I am not a huge sports fan. I do like going to a baseball game now and then, but I don’t prefer any certain team. If I’m honest, I find a high school game just as exciting as an MLB game. When it comes to other sports, I am even less interested. I’ve never understood the excitement of watching football, futbol, or basketball, and I’ve never been to a live hockey game, but I have a feeling my interest in that might wane pretty quickly once the initial novelty wore off. It’s not a lack of knowledge of the game, because I was the team manager and official scorekeeper of my high school varsity basketball teams. Also, I do really like watching the Olympics, and I don’t know a damn thing about curling, but I enjoy seeing it. All that intense sweeping is a good time, what can I say? Maybe I’m searching for logic where there is none.
The one thing I can definitely say though is, I love a sports movie. There is rarely a movie about sports that I’m not at least somewhat interested in. And it can be any sport. (Note: the rest of this paragraph is maybe a little spoilery, unless you’ve seen even one underdog sports film, in which case, you know the formula and can guess how it’s going to go. However, be warned and don’t read on if you don’t want to know about the ending of Lagaan.) One year, John and I were trying to watch all the movies on the IMDb top 250 list. We had actually seen almost all of them, and so the ones we were missing were mostly foreign films that hadn’t screened near us. (Worcester, Massachusetts, is not a hotbed of Bollywood fandom, or at least it wasn’t in the early aughts.) At the time, there were about 4 Indian movies, all starring Aamir Khan, on the list, and we set about going through those. My favorite of the four ended up being Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India[1]. It’s a movie about the evils of British colonialism, but the reason I liked it so much was because the score between the Indian villagers and the British military is settled via a cricket game. The Indian villagers don’t know anything about the game, but in the end, their team, led by Bhuvan (Khan) wins the match and three years with no taxation for the whole village. It’s not too difficult to understand the logic of why I like this movie so much. It’s an underdog sports movie. Like the villagers, I know nothing about cricket at all, and on top of that, I don’t speak Hindi, but I got swept up in the excitement and experienced vicarious joy when the villagers came away victorious.[2]
There are two reasons I think I love sports movies, even though I don’t necessarily love sports: predictability and no boring parts. When you are watching sports in real life, the outcome isn’t clear, but in a movie, the athlete or team we’re following is eventually going to either win big, or learn a lesson that is satisfying enough to make losing worth it. Sports and athletics naturally bring dramatic tension to a story, which is great for a screenwriter. Your conflict is built in, and your characters just move through the formula. It doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of room for growth and interest, and even originality. Look at romance novels—every single one is about two people falling in love with each other, and they are going to end up together, but how many romance novels are out there, and how many people read them incessantly? (No judgment from me; I edited them for a few years, and I think there’s a lot to love about the genre, no pun intended.) For similar reasons, I’m happy to watch underdog sports movies. Also, you don’t have to see the parts where everyone is just aimlessly pacing around waiting for some official to make a decision. And there are less likely to be a ton of commercial interruptions—none hopefully, unless you’re watching a network broadcast or a streaming service with ads.
Major League charts high for me on sports movies because of the way it plays within the genre. It’s kind of like grown up Bad News Bears. These guys aren’t the best at the game. They don’t have all the perks of a big ball club; a couple of my favorite laughs center around the team having to come up with their own version of a hot tub using an outboard motor, or traveling in a travesty of a bus and a death-trap airplane because they don’t have the money to afford what another team would consider the bare necessities. But these guys are scrappers. Jake Taylor has bad knees, and so do I, but he ends up winning a national championship. Rick Vaughn is a juvenile delinquent, but he goes from incarceration to becoming a major league pitcher. Willie Mays Hayes isn’t even supposed to be at spring training, but through sheer talent and ambition, he earns a spot on the team. And my favorite, coach Lou Brown, doesn’t even know if he is up for it, but agrees to forego the relative stability of a life selling whitewall tires to lead his team to a history-making season. When this team started off losing and then added hardship upon hardship to their rough start, without much support even from their die-hard fans, they could have given up. But their scrappiness keeps them going, even if it’s just on spite. They start by uniting against a common enemy, but over the course of the movie, they all start to remember why they care about the game in the first place, and that makes me start to care too.
I first saw this movie in my teens with my stepbrother, who could honestly fit right in with these crazy characters, and it evokes a lot of nostalgia for me because of those memories. When I watch it now, I can see that it’s quite dated in a lot of ways. That does dull my enjoyment, sometimes a lot (Jake Taylor is a stalker, folks), but each time I watch, my experience parallels the characters’ and rewatching reminds me why I started to love sports movies in the first place. Major League may not have been my first sports movie about underdogs, but it’s the one that first made a major imprint. It paved the way for my enjoyment of a lot of other super irreverent, often inappropriate, and sometimes downright offensive movies like Slap Shot and The Bad News Bears (which I didn’t see until I was much older because my mom was very aware it was NOT a kids’ movie in spite of the many kids in it). And it also paved the way for my enjoyment of the many other formulaic underdog sports movies that I love. It’s a great entry into that film subgenre, celebrating the types of people who often don’t get celebrated enough in real life, and I think that makes it meaningful in its own way.
[1] A very close second was Like Stars on Earth, which has nothing to do with sports, but is a super great movie.
[2] Another non-American sports movie I absolutely love is Shaolin Soccer. I’m a huge Stephen Chow fan, which isn’t too surprising, since I love comedy and martial arts, and he knows how to mix them so well. There will certainly be a future Comfort Films ep on Kung Fu Hustle, which is a masterpiece. And come to think of it, also a sports movie and an underdog movie!
Comfort Films Episode 5: Major League (Released November 6, 2021)
