Nice Guys Finish First

By RICHARD CORLISS

EVERY SPORTING EVENT IS a suspense thriller. No one knows who will win, unless it's the Super Bowl and the Bills are in it. But when Hollywood plays the big game, nice guys always finish first. The Cleveland Indians will take the American League pennant -- not on the field this year, perhaps, but in Major League II. A ragtag rainbow coalition of teens will win a junior hockey championship in D2 The Mighty Ducks. Whether the game is big-time baseball (Rookie of the Year, Mr. Baseball) or college football (The Program, Rudy), basketball on the campus (Blue Chips) or on the playground (White Men Can't Jump, Above the Rim), boxing (Gladiator) or figure skating (The Cutting Edge), victory is never in doubt. As Pete Rose might say, you could bet on it.

Now, flash back to Hollywood's supposedly Pollyanna past. Rocky Balboa in the original Rocky: he lost. Jake La Motta in Raging Bull: he went nuts. Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees: he died.

These were sports movies. They said that athletic competition was a bit like life -- humbling, harrowing, draining. You give it your all, and it takes all you've got. For a moment, if you're lucky, you feel great. And in the end, nobody wins. Nowadays it's often the movie studio that wins, by producing inexpensive pictures that have an even chance of making a bundle. The whole genre -- once a kiss-of-death proposition because it was entertainment deemed suitable for men only -- got a reprieve in the late '70s when the first Rocky scored a double K.O. (Oscar, box office) and its sequels earned huge purses worldwide. Audiences also embraced movies about baseball (the Bad News Bears series) and football (Semi-Tough, North Dallas Forty). In the late '80s baseball surged again with Bull Durham, Major League and Field of Dreams, and in 1992 A League of Their Own topped $100 million at the North American wickets. Since then, White Men Can't Jump has grossed $72 million, and lower- budget Disney films also broke through -- the first Mighty Ducks made $51 million, and last year's Cool Runnings, an inspirational comedy about the 1988 Olympic bobsled team from Jamaica, earned $69 million.

You don't have to be a sabermetrician, just a movie mogul, to savor these stats and take counsel from them. Studios are giving the green light to more sports pictures: Angels in the Outfield and Little Big League are scheduled for summer release; the Steven Spielberg production Little Heroes, about kids' football, is due out in the fall. To the lords of Hollywood, the lesson is plain. "Mass audiences are looking to feel good," says Joe Roth, who runs a production unit at Disney. "When teams win in these movies, you feel good that you've participated. They are very easy vehicles to get across emotion."

Sports movies could be much more than that. Sport, after all, makes for potent drama, brimming with passion and fear. It is a stage on which winners, who are sometimes villains, and losers, who are sometimes heroes, are clearly defined at the climax. It creates a clash of strong figures engaged in a recreation as elemental as love or war, and with just as much foreplay, anxiety, strategy, abrasion and betrayal. In The Program, one of the few movies to offer clear-eyed criticism of modern athletics, the players psych themselves up for a game by spitting in each other's mouths, and they define their love for the game as "goin' to war with the other guys. Settin' ourselves apart." When they work, sports films, like sports, compress the emotions and battles of life.

Only a boy's life, however. There are cheerleaders and girlfriends and the rare token female participant (two girls on D2's hockey team), but sports movies are about male bonding. Beating the other guy displays primeval survival skills; getting the crap kicked out of you and not whining proves you are a man; talkin' trash makes you cool. Above the Rim, a gamy but conventional film about a high school basketball phenom detoured on his road to Georgetown by Harlem sleaze kings, is all about not letting street sarcasm get you down. A stream of abuse is the musical accompaniment to the choreography of manhood in motion. The high testosterone content may not be all bad. "I do like the boys' rituals of sports," says Ron Shelton, writer- director of the smartly rueful Bull Durham and the zesty White Men Can't Jump. "I like the notion of boys playing games, men playing boys' games."

