This fall, CBS Sports Network’s sports documentary series Four Sides of the Story will return for its second season, examining the University of Alabama football team’s national championship win in January, the Mayweather vs. McGregor boxing match in August 2017, University of Maryland-Baltimore County basketball team’s upset over the No. 1 seeded University of Virginia team in this year’s March Madness, and the Loyola University Chicago men’s basketball team’s ascendance to the Final Four this spring. Noticeably absent from its lineup of athletic retrospectives are any stories focused on female athletes. It’s not as though producers didn’t have any options to choose from, but like its massively successful cousin, ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, women’s athletics are not a priority.
As I found when I previously wrote about stories centered on female athletes that 30 for 30 could cover, a popular rebuttal for why there are so few sports documentaries about women is that viewers aren’t interested in live coverage of women’s sports to begin with, let alone retrospectives examining them. This claim is demonstrably false when it comes to pro sports like tennis and soccer, and much more complicated than a simple issue of supply and demand when it comes to a sport like basketball. But the theory doesn’t track for a simpler reason: You don’t have to be familiar with the subject of a great documentary in order to be sucked in. I’ve watched hours of documentaries about football, soccer, cycling, wrestling, and baseball, even though I don’t follow any of them. Before 2015, I had never heard of basketball player Christian Laettner, let alone seen him play a game, but I’ve watched the 30 for 30 documentary about him more times than I’m willing to admit.
CBS Sports Continues Its “Four Sides of the Story” Franchise with Four New Documentaries, Highlighting Memorable Sports Moments From the Past Year, Airing This Fall: https://t.co/m9fN6LP6p1pic.twitter.com/zSg8azb93A
— CBS Sports Network (@CBSSportsNet) August 20, 2018
And while historically disproportionate coverage of women’s sports creates added obstacles to telling female athletes’ stories from decades ago, Four Sides of the Story’s focus on the immediate past makes the lack of highlighted women feel particularly egregious. The past 12 months alone offers fodder for such compelling stories as:
- Chloe Kim’s Olympic gold medal win in snowboarding in February, when she became the first female snowboarder to land back to back 1080s and the youngest woman to win an Olympic medal in a snow sport;
- Serena Williams’ comeback in May;
- The 2017 WNBA Finals;
- Stanford University women’s soccer team’s championship win in December;
- Clarkson University women’s hockey team’s overtime championship win in March;
- Simone Biles’s preparation in the lead-up to her recent comeback to gymnastics;
Or, in keeping with the theme of Four Sides of the Story’s Holy Loyola!, which follows “the remarkable Loyola (Chicago) Final Four run,” the series could have covered the remarkable Final Four runs of Mississippi State, Notre Dame, UCONN, or Louisville. One film alone could have examined Mississippi State’s Final Four win over UCONN, ending the latter powerhouse team’s 111-game winning streak.
Miss State's Morgan Williams stuns UConn at the buzzer in National Semis. Huskies streak ends at 111. #MorganWilliams#MissStateWomenhooppic.twitter.com/OWijBV8yVb
— Joe Pequeno (@JoePequenoTV) April 1, 2017
As many, many sports documentarians working today have shown, filmmakers don’t have to make movies about female athletes. They can continue examining every single detail of every men’s sports moment in history until we eventually end up with a 20-part series about how the sun glistened on John McEnroe’s face a specific way as he threw a tantrum at a 1984 match. On the other hand, we’re constantly surrounded by stories about female athletes, world famous and not, that are begging to be examined in depth. I don’t want to tell anyone how to do their jobs, but CBS and their peers are seriously screwing up.
