Cockin’

A 30 for 30 sports deep investigation into the pioneers of cock.

Jeremy Schaap (Robert Downey Jr.) takes us behind-the-scenes of the rise & fall of two street legends: badminton kings Murphy (Will Ferrell) and Sully (John C. Reilly).

We begin with Schaap walking down the daytime Harlem streets and explaining that from these historic backroads have come the likes of Ballin’, Breakdancin’, Rappin’, Ultimate Fightin’, Crunkin’, and now Cockin’.

Not Cold-cockin’, or Cockin’ a gun, no, we’re talkin’ about Shuttlecockin’. And now we see our heroes, Sully & Murphy engaged in a strange form of street badminton.

Schaap sits down the Murph and Sully to learn where and how it all started: late one night, unable to locate a suitable tennis court to engage in the emperor’s game, and living in a tiny shared studio apartment that could barely house the two grown men, let alone a ping pong table, our explorers set out down a dimly lit back alleyway and discovered the underground world of Street Cockin’.

A group of men, with their car headlights illuminating the net, engaged in an epic ballet display of power & finesse that these two boys from Newton, Massachusetts had never before seen.

He quickly finds Blind Willie McTell (Morgan Freeman), the last survivor of the personally dubbed “Cockin’ Four” who dreamed up the sport on those Harlem streets in the groovy 1960s.

Alongside Sonny Johnson (Sidney Poitier), Tommy Blue (James Earl Jones), and Carmine Torres (Edward James Olmos) they took the cock to the people and created what one local sports reporter dubbed “the resplendent cock”.

So why didn’t this new sport catch on and become a global phenomenon? asks Schaap.

“One word,” answers Willie, “Drugs. We all took too many damn drugs.”

Cut to thirty years later and two yahoos from the burbs of Boston, Murphy & Sully, discover the sport and immediately see the potential in the cock.

So they start playin’ this new street form of badminton out in the street, in the daytime, in front of their apartment building.

At first people are confused and think that perhaps the two gentlemen are simply idiots. But soon a crowd gathers and as the boys continue to play, day in and day out, an audience grows and the people begin to embrace the cock.

But the real turning point is Williamsburg, Brooklyn, June 4, 2015, forever and ever to be known as the “Cock Fight”: an epic 7 hour and 14 minute match that finally mercifully ended with a Murphy volley out of the reach of the bellyfloppin’ Sully.

Our trailblazers may have been tired but the appetite for the cock had at long last been whet.

After cutting down the footage to a digestible ten minutes and posting it to the YouTubes, our champions quickly became a phenomenon:

40 million watches in the first week. 300 million within a month. By summer’s end more people had viewed the Cock Fight than had watched every Super Bowl contested ever.

But Murphy & Sully were just getting started…

As their meteoric rise blasts even farther into the stratosphere, the question remains: are they honoring the creators of the cock or stealing their life’s work? How big can the cock get? And would the friendship forged in the fires of that summer day remain, or like the great comet Halley, would Cockin’ burn bright for a short time only to disappear once again into the dark nighttime sky?