Hollywood is Crazy for Sports
By Mary Beth Gentle
Hollywood has always been crazy for sports, some might even say it’s a bit of an obsession. Right now in Hollywood, everyone from the lowly cube dwellers to the senior studio executives are in recovery mode after all the late hours spent watching Team USA night after night pursue Olympic glory. The struggles and hardships that many Olympic competitors had to overcome on their road to the medal podium was captivating, exciting and inspirational. All of which was a constant reminder as to why Hollywood loves making a good sports movie, its heroes are bigger than life and their stories touch something in all of us.
One of the first Hollywood sports movies that falls into this category would have to be 1942’s The Pride of the Yankees starring Gary Cooper as the great Lou Gehrig. It is not praised for its baseball playing accuracy, but it’s touching tale of the baseball great from his New York Childhood to his famous ‘Luckiest Man’ speech set the standard for heartfelt sports movies. The themes in this movie are the same as they are today. At the core of any good sport movie is love, friendship, compassion and heroism.
Another movie that has to be mentioned is 1976’s Rocky starring Sylvester Stallone. And when I say Rocky, I mean the original not the many mediocre films that followed in the series. The Original Rocky not only won best picture that year, but it won the hearts of millions as it told the story of the struggling, small time boxer Rocky Balboa. We watched as his training routine had him pummeling sides of beef in the meat factory, we watched as he won the heart of shy pet store worker Adrian Pennino and we watched as he put everything he had into going the distance against champion Apollo Creed. Rocky was the hero that the ‘everyman’ could relate to.
And my personal favorite is a slightly different sport movie, the 1989, Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner. When Iowa farmer, Ray Kinsella hears a voice from his cornfield bidding him, ‘If you build it, he will come’ he is compelled to tear out part of his crop to build a baseball field. What he thought was going to be a ball field for disgraced White Sox baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson and his teammates quickly became more of a quest to give second chances to people who sacrificed what might have been. Ray ends up on a journey of self-discovery as he helps a disillusioned writer and an old Doctor find joy in their own baseball dreams again.
But, at the end of the day Ray gets a second chance of his own when someone close to his heart comes to the ball park for one final ‘throw’. The love of baseball is what draws all these characters to this small field in Iowa, but at the core of this movie is a lesson to be learned about holding onto your dreams.
There have been many more inspiring sport stories over the years; Hoosiers, The Natural, Rudy, Miracle and Remember the Titans to name a just a few. It doesn’t matter what your goals are, it doesn’t matter if they are even sports related, these movies are filled with enough inspiration and heart to go around. And for a struggling writer sitting in a Hollywood cubicle, I will take inspiration wherever I can get it.
