The Best Sports Movies Ever
Sports captivate people and moments. They become a part of our memories, a part of our souls. But movies about sports are just as captivating, they become connected to the sport to a point where you feel left out if you don’t understand the quote that was just said. This week in my radio show Jacob Keibler and I had a discussion about our favorite sports movies leading to my thought of using this as a topic for my blogpost this week. Throughout my baseball career, The Sandlot is one of the most quoted movie compared to the others but currently it is being challenged by Bull Durham as my teammates and I have developed more mature tastes. The sports movie genre for me is something that cannot be taken lightly and is, to me just as important as the sport itself. My goal of this blog post is to rank, in my not so humble opinion, my two favorite sports movies of all time. Bear in mind that I am a baseball player so my list may become one sided in the sport department but I stand by them just the same.
Hoosiers
How can you hate this masterpiece of basketball in its purest form? Five passes before you shoot the ball, David and Goliath, and Jimmy Chitwood captivate your attention as you follow the Hickory Huskers through their season and with only 8 players winning the Indiana State Championship. The movie itself was inspired from the Milan High Schools teams that won back to back state championship and starred Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey, and Dennis Hopper. The movie focuses on Gene Hackman’s character who was run out of the University of North Carolina and came to a small town in Indiana to coach basketball. He is immediately met with resistance from the locals as he finds that they are more knowledgeable about the game than he thought. The team struggles with his style of play at first but with the arrival of Jimmy Chitwood, the best player on the team, the Huskers begin to win beating larger schools with the heroics of different players throughout the run. Eventually, the little team that could found themselves playing a much larger and much more athletic South Bend Central team in the State Finals in historic Hinkle Fieldhouse. In the last possession Jimmy Chitwood tells Hackman in the huddle “I’ll make it Coach” one of his few lines in the movie and does to win it all. The drama and the identification with this team makes it my number one movie of all time.
Bull Durham
In my opinion, this movie is the most accurate to being a baseball player that I have ever seen. The discussions in the locker rooms and the infamous meeting on the mound make this movie my favorite one covering baseball. Focusing on a catcher on his last legs trying to hold on and a young, naïve, and inexperienced pitcher with nowhere to go but up and their entanglements with love, streaks, and slumps. As a catcher growing up I idolized Crash Davis, the catcher, trying to learn his swagger and trying to mimic to his stance and the way he talked. Imagine a 15 year old kid not trying to hit like Yadier Molina or Buster Posey but trying to hit like a player who never existed. From this movie I learned what it truly meant to control a pitching staff and have the confidence to do it effectively.
These movies are the types of movies that I watch when I’ve had a bad day or aren’t feeling the best. The movies that shape your life becomes a part of you and help shape who you are. These movies can for so long even become a part of your sport’s jargon or how you approach sports. I played my senior year in the regional tournament in a gym three times the size of my home gym. When we took the floor before anyone got there we had sort of a slow walk mixed with excitement and nerves, so as soon as we got in the middle I looked up and yelled “Hickory!” to hear the echo. Its moments like those that create for you a sense of hope because even if its fictional it still shows that challenging things can be done.
