In The Company of Kings

In the Company of Kings is a documentary film about prize fighting which attempts to connect to larger socioeconomic issues but which is too much concerned with breadth and not enough with depth, dabbling across the professional biographies of boxing legends. Frequent narration sometimes feels under-explanatory because it fixates on one man’s memory of his childhood connection to giants of the fight game. This would feel more meaningful if the audience were given more reason to feel connected to that narrator. The anecdotes of the fighters themselves connect to a general narrative about escaping the deprivation of poverty, but most of their stories are compressed as notes within the story of a couple of greats – the promoter Don King and the boxer Muhammad Ali – making the subjects feel like footnotes to an off-camera story that has a lot of holes in it. This leads to the film feeling unfocused despite that it features legendary athletes. It feels like it stops short of asking certain questions and telling certain stories, but the narrative of legends certainly doesn’t make the sport seem easy.

The film is narrated and produced by Robert Douglas, a Liverpudian Black British filmmaker who felt a connection to African American prizefighters, seeing their greatness as a sign of childhood hope while suffering from discrimination in school and racial violence in white neighborhoods adjacent to his own. He tells the story of coming to the U.S., simultaneously shocked by and finding familiarity in the toughness of North Philadelphia. The documentary uses a lot of urban blight stock footage but intermixes it with signs of hope in the form of children smiling and playing, as well as staged filming of young boxers training.

We meet Tyhler Williams, an up-and-coming fighter in Philadelphia using social media to grow his brand, and Rock Ministry, Buddy Osborne’s faith-based fighting ministry (boxing, grappling, homework club) of which Williams is part. It is exemplary, in fact, of a recurring theme throughout the film (intentional or otherwise) of older white men helping out young black guys in poverty, in contrast with the interlocking systems of white supremacy and capitalism oppressing these young black men in their everyday life. We see this again when we meet former heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins and he tells the story of going from an ex-con roofer to training with the man he did roofs for. One of the most telling sequences in this whole section is that we see the police try to frame up Tyhler Williams while he’s walking home from the gym. “The helicopter saw you pulling on the door,” lies a police officer among many searching for some unknown suspect. “The helicopter didn’t see *me* pulling on the door,” he responds, continuing to walk and livestream. It is one of many moments throughout the documentary that feels like it needs more space to breathe on its own; are we so inured to casual police corruption that it’s not even worth commenting on?

Anyway, we next focus on Bernard Hopkins, who tells the story of coming out of the gutter and the jail cell, going from strong-arm robbery to heavyweight champion. Interestingly, a major focus is his return to his childhood projects. People are happy to see him and he’s happy to see them, and it isn’t long before he discusses the need for the community to manage the aesthetics of the space – mow the lawn and so forth. It’s a tone I always find interesting because I believe simultaneously that it’s good to have pride in your home and that the strangling of communities is not the fault of the communities. It is the fault of people in power. Maybe it stands to reason that you can be taken more seriously in your appeals for assistance if it looks like you are trying to help yourself, but I get jumpy about “bootstraps” mentalities. Nonetheless, the film tells us some of Bernard Hopkins’s story and he’s remarkably candid.

We meet Don King’s stepson Carl, a fight promoter who is incredibly nostalgic about the decade between 1987 and 1997, when they basically ran Las Vegas, in his telling. There is just so much that goes unsaid – what are the implications for running a city like that, who are you connected to, what do you mean? Something I always find funny about the self-regard of anyone that finds financial success and has greater social access to rarefied spaces because of it is the way there are overlapping jurisdictions, so to speak. There’s a crew that runs a corner, and an organization they get their supply from; there’s a police precinct captain, a state assemblyperson, and a U.S. congressperson all in the same district. From whence is authority drawn and how is it deployed? Who gave Don and Carl run of the town? How does Carl King remember the Tupac shooting?

