Hacker Cinema
The Two Escobars
2010 · Film · documentary · 100 min
Directed by Michael Zimbalist, Jeff Zimbalist
Pablo Escobar was the richest, most powerful drug kingpin in the world, ruling the Medellin Cartel with an iron fist. Andres Escobar was the biggest soccer star in Colombia. The two were not related, but their fates were inextricably-and fatally-intertwined. Pablo's drug money had turned Andres' national team into South American champions, favored to win the 1994 World Cup in Los Angeles. It was there, in a game against the U.S., that Andres committed one of the most shocking mistakes in soccer history, scoring an "own goal" that eliminated his team from the competition and ultimately cost him his life. The Two Escobars is a riveting examination of the intersection of sports, crime, and politics.
4 positivefrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
The answer is simple once you understand that for thin-tailed distributions, the mean is way more important than population size for getting extreme results. In concrete terms, suppose that to win the olympics you need 5-sigma players (ones who are 5-standard-deviations better than the global average). Five-sigma players are extremely rare: a population of 100 million gets you about 25 to 30 of them. But now suppose you could bump up the quality of your soccer players until the average among them was raised just one standard deviation above the global mean. Now you only need a population of 1 million to generate the same number of five-sigma players. The end result: a tiny country of fanatics can compete against a huge country with tons of casual players, like the US.
You can "make" more fanatics under certain conditions. People respond to incentives, from the financial to the cultural to the brutal. I highly recommend the documentary The Two Escobars. It tells the story of famous drug lord Pablo, who used a portion of his fortune to bankroll soccer in Colombia, including the efforts of the national team. That national team included a defender named Andrés Escobar. In 1994, the soccer playing Escobar accidentally kicked in an own-goal during a critical FIFA World Cup match. He was murdered five days later, almost certainly by angry fans. That’s what a nation of hardcore soccer fanatics looks like.
If any of this is at all interesting to you, I'd recommend checking out the very excellent ESPN documentary "Broke": http://www.espn.com/30for30/film?page=broke
ESPN's 30 for 30 docs are really great, even if you're not particularly huge into sports. Broke is one of my favorites (after a "The Two Escobars"). It goes into a lot of detail about how ill-prepared many professional athletes are for the lifestyle, how they overestimate their net worth and their projected career duration, and digs into all of the different pitfalls new signees might face as they enter sport. It's easy to blow it off and say "whatever, they're all soft, tattooed millionaires anyway", but there's a lot of heartbreaking instances where people did the right thing and still ended up bankrupt.
Anyway, worth a viewing.
There's still some legitimately good content, both on the channels and in print, but you just have to wade through a mountain of keep-you-engaged filler content to find it. The 30 for 30 series had some really high quality, poignant documentary content that, more often than not, transcended sport to become a commentary on other walks of life. I especially liked "The Two Escobars" because it recontextualized an event from my childhood (the US victory over Colombia in the '94 World Cup) that I remembered very differently. And here's two articles [1][2] that, while long, I found very engaging reads. But I see your point that the constant bombardment of drivel you get on the channel and online could give the impression that there's nothing of value there.
[1] http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/10984370/portrait-serial-winner-luis-suarez-soccer-most-beautiful-player [2] http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12728744/how-golden-state-warriors-stephen-curry-became-nba-best-point-guard
I'm not a sports fan by any means but I've been enjoying many of the ESPN sports documentaries.
My favourites:
Muhammad and Larry
The Two Escobars
Into the Wind
Once Brothers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_for_30