(All the) Sports on Screen

In the 1980s, the whole world knew two sports teams - the Brazilian football team and the West Indies cricket team. 

In this episode, your hosts and current pandemic pals, Sasky and Maria, sit down to talk about the team's journey from "Calypso Cricketers" to the world's most dominant team for more than two decades. In a sport with deep colonial roots, the West Indies redefined not just the role of athletes in pushing a country forward socially but the very game itself. 

An exercise in contradictions, Hurley Haywood was one of the 70s and 80s most iconic and successful American sportsmen, a sizzling hot racing driver who matched multiple Le Mans victories with an intensely private life. 

In this episode, your hosts and still pandemic roommates, Sasky and Maria, sit down to talk about pride, petrol, and Patrick Dempsey's hair in Derek Dodge's documentary, Hurley, the story of one of America's best and the battle of being gay in the macho world of 1970s motorsports. 

Hockey is Canada and Canada is hockey, or so we're told.  With the line between prominence and pariah as thin as a blade and a bad hit, this often destructive culture has found itself in the headlines in recent years and on the big screen. In the latest episode, Maria and Sasky sit down to talk about toxic masculinity, hockey culture, and the dark side of 'Canada's Game' (said with air quotes). With national pride under the microscope,  Kevan Funk's film breaks down the myths of the game and brings an unforgettable look inside the locker room and the lives the game leaves behind. Trigger Warning: Violence, Suicidal Themes, Mental Illness, Animal Death

In the first episode of a new year, Sasky and Maria wave goodbye to 2020 and sail towards a new (and hopefully better) year with Tracy Edwards and the barrier-breaking crew of Maiden, the first all-female around-the-world race crew. Featuring icebergs, swimsuits and more garden variety sexism than you can trim a sail at, Maiden is the incredible story of a group of women who dared to make waves. 

In a cliche as old as sport itself, this week Maria and Sasky are talking about "Battle of the Sexes", the 2017 film about the now infamous match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. A 'feel-good' take on the challenges of women in the 1970s, constrained by their gender, sexuality, and what it's like when the fight you face is bigger than you.

At the intersection of race, religion, and really sketchy owners, there is a football team. In the latest episode, Maria and Sasky dive into Maya Zinshtein's 2017 eye-opening documentary, Forever Pure, which chronicles Beitar FC in Jerusalem's descent into anarchy at the hands of a fan base outraged at the club's signing of two Muslim players. More than a little confronting, Maya's film shows a club and community spiraling out of control and forces us to consider the idea that sports have always been and always will be more than a little political. 

Join the Well Actually Sporting Club's Maria and Sasky as they take a movie so iconic, the Library of Congress considers it "culturally significant" and it's still a popular halloween costume nearly 30 years later. By a women, about women and staring women, "A League of Their Own" is one of, if not the most well known female-centered sports films and the pair jump into 1940's baseball, pretty-ing the game and how the radical notion of women as athletes became a social problem. Also, why there 100% is crying in baseball, and every other sport (and definitely when Sasky's involved).