Perhaps that’s all immaterial. Carl’s biographizing of his father Don, a Cleveland numbers runner who took business and philosophy classes while incarcerated, is informative. What it’s lacking is a further exploration of how Don operated as a promoter. We are made to understand how he worked as a negotiator: demand something outrageous and then eventually come to the “middle” for what ends up being a sweetheart deal all in his favor. We don’t learn much about his relationships with fighters, just that he promoted some of the greats.

We visit Muhammad Ali’s childhood home of Louisville, Kentucky, and learn a bit about his rise to greatness and a bit about his association with the Nation of Islam, fighting in the ring for the respect of the Black Man. The most insightful part of this section might be introducing his white and black childhood friends who helped him get into boxing. It might have been interesting, in fact, instead of just mentioning that Ali had a white grandparent and was named Cassius Clay after a white slaveowner-turned-abolitionist, to articulate how that might have informed his conversion to a Black Nationalist political religion. But anyway, we learn about his training camp in Deerlake, PA, cultivating fighters in the woods away from the temptations of the street, and his fraught relationship with former sparring partner-turned-boxing rival Larry Holmes.

The last subject the documentary comments on is how quickly fighters lose their money. Most stay too long because of poor financial management practices, in addition to lacking a pension or social security. This reminds me of a thought I had years and years ago, seeing how frequently professional athletes in the unionized major leagues like the NBA and NFL also end up penniless. Sports are seen as a gateway out of poverty, an example of the American Dream for oppressed classes, with stars as figures to point to about how you actually *do* have options, even if the state refuses to fund your schools or local social services. Then, billionaires pay these men millions (more frequently tens and hundreds of thousands, but the star money is big money) which, by way of their investments and ownership stakes in other companies and industries, comes back to them anyway. Sports are wonderful – human athletic competition is a beautiful thing – and its professionalization has undoubtedly created opportunities for thousands. At the same time, it is a useful release valve for the ruling class because myriad athletes born in poverty do not have a developed politic or any extensive knowledge of financial planning.[1] Earlier in the documentary, scholar Rudy Mondragón discusses how boxing was always something the underclass did, referencing Irish and Italian immigrants and their descendants before it became our turn. I mention it here because it seems like black people have been stuck as the underclass for around a century, [2] as the establishment success of some high achievers does not turn into alleviating structural social ills for the masses.[3]

Strangely, in this section we see some evidence of the mental degradation that comes with a lifetime of head injuries, but the film strangely avoids discussing the topic of a fighter’s body breaking down as such, except for within the context of interviewing Larry Holmes about fighting Ali. There’s certainly no discussion of CTE or other consequences of concussions. It just feels odd – a documentary about the hard work it takes to be a fighter skirts around the long-term sacrifices; maybe, like police casually trying to throw an innocent person in jail, this is something that no longer registers. Maybe Douglas and director Steve Read wanted to avoid that particular sad fact of boxing.

It is unclear from the documentary who Robert Douglas is and why we should care. We understand that Douglas is a fan of boxing and that he emotionally connected to the champions, but the film has a disjointed nature to it because it feels like a scattershot survey of the sport that evades any technical aspects for personal stories,[4] and it doesn’t feel like Douglas gets to connect verbally one-on-one with the fighters except at the end. In the Company of Kings strings together several different theses and two major biographies alongside several minor biographies. All manner of heavyweight champions are discussed and interviewed, although, strangely, Iron Mike Tyson is only briefly mentioned and never interviewed. This is not a film from which you will come away with a deep understanding of the sport of boxing, though you will have confirmed and reaffirmed that poor black kids draw inspiration from sports heroes, and that greatness in sports is fleeting but the memory of your inspiration may last.

Final Score – 2.5/5

As of April 30, 2024, In the Company of Kings is available on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play/YouTube Movies and Fandango at Home.

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[1] This is to say nothing of the recurring prevalence of athletes who aesthetically represent the underclass but come from the suburbs, which is a separate issue.

[2] That Jews in the 1930s or Hispanic/Latine Americans contemporaneous with African Americans do not figure into the story is a separate issue altogether and two separate issues among themselves.

[3] The Obamas and Kamalas of the world have not, in fact, led to a golden age of black uplift.

