The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t history yet. It is still very much our present in the United States. That isn’t stopping HBO from making plans to tell the story of this moment in history. The premium cable network announced today plans for a documentary called The Day Sports Stood Still.
Chris Paul will serve as executive producer of the project. It will be directed by Antonio Fuqua, who has scored major Hollywood hits with Training Day, Olympus Has Fallen, and The Equalizer. Fuqua has experience with HBO Sports too, directing last year’s Muhammad Ali documentary What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali.
The documentary will be built largely around Paul’s first hand account of the March 11 game between his Oklahoma City Thunder and the Utah Jazz. That game was cancelled in the middle of the action after it was revealed that Jazz center Rudy Gobert had tested positive for the coronavirus.
In addition to that night, Paul and other athletes from across multiple sports will relive the uncertainty in between games shutting down and restarting, the efforts to create bubbles for leagues like the NBA, WNBA, and NHL, and life in quarantine.
There’s no firm debut set yet. All we know is that the documentary will show up on HBO sometime in 2021. With that being the case, it is almost certain to hit on stories about college football, the Tennessee Titans, and other teams and leagues having to shuffle schedules on the fly.
