As great as many of the documentaries in ESPN's 30 For 30 series have been, they often haven't succeeded in breaking out of the realm of sports fans and into the interest of general viewers. They're generally excellent as sports stories, but only the best of them have gone beyond that world and shown how events in the world of sports spill over into the larger world of American culture.
Tonight's installment, "One Night In Vegas" (directed by Reggie Rock Bythewood, writer of the Biggie Smalls biopic Notorious), would seem to be an ideal opportunity for just that sort of crossover story. It involves the events that occurred in Las Vegas 14 years ago today — Mike Tyson's WBA heavyweight championship bout against titleholder Bruce Seldon and Tupac Shakur's murder following the fight. As a sporting event, it was nothing special; Tyson's post-prison comeback starting in 1995 found him facing a lot of scrubs and cans, and while Seldon was a decent champion, he wasn't remotely one of the greats of his era. If anything, the fight gained fame not because of its splendid nature, but because Seldon folded so easily — even reeling from blows that completely failed to connect — that many fans assumed that the fix was in.
But as a cultural phenomenon, as one of those curious concatenations of circumstance where so many things from so many angles converge into something both unplanned and complex, it moved beyond notorious and into downright incredible. The friendship of Shakur and Tyson, two short-tempered young men who became incredibly famous on the strength of their street image and served time in jail when it became clear that the behavior that gained them fame was not acceptable in the glorified social milieu that fame won them; the way a sports story became a crime story, and the way they blended together in a musical genre noted for its brutality and criminal ties, and a sport infamous for its violence and mob influence; and the way the fight (assumed to be rigged) and the crime (the still-unsolved murder of one of the most famous men in the country) came together made the separate events into a unified and compelling story.
Bythewood starts the documentary out with a flashy virtuoso display, a spellbinding a capella pseudo-rap by Joshua Brandon Bennett and B. Yung accompanied by comic-book-style illustrations and captions. He keeps things lively through some historical context, largely avoiding the talking-heads issue by sticking with the slick Ang-Lee's-Hulk-style graphics, and limp moments like Michael Eric Dyson's pronouncements on the profundity of Tyson are compensated for by some great fight footage. (Which is also a good reminder of how absolutely punishing a fighter he was in his prime, an indisputable all-time great no matter how much he's pissed on his legacy since then.) A svelte Al Sharpton notes that it wasn't just the white bourgeoisie that hated the street-thug image of Tupac and Tyson; it was also the educated African-Americans of the civil rights generation, who felt that their heirs were squandering the hard-fought freedom they'd inherited and living up to the stereotype of the black man as a violent predator.