The documentary focuses on what built Sorenstam the champion, but also on how she was received by her peers.
There’s a moment early on in the new “Becoming ANNIKA” documentary when a young girl approaches the legend at a clinic and asks if she has any advice for competing against boys.
Sorenstam bent down to eye level and said, “Yes, you know you can beat them, right? You know that. Beat them. Be tough.”
Perhaps one day that youngster will grow to fully appreciate the beauty of that exchange. The new film, produced by NBC Sports in conjunction with the USGA, premieres on May 10 at 9 p.m. ET on Golf Channel.
Academy Award-winning actress Hilary Swank narrates and World Golf Hall of Famers Laura Davies, Juli Inkster and Nancy Lopez offer insight along with two-time major winner Dottie Pepper, former caddie Terry McNamara, USGA CEO Mike Whan and longtime journalist Ron Sirak, who covered Sorenstam’s LPGA career more thoroughly than anyone.
And, of course, Sorenstam’s family: doting husband Mike McGee, her parents Tom and Gunilla, children Will and Ava, and sister Charlotta all help tell the story of the 10-time major winner.
Mike McGee and Annika Sorenstam as seen during the Becoming Annika Premier at Sunrise Theater in the Southern Pines, N.C. on Tuesday, April 26, 2022. (Copyright USGA/Jason E. Miczek)
“Watching a movie about yourself, it’s a bit surreal,” said Sorenstam, who viewed the film for the time alongside her husband at the Sunrise Theater in Southern Pines, North Carolina, last month during media day for the U.S. Women’s Open.
“It’s interesting to hear other people’s perspectives. Of course, I’ve spoken with my caddie many times and with my kids all the time, but for them to speak when I’m not there, the film just captures it all beautifully.”
Emmy Award-winning director Adrienne Gallagher began production of the film at the 2021 U.S. Senior Women’s Open, won by Sorenstam. In January, the crew went to Sweden for 10 days to film where Sorenstam got started in the game and better understand the culture that shaped her.
The documentary focuses on what built Sorenstam the champion, of course, but also on how she was received by her peers.
“When you are winning a lot,” said Lopez, “it’s a shame that the players don’t think that’s really a good thing. I think women are tough on other women sometimes.”
Sorenstam acknowledged that she knew there was a lot of chatter in the locker room, a lot of whispers behind her back. Charlotta chalked it up to jealousy.
“This is kind of a harsh thing to say, but you don’t become taller by chopping someone else’s head off,” Sorenstam said in the film. “I honestly told myself I’m not here to make the most friends, I’m here to make the most out of my career.”
Adrienne Gallagher, Staci Green as seen during the Becoming Annika Premier at Sunrise Theater in the Southern Pines, N.C. on Tuesday, April 26, 2022. (Copyright USGA/Jason E. Miczek)
Gallagher worked with an all-female production crew for the film and believes it made a difference in the way Sorenstam opened up about her divorce to David Esch.
“Dreams can be expensive,” said Gallagher. “The idea that she was achieving so much in her professional life and yet there was some profound emptiness.”
One of the most impactful sections of the film centers around Sorenstam’s son Will, who was born premature at 27 weeks. Will’s enthusiasm for his mom and the game is a big reason why the 51-year-old decided to compete in this year’s U.S. Women’s Open at Pine Needles.
“Becoming ANNIKA” will also be shown on NBC on Sunday, June 5, ahead of final round coverage of the U.S. Women’s Open.
This is the “Two-A-Days” follow-up we’ve all been waiting for.
Editor’s note: Spoilers ahead.
At the end of Episode 4 of the new Netflix series Titletown High, out today, the head football coach at Valdosta High School calls his quarterback into a meeting. The player’s mother enters the room seconds later.
The Wildcats have won two games in a row without giving up a point to move to 3-3 on the season. A string of wins, the coach knows, will be enough to push the team into the playoffs — maybe even with home-field advantage.
“Now we know going forward where you are,” the coach begins. “You’re the guy that’s either going to lead us (to) being successful or not being successful. You know, I think you’ve persevered through some things, and I think that’s a good thing.
“What I’m here to talk to you about, and why I wanted your mama to hear this, is that I am concerned, with the type of kid you are, with this girlfriend situation. And, mom, it’s not a good situation.
“You cannot be my quarterback and continue down this path.”
The episode ends with the quarterback staring blankly.
Courtesy of Netflix
It is unclear whether Amari Jones, the charismatic and quickly maturing junior, knows how bizarre this conversation really is. The head coach speaking to him is Rush Propst, who rose to fame while leading Hoover High and appearing on the MTV hit Two-A-Days 15 years ago.
