Sports documentaries offer an opportunity to see just how much race matters in America. In the past thirty years, there has been a significant rise in the production of sports documentaries as athletes have become world-wide celebrities. Within a number of these documentaries a specific narrative has arisen of the African American sports star as hero for impoverished black youth. Although stories of these stars have certainly made an impact on thousands of black boys and girls, they also promote damaging and outdated stereotypes about Black people. This presentation analyzes sports documentaries deploying this narrative in order to dissect their racial and ideological underpinnings. Scholarship on sports documentaries in general and the “out-of-the-hood" narrative in particular has remained an under researched area of critique. The aim of this research is to situate this type of documentary in its disciplinary and historical contexts.
