Sports

Kevin Rafferty's film Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 chronicles the famous 1968 football game between the two rivals. Rafferty's other movies include The Atomic Cafe and The Last Cigarette.

Critic-at-large John Powers reviews Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, the new documentary about the famous 1968 game.

Jose Torres-- the former light-heavyweight boxing champion-- died from a heart attack on Jan. 19 at the age of 72. Fresh Air remembers him with an interview from 1989.

The Wrestler is predictable, corny and heavy-handed, says critic David Edelstein, but with Mickey Rourke acting his heart out, the sheer adrenaline-pumping violence of the film gets into your bloodstream.

Fans of NBC's Friday Night Lights might want to look into DirecTV; the show, about a small Texas town and its high-school football team, begins its third season exclusively on DirecTV's "The 101," and won't hit broadcast TV until 2009. David Bianculli has a review.

Female athletes suffer a higher rate of injuries than males, particularly to their knees. But some people are reluctant to talk about this "injury epidemic" out of fear of jeopardizing Title IX. Warrior Girls author Michael Sokolove discusses injury risk and prevention.

Fresh Air film critic David Edelstein reviews Redbelt, the new martial-arts film written and directed by David Mamet. The film tells the story of a principled martial-arts master who steps into the professional fighting ring to save his business.

Kyle Chandler plays Coach Eric Taylor on Friday Night Lights, the NBC-TV series about the big drama of small-town Texas high-school football. The third season of the series will be shown on DirecTV before airing on NBC in 2009.

When a Portland teenager accidentally kills a security guard at the local skate park, he pulls into himself rather than talking to the police. Gus Van Sant's film explores the teen's thoughts and actions in a free-form style that critic David Edelstein calls "a raging success."

Pro golfer John Daly has won tournaments on five continents, including two of the PGA tour's four majors. He's also gambled away a couple of fortunes, trashed various hotel rooms, houses and cars, married four times, and downed enough booze to land himself in a string of emergency rooms and rehab clinics. These days, he says, he lives on Diet Coke and Marlboro Lights. "I guess you could say," Daly writes in his recent memoir, that "I'm not exactly a poster boy for moderation."

Mary Lillian Ellison, better known as The Fabulous Moolah, died Friday at age 84. She was a wrestler, promoter and trainer on the so-called "lady wrestling" circuit for more than 50 years.

During his heyday in the early 1970s, shock-rock icon Alice Cooper dressed like a ghoul with a gaunt face and mascara-streaked eyes. His hits included "I'm Eighteen," "School's Out" and "Welcome to My Nightmare." In a memoir — Alice Cooper: Golf Monster, he recounts how he used his obsession with golf to overcome his addiction to alcohol.

This interview was originally broadcast on May 17, 2007.

Zack Hample, an obsessive baseball fan, has by his own count snagged 3,123 baseballs at 42 different major league stadiums. And he's turned his obsession with the game into a career, giving tours of stadiums, appearing on TV and radio and writing books — including Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan's Guide for Beginners, Semi-Experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks.

Maureen Corrigan reviews "Seabiscuit: An American Legend."

Former athlete and president of the World Anti-Doping Agency Richard Pound talks about his new book, Inside Dope: How Drugs Are the Biggest Threat to Sports, Why You Should Care, and What Can Be Done About Them. Pound is also a 25-year member of the International Olympic Committee. In 1960, he participated in the Olympics as a swimmer from Canada.

Coach Bill Resler and former player Devon Crosby Helms are at the heart of the basketball documentary The Heart of the Game. The film follows the Roosevelt High School Roughriders, a Seattle-area girls' team, for six seasons.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews A Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match that Leveled the Game. It's about the 1973 battle of the sexes match that inspired great bravado and even greater publicity.

Boston Herald sports columnist Howard Bryant is author of Juicing the Game. Baseball in the '90s — with greater profit and more record breakers than ever — has come to be known as "The Juiced Era." But the dark side has been the use of performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids.

The new documentary Murderball looks at the rough-and-tumble world of quadriplegic rugby -- otherwise known as "murderball." Fresh Air talks to top-rated player Mark Zupan and Dana Adam Shapiro, the film's co-producer and co-director.