Sports Movies

By Lester D. Friedman

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Mar 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9780813599885

Lester D. Friedman

Lester D. Friedman teaches medical humanities and bioethics at Upstate Medical University and cinema studies in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University.

Book preview

SPORTS MOVIES

QUICK TAKES: MOVIES AND POPULAR CULTURE

Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture is a series offering succinct overviews and high quality writing on cutting edge themes and issues in film studies. Authors offer both fresh perspectives on new areas of inquiry and original takes on established topics.

SERIES EDITORS:

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is Willa Cather Professor of English and teaches film studies in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies and professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Transgender Cinema

Blair Davis, Comic Book Movies

Jonna Eagle, War Games

Lester D. Freidman, Sports Movies

Steven Gerrard, The Modern British Horror Film

Barry Keith Grant, Monster Cinema

Daniel Herbert, Film Remakes and Franchises

Ian Olney, Zombie Cinema

Valérie K. Orlando, New African Cinema

Stephen Prince, Digital Cinema

Dahlia Schweitzer, L.A. Private Eyes

Steven Shaviro, Digital Music Videos

David Sterritt, Rock ’n’ Roll Movies

John Wills, Disney Culture

Sports Movies

LESTER D. FRIEDMAN

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Friedman, Lester D., author.

Title: Sports movies / Lester D. Friedman.

Description: New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, [2020] | Series: Quick takes : movies and popular culture | Includes bibliographical references, filmography, and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019019297 | ISBN 9780813599878 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813599861 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813599908 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813599885 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Sports films—History and criticism. | Motion pictures—United States—History and criticism. | Sports in motion pictures.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.S67 F75 2020 | DDC 791.43/655—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019297

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2020 by Lester D. Friedman

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

TO EBEN HECKTOR

WELCOME TO THE FAMILY

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

SPORTS MOVIES

INTRODUCTION

Some games are purely random, but most follow rules that blend skill and chance to keep things interesting. Competition may call for strategy or strength, challenging competitors physically or mentally, thus building minds and bodies. Players may compete against a personal best or head-to-head against opponents. But competitive team play requires pulling together to win, fortifying social bonds, and maximizing complementary skills.

—The Strong National Museum of Play (Rochester, New York)

THE LOVE AND THE LOOT OF THE GAME: AMERICA’S SPORTING CULTURE

From the point of view of a dispassionate onlooker, or perhaps an alien on a first visit to Earth, all sports are inherently stupid. Why should anyone waste time caring about who can run faster, jump higher, or lift more weight when any number of dire situations threaten our world daily? This confused observer might assume that only a madman thought it would be fun to jump headfirst onto a tiny sled and plunge down an icy mountain as fast as possible—and without brakes. Our puzzled visitor would find it even harder to understand why crowds of people derive pleasure by watching two men punch and kick each other until one can no longer stand upright. Such potentially lethal activities would seem barbaric, and the onlookers cheering ringside would seem sadistic. Roughly calculating the extensive amount of prime real estate devoted to sports—the golf courses, tennis parks, athletic stadiums, football fields, soccer pitches, hockey rinks—this baffled visitor might wonder why these huge tracts of valuable land are not utilized for more socially beneficial functions, perhaps to raise food for hungry people or to provide housing for those who lack shelter.

Upon further exploration, our spectator would be stunned to discover the avalanche of revenue generated by sport activities. For example, WinterGreen Research reported (September 1, 2018) that six in ten children ages six to twelve regularly participate in team sports, helping to spawn a lucrative youth-sports industry currently generating revenues of over $17 billion per year in the US market ($22 billion worldwide). In 2018, the global sports industry was worth $620 billion and growing much faster than national gross domestic product (GDP) rates around the world (Collignon, Sultan, and Santander 1). Americans illegally wager an estimated $150 billion each year on professional and amateur sports, while another $4.5 billion is bet legally (Kang). The salaries of the world’s top-five athlete earners (Cristiano Ronaldo, $93 million; LeBron James, $86.2 million; Lionel Messi, $80 million; Roger Federer, $64 million; Kevin Durant, $60.6 million) were augmented by endorsements totaling another $209 million, and combined performance bonuses added yet another $175 million to the total (Lauletta). Confronted by such almost-unfathomable numbers, our observer might ponder why people who can shoot a ball through a hoop, kick it into a goal, or hit it with a racquet command such huge sums and reasonably conclude that at no time in history have so many people paid so much money, spent so much time, and devoted so much emotional energy to engaging with contests that barely affect, and rarely change, their daily lives. Yet, however foolish, however illogical, and however dangerous, millions of individuals spend inordinate amounts of time, unseemly amounts of money, and excessive emotional energy rooting for a team, playing a sport, or buying sports merchandise.