[4] How does a fighter amass an overwhelmingly positive record; why are there so many separate championships and commissions?, and so on.

Formula 1: Drive to Survive (The First Three Seasons)

According to my mom, some of the first words I said as a child were car marques like Mitsubishi and Toyota. When I was little, I played games like Gran Turismo, Midnight Club, and Need for Speed. I watched movies with my family like Driven, Gone in Sixty Seconds, and Fast and the Furious. I wanted to race cars, I wanted to work on cars. These things did not come to pass, but deeply instilled passions die hard, and in a world of endless content, it takes only moderate means to find ways to tickle those parts of the brain. After watching Ferrari (and movies from Criterion’s 70s Car Movies collection like the original Gone in 60 Seconds and Steve McQueen’s Le Mans) I’ve had a hankering. And I’ve found myself drawn into Formula 1: Drive to Survive and I have been absolutely devouring it.[1]

In little over a week, I’ve watched three full seasons of the show. You’ve probably already heard all about the Netflix documentary series that shines a spotlight on the top level of international open-wheel racing. I became vaguely aware of the show because hosts of two of my favorite videogames podcasts (Rob Zacny from Remap Radio, as well as Three Movies Ahead and A More Civilized Age, and Danny O’Dwyer from NoClip) as well as a videogames journalist you may know from a much-used internet meme (Drew Scanlon) host the podcast Shift F1 and from when I used to listen to Bill Burr’s podcast religiously. But, like I said, I’m just absorbed and obsessed now.

Coming off the first season, two of my favorite drivers were the Spanish Carlos Sainz Jr. (son of rally world champion Carlos Sainz) and Australian Daniel Ricciardo. Daniel left Red Bull racing across from now-repeat champion Max Verstappen to join Renault, and Sainz got moved out from Renault and moved to McLaren after the first season; by the end of the third season, we know Ricciardo has already accepted terms to move to McLaren, where Sainz has taken an opportunity at Ferrari. One of the problems with the show is that its interest in showing each season from multiple angles, while providing a depth of feel for each driver, makes chronology confusing, especially in this case. Renault team principal Cyril Abiteboul was surprised and disappointed that Ricciardo had made his move before the season even started, and McLaren principal Zak Brown felt similarly about Sainz, but it isn’t exactly clear which of those two moved first (it follows that Ricciardo followed Sainz as opposed to Sainz being kicked out by Sainz a second time, considering no big muss was made of it within his personal storyline, but that isn’t presented explicitly). It’s fun trying to navigate external knowledge, trying to avoid spoilers from real life events, and then listening to the Shift F1’s preview for the 2024 season of F1 and learn how much has changed in the time between, how much I still get to learn.

What makes the show intriguing is the combination of the personalities of drivers and team principles (combination general manager and head coach, depending on your sports reference points) as well as the wheeling and dealing that determines driver lineups and sponsorship deals. There’s a lot to do with internal politics, though external politics are largely absent. The closest thing we have to that is dealing with COVID in the third season (set during 2020) and national pride – little outright and explicit nationalism – but we’ll get back to that.

What makes the sport interesting is that it’s high speed, high stakes, big money racing in beautiful locales – from Austrian forests to the Mediterranean principality of Monaco. And also that it’s composed of teams of two drivers, most of whom do not like one another. Many of them have driven together for years, back to their days in carts; on occasion, guys are friends outside of the sport but less on the grid (like Monégasque Charles LeClerc and French Pierre Gasly, who I think are no longer friends). Many of the guys can be respectful to one another between races, while competitive to borderline point of violence on the track. But the biggest rivalries are within the teams – it’s like if every football team had two quarterbacks that they were trying to score points against, or if the two most talented players on the same soccer or basketball team sometimes had to guard each other. Again, your sporting points of reference may vary.

