The Sports Film

Games People Play

Bruce Babington

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231850575
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

After covering the genre's early history and theorizing its general characteristics, this volume then focuses on specific instances of sports films, such as the biopic, the sports history film, the documentary, the fan film, the boxing film, and explores issues such as gender, race, spectacle and silent comedy. Four major films are then closely analysed – Chariots of Fire, Field of Dreams, the Indian cricket epic Lagaan, and Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday. While recording American film's importance to the genre, the book resists the conventional over-concentration on American cinema and sports by its attention to other cinemas, for example the British, Indian, Australian, South Korean, Thai, German, New Zealand, Spanish, and so on, with the many different sports they depict.

1 DOMINANT PRESENCES: ONE

The sports biopic

The classical period biopic is the most conventional of Hollywood genres. For all its range of subjects, formulaic elements impose repetitive meanings on their apparent variety. As if to refute this, like other life-story films, sports biopics claim intimate factual authenticity for their inspirational accounts. Thus, Knute Rockne All American (1940) announces that its life of the Notre Dame football coach is ‘based upon the private papers of Mrs Rockne and reports of Rockne’s intimate anecdotes and friends’. Such ‘facticity’ typically privileges personal testimonies over more objective sources. Certainly sports biopics often display that detailed research with which studio Hollywood flourished its historical credentials, even as it shaped biographies into ideal forms disregarding ambiguities and opacities. In Jim Thorpe All American (1951), a Pennsylvania newspaper reporting Thorpe’s college track feats surprisingly contains cricket reports, an arcanely authentic reminiscence of Philadelphia’s forgotten cricketing past. Yet two of Thorpe’s three wives and seven of his eight children disappear in the cause of dramatic symmetry, and the ageing athlete’s inspirational conversion to coaching children and the framing banquet in his honour occlude his real life’s poverty-stricken last years. His 1912 Olympics triumphs, loss of his gold medals and amateur status for playing baseball for subsistence money and ‘Pop’ Warner, his football coach and mentor, are factual, but sit alongside many inventions. As Robert Rosenstone says in the context of arguing the inevitability of contraction, displacement and condensation in all historical films, there is no absolute rule governing the legitimacy or otherwise of invention in fact-based narratives, but ‘all such judgements must be decided on a case-by-case basis’ (Rosenstone 2006:46). Certainly Thorpe having only a single wife and child makes for a clearer, if more simplistic, narrative and the other changes have a rationale in the inspirational demands on biopics of the time. Georg Lukács justified historical novelists’ and dramatists’ (Shakespeare, Scott, Goethe, Schiller) inventions as transcending the ‘pseudo historicism of the mere authenticity of individual facts’, if the ‘real historical validity’ of such changes delineated underlying ‘world historical’ forces more cogently (Lukács 1969:194–98), but the question arises with the classical biopic as to what are the forces of history and what merely of ideology masquerading as history? Its producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, defending inaccuracies in Follow the Sun (Sidney Lanfield, 1951), the Ben Hogan golfing biopic, claimed ‘No one, in my opinion will ever pin us down to dates except the later dates in the past two or three years which are clearly remembered’ (Custen 1992:37–8), paralleled onscreen in Jolson Sings Again (Henry Levin, 1949) when the singer addresses his biopic’s screenwriters: ‘Let’s agree about one thing at the start, boys. I don’t think anybody cares about the facts of my life… What matters is the singing a man did and the difference that made’. The sports biopic replaces singing with hitting, running, and kicking, but retains overriding narrative conventions, including inevitable romance and marriage plots, and an eschewing of technicalities that might alienate uncommitted audiences. Thus, where Rockne’s coaching innovations are sketched, the development of the forward pass is briefly explained, but the colourful myth of his deriving plays from chorus girls’ precision dancing is more typical. Everywhere indeterminate histories are redrawn with uplifting moral clarity verging on hagiography, as in The Babe Ruth Story (1948). While Gehrig’s untimely death in The Pride of the Yankees (Sam Wood, 1942) is haloed by religious auras, Ruth’s is even more extreme, as he shortens what life remains by experimenting with an untried cancer treatment for the good of others. He also twice commits secular miracles as a crippled boy walks in response to a home run, and then one at death’s door is revived by another.

