Reel Sports

RUBEN: Ernie, listen. This guy can't fight. You'll knock him out. How you feel? Can't hardly wait to get in there?

ERNIE: I'll give it everything I got.

RUBEN: You might have to go the full three, so don't punch yourself out, don't lose your head.

ERNIE: Pace myself.

RUBEN: Yeah, but don't, you know, don't, uh, hang back. It goes fast.

ERNIE: Give it everything I got.

RUBEN: But still you want to pace yourself.

DO YOU remember who spoke those lines in Fat City, John Huston's memorable 1972 film from the Leonard Gardner novel of the same name? Jeff Bridges portrayed the young boxer Ernie Munger, and his trainer, Ruben, was played by Nicholas Colasanto, who would impart similarly addled advice as Coach on Cheers. That's how it is with sports movies: We meet old friends, look for connections, make comparisons, argue over a few beers.

Colasanto, remember, was also Tommy Como, the mob heavy in Raging Bull. However, was he a better heavy than Jackie Gleason was as the boxing trainer Maish Rennick in Requiem for a Heavyweight? And was Gleason any heavier (besides corporally) than the bloodless character ( George C. Scott's Bert Gordon) who guided Paul Newman's pool career in The Hustler"? Did you laugh harder at Slap Shot or Caddyshack? Did you cry harder when James Caan (as Brian Piccolo) shuffled off his mortal coil in Brian's Song or when Robert De Niro (as Bruce Pearson) looked dazed and confused under a climactic pop-up in Bang the Drum Slowly? Did you up-chuck more violently at The Pride of the Yankees or at Knute Rockne, All American? What? You didn't upchuck at all?

Maybe you didn't, owing, most likely, to the Rudy Imperative, the axiom of sports cinema that takes its name from the overwrought tearjerker about the scrappy Notre Dame lap-dog who finally gets a chance to play on Saturday afternoon. The Rudy Imperative forbids you to dismiss Rudy out of hand on the basis of its sentimentality, its playing fast and loose with the facts, or its over-the-top celebration of a common schlub. For if you do that, you hand down, by extension, a wholesale indictment of sports films, which are, for the most part, fractured fairy tales with soft, gooey centers.