I could go on about the drivers who have and haven’t endeared themselves to me. It is easier to feel sympathy for the guys like Esteban Ocan who didn’t come from money than guys born with money like Lance Stroll. In the first three seasons, the only nonwhite drivers are multi-repeat champion Lewis Hamilton (one of the best in the history of the sport), British-Thai Alex Albon, and Sergio Pérez (the sole Mexican driver). I’m generally fascinated by the absolute level of aptitude. Almost all the drivers are *at least* bilingual. Their job is to sit in and drive a car, but the physical strain of that requires physical training like any other athlete – a surprising amount, in fact. But there are other dynamics at play within the structure and the sport and the structure of the show that I think are worth mentioning.

As the sport goes, being the sort of person I am, I can’t help but wonder about, you know, the utility in the face of the constant suffering that our world is built on. All of life is worthy of critique, and besides that I feel guilty for ever experiencing joy, so Formula One must be contextualized within the world it exists in. It’s a gas burning sport in a world with an environment being ravaged by manmade climate change. It’s a machine wrecking sport in a world where some people don’t have homes. That’s hardly the fault of the drivers; it’s just the sort of observation I always find myself making. It’s hard for me, always, to avoid thinking about the current global order as a sinking ship with insufficient lifeboats.

We crave spectacle, and these events are indeed spectacular. Competition is always interesting, but especially exaggerated with these rocket-like cars moving at death defying speeds. Many people have died in automobile racing, including in Formula 1 and its immediate lower tier Formula 2. The FIA have canceled the race in Sochi the last three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the race in Azerbaijan continues despite the ethnic cleansing campaign that recently took place there. [2]

I think there is something to a transnationalism in sports like F1 and soccer, if we separate it from the international competition between teams bearing national flags during World Cups and the like. And much like the World Cup, it is an interesting showcase for transnational identity – most of the racers speak multiple languages, many of them have multinational identities. Daniel Ricciardo’s father was born in Italy, his mother’s parents were born in Italy; Esteban Ocon is French . It’s also a showcase for globalization and the easy movement of capital. Everything we enjoy doing or watching costs money, and that money goes wherever money can be made. Italian racing team Scuderia Ferrari has a logo for the Dutch oil company Shell and had American tobacco company Philip Morris as a title sponsor with the subliminal name “Mission Winnows.” They have a racing driver from the city-state principality of Monaco and the country of Spain. F1 is headquartered in England, and therefore so are many of the teams, like Red Bull, owned by the Austrian energy drinks company that also owns soccer teams in at least three countries (German Bundesliga’s RB Leipzig, Austrian Bundesliga’s RB Salzburg, and Major League Soccer’s New York Red Buls). Red Bull’s team principle is English. Mercedes Benz-AMG Petronas’s team principle is Austrian. McLaren’s now-former team principle was American. The Haas team, owned by industrial automation magnate Gene Haas who also owns a NASCAR team, was run by a German.

At the end of season three, British auto manufacturer McLaren has teamed up with American oil company Gulf as a sponsor on their car. Racing Point team owner Lawrence Stroll (father of driver Lance Stroll), became an investor in Aston Martin and they became a title sponsor of that team – while it’s clear this is distinct from their former partnership with Red Bull, it isn’t clear how because it’s all spoken about as “Aston Martin returning to racing” and the like, even right before switching to talking about Red Bull and showing highlights where they have the Aston Martin insignia on their uniforms. It’s clear there’s a distinction, but we’re not privy to the details.

Something else I found frustrating about the end of season three was that Lewis Hamilton’s political speech felt like it wasn’t given sufficient coverage. Now, the first season was focused almost entirely on the lower-tier and mid-tier teams, except for Red Bull, who finished third; Ferrari and Mercedes drivers and principals didn’t interview. That changed in the second and third season, especially as Ferrari fell into the pack because of a bad car design. When COVID was the focus in the first episode as things shut down and then reopened with social distancing, it was mentioned in an early press conference that Hamilton had been outspoken about COVID before the season started, and he says on stage with a mic in his hand that he doesn’t know why any of them are there. But anyway, the episodes that did focus on Mercedes didn’t talk much about Lewis Hamilton’s political speech until the last episode of the season. The biggest flaw in execution here is that they show just enough (Hamilton leading his competitors in kneeling at the starting line before races, Hamilton wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts under his racing suit, and leaving the suit unzipped and hanging so his “ARREST THE COPS WHO SHOT BREONNA TAYLOR” shirt was visible when he makes the podium) that it is very apparent that this was not a one-time thing for him. His last words on the season, and I think the last words of the season at all, were him saying he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to use his platform and influence to do something positive and meaningful (after also showing highlights from his childhood where he and his father talk about avoiding racists and not being outspoken when they were trying to come up).

