The League from Magnolia Pictures, a Radical Media Production, celebrates the dynamic journey of the triumphs and challenges of Negro Leagues baseball through the first half of the twentieth century. The documentary, hitting theaters July 7, is told through previously unearthed archival footage and never-before-seen interviews.
The League is directed by Emmy and Peabody award winner and Academy Award nominee Sam Pollard and the powerful film was an "Official Selection" at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival.
Pollard, who was born in Harlem, joined SportsJam with Doug Doyle to talk about The League, his love of baseball and jazz.
Pollard also provides the “voice” for the late Negro League’s umpire, author and U.S.. Marine Bob Motley, Motley, the last living Negro Leagues umpire, died in 2017 at the age of 94. Pollard garnered Motley's thoughts from his collections of books. The multi-talented director talked about why he thought this was a unique way of telling the Negro Leagues story.
"When you're making a documentary, you're always trying to come up with a new angle to enliven the story and engage the audience. Now we could have just had the story of the Negro Leagues, but we felt and Byron Motley (Bob's son) also thought this very clearly that to tell the story from the perspective of his dad would give it a different angle. It would make it more personal. One of the things I'm always trying to do is how to make these historical stories more personal, to make them more engaging. As we went through Bob's book, we felt there was moments and pieces that gave you a sense of American history, gave you a sense the history of what it meant to be a black man fighting in a war (WWII) across the ocean, when you had to come back to a segregated community, gave you a sense of what he had to deal with. It also gave you a sense of what he had to deal with when he became an umpire and the challenges he faced."
The doc points out the significant role that Rube Foster, a pitcher, pioneering manager and executive, had. In 1920, Foster set the wheels in motion to create the Negro National League, an association of Black teams modeled after Major League Baseball. Pollard felt it was important to highlight the mostly untold story the "father of Black baseball" and a man who was way ahead of his time.
"He had what I call a larger view. He just didn't focus on being a pitcher. He wanted to become more, he became a manager. He became an owner and he said I need to be more than an owner. He wanted to bring other Negro League owners to form my own league. He was hoping that Major League Baseball would see all these great players and use the Negro Leagues as a way to pull those players in to the Major Leagues, which happened 20 years after his death, but that was his dream. He was really special and I'm glad we've presented him in a way that people can say 'wow, we knew about Satchel, we knew about Josh (Gibson), but if it wasn't for Rube Foster, there wouldn't have been a Negro National League."
Pollard, a huge baseball fan since his dad enjoyed watching the St. Louis Cardinals with him, says he didn't know much about the background on Effa Manley, the co-owner of the Newark Eagles. Effa and her husband Abe were able to keep many of the great ball players like Monte Irvin, Larry Doby, Max Manning, Don Newcombe and Leon Day happy during their time with the team. She also was an advocate for the hiring of African American salesclerks at Blumstein's Department Store in Harlem.
"This was like a revelation for me, Doug. When my story producer started to dig into her story and how she dealt with the owners of Blumstein's. How she challenged Branch Rickey. This (Effa Manley's life) would be a great dramatic story."
Effa Manley, also a Hall of Famer, was upset that Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey didn't reimburse her team when he gave contracts to the to players of the Eagles at the time. The Eagles won the Negro League World Series in 1946.
Pollard's film does a masterful job of weaving Black baseball as an economic and social pillar of Black communities and the unintended consequences of integration. Providing a historical perspective is one of the director's specialties.
"The thing that I've always loved about making historical docs is that it gives you the opportunity to see the shades of grey. It wasn't simply that Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson and voilà, everything was better, no, there were consequences to Jackie's signing, to Monte Irvin's signing, to Don Newcombe's signing, Roy Campanella's signing because all those major players had an impact on those Negro League teams and their teams ended up dying on the vine by 1960. So this was part of the story we wanted to tell."
Through historians and authors like Dr. Lawrence Hogan, Andrea Williams, Larry Lester and many others like Bob Kendrick, the President of the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City, The League also sheds light on other great executives in Black baseeball like Cum Posey and Gus Greenlee, as well as great teams like the Homestead Grays, the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Kansas City Monarchs.
The League's producers are Robin Espinola, Dave Sirulnick, Jen Isaacson and Byron Motley. Executive producers include Jon Kamen, Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban, Haley Jones, Eamonn Bowles, Dori Begley, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Shawn Gee, Tariq Trotter, Zarah Zohlman, Jeffrey Lurie, Marie Therese Guirgis, Josh Green and Nina Dobrev.
Being a jazz fan, Sam Pollard made sure the music in the film reflected the close connection between baseball players and musicians.
Pollard is also the co-director of the documentary Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes, which also thrilled audiences at the major film festivals earlier this year.
"We premiered at South By Southwest in February. It will be on the PBS series American Masters on October 6. It's been playing every place, over in Europe too. It's really another labor of love for me. I worked on the film for many years. With my co-director Ben Shapiro were were able to finally get it finished. It has great people in it like Randy Weston, Jimmy Heath, Tooty Heath, Sonny Rollins, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Abdullah Ibrahim. I'm a huge jazz fan. Max was somebody I spent a lot of time with 1987 to 1994 so I really got to know him."
In 1998, Pollard received an Academy Award nomination for 4 Little Girls with Spike Lee. In 2010, Pollard received an Emmy Award (Outstanding Picture Editing for Nonfiction Programming) for the film By the People: The Election of Barack Obama. In 2020, the International Documentary Association gave Pollard its first Career Achievement Award.
Sam's film MLK/FBI was named best documentary at the 2020 San Diego International Film Festival.
In 2021, Film at Lincoln Center put together a Tribute to Sam Pollard, featuring several of his documentaries, calling him one of "cinema’s most dedicated chroniclers of the Black experience in America."
You can SEE the entire SportsJam with Doug Doyle conversation with Sam Pollardhere.