But why? One answer to that question is that loyalty to a team begets great dollops of enjoyment. Watching a team that you and others support accomplish something exceptional generates a sense of collective pride. As part of a community of supporters, we find pleasure in witnessing a feat we thought to be improbable, or perhaps even impossible, just moments before it happened. By merely watching events unfold, we share the team’s (or an individual member’s) moment of triumph in accomplishing a feat that seemed so far out of reach for so long: fan and team, spectator and athlete, are linked together in a sliver of history the moment it happens—and long afterward as well. Collectively, we revel in the sensuality, the aesthetic beauty, and the natural grace of a body in motion, the instinctive delight in beholding an exquisite physicality that defies the limitations of gravity and the laws of physics as it coalesces into a visual harmony of person, time, space, and teammates. Such sparks of wonder and delight sufficiently dull more painful sports memories and allow us to continue rooting for a team or a particular athlete, despite the inevitable psychic wounds yet to come.

Devoted fans eagerly pursue information about their team, even in the offseason, and utilize multiple social media platforms—predominantly Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat—to interact with others who share their passion; they avidly follow the dramas and melodramas that occur off the playing field as well as on it, cementing their bond virtually with each other in accessible meeting sites unconstrained by geographic borders. Rarely do members of these coteries refer to their chosen squads as separate entities, instead using personal pronouns like we and us that stress their oneness, their entrenched investment, with the objects of their loyalty. Thus, being a fan connects personal identity to collective identity, and media can become one part of a complex relationship that helps link an individual to a larger collective grouping (Boyle and Haynes 13–14).

But what factors account for the chokehold sports retain on the public imagination? People seek escape from the pervasive corruption and injustice of the world in sporting events where the best, most prepared, hardest working athlete can prevail. As Doug Glanville notes, sports on and off the field should set an example for fairness, decency and humanity for all of our children. Of course, they should; but they so often do not. Sometimes athletes or teams reap the just rewards for their discipline and dedication. Yet daily newspaper headlines and TV’s breaking news cycles reveal a constant litany of everything from individual cheating to point shaving to financial payoffs to domestic violence to sex abuse scandals that provides scant reprieve from the pervasive corruption and injustice of the world. Equally evident, the journalistic boundaries that once segregated sports from our daily realities now cease to exist. Athletes are celebrities and, as such, face the scrutiny and wrath of the paparazzi horde eager to expose the clay feet of our current heroes.

In an era when the president of the United States slams NFL players for joining Colin Kaepernick to protest police brutality and racial inequality, it is wishful blindness to view sports as an apolitical escape from the events of daily life; the world of athletics has become—or maybe it was always—a dramatic microcosm of just how corruption, racism, violence, sexism, and injustice have infected our culture. As a result, the culture of sports is plagued by the same ills and problems that enflame the rest of American society, but its denizens find themselves pinioned under a far brighter spotlight. To be fair, we tend to hold athletes to a higher moral standard than allotted most other members of society, one particularly hard to maintain in a world flooded by an intrusive swarm of reporters anxious to feed a ravenous twenty-four-hour news and entertainment cycle that prior generations of athletes never had to navigate. But being a fan in the modern world means, at least for a brief time, having to ignore some of the most disturbing elements of the sports/media complex, tucking them securely into a gloomy corner of our mind—at least until we see who wins.

This book deals predominantly with US fictional team-sports feature films and offers something quite different from responding viscerally either to live sporting events or to sports movies. Exploring the thematic content and cultural significance of films whose narratives center on sporting events, whether based on historical facts or totally fictional, acknowledges the importance of the overflow of feelings but necessarily becomes a process that derives its strength, its worth, from the level and depth of analysis it brings to dissecting the subject. This book’s investigation of sports movies, therefore, foregrounds analytical rather than passionate responses, critically exploring how these movies depict sports in a way that both refracts and reflects the central role that they continue to play in the United States’ cultural and imaginative life.

TELEVISION IS NOT THE TRUTH: SPORTS AND TV

Think of how many more sporting events you have watched on TV as compared to those you have attended in person. Most of us cannot scrape up money for Super Bowl tickets or find a way to attend the NCAA basketball finals, and so the vast majority of people in our sports-saturated environment consume athletic contests as mediated spectacles, mostly live and mostly on TV; in fact, the preponderance of our sports-viewing memories probably have been depicted and filtrated through media broadcasts that package and deliver games to our television screens. Because of this corporate and technological dominance, the network of interlaced connections that binds sports and television tightly together exerts a profound influence on the visual design, ideological content, and cultural context of sports film narratives, conventions, characters, and styles. What results, however, is a reversal of the traditional reciprocity pattern between TV and films. While television programs regularly mimic conventions initially established on movie screens, in this case most sports films necessarily take into account the techniques that TV directors routinely implement to present athletic competitions.

Watching most sporting contests on TV is a hybrid experience: an authentic event interlaced with staged elements and a scripted drama. On the one hand, the action on the field dictates much of the imagery that a viewer receives. But what parts of the ongoing action are shown and in what level of detail depend on what a director thinks viewers need to remain engaged. The games we watch on TV, therefore, substantially differ from attending athletic events in person, much as attending a live theater performance differs from viewing a filmed version of the same drama; in the former, you can observe whatever portion of the stage attracts your attention, but in the latter, a director dictates what and how you see what occurs on the screen.