Last Wednesday, Fate of a Sport made its debut at the Tribeca Festival.
Directed by Michael Doneger, produced by Matt Tolmach, written by Dan Crane, edited by Curtis McConnell and shot by Brett Roberts, Variety reported on Friday that the movie was purchased by ESPN Films and, during halftime of ABC’s airing of Cannons-Archers on Saturday, Paul Rabil said that whether Fate of a Sport will live on ESPN+ or Disney+ is being worked out now, and hopes that it’ll debut late summer/early fall.
I was in attendance at the debut event and had a chance to take in the screening. Though I’m neither a red carpet reporter nor a movie reviewer, I’ll try my hand at each farther down.
First, though, I have to address one of the most interesting prospects of Fate of a Sport. When I texted Mike Rabil about a particular scene that stuck with me the morning following my first watch, he replied, “Hopefully more people become fans [of lacrosse] as a part of it.”
It points to an ambition for this project and the Premier Lacrosse League in totality.
In my opinion, there are three examples from the last 20 years of major sports entities that experienced meteoric growth in popularity in the United States: the UFC, the English Premier League and Formula 1. And what they all have in common is that they had a vehicle outside of the main fight/match/race broadcast that could accomplish everything necessary to create new fans: teach people about the sport itself, the structure of the entity and the characters involved.
UFC had The Ultimate Fighter on Spike. The Premier League had FIFA, the video game. F1 has Drive to Survive on Netfilx.
Lacrosse must find its version of that and the Rabils hope Fate of a Sport is one of those vehicles.
Ready for me to play red carpet reporter? A couple things that I don’t typically encounter in the press box or on the sidelines of a lacrosse game:
- A freelance photographer with a French accent asking me which celebrities from the presskit I thought might show up
- A placard with Inside Lacrosse written on it taped to the ground to direct me where to stand
- Seeing Rich Kleiman (Kevin Durant’s business manager), Eric LeGrand (the subject and creator of amazing sports documentary content) and Peter Berg (which prompted a bit of a fanboy moment given my affinity for Friday Night Lights, the TV series of which he was an executive producer)
The event itself was really cool for me as an on-looker, acquaintance and friend. Wednesday night represented another point on the arc of professional development for so many content creators who cut their teeth with Shootout For Soldiers and TLN, and are now either with PLL or another outfit. Witnessing folks like Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry, RJ Kaminski, Jordan Shiparski and (most substantially, because of his role in the film) Brett Roberts beam with pride seeing their (or their colleagues’) work accepted into Tribeca was especially meaningful for how it validated so much effort from the past decade and, by extension, marked the passage of time.
Similarly, it was cool to see players like Kyle Hartzell and Rob Pannell, but even moreso other retired stars from the prior era — Drew Westervelt, Dan Burns, Michael Evans, and of course Kyle Harrison — guys who were a part of Paul’s journey as a professional lacrosse player, and know this story intimately.
The vibe for the screening was special. On a promenade outside a marina on the Hudson River with the sun setting in the background, hundreds of people in Adirondack chairs looked up to watch the drama unfold.
Ready for me to play movie reviewer?
I can say with full confidence that this film is good. (Certified “Good Deal”) If you’re taking the time to read this article, it will absolutely worth your time to watch the movie. I cannot say, however, whether it is very good or great. It may well be one of those, but for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is that I don’t review movies professionally), I can’t say either with full confidence.
The primary reason I am so disqualified to review this film is because I am in a very small group of people who were along for this three-season ride in real time. Revealing moments of high tension in the film were, for me, parts of the story that I knew were coming and eagerly awaiting to see how the film was going to handle. That’s not to say that I didn’t learn anything from this movie: there’s an incredible scene from the end of Rabil‘s first game in 2019, there is a hugely influential scene — really, a sliding doors moment for PLL’s existence — that I never knew happened, and there are provocative interviews with rivals and opponents that advance the narrative in really important ways.
If I can put on my “I took three film classes in high school and college” hat on for a moment, one of Doneger and his team’s achievements that impressed me the most is how effectively they created a linear narrative that touched on three separate elements of the story, but equally carried the stakes and payoff. That’s not easily done in a documentary. The narrative deftly pivoted from its first focus (a business drama of the PLL emerging in opposition to MLL) to its second (how the social issues that manifested during the summer of 2020 intersected with lacrosse’s reputation as a homogenous sport) to its third (which is much more personal).
Similarly, the film is really well paced and edited. When the first act concluded, I looked down at my watch and noticed that it was almost exactly 45 minutes in. When the second act ended, I looked down and noticed that it was almost exactly 30 minutes later. When I started to feel the movie coming in for a landing, it quickly started the work of tying up all the individual storylines.
Doneger said something to me after the screening that I think illustrates even more clearly how challenging that was for this project. He explained that, compared to a similar film about football or basketball, a lacrosse documentary requires so much upfront exposition that another sport could assume its audience already knows. That’s another reason why I am not a qualified critic of Fate of a Sport: I’m a lacrosse junkie who really can’t be bored by that type of exposition. In this case, I really enjoyed it and thought it flowed nicely.
One aspect of the project that ties together the “passage of time” and “my too-closeness” — themes that I’ve touched on a few times already — when I sat to be interviewed for this film in the summer of 2019 (disclosure: I did not appear in the final cut), it was clear by the line of questioning that this was setting up to be a business movie about developing the infrastructure of the PLL and its initial fight vs. MLL. But the movie didn’t come out after year one, and as the cameras kept rolling, the unique experience of building PLL Island and, the following year, Paul‘s decision to retire from his active playing days, clearly needed to be in the film. As a result (and as producer Matt Tolmach told me is common with documentaries and one of the distinctions between documentaries he likes and ones he doesn’t), the movie that Doneger set out to make is far different from the movie he ended up completing.
The stated goal of this film is to create new fans of lacrosse; it is not necessarily to make new friends, and there will surely be some subjects who don’t appreciate how they’re depicted in the movie. Rabil is on steady footing in that area, though, because arguably no one is cast in as harsh of light as the story’s central figure is himself.
Prior to the screening, Rabil said that typically a documentary depicts the pinnacle of an athlete’s career, not the final three seasons, during which he spent one year, in his words “playing like shit.” But inarguably, little could be more compelling than the story of an athlete creating a disruptive competitor entity while still playing in the incumbent league. The real-life drama that is depicted in this film is why it has the potential to break through to new audiences, to create new fans and, as a creative work, be great.
After the screening, Rabil said to me, “This sport needs honest stories and, if we have to tell them ourselves, so be it.”
