Reggie

Understand something, Reggie was all about team and making sure he was on the same playing level as every other person. I loved the story as a Yankee fan but more importantly I loved the story about his humanity and culture. Great insight into his opinions, heart and mind. I would recommend this documentary to anyone, not just Yankee fans and baseball fans. Everyone needs to hear another person's story and struggles to shed light on the bigger picture that happens beyond self. The fact that people can't hear and listen to someone who brings something different to the table is just plain wrong.

Reggie Jackson is one of the most iconic athletes in the 20th Century. He was self anointed as the "straw that stirs the drink." Well the fizz is nowhere to be found in this flat and monotonous monolog on race and how Reggie was done wrong.

The early sequences of him in Birmingham were quite eye opening and shed some light on the times and even his future team as he came up with guys like Rudi and Fingers in Birmingham, both of whom are in the doc.

But it didn't stop there. For a guy that made hundreds of millions and sported one of the greatest, private car collections, you'd think Jackson was a victim of indentured servitude.

I'm sure Reggie has some great stories but for someone baring it all, they're conspicuously absent.

For someone so dynamic and exciting, Reggie comes across bitter and dare I say, a bit of a bore.

I watched "Reggie" to learn about a person, a time, a place. I knew about his three home runs on three pitches in the 1977 World Series, and was interested in seeing some film of that building excitement. Who doesn't like the Hollywood melodrama Cinderella story in real life?

That part then, was almost anti-climactic since It was was anticipated. What moved me and made me say "Wow" was listening to the voices and words of real people making their comments, telling their stories. It is an eye-opening history lesson.

Like most all biographies, it is titled as the story of a person, but gives you much more to think about.

What was going on daily, what was normal at that time, actions that other people, besides the main subject, were taking, what they were doing is also fascinating.

I watched this documentary to learn about one interesting person, but as usual with history, came away with much knowledge and food for thought on more subjects than Reggie Jackson.

At the start of this documentary a calm, conversational Reggie Jackson says he's nervous about the film because he has no control over it. He needn't have worried. It's more a story about his career-long pursuit of diversity in baseball, all the way to the ownership level, than about his good guy/ bad guy reputation as a player. He's surrounded in this effort by friends, including Henry Aaron, Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers and Julius Erving. No contemporaries from his Bronx Zoo Yankee years are interviewed, so we don't get differing points of view about Reggie's clashes with Thurman Munson, Billy Martin, Mickey Rivers and others.

Reggie credits several players on the Oakland Athletics for helping him withstand mid-70s racism, but fails to mention coaches, veteran players or mentors who improved his game other than Joe DiMaggio. The facts about slow acceptance of Black players, managers, coaches and executives are true. It's also fair to say that Reggie confessed to being too aggressive at times in the media. Still, the lack of critics in this two-hour project unfortunately make it more boring than it should be.

This documentary is a mix of Reggie Jackson's impactful playing career, with his experiences with race relations in baseball both on the field as well as in management, which extends into him working to improve civil rights. To the baseball portion, it is a good overview of his career and his larger-than-life personality at least compared with someone less brash like Jackie Robinson. I never knew he was the highest paid player when he signed with the Yankees, after a short stint with the Baltimore Orioles (shout out to my team!). If you know a moderate amount about baseball, you'll know the Reggie swung so hard he twisted himself up lick a corkscrew, so he was a power hitter that helped his teams win multiple World Series. He takes that experience today to help more black youths get into the sport as well as increase the percent of black ownership of MLB teams. Overall, this was entertaining and informative.