[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 appeal of
underdog champions, and the untold sides to their stories.
If yesterday’s
two types (heroic losers like Rocky Balboa and lovable losers like the Bad News
Bears and Costner’s protagonists) occupy two spots along a spectrum of sports
movie protagonists, then heroic underdog champions occupy a third, even more
inspiring slot. Such characters are as admirable and heroic in their personal
qualities as Rocky, but seek something more than just going the distance—they
want to achieve the unlikeliest of victories, to knock off the seemingly
unbeatable champion. Perhaps the most striking such underdog champions in both
sports and sports movie history are the Miracle
on Ice hockey gold medalists of 1980—but since that group was still an
Olympic team for one of the most successful nations in Olympic history, I would
argue that the midwestern protagonists of Hoosiers (1986) and Rudy (1993), both films directed by David Anspaugh and written
by Angelo Pizzo, provide even more clear examples of this type.
It’d be hard to
decide which of those inspired-by-a-true-story underdog victories is more
unlikely and more inspiring. The Hickory high school team in Hoosiers (based loosely on Milan
High’s 1954 championship season) is coached by two men as collectively
flawed as Buttermaker in Bad News Bears—Gene
Hackman’s Norman Dale has been dismissed from his prior job for losing his
temper and striking a student; Dennis Hopper’s Shooter Flatch is an alcoholic
town outcast—and has barely enough players to field a team, yet goes on to win
the state championship against a vastly more deep and talented South Bend team.
Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger, whose life and events are portrayed relatively
close to accurately by Sean Astin and company, is the undersized son of an
Illinois factory worker who refuses to give up on his dream of playing football
for Notre Dame, overcoming numerous challenges and obstacles and finally making
his way onto the team and into the final game of the season, in which he sacks
the quarterback on the final play and is carried off the field by his
teammates. Having critiqued lovable loser films for their merely pyrrhic
victories, it’d be hypocritical of me not to applaud films that depict underdog
victories, and such stories are indeed undeniably appealing and affecting.
Yet in order to
tell their stories in the way they want, these films also have to leave out a
great deal, elisions that are exemplified by the way racial issues are not
addressed in Hoosiers. For one thing,
Hickory’s opponent in the championship game, South Bend, is intimidating in large
part because it features a racially integrated team, which would have been a
significant rarity in 1952 and which would seem to make them a team worth our
support. And for another, as James Loewen has written in his groundbreaking
book Sundown Towns (2005), southern
Indiana in the early 1950s was a hotbed of overt and violent racism; to quote
Loewen, “As
one Indiana resident relates, ‘All southern Hoosiers laughed at the movie
called Hoosiers because the movie depicts blacks
playing basketball and sitting in the stands at games in Jasper. We all
agreed no blacks were permitted until probably the '60s and do not feel welcome
today.’ A cheerleader for a predominantly white, but interracial Evansville
high school, tells of having rocks thrown at their school bus as they sped out
of Jasper after a basketball game in about 1975, more than 20 years after the
events depicted so inaccurately in Hoosiers.”
Such histories don’t necessarily contrast with those featured in these
films—but it would be important to complement the films with fuller engagement
with their perhaps less triumphant contexts.
Next
MovieStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other sports movies you’d highlight?
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