The plot thickens

Syrupy clichés one reason most sports movies are stinkers



All you need to know about sports movies are two things:

1) All of them have the same plot.

2) Most of them are about boxing.

The plot, basically described as Rocky's Bad News Hoosiers, is about the lovable loser who triumphs in the end. If there is a love story involved, the champ also gets the girl. If not, there is redemption of some other sort, usually for some old, worn-out person.

Boxing predominates because it is cheap and obvious. Hey, is it easier to have two guys fight or 22 of them play football? Boxing also has many "characters" who hold spit buckets and talk colorfully. Once upon a time this might have been justified, but Hollywood hasn't caught on that boxing really appeals to only a small segment of the population nowadays, and so it keeps on turning out boxing movies that get more dreadful, even as the potential audience diminishes.

Hey, I have an idea: Let's make a bad movie for a woefully small crowd!

You will note that Sports Illustrated's list of the Top 20 sports movies includes seven boxing movies -- 35 percent. Suppose 35 percent of the best war movies were about the Boer War. You'd wonder, wouldn't you? I mean, where is the sense of proportion? Oh, well, now they're making a movie about the life of Muhammad Ali, a subject which we all know only slightly less well than sex. But if it's boxing, crank it up and call up all the old clichés.

I'm not going to pick the list apart, because Top 20 lists don't exist except for the purpose of argumentation, and I refuse to lower myself.

However ...

On a high plane, I would like to register three complaints. First, Raging Bull is way too high. I reviewed it for Sports Illustrated when it came out 20 years ago, and I said then what I say now, that it is so peopled with despicable human beings and so gratuitously violent that all the good stuff is cancelled out. However, all the auteurs love Raging Bull, so it will keep on making Top 20 lists. You leave it off at your own peril.

On the other hand, Field of Dreams is way too low and National Velvet isn't even ranked, which makes me suspect of the listmaker's tender sensibilities, even though, heretofore, I always thought he had a pleasant outlook on the world. A man likes seven boxing movies and no horses (with or without a young Elizabeth Taylor) and you have to start wondering, though.

Finally, Jerry Maguire is actually in the top 10. I thought Raging Bull's boxing scenes were more realistic than Jerry Maguire's scenes involving, well, people. For lack of a better way to describe Jerry Maguire, I thought it was the 10th worst movie of all time. (Most of the other worst 10 were all the other Rockys.)

As you can see, there is no accounting for taste.

An interesting thing about sports movies is that they are almost never about college sports. The only one on this list set on campus is Breaking Away, which is a wonderful film but not about the big-time college sports to which we devote so much time. Go back to the first part of the century, when very few Americans went to college, and a great many comedies were made about college sports -- poking fun at the hoity-toity university boys and their games. But for many years now, films have only rarely used the campus as a sports venue. It is a curious oversight, as odd at one extreme as the passion for boxing is on the other.

We are still waiting, too, for the first good tennis or golf movie, although one on the Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs fandango is in the works.

Also, we are still waiting for a good movie on badminton, dog racing, fencing, field hockey, synchronized swimming, beach volleyball and Arena Football.

And, just for the record, my own favorite sports movie was Chariots of Fire. What I especially loved was that it was the anti-sports-cliché movie of all time. The film featured two runners who did not run against each other. Imagine that. Sadly, American movies are so much more beholden to formula. But, of course, that's why sports movies will always be so attractive. Somebody has to win. Somebody has to have a happy ending.

Frank Deford is a senior contributing writer for Sports Illustrated.