The Lives Sports Change Indelibly

Transformation may be the subject of every sports movie, in one way or another, but the seven documentaries that constitute the Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film series — part of the Tribeca Film Festival, which opens on Wednesday night — make a fetish of it.

In fact, the most interesting of the films, Eric Drath’s “Renée,” is about a change so radical that athletics is almost the least interesting part of the story: the transformation of the tennis-playing surgeon Richard Raskind into the professional tennis player Renée Richards.

Ms. Richards, now 76, let Mr. Drath film at her upstate New York home, where we see the modest, cozy house and the vintage sports cars, parked under the trees, like two sides of her brain. She emerges in the interviews as a fascinating, melancholy figure, fiercely intelligent and inherently self-dramatizing.

But Renée Richards isn’t even the best thing about “Renée.” The heart of the film is a chorus of her friends, or former friends: men and women from the same world of New York private schools, Ivy League colleges, Manhattan hospitals and amateur tennis tournaments that nurtured the hard-charging Dick Raskind. Their tribal resemblance and their back-breaking attempts to understand their old buddy’s choices create the feeling of a large, exasperated but loving family.

A similar narrative dynamic is at work in Jonathan Hock’s “Off the Rez,” about the last two high school seasons of the Umatilla Indian basketball player Shoni Schimmel. A strong, rangy point guard with a deadly shot and ferocious moves to the basket, Shoni has the kind of sheer, joyous athleticism that can leave you slack-jawed as you watch.

On the other hand, she can also be closed off and a little blank, the prerogatives of the star, even as a high school junior. Luckily for “Off the Rez,” Shoni’s parents, Ceci Moses and Rick Schimmel, provide the same kind of character and drama in daily life that their daughter generates on the court. The movie cannily doles out the details of Ms. Moses’s and Mr. Schimmel’s own athletic exploits; the story of how his baseball career ended sneaks up on you like an inside fastball.

Ms. Moses, who takes a coaching job in Portland and moves her children all the way across Oregon to find a better brand of basketball for Shoni, is the film’s hot-burning, quick-to-anger emotional center and its real star. (The filmmakers never address the relationship between Ms. Moses’s employment and Shoni’s enrollment at the same school.)

A mother is a significant figure in “Renée,” as well, though she never appears on screen: Ms. Richards’s mother was a pioneering and, from the sound of it, extremely strong-willed psychiatrist.

The maternal presence is also felt in the German filmmaker Sebastian Dehnhardt’s “Klitschko,” about the boxing brothers Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko, and in Pablo Croce’s “Like Water,” about the Ultimate Fighting standout Anderson Silva.

The mothers of these brawling boys, however, are not taskmasters but talismans, loving presences to be coddled and thanked. This is of a piece with the relatively less complex and more promotional nature of these films — the transformation we’re talking about here is the standard one involving money and fame, and the two movies tick off the highlights of their subjects’ careers in a turbocharged manner that will be exciting for aficionados but possibly monotonous for anyone else.

Both offer rewards, though. The Klitschko brothers, the cut-up Vitali and the bashful Wladimir, are endearing and articulate, and the film includes eerie footage of the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, which their father helped to clean up. The best moments of “Like Water” come right at the beginning, in a film clip of an icy Bruce Lee explaining that the fighter should “be like water making its way through cracks.”

“Fire in Babylon,” by Stevan Riley, and “Splinters,” by Adam Pesce, are both stories of third-world athletes tackling commercial, first-world sports. “Babylon” is a story of past triumph, recounting the success of the West Indies cricket teams of the 1970s and ’80s in the reminiscences of former stars like Viv Richards, Andy Roberts and Michael Holding, interspersed with musical numbers, including a terrific tribute to Mr. Richards by the calypso singer King Short Shirt. It’s unusual among sports films for its straightforward discussion of the role of physical intimidation and the threat of injury in winning (something that may surprise Americans who think of cricket as a gentlemanly, if not effete, sport).

Violence also looms in the alternately cheerful and disheartening surfing film “Splinters,” though it’s strictly on the sidelines. The local Papua New Guinea surfers prepping for an inaugural Western-style competition — with the promise of a training trip to Australia for the winners — must negotiate not only waves but also the everyday dangers of life in a country with an extremely depressed economy and a patriarchal, chest-thumping social framework.

The darkest view of sports among the Tribeca/ESPN films is likely to belong to “Catching Hell,” by the prolific, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side,” “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer”), which was not ready to be screened for critics. (It was originally scheduled in, and then pulled from, ESPN’s “30 for 30” series of television documentaries last year.)

Mr. Gibney’s subject is Steve Bartman, the man whose name has lived in infamy in Chicago since his awkward attempt to catch a foul ball in the left-field stands was blamed for keeping the Cubs out of the World Series in 2003. “Catching Hell” feels particularly timely in the wake of the brutal beating of a San Francisco Giants fan outside Dodger Stadium earlier this month, another reminder that not all of the changes that sports effect in us are for the better.