Sports Movies

Lester D. Friedman

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813599885
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

From Rocky to Field of Dreams, sports movies are among the most beloved of American films. Revolving around familiar narratives like the underdog story, these movies have generated modern-day legends, reinforcing and disseminating our national myths about the American Dream.In Sports Movies, Lester D. Friedman describes the traditional formulas that have made these movies such crowd-pleasers, including stock figures like the disgraced athlete on a quest for redemption, or the wise old coaches who help mentor the heroes to victory. He also explores how the genre's attitudes have changed over time, especially in key issues like class, race, masculinity, and women in sports.Along the way, he takes stock of sports films from the dawn of cinema's silent era to the present day, including classic baseball movies like Pride of the Yankees and Bull Durham, basketball movies like Hoosiers and He's Got Game, football movies like Friday Night Lights and Rudy, and boxing movies like Raging Bull and Million Dollar Baby. As Friedman's analyses reveal, not only do sports movies influence our perceptions about the drama of real-life sports, but they also help to shape our attitudes toward the competitive ethos in American life.

1

BASEBALL MOVIES

Baseball was a kind of secular church that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms, and antagonisms. Baseball made me understand what patriotism was about at its best. . . . It seemed to me that through baseball I came to understand and experience patriotism in its tender and humane aspects.

—Philip Roth, “My Baseball Years” (1973)

Although stadiums were built in cities, baseball has always projected the aura of a pastoral game played on grassy fields during sunny summer days, a sport that sprouted naturally from the soil that nurtured the United States’ agrarian roots. And, as the writer Philip Roth observes, baseball (aka “America’s National Sport”) has played a considerable role in the American imaginary, particularly in the ways that Americans defined themselves and their country in the twentieth century. In particular, Roth emphasizes how baseball provides a common event that transcends the differences that divide Americans. In a famous routine comparing baseball and football metaphors, the comic George Carlin dissects the common language of each sport, comparing football’s military metaphors to baseball’s more comforting language, such as, “The object of the game is to be safe at home.” Such musings situate baseball as a creaky anachronism in the modern world, a bucolic nineteenth-century game without time limits trying to adjust itself to a technologically driven twenty-first-century mind-set devoted to speed and impermanence.

Susan Jacoby’s Why Baseball Matters (2018) contends that the qualities that this game demands—concentration, time, and memory—feel out of sync with our contemporary culture of “digital distractions” that routinely disrupt all three. Because baseball “derives much of its enduring appeal from a style of play and adherence to tradition,” Jacoby continues (22), it fails to attract a sizable following of younger sports devotees who can choose among numerous high-tech entertainment options intently attuned to the hustle and flow of modern times. As a result, baseball’s fan base is shrinking. With an audience mostly composed of white men over fifty-five, baseball games attract fewer female and African American watchers during its season than do NFL or NBA games and NASCAR races during theirs. Such a decline troubles some of baseball’s most ardent supporters. In the 1954 book of essays God’s Country and Mine, the cultural historian Jacques Barzun lavished praise on baseball, concluding, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball” (qtd. in Jacoby 15). But later in life, Barzun, disgusted with the sport’s zealous embrace of commercialization and greed, recanted: “I’ve gotten so disgusted with baseball, I don’t follow it anymore. I just see the headlines and turn my head in shame from what we have done with our most interesting, best, and healthiest pastime” (qtd. in McDaniel 1). Such head-shaking sadness, even antipathy, toward the current state of baseball is not an uncommon stance among those who once revered the game as representing the soul of the United States.