Nevertheless, much as these sporting lives mirror other classical biopics’ idealising, they also develop specific meanings ascribed to sport: (i) American sports as a symbol of Americanness, with success in them a means of moving from society’s margins to its centre; (ii) Sport, especially baseball, as an industrialised society’s postlapsarian pastoral, though, paradoxically, as the product of industrialism, itself growingly industrialised, something generally obscured by the films; (iii) Sport as a site where tensions between the individual and the group, and between the drive for success and more restraining attitudes, are significantly enacted; (iv) Sport as a moral force; (v) Sport as celebrating both the life of the body and marking its limitations.

Between 1940 and 1951, The Pride of the Yankees, Knute Rockne All American, Gentleman Jim (the boxer James J. Corbett, 1942), and Jim Thorpe All American depict non-mainstream Americans (Gehrig the son of German immigrants, Rockne of Norwegian, Corbett of Irish) moving to the centre through sporting prowess. Two of the titles play on the double meaning of ‘All American’: i.e. selected among the best of the year, and become wholly American out of the melting pot (‘don’t talk Norwegian, Dad’, Rockne as a boy admonishes his old world father, ‘we’re all Americans now’). Thorpe, a native American, is further outside the dominant culture than the others. Playing the white man’s games, he is a median term amongst the first biopics based on black athletes breaking race barriers (The Joe Louis Story, 1950, The Jackie Robinson Story, 1953). Sport thus is presented as a powerful validation of American social mobility, proving that in America you can choose to be what you want. In Gentleman Jim, Corbett’s ‘scientific’ fighting style and social climbing act out not just a refining of what his brawling Irish family stand for but a general refining of national manners articulated through his boxing. At the same time these films may overtly bind sport to national moral purposes, as when Rockne defends college football against a hostile educationalist as a channel for male aggression, and a bulwark against American youth going ‘soft’. The Pride of the Yankees was released soon after the US entered World War Two, and is epigraphed by Damon Runyon’s words linking Gehrig’s courage in dying to the battlefield fates of young men. This military building of manhood has a more softly patriarchal inflection in the Ruth, Gehrig and Thorpe films’ emphasis on the heroes’ positive influence on children. In a contradiction fundamental to the meanings of sports, the heroes are seen both as carrying meanings such as the above, and yet also as proponents of pure play divorced from the complex world, though this last is complicated by ambivalences in the part approval/part denigration of the sportsman as childlike encapsulated in Ruth’s nickname of ‘Babe’, in Gehrig’s slight slowness as played by Gary Cooper, in Thorpe’s difficulties with the adult world, and in Corbett’s narcissism.

The Death of ‘The Gipper’ in Knute Rockne

Lastly, all these films, though optimistic in their thrust, either embrace the realities of death – the ultimate breaking up of the body, e.g. the famous death of ‘The Gipper’ in Knute Rockne, the dying Gehrig walking from the light of Yankee Stadium into darkness – or more usually the little death of the diminution of the sportsman’s powers dramatised variously in The Babe Ruth Story and Jim Thorpe, and most affectingly where Corbett meets the defeated Sullivan at his victory party in Gentleman Jim. In the golfing biopic, Follow the Sun: The Ben Hogan Story (1951) the period’s rigid lifestory form finds different emphases within basic patterns – rise to fame, comeback after injuries and so on. Here a novel concern is the pressured sportsman’s mental fragility, different, say, from Thorpe’s problems of racial identity, which precede his sporting life. Hogan’s psychological affliction is far from the extreme of the oedipally-incited one mentally unbalancing Jimmy Piersall in Fear Strikes Out (1957), the result of his father’s pressure on him to succeed at baseball. But Follow the Sun and Fear Strikes Out both display a psychologising of the sports biopic analogous to the psychologising of other genres of the time, as Hogan struggles against feelings that his nickname of ‘the Texas iceberg’ demonstrates his inability to be popular, fears only eased by the public response to his courage in resuming his career after a terrible car crash.

