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Tuesday, 15 August 2006 01:06 |
John Dower and Paul Crowder's film exhaustively documents the rise and fall of the scrappy team that, thanks to the late Warner Communications honcho Steve Ross, briefly became the Yankees of the sport. Using a canny combination of archival footage and contemporary interviews with nearly all of the surviving figures involved -- Cosmos superstar Pele is a notable and highly unfortunate exception -- the film is as much morality tale as sports docu.
Cannily scored with vintage pop music of the period, the film details the team's humble beginnings on New York's decrepit Randall's Island, playing on a field littered with broken glass that literally had to be spray-painted green, to selling out 77,000 seats at the newly built Giants Stadium just a few years later.
This was of course be-cause of Ross' fervent passion for the sport and his high-spending ways that brought such superstars as Pele, Italy's Giorgio Chinaglia and Germany's Franz Beckenbauer to the team.
One amusing anecdote follows another in the compelling narrative, from player Shep Messing's decision to pose nude for a magazine spread to Henry Kissinger's persuading the leaders of Brazil to allow their national hero to play for a U.S. team.
As one interview subject astutely predicts, a "Rashomon"-like scenario develops as the various participants in the tale relate their highly differing viewpoints, with many pointing to Chinaglia's "malign influence" on Ross as the team became undone by various forces. The ultimate reason for its demise, however, emerges as far less sinister than mundane, namely the failure of the sport to catch on quickly with the American television audience.
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