Home Recreation: A Way of Life Modern society tends to fragmentize life Sports Films History Baseball: The Components of Profit Estrogen and Antagonists Diet and Nutrition The Vitamins Vitamin B Vitamin C Vitamin D Vitamin E Let the stars size up your shopping style Astrology: Magic or Science? Jamaica For Cyclists Maine: Earliest Inhabitants The passion for football Changes in Body Weight The Metabolism and Energy Transformations of Healthy Man Normal Activity Restricted by the Conditions of Experiments Metabolism During Specific Activities and Movements Public Colleges M to N N to Z What Is It We Want? Directed Thinking On Being Oneself Economics Is a Branch of Biology Life Is Also Frustration How Goods are Bought and Sold Leisure and work The Pecuniary Standard of Living The Uses of Time Teaching People to Want Things Art as leisure The Loss of Privacy The Great Emptiness	Sports Films History Since the beginnings of the motion picture industry in the United States, professional sports have been a frequent subject for the movies. Hundreds of films about sports have been produced for the same reason that synergistic ties have been established between American movies and other cultural forms including theater, literature, fashion, television, advertising, and toys. From the documentary-style “news films” of major prizefights and the World Series that were an important part of the early film industry to contemporary blockbusters such as Angels in the Outfield (1994), Space Jam (1996), and Jerry Maguire (1996), collaboration with professional sports has helped sell the movies. Because they frequently draw upon real contests and athletes, sports films have often claimed historical status. Although one might regard any film as historical in the sense that it offers what Robert Rosenstone calls “a document (text)” representing “the social and cultural concerns” of the time when it is made, most sports  movies that make explicit claims to historical meaning do so instead by portraying the past while looking back in time through the lens of present concerns. Rosenstone identifies several characteristics shared by most of the latter type of explicitly historical films, whether dramatic features or documentaries. They generally tell history “as a story” with a strong degree of closure that leaves the audience with “a moral message and (usually) a feeling of uplift.” Hoosiers (1986) does this by employing the climactic contest conventional to sports films to reestablish a moral order that rewards the hard work and determination of underdog protagonists. Even historical sports films that are more qualified in their optimism generally suggest that things have gotten or are getting better, although they may emphasize the price paid for such progress. Two examples of the “progress doesn’t come cheap” ending are Knute Rockne—All American (1940) and Pride of the Yankees (1942), both of which end with the death of their biographical subjects. These two films suggest that the hard work of men like Knute Rockne and Lou Gehrig—from working-class, immigrant families—earned them fame and material comfort and therefore justified their deaths to endorse the values that made that success possible. Released just before or during U.S. involvement in WW II, these movies validate military service by suggesting that sometimes the ultimate sacrifice is necessary to ensure a free and prosperous future. The preface to the Rockne biopic states that he is killed in a plane crash that cuts short his work “molding the spirit of...millions of young men and boys who are living by the high standards he taught.” Sports films frequently represent this progressive view of history in melodramatic terms. Literary critic Peter Brook says that melodrama is a common fictional mode of addressing disturbing social issues that are otherwise repressed. In an essay on television movies, Laurie Schulze qualifies Brook’s assertion by noting that “If melodrama involves itself with the excessive, its function consists, many critics have argued, in invoking desires or anxieties only to put them back into the box again.” This melodramatic containment is a common way for Hollywood films to present history—and sports films are no exception. Sports movies generally frame history as adequately represented by the individual desires, goals, and emotional dramas of the main characters, often in a biopic story. A large part of the complexity of the historical questions raised is excluded by such telescoping, and by the end of the film answers in the form of individual actions are fit into a single explanation, represented with a realistic mise-en-scène and an emotional resonance that undermine critical scrutiny. Pride of the Yankees, like Knute Rockne—All American and another sports biopic from the period, The Iron Major (1943), defines masculinity in martial terms that emphasize the need to sacrifice for a better future. Unlike Babe Ruth, whom Pride of the Yankees represents as selfishly embodying the consumer culture of the 1920s, Gehrig (Gary Cooper) dutifully accepts the authority of Yankee managers Miller Huggins and Joe McCarthy. We see Gehrig attentively receiving advice from Huggins about how to become a better fielder, and in a newspaper photo with his arm around McCarthy when the latter became Yankee manager in 1932. In its opening dedication, Pride of the Yankees connects Gehrig’s “courage and devotion” in the face of a deadly disease to the “valor and fortitude” of “the thousands of Americans on far-flung fields of battle.” The Gehrig character’s clearest statement of his submission to the rules of the game comes when he first hears