During the silent-film years, viewers watched clips of baseball games captured in newsreels while sitting comfortably in the movie theater, such as the Essanay Company’s one-reeler of World Series highlights between the Chicago Cubs and the Detroit Tigers in 1908 and Selig Polyscope’s four reels of the World Series between the Giants and the Athletics in 1913. Such productions allowed those who lived outside the environs of the ballparks to see baseball stars they read about in the newspapers, such as Babe Ruth, in action. Not surprisingly, therefore, making baseball movies appealed to early fiction filmmakers as well. In the late 1890s, Thomas Edison produced plotless one-reelers, such as The Ball Game (1898) and Casey at the Bat (1899), that capitalized on and further fueled the popularity of the sport. As films got longer, Biograph released Play Ball on the Beach (1906); Edwin S. Porter directed How the Office Boy Saw the Ball Game (1906); G. M. “Bronco Billy” Anderson’s short film The Baseball Fan was often included as a part of vaudeville programs in 1908; and His Last Game (1909), about a Native American pitcher, appeared the same year. In films like Spit-Ball Sadie (1915), starring Harold Lloyd, comedy and baseball exist comfortably together. Rob Edelman, whose books include Great Baseball Films (1994) and Baseball on the Web (1998), describes the baseball films made during this era as a mirror to “the now long-extinct American culture before 1920: a time of innocence, a pre–Jazz Age America of small towns and small-town types. The prevailing view was that the simplicity of rural life was preferable to the corrupting ways of the metropolis. It was an era when filmmakers could celebrate a pastoral America whose foundation was Victorian morality, while emphasizing the notion that leaving the farm for the city meant going off in search of sin. . . . If baseball truly was America’s national pastime, such baseball players were ideal all-American heroes” (qtd. in Thorn). A good example of these early movies is The Busher (Jerome Stern, 1919), the story of a talented small-town pitcher who finds life in the city as a professional ballplayer filled with far more obstacles and temptations (including women, gambling, and drinking) than had his innocent country life, and a rural/urban dichotomy becomes a convention in many subsequent baseball films. Treated as a rube by his new teammates, Ben Harding (Charles Ray) fails miserably in his debut before family and friends, leading him to flee in shame. Eventually, life offers him another chance to become a hero, as his hometown team faces its arch rivals and he redeems himself with his pitching and his hitting, regaining the respect of his father and love of his former girlfriend (Colleen More).

As the decades rolled on, Hollywood produced a relatively sparse but growing number of baseball movies: twelve during the 1930s, thirteen during the 1940s, and twenty from 1950 to 1958. Then, fifteen years slipped by with only one baseball movie. Considering the conspicuous gap between 1958 and 1973, when, other than the comedy Safe at Home (Walter Doniger, 1962), baseball movies essentially disappeared from movie screens (see Zucker and Babich), Vivian Sobchack speculates that it occurred “because the utopian national space previously figured by baseball on the screen was so completely at odds with the cultural upheavals in the America of the 1960s . . . and not yet ready to be nostalgically redeemed” (10). Before and following this hiatus, the vast majority of baseball movies in the sound era depict the game deferentially, paying respectful homage to its traditions and showcasing its players as larger-than-life, quasi-mythological figures. Biographies—such as The Pride of the Yankees (1942), The Babe Ruth Story (1948), The Stratton Story (1949), The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), The Pride of St. Louis (1952), One in a Million: The Ron LeFlore Story (1978), and Fear Strikes Out (1957)—all show their protagonists struggling with personal and professional problems but ultimately surmounting these obstacles to achieve their objectives; these “inspirational” narratives far outnumber more disparaging biographies presenting negative aspects of the sport, including racism and fixing games, for example, Eight Men Out (1988) and Cobb (1994), that render a far-less-flattering picture of their tainted players. Many of the fictional plotlines over the decades—seen in movies such as The Adventures of Frank Merriwell (1936), The Kid from Cleveland (1949), The Kid from Left Field (1953), The Natural (1984), A League of Their Own (1992), The Sandlot (1993), and The Rookie (2002)—follow a basically similar formula as do the majority of nonsports biopics: hard work and talent properly applied turn adversity into victory. Even films that take a more jaundiced look at the game show how players, coaches, or scouts who initially seemed jaded—as in The Bad News Bears (1976), Bull Durham (1988), Major League (1989), Mr. Baseball (1992), and Million Dollar Arm (Craig Gillespie, 2014)—eventually succumb to the purity, the inherent integrity, of the athletic contest and offer up their best efforts.

