When daily sports pages, weekly sports magazines, and network, cable and pay-per-view game broadcasts and sports talk shows aren’t enough, home video provides a further sports fix. A new roster of highlights and documentary videos, each priced less than $20, are your season ticket to the best in sports, past, present and future. Let’s go to the tapes.
NFL Films, distributed through Polygram Video, has football fans covered from the “Official Team Video Yearbooks,” “NFL’s Greatest Moments” and “NFL Throwbacks,” available now, through the “Super Bowl XXXII” highlights tape scheduled for release next February.
Kicking off the new season is the Sept. 16 release of two of “The NFL’s Greatest Games,” the Green Bay Packers’ 1967 championship victory over Dallas in “The Ice Bowl,” and “Super Bowl III,” for which Joe Namath promised and delivered victory. Both are presented in their entirety for the first time since their original broadcasts.
Bears legend Walter Payton scores his own video with “Pure Payton,” a career retrospective in stores on Sept. 30.
Chicago baseball has given fans little to cheer about this year, but at least the White Sox are represented in Major League Baseball Home Video’s “Prime 9,” an all-star lineup of baseball’s best position players hosted by Ozzie Smith. Outfielder Albert Belle says more on this tape than he has to the press all season.
“Jackie Robinson: Breaking Barriers” commemorates the 50th anniversary of Robinson’s historic debut in the major leagues.
Robinson’s legacy lives on in golf phenomenon Tiger Woods. Not par for the highlights course is Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment’s “Tiger Woods: Son, Hero and Champion,” which charts Woods’ life and features such incredible footage as his appearance at the age of 2 on the “Mike Douglas Show” with an awestruck Bob Hope and James Stewart.