the diagnosis of his illness: Gehrig: Give it to me straight, Doc; is it three strikes? Doctor: It’s three strikes. Gehrig: Doc, I’ve learned one thing. All the arguing in the world can’t change the decision of the umpire. Gehrig’s courage in the face of death, after a career in which he played in 2,130 consecutive games, is shown as a model of dedication to duty and acceptance of authority even if there is little time to enjoy the rewards of that self-sacrifice. Knute Rockne—All American also exemplifies this type of personalized, melodramatic version of history. Rockne’s life is shown as representative of the social mobility possible in America where even a boy from a working-class, immigrant family can grow up to become a national sports hero. George Custen comments that the first generation of Hollywood studio heads liked heroes whose traits resembled their own, which is why many biopics from the classic period use a similar narrative of “immigrant pluck rewarded by a benevolent America.” In his history of Notre Dame football, Murray Sperber mentions that when producer Mark Hellinger pitched the idea for the film to Jack Warner, “the movie executive liked it immediately” Yet while Knute Rockne—All American ostensibly offers the biography of the Notre Dame coach as historical proof of the American dream, it inadvertently makes reference to the selective nature of such opportunity. As Knute Rockne—All American opens, we are told that Lars Rockne brought his son, Knute, and the rest of his family from Norway, “following the new road of equality and opportunity which led to America.”1 The film unintentionally shows, however, that such opportunity did not extend to African Americans. Blacks appear only as minor characters in most sports films prior to the early 1950s, a marginalization that reflects their exclusion from the highest levels of commercial sports. Despite their brief appearance in the film, the two black characters in Knute Rockne—All American qualify its affirmation of the American Dream. In an early scene when young Knute plays football for the first time in a sandlot game, an African American boy running the ball for the other team knocks him flat. The only other appearance of an African American character comes much later in the film, when Rockne, now the famous football coach at Notre Dame, returns to South Bend on the train after a tough loss. A black porter stops at the door of his compartment and asks Rockne if he would like his suit brushed off before they arrive. The presence of the porter ironically recalls the boy who had run over little Rock in the football legend’s first experience with the game that was to make him famous. The difference in social position between Rockne and the porter suggests why the experience of the African American boy appears nowhere but in the one early scene. The promise of equal opportunity, which both blacks and whites were called upon to defend in the War, extended to some parts of American society but not others. Even more recent revisionist sports films don’t operate entirely outside these Hollywood conventions. As an independent filmmaker whose career has been distinguished by his attempts to avoid the melodramatic, ahistorical tendencies of Hollywood, the concessions John Sayles makes in Eight Men Out (1988) to the dominant model of historical filmmaking demonstrate its authority. In an interview with historian Eric Foner, Sayles explains that he had to wait eleven years from the time he wrote the first draft of the script to make Eight Men Out because, he says, “I wanted to tell the story Eight Men Out. Not One Man Out or Three Men Out and A Baby.” 12 Yet in that same interview Sayles admits the difficulty of not presenting history “as the story of individuals.” He justifies this compromise with the assertion that audiences will only understand and tolerate a story from three points of view at most: that of the protagonist, of an antagonistic opponent, and of an omniscient narrator. Although the eight ballplayers associated with the fix of the 1919 World Series have different interests and their opponents are both the gamblers and the owners who want to make an example of them, the film tries to center viewer identification on two characters: Buck Weaver and Joe Jackson. The sympathetic treatment of Weaver and Jackson implies that if their actions—playing well in the World Series—didn’t determine the course of events, they should have. Although the other six players are shown to adopt the self-serving tactics of the gamblers and owners, Sayles represents the outstanding play of Weaver and Jackson as both a rejection of the manipulative deal and an example of how the achievements of working people are often unrewarded and unrecognized. In the film’s last scene, we see Jackson four years after his expulsion from the major leagues, playing for a semi-pro team in New Jersey. A dramatic series of shots shows him hitting a long drive to right-center field, rounding first and second, and arriving safely at third base. These shots recall a tracking shot used earlier in the film to establish Jackson’s hitting ability while he was with the White Sox. In both cases, we know that the spectacular skills shown are not well-rewarded, but during the latter scene we also hear a spectator tell another that Jackson was “one of them bums from Chicago...one of the Black Sox.” With this comment Eight Men Out sums up the distortion in public memory that it hopes to rectify by showing the social and economic forces that affected players like Jackson and Weaver. To further this revisionist project, however, Sayles is not above using the tactics of