Propst would leave that job, and the dynasty he built, amid the revelation that he **had an entire second family.** (He was also accused of having an affair with an administrator who was involved in changing players’ grades; he’s denied that.)
Maybe Propst has learned from experience that relationships can be a distraction. Or maybe it’s just old-school football-man manipulation. You can’t ever really tell, which is how it generally goes with Propst, who manages to be both remarkably direct while forever appearing to have a secret he might but probably will not share.
At heart, Titletown High is in so many ways a follow-up to Two-A-Days. It gives executive producer Jason Sciavicco a chance to revisit the project that propelled his career at age 24 and made Propst the most famous high school coach in the country. Here, 15 years later, is a study in how time changed it all: reality television, high school kids, a cantankerous football coach.
Whether it can replicate the success — Two-A-Days was at one point MTV’s most popular show and helped spawn a wave of embedded-with-the-team documentary series — is impossible to guess. The formula feels well-worn at this point (Netflix has had Last Chance Useasons in previous summers) and it’s hardly novel to have high school kids express themselves on video; they’re filming themselves a lot of the time, anyway.
Courtesy of Netflix
But if you give the show a chance — just get past the initial wave of remembering how cloying it can be to be in high school — you’ll find a warm, big-hearted look at growing up today. And of playing football in yet another place where football matters too much to the adults who generally manage to cause most of the problems.
Sciavicco, who would go on to produce a searing look at youth football called Friday Night Tykes and then embed for seasons with Notre Dame and Florida State, always had the idea of catching up with Propst in the back of his mind. Then Propst landed at the winningest high school program in the country.
“Seemed like the right time,” Sciavicco says.
The Wildcats have won 24 Georgia state titles but only one this century and while all the pressure of being a dominant program exists in town, the elements that actually make up such a program are, according to Propst, lacking. He puts the team through a fevered preseason — he runs his offenses at breakneck pace — while simultaneously telling his players outright that 1) the program is broken and 2) nevertheless, their goal should be a state title.
Titletown High is ultimately a show about the kids, though. One of them, quarterback Jake Garcia, is the quintessential grown-up-too-fast elite athlete: A USC-commit (who ultimately signed with Miami), he has moved to town because California canceled football due to Covid-19. He’s eventually ruled ineligible and leaves the team.
Grayson Leavy, meanwhile, is a sophomore defensive end who vacillates between two girls … but also between profound realizations and ridiculous justifications as he figures himself out.
Courtesy of Netflix
Jones’ mother encourages him to focus on football and school and not date, yet he can’t resist Morgan Miller, a fiercely passionate classmate determined to draw him out from the shelter of books and the huddle.
Sciavicco gives us an immersive look at life for the students as the coronavirus pandemic swirls. They live so much of it on their phones, a source of frustration for Propst. “The thing they’ve lost is that ability to be one-on-one, that personal interaction, because they don’t have to do it,” he tells me. “You sit down with them, and you have to dig things out of them.”
Yet they hardly shy from having intimate conversations in front of the camera. “They’re remarkably open, and they adjust to it so quickly,” Sciavicco says.
Propst remains an anti-Ted Lasso character. Sure, he wears a visor, deploys a disarming Southern drawl and can — will — talk to anyone. He’s more slight now — he was bed-ridden and had suicidal thoughts while fighting cancer a few years after leaving Hoover — and his hair has gone white. He looks less bombastic, more grandfatherly, and, though he tells me that he regrets how brash and surly he seemed in Two-A-Days, he is much the same coach on film now, constantly belittling and challenging his players in hopes that they will rise to his challenges.
They mostly do, as they usually have for him, and Valdosta appears to be on the cusp of regaining its rightful place in Georgia high school football. Among many of his players, Propst is a revered figure; they gather at his house to eat and study, and he speaks proudly of the players headed to college on scholarship.
Now Propst is out of football again, and Valdosta is, for the first time in the school’s history, ineligible for the playoffs. Propst has moved back to Alabama, not far from where he was raised, and is focused on being a dad.
“I’ve spent so much time raising up other kids,” he says, “that maybe my kids have been cheated a little bit.”
He reckons he’ll coach again someday, and says that the whole story about what happened at Valdosta will come out eventually. “It has always taken time for the truth to come out,” he says.
The truth about his other family at Hoover is this: He eventually divorced his first wife, Tammy, to marry his girlfriend Stefnie. She’s the other woman present for the meeting where Amari is told he needs to breakup with Morgan.
They have three kids, all born while Propst was at Hoover and hiding his relationship; the oldest is a junior in high school. A wide receiver, like his dad was. In one scene of Titletown High’s last episode, Propst has to tell them that his world, and therefore theirs, has been upended by scandal again. Sciavicco has made a career out of filming raw moments like this and even he felt like he was intruding on that moment.