“YOU CAN’T TRY TOO HARD”: PRIDE OF THE YANKEES

Pride of the Yankees (Sam Wood, 1942), cited by some commentators as the first great sports movie, tells the story of baseball’s preeminent martyr: Lou Gehrig, nicknamed “the Iron Horse.” A seven-time all- star, Gehrig was a fearsome slugger—batting .340 over seventeen seasons, slamming 493 home runs, winning the Triple Crown, playing on seven World Series teams that won six titles—and he is usually considered the greatest first baseman in major-league history. But he remains most famous for playing in 2,130 consecutive games from 1925 to 1939, when at age thirty-six, he acquired the incurable neuromuscular disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—thereafter called “Lou Gehrig’s disease”—and was forced to retire. His farewell speech, immortalized in this movie, concluded with the poignant line, “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” a quote as familiar to sports fans as lines from the Gettysburg Address are to history majors. Released during the United States’ first full year in World War II, Pride of the Yankees provided audiences with an enduring archetype of an athletic hero who was struck down in the prime of life, a GI in pinstripes who confronted tragedy stoically. Gehrig became the incarnation of American manhood and a model for those American boys facing death on faraway battlefields. We never see Gehrig in the final, degenerative stages of his life, and the movie ends with his leaving his beloved Yankee Stadium for the last time, accompanied by the cheers of over sixty thousand fans. The plaintive melody of “Always” lingers throughout the film’s soundtrack, reminding viewers, “Days may not be fair / But I will be there always,” a summation of Gehrig’s idealized courtship and marriage to Eleanor (Teresa Wright), a loving relationship doomed by a terrible ailment that they face bravely together.

As such, Pride of the Yankees remains a paradigmatic example of the Hollywood baseball film of this era. As one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Gary Cooper had already gained fame playing heroes in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936) and Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941), by the time he embodied Gehrig on the screen. (Although Cooper was a right-hander and Gehrig battled left-handed, the magic of Hollywood prevailed, as Cooper relates: “The letters on my uniform were reversed as it is in mirror-writing and the film was processed with the back side to the front. My right hand thus appeared to be my left”; qtd. in Sandomir 135).

The studio hired the sportswriter Damon Runyon to explicitly connect the film to the war effort, and his patriotic words scroll across the screen to start the movie: “This story is a . . . lesson in simplicity and modesty to the youth of America. He [Gehrig] faced death with the same valor and fortitude that has been displayed by thousands of young Americans on far-flung fields of battle. He left behind him a memory of courage and devotion that will ever be an inspiration to all men.” The film explicitly espouses a staunch faith in the American Dream, when Mama Gehrig (Elsa Janssen), a German immigrant, tells her son, “In this country you can be anything you want,” and encourages him to attend Columbia University to become an engineer—a plan Lou rejects when the Yankees offer him enough money to pay her medical bills. When Gehrig and Babe Ruth (who plays himself) visit a sick child in the hospital, the Bambino plays it up for publicity photos, but Gehrig makes a personal connection with the child, telling him, “There isn’t anything you can’t do if you try hard enough”—again words that characterize a vital element of the American Dream.

Throughout the movie, Gehrig is characterized by his sports writer friend Sam Blake (Walter Brennan) as a working-class hero: “A guy who does his job and nothing else. He lives for his job. He gets a lot of fun out of it. And fifty million other people get a lot of fun out of him, watching him do something better than anyone else ever did it before.” When Lou and Elsa marry, it is not a fancy celebration; they are joined by family, friends, and the blue-collar workers building their house. When Lou is late coming home, Elsa finds him umpiring a baseball game for some local kids. Such sentimental moments cement Gehrig into the role of the Everyman who works hard, is granted great gifts, and then has them tragically taken away from him. A modest Gehrig responds to both his good fortune and his bad luck with a laconic acceptance of life’s fluctuations. It is, however, significant to remember that during this time so nostalgically invoked by so many Americans, major-league baseball was a totally segregated sport. Off the screen, the lofty sentiments of the United States as a country of opportunity for those who are willing to work hard to achieve their dreams, expressed by Lou and his mother, would have struck many Black ballplayers merely as empty platitudes with little applicability to their lives.

