Reel Sports

Our feelings about sports films, in fact, often defy reason. Every time a ballplayer materializes out of the damn cornfield in Field of Dreams, I get a migraine (one Hollywood writer calls the movie Field of Corn), yet Oliver Stone, no sentimentalist he, says he loves the film and "the way it evokes The Wizard of Oz." The next time I crack as much as a smile at Caddyshack will be the first, yet legions of my peers proclaim it legendarily, reload-the-bong hilarious. (That's how I feel about Slap Shot.) I buy lock, stock and theme song into Chariots of Fire, but director-screenwriter Robert Towne, who sent Mariel Hemingway over the hurdles in 1982's Personal Best and chronicled the life of Steve Prefontaine in 1998's Without Limits, dismisses Chariots as "a bunch of latter-day saints running around in their mission underwear." If we could explain our individual prejudices about sports films, maybe we could explain a lot of things in Hollywood. Like Adam Sandler.

There are, however, two certainties about sports films: They keep getting made, and the people who make them don't want to call them sports films. In recent months we've gagged at The Replacements (which celebrates a bunch of scabs), grimaced at For Love of the Game ( Kevin Costner doesn't have enough stuff to get out Mario Mendoza, yet he pitches a perfect game) and gone gaga over Remember the Titans (the box office is at $115 million and rising). Less-than-satisfying sports films have been made by well-known directors ( Robert Redford's The Legend of Bagger Vance), and satisfying sports films have been made by little-known directors (Gina Prince-Bythewood's Love & Basketball). Before he united the South in Titans, Denzel Washington upset the U.S. legal system in The Hurricane. We've had violence from both genders, as in Stone's Any Given Sunday and Karyn Kusama's Girlfight. Furthermore, so many animals have done so many incredible things in sports movies in recent years that some of us feel inadequate if the family basset hound can't go deep in the hole, make a backhand stop and fire a perfect peg to get the runner at first.

The coming-attractions list (page 97) is loaded with sports films, but Hollywood is still reluctant to acknowledge the genre. Director John Avildsen declares that the original Rocky is not a sports film. "Rocky is a character study with sports in the background," says Avildsen, who won the Best Director Oscar in 1976 for his valentine to a South Philly brawler. "I had never seen a prizefight before the movie, and I still haven't gone to one. Couldn't care less about them."

Sylvester Stallone, a struggling actor-screenwriter when he wrote the Rocky script, was (still is) a fight fan but says that Rocky Balboa's being a boxer was strictly metaphorical. "If Rocky was, say, a struggling writer instead of a struggling athlete, it would've been very difficult to convey dramatically what I was trying to say," Stallone says. "But put a guy in a ring, and you know him. Everyone's been kicked around. Everyone's been bullied. Everyone's been beaten up. That's what sports does in a movie. It provides a way, without being hackneyed, to get at the character." Stallone says he did something similar in his screenplay for the upcoming Driven, in which he plays an aging race car driver. "People understand what it's like to race against someone or something," he says. "The tax man, time, competition at the office, whatever."

Stone describes his Any Given Sunday thusly: "It's really a multilayered, Balzacian approach that studies the whole city, the whole social ball." While Angelo Pizzo was writing Hoosiers and Rudy, he hung a sign over his desk that read THIS IS NOT A SPORTS MOVIE, and his fuel for writing Rudy, he says, was his own struggle to make it in Hollywood. Hoosiers is "not really about this underdog team winning the big game," Pizzo says. "It's about people who are lost, isolated, stuck in their lives, and through the aid of another person they get unstuck. It's about second chances."

Even Ron Shelton, who directed and/or wrote such films as Bull Durham, Tin Cup, White Men Can't Jump and Blue Chips, insists these are not sports films; Tin Cup, for example, was about "the desire for immortality, self-destruction, our inability to get rid of who we are." Michael Tollin, the director of the forthcoming Summer Catch, says that film is not about baseball but about "believing in yourself, about fear of success, about people who are their own worst enemies."

What all of them are saying, in effect, is this: To do meaningful box office, a sports film must attract the nonsports fan. Makes sense. What these filmmakers also fear is that they won't be taken seriously as artists. Steve James, who made the incomparable documentary Hoop Dreams and directed Disney's Prefontaine, laughs off the fact that he's known mainly as a sports guy. "A friend told me, 'Hey, you're lucky anyone knows you at all,' " says James.

But for the last 100 years (and probably for the next 100) sports films have been made. "Sports movies are today's Westerns," says the 55-year-old Shelton. "Our contemporary mythology is built around the athletic field and sports heroes. We have our white hats and our black hats, just as my generation had its Western heroes."

SPORTS FILMS get made for a variety of reasons. "The big one is, stars love playing jocks," says Robert Wuhl, who turned in a memorable performance as the pitching coach in Bull Durham and also played the sportswriter Al Stump in Shelton's Cobb. "And the one constant is, they think they're better athletes than they are." The surprising thing is not that Costner (American Flyers, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Tin Cup, For Love of the Game) has been in so many; it's that stud muffins like Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson, who have kicked a lot of butt over the years, haven't starred in any. Then, too, says Shelton, studio executives are frequently fans: "If they make a sports movie, they can somehow be Hall of Famers."

Pizzo expected to be tossed out on his ear when he and his director buddy David Anspaugh (they had made Hoosiers together six years earlier) pitched Rudy to Frank Price, then president of Columbia Pictures. "When we got done, Frank leaned over and said, 'I can't wait to see this movie,' " Pizzo says. "That never—I mean never—happens. Turned out that Frank graduated from Michigan but was an unabashed fan of Notre Dame football."