I ask Propst why controversy has followed him, and he says it’s a mix of his success, his personality and his mistakes. He talks about learning from the past, about having Sciavicco film almost every second of his life and condense it into a cohesive, coherent narrative. He hasn’t seen Titletown High yet. He’s anxious to know what others will think. He’s anxious to know what he will think.
“Jason knows me better than I do,” he says. “But I remember a time, at Hoover, when we’d been to four state title games in a row, won three of four, and we’re on the bus back and, no lie, we had a staff meeting before we even went out to celebrate. We had to plan what to do next.
“I don’t think that’s who I am now. But, that monster’s still flourishing at Hoover, so, I don’t know.”
There’s something about rehashing media-saturated events — like Tiger Woods’ 10-month stretch that netted all four of golf’s majors — that always has me assuming I’ll be as disappointed as the first listen on a “new” Beatles song that’s just been unearthed.
There’s typically a reason why the highlights deserved to be the highlights.
And while there’s not a ton of new ground broken in “Tiger Slam,” the Golf Channel documentary hoping to capitalize on the audience of Sunday’s “The Match II,” it’s great theater presented with a new and modern twist. The film will premiere on Sunday at 8 p.m. ET on Golf Channel.
Maybe it’s the charisma that Emmy Award-winning actor Michael Kenneth Williams (The Wire, Boardwalk Empire) brings through narration. Maybe it’s the pace, which doesn’t feel like a typical golf documentary.
Or maybe it’s a few zingers you weren’t expecting.
Like one in which longtime swing coach Butch Harmon talks about how Woods called and said he’d finally had that magical light bulb go off, this after a long stretch of tinkering. Woods was already a wunderkind. He wanted to be a legend.
And after calling to tell Harmon he’d felt something fall perfectly into place, the two joined with a few others to play a round near Harmon’s school in Las Vegas.
Despite difficult conditions, Woods shot a 64 and showed the form that Harmon knew would mean a transformation of the golf world. This came with a huge tournament looming in Pebble Beach.
“Quite frankly,” Harmon said, “we all rushed to the casinos to bet on Tiger Woods to win the U.S. Open.
“It was a profitable week. Let’s put it that way.”
Sure, it’s a story that’s been told before, but it adds to the intrigue and drama of the film, and reminds how even when things were seemingly perfect, Tiger and his team avoided landmines along the way. The backstory with Bob May is well-known, too, but still fun to reminisce on.
All told, the slick, impressive film is certainly worth your time, and even though much of the tune is one you likely already know, it’s told in such impressive fashion that you certainly won’t mind humming along.
These stories are ripe with interest for Michigan State football and basketball documentaries.
On Sunday night ESPN debuted the first two parts of The Last Dance, a ten-part documentary series on the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls. It was a great two hours of television, with a ton of in-depth stories building the foundation of the story of what was the end of one of sports’ greatest dynasties.
That got me to thinking: What Michigan State sports documentaries would I want to see?
What may be the obvious answers for a MSU fan, aren’t the ones I thought of first. For example, I don’t particularly want to see a Flintstones documentary, or a documentary on the 2013 football team. There’s certainly interesting things there, but those stories have been pretty well documented. The best documentaries are revealing in nature and often have to do with some sort of scandal or trouble. Add in that conflict to something like a giant corporation or megs sports franchise and “viola” you’ve got a pretty interesting documentary. So the Flintstones are out. MSU football 2013-2015 is out. Magic Johnson’s career is mostly out, but there could be something interesting there digging into the status of college sports at the time and how the 1979 NCAA Tournament shifted basketball both on the court and off. But Magic vs. Bird is a pretty well-mined pit.
What follows is a list of MSU-related sports documentaries that I would absolutely love to see. They aren’t in any particular order, really, with the exception of the first one. You’ll see why.
You don’t have to be a Patriots fan to know what a workhorse Julian Edelman is whether it be training or on the field, stream this now.
With most of America working from home due to what we’re going through as a country right now, we want to provide you with options to stay up to date with sports content that we believe is worth watching.
You don’t have to be a Patriots fan to know what a workhorse Julian Edelman is whether it be training or on the field, Edelman is always going at 100 percent with his craft.
Narrated by some of the best including Tom Brady, Snoop Dogg, and Michael Rapaport they look back on a young Julian Edelman through his childhood and his sometimes tumultuous relationship with his Dad. Being a 5’10 receiver was always tough and needed hard work if he was going to make it to the NFL. This is more about hard work, determination, and never giving up than it is about Julian Edelman.
This documentary follows Jules as he goes through injury and his four-game suspension in 2018, it shows you the work that he puts in every day to get back to his old self while going through these trials and tribulations of injury and suspension.
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