Each county within each state is color-coded based on which official NFL team page has
the most Facebook “Likes" by users who live in that county.
Sports is a lot like politics, at least in the ways the public approaches them in their reactions and behavior. The team one follows is more than likely to be based on the region, city or town where someone grows up and the fan affiliation of one's parents and immediate family, with research data showing
the fandom of one's father is especially important in forming one's attitude toward sports. This is very similar to political belief, in that it is usually informed by the
cultural identity within a given area of the country and
tends to follow a parent's politics, with some variations and
rebellion.
If one examines a particular sports fandom further, things get particularly tribal and populist. Just as in politics and political parties, people are more willing to give those on their own side more of a pass, make excuses, or overlook past transgressions. So if one of your star players has been part of a dog fighting ring, convicted of domestic violence, has a history of sexual assault allegations, doing drugs, or any other assorted mess, most fans of that team are willing to rationalize it to some extent, and put it to the back of their minds as long as the player is scoring touchdowns or making sacks. To the supporters of the New England Patriots, they are a premiere dynasty in the history of the National Football League. To the fans of the other 31 teams in the NFL, Bill Belichick has presided over a team with a history of doing questionable things to win, with even the new Miss America calling Tom Brady a "cheater" on national television last night. But to Patriots fans, this is all sour grapes and part of the world being out to get them. And this sort of "us against the world" rhetoric is common to most sports fantasies and has a whiff of populism. It frames sports as a David versus Goliath struggle, where the small underdog has a chance and on any given Sunday anything can happen.
With the start of football season, I thought I would tackle sports and sports films. Which movies stand out as your favorites? Which ones do you hate?
Continue below the fold for more.
- Not too long ago, Vertigo overtook Citizen Kane at the top of Sight & Sound's poll of film professionals and international critics for the best films of all-time. On Quentin Tarantino's ballot, he listed The Bad News Bears (1976) as one of the ten best films ever made. I decided to re-watch it last night after having not seen it for a long while, and the one thing that strikes you about the movie is its honesty. And that's probably the reason it still holds up, while its de-fanged remake didn't work. This is a film with flawed children, being coached by a flawed man, in a flawed little league system that wants to look down their nose at the Bears at every turn. The Bad News Bears was directed by Michael Ritchie, and it's an interesting contrast to Ritchie's other best-known film: The Candidate. In both films, the lead characters, Walter Matthau's Buttermaker and Robert Redford's Bill McKay, are not taken seriously at first, but become seduced into becoming what they hate the most by the chance of winning. Buttermaker decides there are things more important than winning, where McKay doesn't. Also of note is Vic Morrow, who's great and just nails his part in this movie as the coach of the Yankees. Anyone who's ever been around little league baseball or pee-wee football has met the kind of asshole coach/parent he plays in this movie. And arguably, the problem he represents has gotten worse, not better, since 1976. Finally, this is probably one of the most empowering films where the team loses. Sometimes in life you're going to lose to assholes. Instead of accepting it and smiling, tell the assholes to go fuck themselves.
- The picture painted of professional football in North Dallas Forty is a brutal one. Based on the novel by Peter Gent, a wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys in the late 1960s, the story is a scathing satire with most of the characters based on members of the Cowboys organization from that era, with analogues of Don Meredith and Tom Landry present in the film. Where football is usually put forward in the public psyche as a "game" that accentuates Americana and the glory of individual and team to overcome adversity, the movie was one of the first fictional pieces to present the situation as a business where the health and safety of the players is secondary, and the bottom line is the true winner. The tone is set in the opening scene, when Phillip Elliott (Nick Nolte) struggles to get out of bed and limp his way to the bathtub after suffering through a game the night before.
- Written by Nancy Dowd, and based on the experiences of her professional hockey player brother, George Roy Hill's Slap Shot is reportedly the film Paul Newman rated as the favorite of all his performances. The film centers on the Charlestown Chiefs. It's a middling club in minor-league hockey, and Reggie Dunlop (Newman) is an aging player that's in the last stages of his career. When the news comes that the Chiefs are going to fold after the local mill close, Dunlop devises a plan to keep the team going by starting a rumor of outside investors buying the team and moving it to Florida, and upping the violence at hockey games by bringing in "goons" like the Hanson Brothers. This new direction builds the popularity of the team, and unites the town. The movie has many, many funny moments, while also both critiquing sensationalism and using it to make the film's point.
- The thread which runs through Chariots of Fire is personal integrity. Based on the lives of runners Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, who both ran for Britain in the 1924 Olympics, the movie examines the reasons why both men competed. For the Jewish Abrahams, running was a way of expressing himself and his worth against the anti-Semitism he encountered. And in the eyes of the devoutly religous Liddell, running is a glorification of God's gifts. The film was a critical darling when it was released, winning multiple Academy Awards including Best Picture, but it's usually remembered for Vangelis Papathanassiou’s stirring theme.
- One of the most interesting aspects of sports is that while it can divide it also allows people of different cultures to find a common medium to bridge differences. Based on the real relationship between Chicago Bears players Brian Picolo (James Caan) and Gale Sayers (Billy Dee Williams), Brian's Song is a prime example of the "buddy" movie and creates compelling characterizations of both men, which makes it sting just that much more when Picolo's plight is actualized. The speech given by Sayers toward the end of the movie is generally regarded as one of the top "guy-cry" moments in all of film.
- Speaking of tears, 1989's Field of Dreams has been known to make people misty. The quintessential emotional nature of sports is that it ties into childhood memories and that time in one's life where everything was possible. Things seemed simpler, the world wasn't as complex, and there was an innocence about life. Field of Dreams is not really about baseball, and technically really isn't about sports. It's about regrets and opportunities, and hoping we can have another chance to have a catch with Dad some day.
