[Each of the last
six years, I’ve used the Super
Bowl week to AmericanStudy
some sports
histories and stories. This year I’ve decided to focus on sports movies and
what they can tell us about American culture and identity. Be a good sport and share
your responses and nominees in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’s
sure to take home the championship!]
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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