“THE CHURCH OF BASEBALL”: BULL DURHAM

Pride of the Yankees represents a period of baseball movies that stretches from the 1930s to the end of the 1950s, one that incorporates the typical Hollywood stereotypes and narrative conventions that dominated US cinema during the studio era. Bull Durham, however, typifies a more raucous and cynical period from the 1970s onward, when fans proved unwilling to ignore the disparities between the lofty myths and the daily realities that constitute a professional athlete’s world, including movies such as Bang the Drum Slowly (John D. Hancock, 1973), Eight Men Out (John Sayles, 1988), Major League (David Ward, 1989), The Babe (Arthur Hiller, 1992), and The Rookie (John Less Hancock, 2002). While these movies still revere the sport, they replace pious sentiments and nostalgic romanticism with dying athletes, crooked ballplayers, corrupt owners, and drunken legends, generating a sharp conceptual shift in how the game and its players are depicted. For example, marketing and profits are omnipresent: “a bright array of commercial products and logos has entered the generally pastoral and timeless space of baseball [that] connects the game and players not only to the commodified social space around them, but also to the commercial logos that increasingly substitute for the symbolically impoverished, traditional icons of nationalism” (Sobchack 13). Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), for all his appeal, is no Lou Gehrig, either in his athletic talent or in his pristine character. About thirty minutes into Bull Durham, for example, the team’s batboy implores Crash to “get a hit.” His grumpy response is, “Shut up!” A sly and knowing parody of the famous sick kid in the hospital scene in Pride of the Yankees, this quick scene provides recognition that, in tune with the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, this is a far-less-heroic era than evoked in previous baseball movies but one containing a greater ring of truth and authenticity.

This is not to say that baseball’s more fabled claims are absent or that Crash and his teammates love the game any less than did their celluloid predecessors. Bull Durham’s opening monologue, spoken by Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), grandly binds religion, sex, and baseball together, as she claims that “the only church that feeds the soul, day in and day out, is the church of baseball.” But rather than concentrating on the glamorous side of the game, the major leagues (“the show”), with its creature comforts, coddled players, and beautiful women, Bull Durham foregrounds the hardscrabble lives of blue-collar ballplayers who inhabit the minor leagues, a grubby underworld of decaying locker rooms, long bus rides, bush-league stadiums, fast-food restaurants, and two-lane country roads. It is a period of “prolonged adolescence,” as Tim Robbins says in the “Extra Innings” section of the DVD, a short stretch of frozen time when men can still act like boys but finally must hang up their spikes, abandon the game they love, and assume more mundane pursuits. But for all the film’s brashness, its liberated female figure, its X-rated language, and its heated sexuality, Bull Durham still espouses much the same fundamental ideology as does Pride of the Yankees, particularly the need for players to realize their part, be it large or small, in the hallowed tradition of baseball and that the game, boiled down to its essence, is three simple acts: “You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball.”

As in Pride of the Yankees, a love story also exists along with the baseball action in Bull Durham, but instead of the virginal devotion between Lou and Elsa, the film offers Annie’s sexually charged affairs. She chooses a player to have sex with and to mentor each year: first Nuke LaRoosh (Robbins), a rookie with a “million-dollar arm and a five-cent brain,” and ultimately Crash, a world-weary catcher with twelve years in the minors trying to break the league home-run record—a feat few know about and even fewer care about. The plotline reaches back to a standard story of a young man with tons of talent and little discipline needing to be mentored by an older man who teaches him to harness his gifts and respect the game. At first antagonists, these men come to share a bond of trust that grows between one who has a chance at greatness and the other who knows he will never return to “the show.” Despite Annie’s interpretation that such macho bonding is just “latent homosexuality rechanneled,” the two men come to recognize the strengths of the other. Crash even teaches Nuke how to employ sports clichés effectively, which he aptly demonstrates when he arrives in the majors, and to always approach the game with “fear and arrogance.” Despite Annie’s smoldering, libidinal presence, however, attitudes toward women sometimes retreat to tired clichés, such as when Crash warns Nuke that a woman’s “pussy is like the Bermuda triangle. A man can get lost in there and never be heard from again.” He also decrees that as long as Nuke and the team are winning, his protégé cannot have sex, a plot to keep Nuke from Annie but a note to superstitious players as well. Women may not weaken legs in Bull Dur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Baseball Movies
• 2. Basketball Movies
• 3. Football Movies
• 4. Boxing Movies
• Conclusion: Fields of Perpetual Dreams
• Acknowledgments
• Further Reading
• Works Cited
• Selected Filmography
• Index
• About the Author