati Reds. Since then, Rose has attempted to lobby against his ban but has not seemed penitent for his actions. Charlie Hustle and the Matter of Pete Rose is an illuminating look at the star and all-time hits leader’s career in the sport while it searches for Rose’s own path to redemption.
This four-part documentary includes never-before-seen interviews with the late Rose that depict him as a man who is still far too unwilling to atone for his sins even over thirty years later, and director Mark Monroe catches him in several lies, going as far as to interrogate him over his statutory rape allegation. It’s a sobering, but compelling, portrait of fame, desperation and denial.
‘What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali’ (2019)
Directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), this documentary chronicles the life and legacy of boxing star Muhammad Ali. The film charts Ali’s rise to heavyweight greatness, through the height of his career as a champion boxer and leading into his later life as an icon and social activist. Through his many challenges, clashes, victories and setbacks, Fuqua paints a portrait of a man who became a legend and ultimately a symbol of humanity and peace.
Despite being nearly three hours, the film never feels excessive. Using archival footage, Ali is allowed to tell his own story through numerous interviews, which plainly reveal the professional and personal contradictions of a man who is easy to mythologize, but was ultimately just a man — and one whose ego occasionally threatened to overtake him. Thus, his larger-than-life status is both humanized and immortalized in this engaging story of a captivating life.
‘Tiger’ (2021)
Based on the 2018 biography Tiger Woods, Tiger is a two-part miniseries that examines the iconic golfer’s rise, fall and ultimate return to the green. The documentary examines Tiger Woods’ relationship with his father and how it affected his career, as well as his 2009 cheating scandal. Tiger paints a portrait of a gifted athlete whose dedication and craft brought him untold fame and also untold excess, leading him down a dark spiral that he managed to triumphantly return from with his win at the 2019 Masters.
Instead of featuring testimony and perspective from the man himself, Tiger utilizes interviews with people in Woods’ orbit. This includes his former caddie Steve Williams, his ex-girlfriend, Bryant Gumbel, Nick Faldo, and even Rachel Uchitel — the journalist and media personality involved in Woods’ cheating scandal. Even though Tiger lacks Woods’ voice, it is no less an exceedingly in-depth and revealing look at the golf celebrity, one that reveals his flaws in a way that exposes his own humanity.
‘Magic and Bird: A Courtship of Rivals’ (2010)
Beginning at the 1979 NCAA championship game, star athletes Magic Johnson and Larry Bird established their years-spanning rivalry. After Johnson’s team, the Michigan State Spartans, defeated Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores in 1979, Johnson got drafted to play with the Los Angeles Lakers, and Bird went to the Boston Celtics, eventually clinching the “Rookie of the Year” title. For years, the Celtics and the Lakers tossed the NBA Championship title back and forth between each other.
Ultimately, both men’s careers would be cut short by physical ailments: an HIV diagnosis for Johnson and a back injury for Bird. Magic and Bird: A Courtship of Rivals charts the two athletes’ rise to fame and competition with one another to their retirement and current status as real-life friends. The Peabody Award-winning documentary examines their heydays as well as the racial tensions that bolstered the rivalry between the Celtics and the Lakers, crafting a riveting story of two men vying for greatness, both ultimately undone by their own vices.
‘Fists of Freedom: The Story of The ’68 Summer Games’ (1999)
This sports documentary from 1999 surrounds the 1968 Olympic Games that took place in Mexico City, one of America’s most culturally and socially important moments. With racial tensions flaring from a year that took the lives of both Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy, the games culminated with the historic “Black Power” salutes by winning athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos while on their victory stand.
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Using rare archival footage in addition to interviews with Smith and other athletes like Lee Evans and George Foreman, plus activist Harry Edwards, Fists of Freedom: The Story of The ’68 Summer Games takes viewers back in time to a pivotal moment in the 20th century, and the events both before and afterwards. In the end, the two men were not welcomed back home after their defiant gesture, and it endures as a revealing portrait of respectability politics and civil rights issues that are still ongoing to this day.
