What Makes A Great Sports Movie?

Sports films were the films I grew up loving the most. They were the films my family would all sit down for, the films that gave my emotionally-repressed parents permission to cry when The Team Overcame The Odds and Won The Big Game. I came of age when Disney was making their run of great sports films like Remember the Titans (a classic) and The Rookie (flawed but watchable) and later Invincible (deeply mid) and Mcfarland, USA (underrated/seen). Sports films make up many of my first memories going to the movie theater, and even more memories of being able to be emotionally vulnerable with my family. I cannot begin to tell you the number of times I have cried watching Rudy, let alone cried watching it with my Dad.

To ask the question of what makes a good sports film, a question and task I have decided to give myself, is really to ask what do you like in a sports film? You’d get a million different answers depending who you ask. Film, like all art forms, is interpretation. Audiences bring their own beliefs and expectations to the proceedings and in turn, those beliefs and expectations shape their experience of the film. So to claim X is the best Y is inherently a fool’s errand- one that, nevertheless, is too fun not to do.

While it’s easy to imagine many people love sports films for the permission it gives their emotionally-repressed parents to cry, tears-in-your-beers is far from the only thing the genre is good at. Sports films contain their own highwire acts, their own unique emotional cores, and their own feats of filmmaking prowess. The Steadicam was first used on Rocky, lest we forget. Yes it has its own conventions- the team will overcome the odds, the dad will show up in the end, she’ll make the big play to win it all. But I’ve always thought of convention as a way to appreciate craft. Ideally if the craft is there, the convention won’t matter because you’re in it for the characters anyway. As an example, the first John Wick movie (the only one I’ve seen) was a hit largely because it employs its craft so skillfully. If you look at the premise- a grieving man seeks revenge when the only memory of his deceased wife is taken from him- does that wow you in and of itself? Not really! But Reeves is skilled at making you care about this guy, the script is smart at investing you in the situations, and the action choreography has literally reshaped how people think about an entire profession. When the audience knows the premise backwards and forwards, all you have left is craft and character. That’s where sports movies excel. 

Because so much of the sports film canon is about “overcoming the odds”, I think it’s useful to examine what exactly that means and what emotion that action strives to invoke. To overcome the odds is to achieve a goal that others thought impossible. It’s to be worthy of awe and be seen as an inspiration to those around you. Therefore, I think the ultimate question a good sports movie poses, intentionally or not, is “what are you in awe of?” Which is both a question for the audience scrolling through the Kanopy sports film section, and a question for the director of the picture.

So where do you as an audience member connect to that feeling of awe?

For me, I am constantly in awe of the instances when people are able to overcome their differences and work together to achieve a greater good. So the best sports films in my opinion- what makes a good sports film, if you will- are the ones that highlight that, even in passing. I saw George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat in theaters. Why? Because the trailer ends with one of the boys (the ones in the boat) yelling at his teammates “FOR ALL THE PEOPLE WHO NEVER BELIEVED IN YOU! AS! ONE! AS! ONE!”. They’re working together to bring glory to their team and their university and I, for one, cried every time that trailer came on.

I love when a sports film can explore the variety of ways people can work together and collaborate to solve a problem. In Rudy, it’s Rudy (Sean Asten) trying to overcome his lack of size and skill to play football for his beloved Notre Dame. Along the way, a cast of friends and family helps and supports him and in the end, he achieves his goal in front of all of them. In Bull Durham, Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) has to work with groupie Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) to help blue chip pitching prospect Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) find his stride so he can move up to the majors. While Crash works with Nuke on the baseball side of things, Annie works the life (and sex) angle to get Nuke’s head on straight. In recent years, sports films have been used as an ill-formed replacement for the social issues dramas of yesteryear. 2013’s 42 is a prime example, treating Jackie Robinson as a cipher plucked from obscurity to help a capitalist ball club owner (pretend to) solve racism in baseball. The film works because each character in the tapestry is imbued with a chance to do their part in overcoming/fighting against prejudice. It’s imperfect, but it mostly fits the structure.

There’s also something to be said about the way the removal of expectation can impact an audience’s viewing. If we know The Avengers are going to save the day in the end, it creates the opportunity to thrill an audience when the villain gains the upper hand, and to do so again when the hero comes up with a solution that we would not expect in order to win the day. The same can be argued for sports films, where the outcome is almost always “they win” but the road to that victory can be murky and laced with opportunities for characters to hone their craft. This helps invest an audience emotionally through a character’s failure, vulnerability, and ultimate growth. 2005’s The Greatest Game Ever Played employs this beautifully, by forcing Shia LaBeouf’s Francis Ouimet to focus on improving his putting form in order to win. The film gets specific with this, training the lens on proper and improper hand placements. Ouimet’s later victory is framed as being facilitated by his perfect putting form.

It must be acknowledged that this is ultimately a very specific framing and all sports films do not adhere to these ideas. In particular, films like The Iron Claw and Slap Shot employ the skeleton of collaboration as a means to explore the tragedy of its failure. The former rests on each brother ultimately succumbing to the pressure placed on them by their father, while the latter pivots at the story’s peak, revealing itself to be one of the all-time great indictments of wealthy team owners. The Hustler, Color of Money, Jerry Maguire, Prefontaine, and countless others lean more heavily into one genre or another rather than the pure, collaborative spirit of sports films. You could even make the argument for sports films overlapping surprisingly neatly with Heist films (with Oceans 13 as your nexus point) in the way they often work in some element of recruitment paired with the use of an impossible plan to overcome the odds.

A good sports film, in my estimation, isn’t just about a group of scrappy underdogs overcoming the odds. A good sports film blends elements of melodrama, character drama, heist films, and the occasional social issues drama to explore the ways in which our collective strength is greater than our collective weakness. They’re about working through a problem instead of letting it beat you. Most of all, they’re about the ways in which our community and belief in each other can sometimes be just enough to get us across the finish line. 

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