Stream It Or Skip It?
There’s no moment like it in professional sports. After a long, hard-fought best-of-seven series, it all comes down to one winner-take-all game. Game 7, a new six-episode documentary miniseries on Prime Video, looks at the phenomenon through the lens of a half-dozen of the most memorable Game Sevens in recent sports history.
GAME 7: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: The first episode deals with the 2003 American League Championship series between the then-long-suffering Boston Red Sox and the then-dominant New York Yankees, and so we’re treated to a montage of intense chatter preceding that series’ final game. Yankees fans swagger, confident in victory, and the ferocity of the rivalry is plain to see. As Yankees ace Roger Clemens puts it: “I gotta tell you, there’s nothing like a Game 7, because there’s no tomorrow. One team continues, and one goes home.”
The Gist: Each episode of Game 7 portrays a single different Game 7, pulling from baseball, basketball and hockey. They’re mini-documentaries, setting up the context of the game and the series that led up to it with archival footage and commentary. It’s fast-paced and as-it-happens, packaging it as more of a highlight reel than a sober recounting.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It’s hard to review any sports documentary without comparing it to a 30 For 30, and Game 7 compares to some of the faster-paced ones. There aren’t a lot of quiet, introspective moments here, and in that sense it’s probably closer to some of NFL Films’ highlight packages. (Ironically, as football’s the one major North American professional sport not represented here.)
Our Take: The Super Bowl might hold America’s heart, but there’s nothing that can compare to the intensity of a Game 7. Two exhausted teams have traded blows for a week or more, and now everything comes down to one final game, winner-take-all. It’s thrilling and terrifying and absolutely wonderful–so long as your team isn’t one of the two involved.
I’m a Cleveland sports fan, and there’s a handful of Game 7s that will be forever etched in my memory, for better and (mostly) for worse. Game 7 of the 1997 World Series, when the then-Indians came within two outs of clinching an elusive championship, only to see previously-dominant closer Jose Mesa blow the game. Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, when the similarly-suffering Chicago Cubs benefited from a lucky rain delay to overcome their demons and pass their curse off to Cleveland. And, in brighter terms, Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals, one of the greatest basketball games ever played, when the Cleveland Cavaliers completed a comeback from a three-games-to-one deficit against the historically-dominant Golden State Warriors.
I got sick just thinking about those games, and they were a hundred times worse in the moment.
Game 7 chooses to illustrate this point by showing rather than by telling. There aren’t sober commentaries on what Game Sevens mean, no Ken Burns-y navel-gazing or generalization. There’s just the games themselves, six in particular: the 2003 ALCS between the Red Sox and Yankees, the 1987 Stanley Cup Finals between the Edmonton Oilers and Philadelphia Flyers, the 2006 NBA Western Conference Semifinal between the Dallas Mavericks and San Antonio Spurs, the [eye twitches] aforementioned 2016 World Series, the 1994 Stanley Cup Finals between New York Rangers and Vancouver Canucks, and the 2024 Stanley Cup Finals between the Edmonton Oilers and Florida Panthers.
It’s a great selection of games, and if you’re a non-hockey fan questioning the fact that a full half of them are Stanley Cup Finals games, I quote sportswriter Jon Bois on the intensity of playoff hockey: “Why watch playoff hockey when you can simply snort cocaine and ride a motorcycle out of a helicopter?”
The first episode is devoted to that 2003 clash between the Yankees and Red Sox, a peak in the two northeastern baseball teams’ historic and ferocious rivalry–a moment when the Yankees were the Evil Empire and the Sox were still saddled with the Curse of the Bambino. They’d shake off that curse the following year with one of the great comebacks in sports history, but in 2003 the Yankees still had the swagger on their side. The episode sets up this context well, and brings in some of the key figures to reminisce over fast-paced, heavily-soundtracked highlights. There’s ace pitchers Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez, and then-Yankees third baseman (and current Yankees manager) Aaron Boone, whose (spoiler alert, I guess?) walkoff home run in Game 7 would send New York back to the World Series and earn Boone a profane nickname from Red Sox faithful.
That’s a series that I watched every pitch of at the time, and Game 7 does a capable job condensing the (often interminably-long, thank god we have a pitch clock now) games into an hour-long highlight reel. It’s a solid proof of concept, and provides enough background that I could go into the other, less-familiar Game 7s (I’m not a big hockey watcher) with confidence that they captured the essence.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Boone didn’t start Game 7, but he entered the game late as a pitch-runner, a fateful lineup shift that would find him at the plate with a chance to make history. He reflects on his experience coming to the Yankees that year, and facing the intense spotlight of playing in New York. “It can be a challenging place to play, and those pinstripes do get heavy sometimes.” He leads off the bottom of the 11th inning against Boston knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, a pitcher who he’s struggled against in the past. It’s his first at-bat of the game, in his first year playing in the postseason. He swings–and deposits one into the left-field stands, sending the Yankees to the World Series yet again. “It’s a moment I told myself to drink this all in,” Boone recalls. “A childhood dream, realized and fulfilled.” Red Sox players reflect on the sting of that moment, still present after all these years. “Aaron F**king Boone,” Johnny Damon recalls. “It hurts to this day. We had a bond. We win and we lose together. Yeah, it was a tough one.”
We see Boston fans bereft, and the Yankees exultant. Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman smiles, and notes with a hint of ironic foreshadowing (considering what happened the following year): “To come out victorious and win the war… there’s no way they’re going to be coming back from this.”
Sleeper Star: It’s hard to call one of the greatest pitchers of all time a “sleeper”, but Roger Clemens’ presence carries the first episode–he’s still got the fiery attitude that made him dominant on the mound, and he clearly still relishes sticking it to the Red Sox more than twenty years after the fact. It’s not a one-sided argument, though, as Pedro Martinez delivers the same fire from the Boston side of the trenches.
Most Pilot-y Line: “You can feel their emotions, you can feel the intensity they have,” Roger Clemens recalls. “It was fantastic. You’ve seen these guys so many times, and more importantly–they saw me four or five days ago. And now here we are, Game Seven, with everything on the line.”
Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s nothing like a Game Seven, and Game 7 does a great job channeling the energy of sports’ most exciting moments into a tidy package.
Scott Hines, publisher of the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter, is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky.