It felt like Netflix and F1 weren’t trying to minimize it exactly, but that it was certainly worth more than five minutes at the end of the season. It is a compression due to the focus of the series – what they are allowed to do is to focus on what is happening among the teams in a way that stirs up drama to entice and delight the audience, but there is a lot that gets avoided. Reserve drivers are a part of every team, but we don’t always know who they are, even if they’ve featured in a season of the show before.[3] There are also junior driving schemes racers get put on, but it is unclear to me how similar this is to an American football team’s practice squad or a Premier League team’s academy out of which other teams can sign players. There’s occasional lack of clarity regarding chronology because each episode tends to focus on one or two teams or racers. I still don’t know just about anything about how cars are designed – I know there are good cars and bad cars and that Racing Point seemed to steal the 2019 Mercedes design for their 2020 design, but the show doesn’t get into that too much. [4]

Formula 1: Drive to Survive, is an effective marketing vehicle for Formula One racing. I do not know if it is unparalleled in quality among Netflix sports docuseries (Last Chance U was definitely more critical of its sources) but it has me in a chokehold. It has got me playing Need for Speed and Forza again and seeing when the open-wheel, stock car, and sportscar races are happening all over.[5] It has me intrigued and fascinated, thinking about how cars and teams are constructed. I look forward to continuing watching it, and I remain curious in what new ways the show will shift its revelatory gaze.

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[1] In fact, my film watching dropped off considerably between January and February mostly, I think, because of work… but I also watched three seasons of this show, so I am hoping I can make up some lost ground before the end of this month. And anyway I feel like anything I consume I need to write about, but also this show and sport just inspired me to think about so much.

[2] I read somewhere that sports have become a contemporary substitute for war, as national pride is worn during international competition as an outlet instead of killing one another on battlefields. I’m simplifying the hypothesis in a way that underlines its stupidity. For one thing, war hasn’t gone anywhere. For another, little in the way of resources or territory are managed or directed by who wins the FIFA World Cup or who takes gold at an Olympics competition. There is a more interesting argument to be assessed in the context of “sportswashing,” but only slightly; Anglo and American journalists are keen to point to the hosting of international competitions in Russia or China as exemplifying a tendency of “authoritarians” to downplay internal despotism by putting on a global extravaganza. These journalists are less likely to critique the same thing happening at large in their own countries; we have sports facilitated by universities that pull in billions collectively while not paying their players, while several public university systems are being neutered of intellectual value, HBCUs go underfunded for over a century, and public education at large is suffering for funding. Simultaneous to the Super Bowl, the Israeli government stepped up their bombing in Rafah in the south of Gaza, after ordering Palestinian civilians to evacuate in that direction from further north in the strip, continuing their genocidal campaign while the U.S. government sends them money, weapons, and international sanction. But I go on. I will revisit some of this in other pieces.

[3] I’ve mostly found them when going on Wikipedia looking for details on a season I’ve already seen

[4] they paid Mercedes for information on brake duct design, which was protested by multiple teams, then they were fined but allowed to keep using them, but the body overall looked a lot like the previous Mercedes… Yes, I know, I need to read Adrian Newey’s How to Build a Car

[5] Dayton is ongoing as I type this and I remember my opinion of NASCAR changing for the positive after I watched a Top Gear episode and I think I’m going to have to watch the new Netflix NASCAR docuseries after I finish up Drive to Survive because, without the turns and chicanes, it’s a little bit harder to understand strategy… plus the