[Each of the last
few years, I’ve used the Super
Bowl week to AmericanStudy some sports
histories and stories. This year I wanted to do the same, focusing this
time on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture and identity.
Be a good sport and share your thoughts in comments, please!]
On the American
obsession with lovable losers, and a problem with it.
One of the best
sports movies of all time, Rocky (1976),
features a protagonist whom I’d call a heroic loser. That is, even before Rocky
Balboa went on to win all the climactic fights in his subsequent films, his initial
losing effort against Apollo Creed was a reflection of his heroic qualities:
his grit and perseverance, his desire and ability to “go the distance.” Well,
that’s not the kind of loser I’m going to focus on in this post. These losers
are the drunken coach and his team of misfits and outcasts who lose the
championship game and then start a brawl with the winners (The Bad News
Bears), the drunken career minor leaguer who ends his career setting a
record that nobody will remember and then quitting (Bull Durham),
the drunken washed out golfer who blows his one chance at redemption due to a
stubborn insistence on perfection over success (Tin Cup).
Other than drunkenness, what defines this bunch is precisely how anti-heroic
they seem.
But on the other
hand, they are the heroes of their stories, each of which culminates very fully
with a moment that asks us to cheer for the protagonists—often in the precise
moment of their lovable losing (such as Tin
Cup’s catastrophic final hole), and always in triumphs that are framed as
far more important than the actual on-field victories would have been (the
Bears proving that they’re a team, Costner’s characters getting the girl).
Concurrently, their stories’ actual victors are typically framed as either
unlikable snobs (the Yankees
in Bears, Don Johnson’s rival golfer
in Cup) or at best clueless jocks who
will never understand what’s most important (Tim Robbins’ star pitcher
in Bull). In a nation that was
created out of a revolution that pitted farmers against the world’s greatest
army, a nation whose general
and first president pretty much never won a battle in the course of that
revolution, it’s easy to see where this embrace of losers over snobs, the
flawed but lovable everyman against the powerful champion, arises—and easy to
embrace it ourselves as well.
I enjoy those
characters and their stories as well, and am certainly not advocating rooting
for the Redcoats during the Revolution (you definitely lose your
AmericanStudier card for that one). But I think there’s a subtle but
significant problem with these lovable loser stories, now more than ever: they
make it much easier to swallow substantial inequalities, to see it as
sufficient to achieve pyrrhic victories against the powers that be and thus
leave those powers ultimately unscathed. That is, whereas Rocky hit the unbeatable
champion Apollo hard enough that he famously noted, “There’ll be no rematch,”
in these lovable loser stories the champions don’t seem much affected at all—it’s
simply about the little guy achieving whatever victory he can reasonably get,
and us all being happy with that. And at the end of the day, that seems like a
recipe for giving up even the idea that either side can win—an idea that, mythic as it may
too often be, is to my mind at the core of the best version of American
identity and community.
Next
MovieStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other sports movies you’d highlight?
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