The SMU one was pretty good for the reasons you state, but it could have been shorter. There were parts where they had six different people saying the same thing. It's especially tiresome when one of those people is Skip Bayless, but at least in this case he does know what he's talking about. Sort of.

I agree that its not a right to have big time football. In many cases, it's not even a good idea. SMU is probably a better school now than it was then. Good soccer program too.

Also, I was appalled at how unapologetic Dickerson is. He got a free trans am from Texas A&M and then SMU took over the payments. It's not a secret. He acts like a victim. And Craig James can kiss my ass.

It seems like a lot of the SMU people still think they're victims and the "everyone is doing it" defense is legit. It's not. However, it is clear that everyone in the the SWC was doing it.

And the show didn't point out that the main NCAA investigator guy is now Big XII commish and widely accused of being totally in the tank for Texas. So it's not like it's a straight good vs evil story. It's a story of the dumbest crooks being caught while the more clever ones slip out the back.

Also, that 82 SMU undefeated, but tied, team played a weak schedule. We would have beat them anyway. Our defense stopped Herschel Walker that year, among others, and Marcus Allen the year before. We could have stopped SMU. Georgia and Nebraska and Bama were better than them too. Texans tend to overrate the quality of the old SWC.

I thought Foresst Gregg had died. He looked 80 when he played. Now he looks like he's 200 but could still kick ass. What a great football name and what a great American face!

Forest Gregg looks a little like Harry Dean Stanton.

Agreed on Dickerson. He came off like a jerk in the movie.

I forgot to mention the part from the story done by the local TV news reporter when they had the envelope that the player alleged to have received a payment in, with an administrator's initials on the SMU envelope. He feigns confusion and swears that he would have had no reason to mail a player anything, then passes the envelope to the coach and the school president to see if they know what it is. That was a great moment.

I also liked the story of the player that illustrated just how everyone was buying off recruits. When SMU showed him a briefcase with $20,000 in it, he stared at it for a long time and then said "coach, that's not even close." He went to A&M.

I'm just catching up with these on ESPN Classic and had to search for a thread on here about Once Brothers.

The film is about the friendship of former Yugoslavian basketball team mates Vlade Divac (Serb) and Drazen Petrovic (Croat), and their eventual falling-out during the Yugoslavian conflict.

Despite knowing nothing about Basketball, this film had me blubbing like a baby. The storytelling is both powerful and moving as you would expect given the topic being covered.

If you haven't seen it yet, I would say it's one of the best of the 30.

It is difficult not to tear up when hearing any story about Drazen Petrovic.

For years I'd hear how people gave up Nascar after Earnhardt's death, and my Earnhardt was Petro. I never even watched a minute of the Jason Kidd years, and I'd go see Nets games back in the 17-win seasons.

What struck me in the film was that Divac came accross as genuinely devestated by the break up of their friendship whilst Petrovic and the other two Croats in the NBA, Toni Kukoc and Dino Rada, came accross a bit shitty in their treatment of Divac. Divac obviously wanted their friendships to continue and couldn't understand his former friends blanking him on and off the court.

The Croats walking off the podium of the Euros just as Yugoslavia/Serbia stepped on to it was something I'd never seen before and was incredible.

I know we're only talking about a 60 minute film ... about a group of basketball players ... and one made from a Serb point of view, but even with those caveats it made me question slightly the whole "Croatia = good / Serbia = bad" angle which has been fed to us by the Western media for the past 20 years.

What was the reaction towards Divac in the NBA and the US at the time?

The vast majority of NBA fans couldn't have told you which of the trio were Serb and which were Croat.

It was about as far from Ardiles having to go to PSG as you could get.

So none of the players suffered any adverse reaction during the conflict? Was the fall-out well knowm at the time?

I've never been a big NBA person, but I never heard of any fallout. Divac is a very personable and entertaining guy, as well as a decent player, and turned his propensity to "flop" (i.e., fall over so as to draw fouls on his opponents) into an art form.

He was somewhat of a media darling in LA and loved in Sacramento. I'm pretty sure the Kings retired his number.

Yes, they retired the number 21.
He also played for both Partizan and Crvena Zvezda which I didn't think happened!

Vlade is also popularly held to be the player who introduced flopping into the NBA. As he was foreign, the stereotype of foreign players is that they are prone to flopping, and some who criticize flopping point to it practiced by European and Southern American (Manu Ginobili) players who got it from soccer.

This American Life did a segment on flopping in the NBA and the popular theories about it in a recent episode.

Jorge, absolutely no fallout. Even when Serbs were seen boiling Bosnian babies, did anyone give a shit. Keep in mind it was all before the internet, on top of American ignorance.

People literally had no clue why Vlade and Petro would be angry at each other. And when Clinton launched the bombs, fans were more concerned if Vlade would play well.

Inca probably has memories of Vlade and Magic playing together, as Vlade was seen as the lovable "I love Amerika!" NBA version of Yakov Smirnoff.

At the Nets game, there would be a regular group flying Croatian flags in the upper deck, but everyone wondered what language they were chanting in, and why the fuck they liked checkers so much as to flying a checkerboard all the time.

The biggest heat that players ever got in the NBA, was Jason Kidd beating his wife and the treatment he'd get, and the fallout from Kobe's rape case. In other words, love/sex stuff.

The biggest fallout politically that I'm aware of in American sports was when Canadian fans or American fans boo the other's national anthems, or players with Texas license plates getting their windows smashed in after JFK's assassination.

I got to see Vlade kind of up-close--the Lakers did a practice game/"stay in school" type of thing for local schools in the early 90s, and we got to sit in the bottom section of the Forum. No Magic, but I did get to see James Worthy and Vlade.

The series (not surprisingly) has been too American for British taste, I think. I enjoyed the OJ one, the Miami University football one, and USFL one(immensely) and dipped into a few others. But unless you're an American sportshead, you can only watch so much "his transfer to New York seemed to galvanise the whole city" stuff.

It was a wonderful project though, and there's no chance at all of Sky making anything like it.

I watched Once Brothers today, I don't have a clue about NBA nor had I heard of either player, but it was a cracking documentary. Like Jorge, I couldn't prevent myself from shedding a tear near the end.

The Escobars documentary is on in 15 minutes, I'm hoping the other half will let me watch it but House of Secrets is on and she never misses House of Secrets!!!

The Escobars documentary was watchable, but not a patch on Once Brothers. I found the match highlights really irritating in the documentary, the way they'd splice reactions of the manager and players clearly from other games to make the game being focussed on seem more dramatic.

There were loads of unanswered questions and the focus should really have been on the Columbian national side rather than Andreas Escobar. He paid the ultimate price, but there was so much tragedy involving the whole team that it might've been better to focus on that. The situation with Higuita's imprisonment really wasn't investigated thouroughly enough. If the documentor is saying it was a stitch up, you reall should go further and get Higuita's side of the story, but as soon as he was imprisonned, they stopped him appearing as a talking head.

Finally, why on earth did Andreas Escobar go out that night. Then even when he decided to go out, why did he go to a nightclub that would be frequented by psychotic drug cartel bosses? There really was a need to try to explain that, it seemed far more than wrong place at the wrong time to me.

Were there any decent nightclubs in Medellin at that time that weren't frequented by psychotic drug cartel bosses?

It was the only game in town.