Dark Horse is pleased to share the news that Bill Russell: Legend has been named Sports Business Journal‘s Best Sports Documentary of the Year (2023).
From High Five Productions, the documentary chronicles the life of Bill Russell, the greatest champion in the history of American sports and a true Civil Rights icon. From the humblest of beginnings, Russell went on to lead each and every one of his basketball teams to Championships—notching two California State High School Championships, two back-to-back NCAA titles with the San Francisco Dons, a Gold Medal at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games, and 11 championship titles in his 13-year career as a Boston Celtic (his last two as the first Black Head Coach in NBA history, while still playing for the Celtics). Russell’s story is innately and uniquely intertwined with the 75-year history of the NBA, and the story of America’s last eight decades.
“No one had ever really done the investigative, definitive look at Bill Russell’s entire life,” said Ross Greenburg, who was an executive producer on the project along with Larry Gordon, Mike Richardson, and Charles Rosenzweig. “This was a very committed, special and forceful human being who was highly principled and set out to make his feelings known in the world of civil rights and social justice. He just lived his life uncommonly for a professional athlete.”
From Sports Business Journal:
At a time when sports documentaries are more prominent than ever, Bill Russell: Legend stood out for the way it found a deeper way to tell the life and times of a prominent subject while connecting that life and those times with the world we live in today. That is why it is the winner of SBJ’s Best Sports Documentary of the Year award.
The two-part film, which premiered in February in conjunction with Black History Month, paints a compelling, chronological narrative of Russell’s career and life. It is narrated by actors Jeffrey Wright and Corey Stoll and features interviews with Russell’s family and friends, as well as current and former NBA players, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, Steph Curry, Julius Erving, and Magic Johnson. Sam Pollard, the Oscar-nominated documentarian who directed the film, told SBJ in January that wrangling all the archival footage, stills and documents to tell the definitive Russell story was “a mammoth job” that proved to be the project’s biggest challenge.
See more details about the award here.
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