Voir ESPN Films: 30 for 30, Vol. 5 - Episode 18

Candace Parker is one of the biggest stars in basketball. She’s a champion and pioneer who’s not only fulfilled the weighty expectations that have surrounded her potential since she was just a young teenager, but redefined what it means to be a women’s sports star in the twenty-first century. Now, in the wide-ranging, revealing, and at times intimate ESPN film "Candace Parker: Unapologetic", Parker opens up about her journey through basketball and life, and where she might go from here. The documentary features rare behind-the-scenes access during Parker’s 2022 season while tracing the entire arc of her story back to her childhood in Naperville, Illinois, outside of Chicago. Growing up in a basketball family that included her older brother Anthony, who’d become an NBA player himself, Parker emerged as a high school phenomenon, dunking in a game as a sophomore. An ACL tear would be the first of a long series of physical setbacks she would encounter throughout her career. But she battled through the injury and became a highly touted recruit who chose the storied Tennessee Lady Vols program. In Knoxville, she’d overcome more injury struggles while leading the team to back-to-back national titles in 2007 and 2008 under Tennessee’s legendary coach and mentor Pat Summitt. "Candace Parker: Unapologetic" also covers Parker’s pro career, starting when she was the WNBA’s first overall draft pick in 2008, and showcasing her ensuing dominance – winning the league’s Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player awards for the Los Angeles Sparks in her first season. From there, life would be about balancing the personal and professional, as the following year she gave birth to her daughter Lailaa. Along with her basketball ups and downs – highlighted by championships in 2016 in Los Angeles and 2021 with the Chicago Sky, and marred by waves of criticism and a messy departure from L.A. – the film chronicles her journey through motherhood, her divorce from former NBA player Shelden Williams, and her marriage to Anna Petrakova, her former teammate in the Russian league. As the 2022 season unfolds, Parker is revealed as a veteran superstar going to extreme lengths to manage a body battered by years of injuries, a mother and wife anticipating and then celebrating the birth of a new child, and a transcendent figure in sports balancing playing and broadcasting, and ultimately – as she herself puts it – resolving to live her life boldly and unapologetically. Everyone else, as far as she’s defiantly concerned, can go kick rocks.