- Directed by Steve James and released in 1994, Hoop Dreams is usually in the conversation for one of the best documentaries ever made. The film follows two African-American high school students from the Chicago inner-city, William Gates and Arthur Agee, over the course of four years. Both Gates and Agee dream of making it to the NBA, and the viewer watches how that dream rises and falls based on things within and beyond Gates' and Agee's control. Some family members are supportive, while others are frustrating. A scholarship to a prep school has more to do with performance on the court than providing an education. And all it takes to remove one's path to college and professional sports is a random injury, with the injuries taking their toll as time moves forward. Analysis of the film has seen larger themes about race, class and perceptions of social mobility in America. One last tangential note, Hoop Dreams is also infamous for its Oscar snubbing, with members of the Academy's documentary branch reportedly conspiring to blackball its nomination. The incident led to reforms in the Oscar nominating process.
- For all intents and purposes, the audience should hate Burt Reynolds' Paul Crewe and his "Mean Machine" team in The Longest Yard (1974). The movie starts with the professional football player slapping around his girlfriend, stealing her car, and generally acting like a prick for a huge section of the movie. And the protagonists of the movie are a bunch of criminals. But the movie wins the audience over by being about how people come together to tell an authority that's just as awful (and maybe even worse) to "Go to Hell," while also finding some self-respect.
- At the core of Caddyshack is a story that finds humor in class division. Since some people think of golf as the official game of capitalist imperialism, it lends itself to that kind of story. Plus, rich people tend to be assholes in fiction, especially in comedies. Put both of those things together, and Ted Knight doesn't disappoint as Judge Elihu Smails, with the character's desire to keep Bushwood Estates a country club haven for rich assholes like himself. Directed by Harold Ramis and written by Brian Doyle-Murray, the movie has some iconic comedy moments and is highly quotable.
- Class is a big theme in a lot of these sports movies, and it's certainly a big part of Breaking Away. In Bloomington, Indiana, Dave Stoller (Dennis Christopher) dreams of being part of the Italian cycling team, but him and his friends (Dennis Quaid, Jackie Earle Haley and Daniel Stern) can't afford to attend Indiana University. The college kids look down on them and call them "cutters," since their families were the stone cutters which built the university. All of this eventually leads to the Little 500 race, where realizing what one is and isn't, and digging down deep is what eventually carries the day.
- Reportedly, author H. G. Bissinger received death threats for what he reported in Friday Night Lights. Football is a big part of Texas culture, especially high school football. And it's a big driving force in Odessa, Texas. The socioeconomic dynamics were fascinating, since it's a Texas oil town, that doesn't have anymore oil, there's hell to pay for losing a game, and dreams of escaping poverty through football can be shattered suddenly and viciously. All of the different iterations of Friday Night Lights are interesting in analyzing how the parents and people in a town "use" kids on sports teams as vicarious vessels.
- 1988's Bull Durham is part romantic comedy and part depiction of baseball as a philosophical exploration of the nature of man. Writer-director Ron Shelton drew on his own experiences as a minor-league ball player, and the prevailing theme of the movie is the search for meaning in things that may be trivial. All of the characters are passionate about something, whether it be baseball, or fucking baseball players, or finding meaning in baseball and fucking baseball players. The story mixes baseball, sex, religious metaphors and literary shoutouts to make a case for how people interpret life. The Durham Bulls’ manager (Trey Wilson) says baseball is simple, in that it's a game where “You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball.” And a lot of people break down life into just as simplistic a formula of "you're born, you live, and you die." But the truth is that the stuff in-between makes things much more complex and can take on great significance, whether or not the underlying condition truly have meaning or are as trivial as hitting a ball.
- Considered by many critics to be the best film to come out of the 1980s, Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull features one of Robert De Niro's finest performances as boxer Jake LaMotta. Throughout the movie, LaMotta is defined by his relationship with his wife, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), which the main character can only see in terms of being a virgin or whore. His rage, both inside and outside of the ring, comes from his inability to fully understand his attraction, jealousy, and need to control Vickie. Boxing is a place where LaMotta can take out his frustrations on someone else's face, and be punished for his sins.
- Just like Raging Bull, Sylvester Stallone's Rocky is not really about boxing. It's about a person finding a way to believe he's worthy of having something good in his life. When given the opportunity to fight the world champion (Carl Weathers), Rocky is originally told by Mickey (Burgess Meredith) that it's a waste of time because he doesn't have heart. By the end of the movie, the character has the self-respect to keep going, and that's why it doesn't matter if he lost the fight. He's in a mental place where he's winning in life.
- If you love basketball, there's something in Hoosiers that'll speak to you. It embraces the love of the underdog, but it also preaches fundamentals and the importance of being a team. Moreover, Gene Hackman's coach Dale feels like a real coach, the players seem like the kind of people one would meet on a varsity basketball team, and the town goes through the usual emotional highs and bitter lows when things are good and bad. But it's pop culture mystique comes from its Cinderella-esque fantasy of the small town squad being able to overcome all adversity to win it all.
- There's something about Major League which totally captures what it's like to be a fan of a perpetually losing team. I remember reading an article which compared being a fan of the Cleveland Browns to the existence of Theon Greyjoy (a.k.a. Reek) in Game of Thrones. After a while there's a sort of calm sense of doom that sets in, where one doesn't expect much from their team but there's still a sliver of hope which you're waiting to be crushed out of existence at any moment. And every year fans of those losing teams voluntary come back to be tortured by it all over again. But within that sliver of hope is the dream of every Chicago Cubs fan for more than a century. Maybe, just maybe, the Gods of chance and luck will finally come around and be our side this time. In Major League it's the Cleveland Indians, but it's totally an expression of that fantasy, while building a believable ragtag bunch of misfits who pull together to be great.