The Spectre of Defeat: Sullivan at Corbett’s victory celebration in Gentleman Jim

Sports biopics continue into the present, negotiating between stubborn inherited idealising structures, too simple and cynical subversions of them, and movements towards more complex engagements with ambivalence, opacity, and the many contemporary meanings of sports. Some significant examples being: Dawn!, the swimmer Dawn Fraser; Raging Bull, Scorsese’s famous take on Jake LaMotta; Heart Like a Wheel (Jonathan Kaplan, 1983), the drag racer Shirley Muldowney; Cobb, (Ron Shelton, 1994), the baseballer Ty Cobb; Best (Mary McGuckian, 2000), the football superstar George Best; and Ali (Michael Mann, 2001). Among these, two characteristics depart significantly from tradition, with two films centred on sportswomen, unknown in the classical biopic; and three portraying pathologically self-destructive figures undermining the noble Gehrig paradigm. Cobb’s journalist narrator has a more complex role than Sam Blake, The Pride of the Yankee’s good newspaperman-celebrant of the hero, faced with the decision, when hired by the dying Cobb to ghost his autobiography, whether to publish Cobb’s account, or his own exposé of the legend’s viciousness. His ‘printing the legend’ ironically acknowledges the biopic’s – and its audience’s – tendency to idealisation. Despite Raging Bull’s gospel quotation afterword with its hints of the director’s belief in his character’s redemption, it is difficult to see Scorsese’s Jake LaMotta transcending the paranoia and the violence of which his ring style is only one aspect, as the film pessimistically reworks Rocky Graziano’s trajectory in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) from Barbella to Graziano (barbarism to grace), juvenile death house candidate to domesticated family man, even if still a spectacularly dirty fighter. In Best the protagonist, a hedonistic age’s literal ‘hero of consumption’, unbalanced by his new role of sporting pop star, neglects his talent, ultimately the only thing meaningful to him, unrestrainable even by the great manager Matt Busby. Dawn!, a downbeat biopic of Dawn Fraser, the 100 metres freestyle winner at three Olympics, evades the classical biopic mould in several ways, in its very Australian interest in the larrikin, the misbehaving nonconformist, in its long post-sporting prominence section portraying the heroine’s unsuccessful attempts to find a satisfactory sexual relationship, either heterosexual or lesbian, and in its muted celebration of her inability or refusal to abandon her working class roots. Michael Mann’s Ali, made in the context of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X’s (1992) foregrounding of black 1960s politics, belongs to a different age than the ‘good negro’ heroes of The Joe Louis Story and The Jackie Robinson Story, whose patient deportment countered the white supremacist’s nightmare of Jack Johnson’s arrogant ‘bad nigger’ holding the world heavyweight championship (1908–15). Johnson was himself the subject of a lightly disguised biopic, The Great White Hope (Martin Ritt, 1970), made during Ali’s persecution for refusing the draft and suggesting links between the two noncompliant champions. Ali, though ending traditionally with his regaining his crown by knocking out Foreman, and avoiding as many questions as it answers – almost inevitably with the complexity of the issues surrounding the hero – gives considerable space to the boxer’s relationships with Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, thus bringing radical racial politics into the subgenre. While not even gesturing to Ali’s Parkinson’s Disease-stricken later life (which When We Were Kings (Leon Gast and Taylor Hackford, 1996), the documentary of the Kinshasa fight does touch on at its end), the film modulates its celebration of his charisma, importance, and individual and racial self-assertion with complex moments in which he appears, in reiterated shots, silent, pensive, even bewildered, the not-wholly-in-control centre of the many meanings he carries for others.

The sports history film

Every sports film reproduces a historical zeitgeist, past or present, or both, as present engages with past, but two of the genre’s sub-types engage directly with history – the documentary, dealing with real-world performers and events in a way unmediated by fiction, and the biopic, turning into dramatic form the lives of real sports figures. A third type, here designated the sports history film, differs from the biopic in not centring on a single individual’s trajectory, but instead reconstructing a historical sporting event. It also differs from documentary, and parallels the biopic, in combining the appeal to fact with use – certainly with regard to the classical biopic, slightly more restrained use – of the resources of fictional dramatisation.

