Sports Movies

Sports and movies. Those are the two topics that I said I would try to be consistent on writing about on my blog. These are two topics that I know a little about and that I am fairly interested in. So why not combine the two, and write about sports movies? Good idea, right?

Sports movies may be one of the hardest genres of movies to make. It is difficult to make them realistic, intriguing, and not cheesy. Most sports movies are feel good movies with the underdog winning in the end. There are a few good movies like that (Hoosiers most notability), but most are just follow the generic template of setting up the underdog story then showing them win. A lot of these feel good sports movies come from Disney. So when I sit down to watch a sports movie and I see the Disney castle come to the screen, I already have a biased view before the movie even starts.

Even with some of the most average or worst movies having the sports theme, some of the best movies ever produced revolve around sports. Sometimes these movies are feel good, they just have a different way of getting to that point, and some of the time these movies do not end with the “good guy” or main character coming out on top. These movies are especially moving because we are so used to seeing the underdog win, that when he doesn’t, it is unexpected and, I feel, appreciated more.

The two sports movies that stick out in my mind where the main character (or team) doesn’t win are Friday Night Lights and Raging Bull. Friday Night Lights is a good football movie that is fairly realistic for southern high school football. They main team gets to the championship but they fail to score a final touchdown and their season ends. I thought that this was a good movie and I was pleased when I walked away.

Raging Bull is one of the best overall films ever made. It is a tragic story of Jake LaMatta, the middle weight champion boxer of the 1940’s and 50’s. The movie is the struggles he faces in his life and in the end he basically loses everything. The end is dark because you had seen this champion on the top of his game with a great life in the beginning of the movie, but you see him as a bum with nothing, not even his champion belt, in the end.

So I have been talking about some of the best sports movies, but I have not mentioned all of them. So here are my favorite movies by sport:
Football- Remember the Titans
Basketball- Hoosiers
Baseball- Tie between Bull Durham and Field of Dreams
Golf- Caddyshack
Boxing- Raging Bull