Forget all those Rocky horror shows, sport is big box office business again
Rob Steen
The camera pans away from the centre of the ring towards the top rope, alighting on a patch of fresh blood. Black blood. Slowly, hypnotically, the treacly trickle becomes an ooze, splashing on to the next rung in a series of chilling plops. The director defies you to look away. You don’t.
Martin Scorsese knew what he was doing when he shot Raging Bull in grimmest monochrome. What could be more black and white than boxing? Somebody wins, somebody loses, everybody hurts. Body and mind in perpetual search of fusion. No editor or producer to correct flaws or longueurs. It is raw, naked entertainment.
Not even Rocky Marciano ever claimed to have “played” boxing, but there is similar drama in those pastimes traditionally described as “games”. Hence Hollywood’s passion for sport. Hence the 700-odd titles listed in the index to Ronald Bergan’s Sport in the Movies – and that was published nearly 20 years ago.
Never, indeed, has Hollywood been more eager to show its fondness for balls. Antonio Banderas, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Matt Damon and Keanu Reeves, even those old lags Al Pacino and Robert Redford, have all recently been involved in projects about the competitive arts.
This year brings no fewer than three major gridiron-based contenders, not to mention a golf pic in which the Almighty is unmasked as a caddie.
Even soccer, hitherto bankrupt as a source of inspiration – bar The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, directed by a German, naturally – is finally sniffing hipness. Stand by for a homage to the Busby Babes starring Liam Neeson, improbably, as Sir Matt.
All of which might seem rather rash, given that ancient wisdom about the genre possessing the profitability of a week- long stint at the Oslo Odeon for The Nicholas Parsons Story.
Yet with the Paramounts and Universals rapidly running out of plausible plots, let alone terrestrial heroes, the playing field has become the prime stuff of dreams.
All too often – and Field of Dreams itself was horribly guilty here – the result veers between mawkish sentiment and skin-deep psychology.
A sporting season on British TV recently opened with Jerry Maguire, Cameron Crowe’s stab at creating that walking contradiction, an agent with scruples.
From Fat City and Big Wednesday to Death Race 2000 and Hoop Dreams, notwithstanding the odd dodgy connection (Gregory’s Girl is a football story in the same way that Jaws is a yachting yarn), most of the best are laudably present and correct.
The affair, nonetheless, has been longer on fou than amour. While recreating rumbles in jungles is best left to documentary-makers (but not the makers of Bodyline, who passed Bradman off as a 6ft bronzed pin-up), the make-believe action rarely hints at authenticity.
To be fair, mind, Sly Stallone’s goalie in Escape to Victory was vastly superior to OJ Simpson’s attempt to be funny in The Naked Gun. And at least Russell Osman and John Wark’s staunch efforts to render Sly believable allow them to tell their kids they once outplayed Pele.
Seldom, moreover, do players transcend scripts, the vast majority of which rarely go much beyond the crude and crass.
For every John Goodman (playing Babe Ruth) or James Earl Jones (Jack Johnson), there have been dozens of one-dimensional Gary Coopers (Lou Gehrig) and Glenn Fords (Ben Hogan); for every Raging Bull there have been a score of Rockys.
The overriding reason for this low success ratio, of course, is that sporting fact tends to be richer than fiction. Imagine Mr Warner and his brothers buying the rights to a novel wherein a jockey is stricken with cancer and his favourite mount goes lame, whereupon, lo and behold, the pair win Britain’s toughest horse race. Too yucky.
Better, surely, to salute Jim Bouton, the former New York Yankee and author of Ball Four (1970), the original “Jocks in the Raw” diary. As the playboy killer Terry in The Long Goodbye, his screen debut ranks alongside Mick Jagger’s Turner in Performance – a priceless example of a star swapping spheres and producing something utterly inimitable.
Better, too, to thank our lucky stars for Ron Shelton, the former Baltimore Oriole responsible for some glorious exceptions to the norm. Bringing his extensive baseball expertise to bear, he invites you to taste the pain, touch the tension, smell the sweat.
Consider, too, his array of oddballs: Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as basketball hustlers (White Men Can’t Jump); Tommy Lee Jones as baseball’s very own sultan-cum-Satan, Ty Cobb (Cobb). Crash Davis (Bull Durham) and Roy McAvoy (Tin Cup), mavericks of diamond and tee, the most resonant roles of Kevin Costner’s career. Play It to the Bone, the latest, centres on Shelton’s first love – boxing – tracing the tale of two feckless pugs, bosom pals whose last shot at the big time is a fight against each other. Even Don King might blanch at such ingenuity.
Shelton’s heroes, unsurprisingly, are invariably nearly-men, rebels with fatal causes. “Those trying to reach the spotlight are more interesting,” he asserts. “Celebrity does something to people. We haven’t addressed the sickness.” Next stop Maradona?
He talks about “choreographing the onfield stuff”, about capturing the physical beauty. He prefers the balletic to the bathetic, humour to histrionics. His chief asset, though, is his ear. Those seasons in whiffy locker rooms have not been wasted. Not, he confesses, that it has been entirely his own work.
“When Crash Davis tries to provoke Nuke Laloush into pitching more accurately in Bull Durham, he says: ‘You couldn’t hit water if you fell out of a boat.’ That was Kevin’s line.”
Doubts about Costner’s sense of humour are hereby dispelled.
“I make movies from the athletes’ point of view, not the fans’,” Shelton stresses.
“You see things differently from the dugout.”
In other words you’d be better off taking up scriptwriting than management, Shearer, old buddy. You can get away with more.
And just think llllof the mileage llyou could get llout of His llRuudness.