Some instances are 8 Men Out (John Sayles, 1988), retelling the 1919 Boston White Sox’s throwing of the baseball World Series; Bodyline (1984), the Australian television mini-series reconstructing the violent ‘Bodyline’ England v Australia cricket series of 1932–3; The Four Minute Mile (Jim Goddard, 1988), an Anglo Australian two-part television mini-series centring on the rival athletes striving in the early 1950s to run the first sub four minute mile; Invictus, retelling the 1995 rugby World Cup; the German film The Miracle of Bern (2003), reenacting West Germany’s upset defeat of the mighty Hungarians at the 1954 football World Cup; Miracle at Oxford (aka True Blue, Ferdinand Fairfax, 1996), based on the 1967 Oxford v Cambridge boat race; When Billie Beat Bobby (Jane Anderson, 2001), on the tennis challenge between the women’s champion Billie Jean King and the old male ex-champion, Bobby Riggs; and Chariots of Fire (1981), recounting the victories of the British runners Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell at the 1924 Paris Olympics. Such films differ from the biopic in various ways. (i) In a marked tendency to have multiple rather than single protagonists – e.g. Bannister, Landy, and Santee in The Four Minute Mile; Bradman, Jardine and Larwood in Bodyline; the eight (‘Shoeless Joe’ Jackson, Gandil, Weaver and so on) in 8 Men Out; Abrahams, Liddell, and the fictional Lord Lindsay in Chariots of Fire; both King and Riggs in When Billie Beat Bobby. (ii) In eschewing the biopic’s typically longer trajectory to highlight one major event, e.g. the England v Australia cricket series of 1932–3, the baseball World Series of 1919, the 2002 baseball season in Moneyball (2011), the 1954 football World Cup. The Four Minute Mile has a longer chronological span, 1946–54, than the other events (though Bodyline stretches from 1928 to 1933 and briefly even further back with scenes from Jardine’s and Bradman’s childhoods establishing the backstory), but still can be seen as one sustained happening – the competition of the various athletes to break the four minute barrier, with three climaxes, the Englishman Bannister first breaking four minutes, the Australian Landy beating his record, and finally Bannister beating Landy at the 1954 Empire Games. (iii) The sports history film, with a wider perspective than the biopic, may focus equally on both the opposing teams, or both, or all, of the rivals, in a more totalising gestalt than the biopic’s often simple oppositional structures. While this is not a feature of 8 Men Out, The Miracle of Bern, Invictus, Moneyball and Chariots of Fire, it certainly is of Bodyline and The Four Minute Mile, both films about Anglo-Australian relations and rivalries, necessitating understanding of, and investment in, both sides, and of When Billie Beat Bobby. In The Four Minute Mile, after Bannister’s victory, the English spokesman’s banquet speech sees the race’s greatness enabled as much by the loser, Landy, as by the winner. (iv) It is also characteristic of these films, all recent, that they tend to be rather more respectful of known facts, the ‘discourse of [sports] history’ to use Robert Rosenstone’s term (Rosenstone, 2006) than biopics, particularly earlier ones. This is because they are the products of a time when a highly developed sports journalism has diffused historical information widely, and where, consequently, factual authenticity has become a value to audiences knowledgeable in sports history. Nevertheless, the difference between the older biopic and the sports history film and certain modern biopics is one of degree rather than essence, since all are ruled by the popular dramatic film’s necessary omissions, contractions and shapings of incidents, and assignments of unrecorded motivations and feelings, a truth persuasively articulated by Rosenstone (Rosenstone, 2006).

Did Ring Lardner really walk past the White Sox players in a train singing ‘I’m for ever blowing ballgames?’ Probably not, but he certainly should have. Did Buck Weaver really recognise Shoeless Joe in the New ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series List
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Start of Play
• 1. Dominant Presences: One
• 2. Dominant Presences: Two
• 3. Four Major Sports Films
• Select Filmography
• Select Bibliography
• Index