When the Tribune Company bought the Chicago Cubs in 1981, its executives saw nighttime baseball as a way to turn around the club’s fortunes. The only problem? Scores of Wrigleyville residents were ready to fight against it. This is the story of the decades-long wait to bring lights to Wrigley Field, and a battle pitting a giant media conglomerate against a scrappy neighborhood. Duration: 49mins
In the early 1990s, salesman Art Davie and Brazilian jiu-jitsu master Rorion Gracie set out to answer a simple question: Who is the ultimate fighter? A wrestler? A boxer? A martial arts master? The result, the first-ever ‘Ultimate Fighting Championship’ (UFC), was more violent, chaotic, and electrifying than anything else on TV. In the aftermath, a multi-billion-dollar sport was born. Duration: 53mins
On the night of the 2012 NBA All-Star Game, Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was shot and killed. Five weeks later, his hometown team the Miami Heat took a photo wearing hoodies to protest his killing. Hoodies Up tracks how the photo came together, and its impact on our current era of athlete activism..
Duration: 31mins
How does a professional boxer, convicted of armed robbery in 1975, end up rising in the ranks of the sport — from inside a state penitentiary? The Fighter Inside is the unlikely story of an inmate who wanted to continue his boxing career while behind bars, and the visionary prison warden who made his dream a reality.
Duration: 43mins
In 2012, poker star Phil Ivey pulled off an elaborate baccarat scheme that won him over $20 million and landed him in court. But Ivey had another card up his sleeve — a secretive mastermind named “Kelly” Cheung Yin Sun, who crafted the scheme to get revenge. A Queen of Sorts dives into the world of high stakes gambling, and what happens when a casino underestimates an Asian woman.
Duration: 46mins
Twenty years ago, hundreds of women answered a classified ad seeking intrepid adventurers for an all-women trek to the North Pole — no expedition experience necessary. On the ice, 20 of those women came face to face with just how deadly the Arctic can be, along with the supreme beauty of the top of our planet. They also discovered something in themselves that changed their lives forever.
Duration: 42mins
The story of how a chant and a shirt came to dominate one of baseball’s biggest rivalries, thanks to a group of hardcore punks from Boston. Starting in 1999, a group of kids infiltrated Fenway Park with one of the most popular bootleg t-shirts in sports history — a shirt that became the emblem of the moment the Red Sox and Yankees rivalry was turned on its head. This piece was inspired by the Grantland article “Yankees Suck! Yankees Suck!” written by Amos Barshad.
Duration: 49mins
The 1992 Olympic Summer Games in Barcelona produced a great many heroes, but in the months leading up to the Games, television viewers were led to believe that they were all about decathletes Dan O’Brien and Dave Johnson — who were competing not only for the United States but for Reebok, as well. The ad campaign cost some $25 million and made them stars. 25 years later, we revisit the hype, how the campaign went bust — and Dan O’Brien’s path to redemption.
Duration: 52mins
