I used to have a chip on my shoulder about sports movies. Actually, more properly stated, I used to have a chip on my shoulder about sports in general, and sports movies were just a subset of that entire category of human activity that I disdained. As a kid, I wasn’t athletic—I have joked I was an avid indoorsman. It wasn’t that much of a joke.
And as sports movies go, Hoosiers was my go-to case study, the exemplar of exemplars, Patient Zero. The 1986 film is a perfect conglomeration of sports movie clichés: the down and out kids who find self-confidence as a team, the star player who needs to learn the meaning of “team,” the washed-up has-been coach struggling for redemption, the game that comes to mean Everything in the World to the main characters, who have no shot at winning it until they do… I remember reading a review (in Newsweek, I think?) when it first came out that dismayed at how predictable and routine the story beats were.
For a time, back in the early 1990s, I taught a screenwriting class in Bloomington, Indiana. I was a terrible teacher. I think I crushed the spirit of everyone foolish enough to sign up for the class—the only thing I focused on was teaching Syd Field’s three-act structure and how to properly format your scripts. As if people who signed up for an extended learning program through a community arts organization in Bloomington, Indiana wanted to learn how to sell their scripts to Hollywood agents, rather than just have a rewarding creative writing class. Well, anyway, I used Hoosiers as a case study in story structure, because its status as a generic formula picture in the most formulaic of genres meant it wore its structure very obviously on the surface and was therefore easy to dissect.
Hoosiers also had a special hometown appeal—beyond the Indiana setting, I mean. A certain Spyridon “Strats” Stratigos had a small but notable supporting role in the film, but a far more substantial role in the Bloomington community. A prominent restauranteur and local investor, Strats was a beloved figure and he became a crucial mentor to me.
I had been trying to mount my own independent production at the time—I had a screenplay, a cast (which included Strats), a crew, locations, film equipment, a shooting schedule, a lawyer, and some investors (including Strats). It was just about as real a thing as you could get without ever actually resulting in a movie. In the end, I decided not to sink myself into gargantuan debt to make a movie on the egotistical confidence that just because I wanted to make it, other people would want to see it. I returned the movie to the investors and called the project off—and realized I needed something else to do with my time.
Strats gave me a job managing the deli counter at the bakery he’d just opened in the Bloomington town square. It was one of the happiest times of my life, and remains one of my favorite professional experiences. I remember one of his mantras: that being in customer service was like being an actor. It doesn’t matter if you’re having a bad day, or a good day, or what is going on in your personal life—you have a part to play, as the representative of your employer, and need to be cheerful, professional, and accommodating because that’s the way that role is written.
Admiring Strats the way I did, and knowing how proud he was of his participation in Hoosiers and Rudy (which was filmed around the time I met him), inclined me to revisit my attitude towards Hoosiers. Without even really being conscious of it, I started to appreciate Hoosiers more and more… my snarky ironic disdain melting in the face of real humanity.
But the clincher was when I finally developed a sports fandom of my own. Younger me was an arrogant little snot who didn’t understand how honestly thrilling it is to be a part of a mass of people, cheering and hoping and loving all at once. And while I used to think that sports movie clichés were inherently phony, the fact is that sometimes real life serves up storylines as absurd and fantastical as any movie cliché.
Perhaps you saw it last week, or maybe you read about it afterwards—but there was a game in Yankee Stadium on September 25. There was absolutely nothing at stake for either team—the Yankees had already been mathematically eliminated from any postseason play, and their opponents the Orioles had been the first in their league to clinch their postseason berth. Winning or losing that night’s game would sway nothing for either side.
New York came into the ninth with a 5-2 lead, only to fritter it away immediately.
Derek Jeter came to bat for the Yankees in the bottom of the ninth, in a tie-game—this would be his last plate appearance in Yankee Stadium ever, and for all anyone knew at the time possibly his last anywhere. The veteran superstar had been on a farewell tour all season. The crowd crackled with anticipation—one good swing of his bat and he could drive in a run, enough to win the game. That is of course what everyone wanted to happen—even the opposing side couldn’t be so curmudgeonly as to deny that would be a storybook end to Jeter’s career, to win his final home game in a walkoff. And that is exactly what then did happen—as if scripted and performed in a cliché-addled movie.
I have no love for the Yankees—they’re a team of knuckle-headed bullies who play for a fanbase of entitled whiners, if I say so myself, and for that matter I’m not convinced American League “baseball” even counts as real baseball. But even I was taken in by the gloriously cinematic finale Jeter pulled off.
And in the end, that’s why sports movies work they way they do—because that’s how sports themselves work. These aren’t clichés, they’re the basic building blocks of the actual storylines of real-life games, played by real people and enjoyed by real fans. And every sports fan has at least one anecdote even more implausible than anything that’s been put on the screen.