You Gotta Be a Football Hero Wildcats

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Football has turned into a machine dream for most of us. It is a game now played at its most domineering level by impossibly large, improbably rich young men on Sunday afternoons. There may be a chill in the air of a domed stadium, but it derives from the air conditioning and it does not carry the scent of burning leaves. The grass may be greener indoors, but for that we have to thank some faceless chemical conglomerate, not Pops the groundkeeper. And television somehow seems to dehumanize the skills of the players; it turns them into the A-Team in helmets and pads. Only rarely does someone like William ("the Refrigerator") Perry break through the defense that technology has stacked against emotional involvement.

There is another, older, better football fantasy. It requires that the big game take place on the shores of a pond small enough so that ordinary people may reasonably dream of becoming its frog king for a day. The altogether agreeable aim of The Best of Times and Wildcats is to reanimate this sweetest of sporting fables, in which losers are born again as winners at the last heroic moment.

Both scripts are flea flickers. Indeed, one can almost imagine The Best of Times's production team huddling around Writer Shelton as he draws ploys in the practice-field dirt with his finger. Hey, guys, get this! A dozen years ago, Jack Dundee (Robin Williams) drops what would have been the game-winning pass from Reno Hightower (Kurt Russell), the best quarterback in Taft High School history. It was more than a ball Jack bobbled. It was the only decent chance Taft ever had to beat big, bad Bakersfield down the road and restore a sense of pride in a town known mainly for plagues of mice and seagulls. Reno has passed the years customizing vans and trying to forget that an injury on $ that play cost him his chance for an athletic scholarship. Poor Jack, the town scapegoat, is never allowed to forget. The only cure for his aching ego, and Taft's, is to replay that game.

Jack's devious efforts to engineer that unlikely event (and stay within the movie's realistic frame) require some fairly desperate contrivances. But they alternate with grace notes, like a dinner at which Jack and Reno attempt to reconcile with their estranged wives while following the Monday-night football game. Williams' portrayal of a man disheveled but not defeated by history is first-class, and so is Russell's as a man chilled by the fear that his legend exceeds the truth. Theirs is a matchup worthy of instant replay.

The conceit of Wildcats is much simpler and clean lined, dramatically speaking. Molly McGrath (Goldie Hawn) is the daughter of a football coach who has always wanted to follow in her father's footsteps. Sexism being what it is, the only shot she has is at an inner-city high school whose team has the juvenile authorities beaten by no more than half a step. Can she weld them into a fighting unit? Can their victories create a new school spirit at Central? Can she at the same time provide a role model for struggling feminists everywhere?

If you have to ask, you are probably still wondering if Jack finally found a way to redeem himself in The Best of Times. But her team is full of genuinely funny fellows, Hawn herself is full of spunky charm, and Director Ritchie has a light and wayward comic touch, so even a hopeless male chauvinist can have a good, instructive time at Wildcats. If there are such things as necessary fairy tales, these movies cheerfully provide them.