conventional history films. The identification with Weaver and Jackson that Eight Men Out encourages, combined with the injustice of their treatment, follows the third of Rosenstone’s rules of historical filmmaking by emotionalizing history—aiming for feelings of outrage and sympathy to increase viewer investment in the story. The primary focus on individual characters as the makers of history in most sports films fits with what Robert Ray has described as Hollywood’s tendency to affirm “American beliefs in individualism, ad hoc solutions, and the impermanence of all political problems.” In Ray’s view “history’s major crises,” those situations in which individuals (and groups) feel the influence of larger social institutions and discourses on the choices about how they will define themselves, “appear in American movies only as ‘structuring absences’—the unspoken subjects that have determined an aesthetic form designed precisely to conceal these crises’ real implications.” Rosenstone describes such omission as a fourth practice in most historical filmmaking, its tendency to be “unproblematic and uncontested in its view of what happened and why.” Sayles refers to this reductionist approach when he says that the historical feature film has to avoid too many points of view or risk threatening the all-important emotional connection with its audience. He admits, however, that this limiting of perspective “mitigates against complexity,” or what Rosenstone calls “alternative possibilities to what we see happening on the screen. Feature films about sports follow all these rules that Rosenstone and Bay describe, but Hollywood is especially fond of the idea that history is made by individuals. I can think of only six feature films about sports history that are not biopics: The Harlem Globetrotters (1951), The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976), Hoosiers, Eight Men Out, A League of Their Own (1992), and Soul of the Game (1996), and even these focus primarily on two or three main characters. The overwhelming prevalence of sports biography films (seventy that I know of between 1940 and 1997) demonstrates that the symbiosis between sports and movies is ideological as well as economic. Custen points out that the inclination of biopics toward the stories of a few, mostly white, men is an important part of a Hollywood version of history “limited in historical setting” and “ideologically self-serving” for those who have run the movie business. Therefore, just as biopics are part of the promotion of self-reliance through classic Hollywood narrative guided by what David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson call “individual characters as causal agents,” sports also give the greatest recognition to star performance regardless of any gestures they might make toward teamwork, fair play, and the support of fans. At this point I want to briefly digress to make some general statements about the meaning of individual performance in media representations of American professional sports. Some of what follows may sound dehistoricized, but I would argue that since their inception in the later half of the nineteenth century professional sports have consistently been portrayed as disproving the idea of a socially constructed identity. Sports movies at least in part follow this representational tendency. Borrowing from the work of the Annales historians, Stephen Hardy has referred to such diachronic meanings as the “long residuals” of sports culture that have “crossed time and context.” Like Hollywood movies, professional sports fit squarely within “the traditional American mythology” that champions the promise of unified identity through individual achievement. Despite the recent growth of women’s professional sports, such a self-reliant identity is still strongly identified with masculinity, and movies about professional athletes with a few exceptions involve women only as they support male self-definition. Although they aim themselves at women more than most sports films do, Nike’s ad campaigns centered around slogans like “Just Do It” or “I Can” are recent if prominent examples of the notion that sports offer an opportunity for uncomplicated self-definition; the emphasis on stars and the many sports biopics are more longstanding manifestations of this idea. Such belief in agency supports the utopian promise of sports: that once the contest begins, success depends primarily on one’s own determination and effort. Movies and other media texts about sports at times digress with endorsements of teamwork and fair play to allay audience fears about the potential for athletic competition to devolve into Social Darwinism. Yet ultimately the individualist mythology has a stronger appeal as utopian narrative, and it certainly best represents the interests of those who own teams, newspapers, networks, movie studios, and the other corporations that profit from sports. Even when teamwork figures prominently in narratives about athletics, this doesn’t reduce the value placed on individual performance. Rather, like the bourgeois nuclear family, the team operates as a social structure that fosters the development of self-reliant individuals; self-effacing play therefore subordinates itself to the more recognized actions of the star. Hoosiers offers a good example of this ideological hierarchy. Although much of the film is a nostalgic parable involving a big-city basketball coach who learns the importance of teamwork and community in a small Indiana town, that thematic emphasis is subordinated in the film’s climactic scene to the individual heroism of a game-winning basket by a star player.