And when the play begins, when movies capture the grace and crunch on the field or court or ice, it can be beautiful to watch. Films can't duplicate the 17-camera omniscience of the World Series on TV, but, as Shelton says, "I can put a camera where none of those 17 can go: on the mound, in the dugout or the shower." With such details, a sports film can appeal even when it is about spring training -- for how many other kinds of contemporary films actually show people working? An athlete's job may be more glamorous and hazardous than most, the payoff quicker and richer, the taste of failure more acrid. But that urge and pressure to do well at work is universal and an honorable subject for films. As Shelton says, "There are real adult issues that come up: issues of triumph and loss and honor and craft."

In most of the new jock cinema, there is plenty of triumph but not much craft. Indeed, these movies are basically the same movie, with plots from Horatio Alger and psychology from Freud for Beginners. The story, almost inevitably, goes like this:

Against impossible odds, and goaded by the desire to avenge his dead or absent father, a nobody toils heroically to become a star. He learns both to be himself and to merge with his team. His opponents are either Nazi-oid stepfather figures or faceless goons (the Icelandic hockey players in D2 are outfitted like S&M Darth Vaders). If the movie is a sequel and stars one of Martin Sheen's sons (Charlie Sheen in the easy-to-take Major League II, Emilio Estevez in the noisome D2), the hero will go soft until he rediscovers the heart and guts he needs to be a man again. His team will lose early and win late, fall behind and catch up. The good guys win, to an orchestral crescendo (Rudy, for example, is a symphony with a movie attached). They are carried off on the shoulders of a cheering mob -- just the way we'd all like to end our workday.

The films replace the common fan's rooting interest for the home team -- just a geographic accident really -- with moral superiority. They are not just our guys, they're good guys; in some of these pictures, the fiercest competition is about which character gets to display the highest level of insufferable righteousness. "Sports movies always draw a contrived moral," notes film critic Andrew Sarris. And that moral is: the person who wins is always the better person. "But there is no moral in real sports," Sarris says. "Somebody wins, and somebody loses, and that's it. I watch all kinds of sports, but as a sport, not as a morality tale. I don't think Shaq O'Neal is a better human being than the players he jumps over. Most people lose. That doesn't make them any less human." And it's precisely that humanness that the new sports movies, with their pat victories and their egregious ethnic stereotypes, are incapable of exploring.

Morality is the ostensible subject of Blue Chips, from a script Shelton wrote in 1980. A college coach (Nick Nolte) fights for traditional values against venal alumni who want to buy the best players. But the film avoids the hard truth that even traditional values in big-time college sports are a shuck. Education is just the fig leaf for the only multibillion-dollar entertainment conglomerate in which the entertainers (the players) don't get paid. The Nolte character, like any college coach, is the overseer of slave labor.

Yet there are always athletes eager for this indentured servitude. In the poignant three-hour documentary called Hoop Dreams (due out in the fall), about two teenage basketball prospects from Chicago, the sport's glamour is a flicker of light at the end of a long tunnel of family troubles, daunting schoolwork, perilous street life and their knowledge that stardom is a buyer's market. But they persevere because the dream is all they have.

Sports life is so much more complicated -- and dramatic -- than life in sports movies. As Allen Barra, a sportswriter for the Village Voice, says, , "We know that sometimes the skier breaks her neck. Sometimes the hero is crushed. And sometimes you achieve some minor victory that only means something to yourself. That is something a lot of people who know they will never be stars or professionals can relate to -- the victory you yourself have won, the satisfaction you can get out of it." There is surely such satisfaction felt by the Jamaican bobsledders at the end of Cool Runnings. Having crashed in their final run, they hoist their sled above them and carry it to the finish line like a dead comrade. Winning, the movie dared say, isn't everything. Trying is.

Winning had better not be everything, for as the old baseball maxim has it, losing hurts more than winning feels good. Losing is mostly what sport is about. There are dozens of players on nearly every team, from the Peewee League to the pros, and dozens of teams in every sport. How many of us make those teams, or become star players, or get to play for a championship, or cinch the game with a last-second score? Hoop Dreams notes that of the 50,000 or so gifted kids playing high school basketball each year, 14,000 play in college, and only 25 reach the NBA. Even a star jock -- Charles Barkley, Ernie Banks, O.J. Simpson -- may never be "a champion."

Athletes know these truths, and so do the fans. The only people not clued in are the fabulators of the new breed of sports movies -- and the moviegoers who, for a couple of hours, take a warm bath in the false emotion of the Big Win.

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/ New York