Familiar Analytic Regions

When HBO released its Sports on the Silver Screen (1997), Robert Lipsyte characterized it as a “90-minute slalom through 130 of the estimated 2400 sports movies made in the last 100 years.” Whatever the population then or now, sports films can be arrayed into familiar analytic regions: genres (comedy, drama, melodrama, noir, fantasy, biopic, documentary, TV reportage), film history (technology, aesthetics, studios, auteurs, stars), or symbolic analysis of representational truth and ideologies. All Stars & Movie Stars is organized into the sections “Sport as Cultural Production and Representation,” “Masculinity Misogyny, and Race in Sports Films,” and “National Identity and Political Confrontation in Sports Competition.” Diversity within this structure is achieved by including television productions [Visions of Eight (1973) and ESPN’s Funai Golf Classic 2003)], non-Hollywood films (The Endless Summer [1966], The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner [1962, U.K.], and The Miracle of Bern [2003, Germany]). Selectivity among sports is obviously required. Nonetheless the works chosen reflect legendary sports figures or movements, large audiences, significant filmic innovations, or critical accolades.

Historical framings

Mirroring the book’s title, Schoenecke’s essay on Bobby Jones evokes the role that sports celebrities assumed in playing themselves on screen, a circumstance with Jones, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jackie Robinson. Clay Motley’s “Fighting for Manhood” on the Rocky franchise reconstructs parallel cultural imperatives from a century earlier—a time of devalued physical strength, the subordination of men to factory and enterprise disciplines, the rising influence of women in the home, etc. Motley sees the rise of professional sports and Rocky as an attempt to re-establish a male sphere of physical dominance. Joan Ormrod’s analysis of The Endless Summer fascinatingly blends mid-60s existentialism (discover your self), technology-flavored consumerism, and postcolonial analysis of the “surfari” on a “frontier” where “primitive natives” can be enlightened by perfect wave seekers. Daniel A. Nathan’s commentary on Horse Feathers (1932) reminds us how early the Marx brothers began fighting the faculty’s battle against the collegiate arms race toward more lethal football.

Stereotypes

Anyone believing that Title IX (1972) launched a significant change in attitudes toward women as athletes must read Dayna B. Daniels essay, “You Throw Like a Girl.” She documents the longer history of agendas (endorsed by medical and educational authorities) to restrain women’s activities in the interest of their health. She also recounts steady film exclusions, putdowns, and vilifications of women--often scenes in which male athletes are urged not to be “pussies” (women or homosexuals). In the arena of racial antagonism, several essays nuance the exclusion of African Americans, first from the sports teams themselves and then from the screen. Pellom McDaniels III recounts “the absences, silences, and misrepresentations of black athletes” in baseball films, practices which amount to under representation generally accompanied by overt stereotyping.

Ron Briley’s “Basketball’s Great White Hope and Reagan’s America” deciphers the racial coding of Hoosiers (1986), which features white rural basketball players in triumph over teams with urban black players. C. Richard King’s “Do You Believe in Miracles?” describes the symbolic triumphs of white nationalism and unification in Do You Believe in Miracles? (2001) and Miracle (2004), both depicting the U.S. hockey team’s 1980 Cold War victory over the Soviet Union. Victoria Elmwood’s “Just Some Bum from the Neighborhood” moves in a different direction when she argues persuasively that the Apollo Creed character in Rocky (1976) is not coded as a black threat to Rocky’s white identity, but that he represents slickness and lack of integrity in a boxing scene dominated by the values of corporate marketing.

National identity

Tobias Hochsherf and Christoph Laucht’s “Every Nation Needs a Legend” is a subtle analysis of The Miracle of Bern that explores post-WWII tensions about the Nazi past, the re-integration of East Germany, and selective national memory. John Hughson’s “Why He Must Run” on The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner...