Catching Hell Review
By: T.J. “the wheels fell off” Mulligan
Fandemonium can drive people to crazy lengths. Music fans will spend days on end standing out in inclement weather just to hear a band play at a festival, Twilight fans have permanently marked their bodies with tattoos honoring their favorite characters, hell, even film fans across the country continue to frequently give up their Saturday nights to arrive at a theater at midnight, decked out in drag and ready to dance and sing to every part in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Calling this level of devotion an obsession might not be too much or a stretch, but nonetheless these fans soldier on, continuing to go the extra mile for what they adore. Of all of these types of groups, perhaps sports fans are the most rabid. If you see a sports fan at the bar, donning the jersey of his favorite team, and you strike up a conversation with him, you’ll probably find him to be a regular, genuinely cordial individual. The second you bring up sports, though, you can see a totally different look in his eye. Talk well of the team he slavishly supports and he’ll be your new best friend (it might even land you a couple of free drinks, even), but talk ill of their team or, worse, show your support for a rival team and you run the risk of incurring their wrath. Just as some music fans won’t wait around getting soggy to hear the music they like, some Twilight fans won’t mutilate their bodies, and some film fans wouldn’t be caught dead in drag or even out at midnight, so, too, it stands to reason that not all sports fans are outlandish brutes like the ones highlighted in Alex Gibney’s Catching Hell. The ones who displace blame for “their” team’s shortcomings or handle losses so bad that they take it out on others.
Catching Hell is a look at the darker side of sports fandom, namely surrounding the events of game 6 of the 2003 NLCS playoffs between the Florida Marlins and the Chicago Cubs. On that night, a Cubs fan named Steve Bartman was sitting in the stands at Wrigley Field when a ball was hit into his direction. Bartman’s attempt to retrieve the ball impeded the Cubs’ Moises Alou from making a game-winning out that would have sent the Cubs to that year’s World Series. The subsequent reaction of the Chicago fans, the event’s relation to other similar situations in sports history, the theory of the “scapegoat,” the relation of sports and superstitions and how significant Bartman is in all of these are explored.
I have to preface my take by saying that, while I am a sports fan (hopefully not to the degree of some of those spotlighted in this documentary), I am not a baseball fan in the least. Baseball is the absolute most boring sport, nye insufferable outside of people watching at the ballpark. That being said I thoroughly enjoyed this doc. What Gibney, an Academy Award winning documentarian, gives us here is an often scathing look at the lack of seperation some people have between the game and real life. This is a documentary about people and the extremes to which they will go in staunch defense of something they are inexplicably connected to. Sure it’s about a sport and that might automatically turn some people off, but it is more so a very poignant look at human behavior with a sports backbone.
This is an ESPN Films production and is scheduled to run as part of their “30 for 30” series. I’ve watched a couple of the films in this series when it ran last and they have all been fantastic, taking the audience beyond the world of the field or the rink or the diamond or the court. As great as these have been, this one tops all of the others I’ve seen thus far. In my opinion this film should be required viewing before ever attending your first live sporting event as an adult. Maybe if more fans grasped the message delivered by this doc we wouldn’t need stadium crisis hotlines and the next Steve Bartman can be spared a little dignity. A fan can dream, right?
I give Catching Hell 4 iconic attempted ball grabs out of 5.
