The six-hour "Power Play," a look at American professional sports, includes everything from the Dallas Cowboys to Michael Jordan to Wayne Gretzky - to the Salt Lake Trap-pers.
Nicolas Kent, the documentary maker who brought us "Naked Hollywood," spent two years focusing his efforts on professional sports in America. And the Trappers figure prominently in the series' fourth hourlong installment."We were looking for an independent minor league baseball team to contrast with the majors," Kent said in a telephone interview from his home in England. "At that time, there were only two. And the Trappers seemed to be the most attractive one, partly because of the personalities of Van Schley and the people who owned the team. And, also, Derks Field was a very attractive location for us."
This particular segment contrasts the Trappers' Schley with Marge Schott of the Cincinnati Reds and Jerry Reinsdorf of the Chicago White Sox and Bulls. And Schley comes out with one of the series' tag lines:
"Baseball has to be the greatest game in the world to survive the idiots that have run it for the past 100 years," he says.
Kent, for his part, remembers Utah and the Trappers fondly.
"We went on a nine-hour bus ride with them overnight from Salt Lake City to Butte, Montana. It was one of the more interesting experiences," he said with a laugh. "Actually, some of the best fun I had was filming with the Trappers.
"There's an intimacy between the fans and the players that I guess has been lost in professional sports at the major-league level. As players are paid more and more, they've become untouch-able."
He compared it to how old-timers remember the major leagues 30 or 40 years ago.
"With the Trappers, it's great to see the intimacy between the community and the team. It's very real and it's very emotional," said Kent, who's well aware that the Trappers and Derks Field are gone. "It was kind of a Norman Rockwell world with the Trappers. It was a world that was destined for extinction."
As for big-time sports, Kent said he saw a number of parallels between that world and the world he exposed in "Naked Hollywood." As a matter of fact, it was during the filming of an L.A. Lakers game for "Naked Hollywood" that he was inspired to do "Power Play."
"It really sort of struck me that the seating plan at the Forum was like kind of a map of Hollywood power. The more powerful you were, the closer to courtside you sat," he said. "Right at courtside was Mike Ovitz and Kevin Costner and Barry Levinson and Mike Eisner and so on."
NBA Commissioner David Stern strengthened those parallels.
"He talked about how he modeled the NBA on Disney," Kent said. "He said, `Disney has Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and we have Michael Jordan and Shaquille O'Neal. Disney has its theme parks, and we have our stadia. Disney does merchandising; so do we.' "
But there are also great differences between show business and sports business.
"The funny thing about Hollywood is, no matter how successful you are, people there never seem to feel entirely secure," Kent said. "There's a tremendous air of paranoia in Hollywood, even among people who you'd think have no reason to feel paranoid. But somehow there's a sense that they didn't quite know why they've been successful, and they're never sure that their next movie is going to be as successful as their last one.
"Whereas in sports, people who make it in sports make it because they're talented and they know that. And they have a confidence in their ability. The difference is, in sports you can't fake it. It's real. So that makes people in some ways more interesting."
And made "Power Play" different from "Naked Hollywood."
" `Naked Hollywood" was a kind of dissection of a company town," Kent said. "The idea is that `Power Play' would be kind of a dissection of America through its obsession with sports.
"It's also about the American way of sports, and the way that it's kind of interwoven with the American way of life. To me, what was really interesting was the way that Americans express themselves and express their own identity and their sense of community and their sense of country through their relationship to sport."
Kent began his two-year project as a complete outsider to his subject. Not only is he British, but "when it all began, I'd never seen a game of American professional football or hockey or baseball in my life. So I was really starting from the basics," he said.
What he ended up with were the six segments in "Power Play," which are:
- "The Player: Be Like Mike" - a profile of Bulls superstar Michael Jordan in what proved to be his final NBA season, something Kent and his staff had no way of knowing at the time.
"Reading between the lines now, you can see the guy was starting to feel uncomfortable about the kind of media attention he was getting," Kent said. "But we never anticipated this was going to be his last season."
- "The Promoter: Welcome to the Sewer" - a look at the wheeling and dealing involved in boxing.
- "The Agent: The Big Pitch" - a profile of professional sports agents, in particular the flamboyant Norby Walters, who has been indicted for his dealings and may have Mafia connections.
- "The Owner: Home of the Brave" - the segment that features the Trappers also looks at how owners deal with a business that has seen its players unionize and salaries skyrocket.
- "The Coach: Fields of Blood" - started out to be a look at the decline and fall of the Dallas Cowboys and their former coach, Tom Landry, and took a rather different turn when it turned out Kent was filming them during a season in which they won the Super Bowl.
"When we decided to film the Dallas Cowboys, the people at PBS thought we were crazy because they said, `The Dallas Cowboys are history. You should concentrate on the Washington Redskins.' We had no idea the Cowboys were going to turn around like that. We were interested in the Cowboys because they had come from being winners to being losers."
This installment is also a look at the status of football in the state of Texas.
"You really get a sense there that football is like a fundamentalist religion and the coach is like a priest. And the coach of the Dallas Cowboys is like the high priest," said Kent, who added that when "Power Play" aired in Great Britain it was very well-received despite the fact that much of it was foreign to the audience.
"What they were reacting to was the characters and the stories," he said. "You don't need to know much about football to appreciate the rise and fall of Tom Landry. It's sort of like a Shakespearean tragedy in a way."
- "The League Boss: That's Entertainment" - which looks at the marketing strategies of the NBA and the NHL.
The one theme that runs through all six segments is how interwoven professional sports are with American life.
"In America, there are certain moments in the year - like the Super Bowl and the World Series - where it seems like the whole country is sort of in the grip of this mass obsession, irrespective of whether they're particular sports fans the rest of the year," Kent said. "It's part of what being an American is, to get wrapped up in that ritual."
And while "Power Play" does expose some of the less savory aspects of professional sports, this is no hatchet job.
"In some ways, the world of sport is one of the few venues where you can still see the American dream alive and kicking. Where it's still possible for a kid who's born into the ghetto with nothing to ascend to the very heights of society, in terms of fame and wealth and success, purely through his own God-given talents," Kent said.
"There's a darker side to that, too. You see a Michael Jordan, and he's the greatest player the game has ever seen. But he's no Albert Schweitzer, he's not Gandhi. He's not Martin Luther King. And yet he's got this profile that's greater than any of them. And you can't help feeling there's some sort of imbalance in society for that to happen."
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Additional Information
'Power Play' on KUED-Ch. 7
The six-part, six-hour "Power Pay" airs in two-hour installments over three nights--Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from 9-11 p.m. on KUED-Ch 7.
The segment that features the Salt Lake Trappers will air Tuesday at 10 p.m.