Movies with Balls: The Greatest Sports Films of All Time, Analyzed and Illustrated
256
Movies with Balls: The Greatest Sports Films of All Time, Analyzed and Illustrated
256eBook
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Overview
Including Caddyshack, Rocky IV, White Men Can’t Jump and 23 more classic flicks!
If you’re the kind of fan who cheers every single time you watch Rocky beat Drago, or remembers who said “If you build it, he will come,” or has ever wished you were in the stands at the ADAA Dodgeball Finals when Peter LaFleur took out White Goodman, then Movies with Balls is the book for you.
Movies with Balls celebrates and analyzes more than two dozen of the greatest sports films of all time. You’ll be transported into fictional arenas, stadiums, gyms, fields, and golf courses to relive the climactic moments from:
- The Natural
- Field of Dreams
- Teen Wolf
- The Karate Kid
- She’s the Man
- The Waterboy
- Bend It like Beckham
- Creed
- And many more!
Illustrated with fictional ticket stubs, trading cards, play maps, and more, Movies with Balls brings to life the iconic films and characters that we love and admire—just as much as we love our real-world sports and athletic heroes—letting us cheer them on, again and again.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781683693765 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quirk Publishing |
| Publication date: | 09/24/2024 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 756,861 |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Movies with Balls was inspired by a straightforward question: “What would the tickets from our favorite sports flicks look like?” Rocky vs. Drago? The 2004 Las Vegas Dodgeball Invitational? The infamous Chiefs vs. Bulldogs 1977 Federal League Championship? Initially, we just wanted to create physical, tangible tickets for events we would have loved to have had a front-row seat at, rather than just being confined to a chair in a movie theater or a living room couch.
This idea grew and took on a life of its own. Classic sports movies provide a doorway into worlds most of us don’t get to inhabit—this is part of why we love them, what makes them still resonate to this day. Your favorite sports movie is like a warm blanket, if that blanket smelled like beer and popcorn. These are the movies we click on right away when we see they’re on cable; they’re the “Why don’t we just watch this again?” option when picking a movie to wind down the night. If you’ve ever woken up at three a.m. to the DVD menu of Bull Durham blaring on repeat (why is DVD menu music so loud?), then you’re a Movies with Balls kind of person.
Perhaps you flipped through the table of contents (while deciding if you would be purchasing this book or placing it back upside down on the wrong shelf) and thought, “Wait, no Remember the Titans? No Miracle? No A League of Their Own? These monsters!”
Allow us to explain.
For sports movies that are based on a true story, those tickets actually exist somewhere, those games really happened. Movies inspired by actual events make up some of the best in the genre, like the aforementioned Miracle and Rudy and Hoosiers. We love those movies as much as any other, but for the sake of this book, they’re on the bench. Tickets for the actual Miracle on Ice game are on eBay, but fortunately, the ticket featured in this book for Bobby Boucher’s Miracle on the Bayou at the Bourbon Bowl is much cheaper.
Moreover, we wanted to discuss the actual (fictional) athleticism of these movies, no matter how ridiculous. Rudy Ruettiger’s “sack” has already been litigated for over forty years, but we wanted to investigate the events that never got their time on First Take or in a 30 for 30. We felt that Roy McAvoy’s implosion at the fictional 1996 US Open and the season opener between the Western U Dolphins and Bob Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers deserved the same kind of shine as those real-life Hall of Fame moments.
Also, we covered only one Rocky because, well . . . there are a lot of Rocky movies. And we’ve got Creed, because dammit, we love Creed.
Having the “no true-story movies” rule helped us narrow the pool, because selecting twenty-six of the best sports movies and greatest games never played was a bear of a task. Imagine choosing a wedding party, but you have fifty-plus friends you love and cherish.Just since the 1970s, Hollywood has been churning out sports bangers,so narrowing down hurt. Deciding not to include Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior or either of the Longest Yard films felt equivalent to HerbBrooks making Ralph Cox the final cut of the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team. Much like a team captain, this book follows its gut—we ultimately picked which movies just felt right to feature and explore. If you’ve got a favorite that is not featured, just know that it hurt us just as much to leave it out as it does for you not to see it (unless that favorite is Trouble with the Curve, which is terrible).
This meant we dived into the works of the great Ron Shelton, the easiest the first-ballot sports movie Hall of Famer of them all, and Kevin Costner, the pound-for-pound best sports movie athlete there is. It doesn’t take a film school valedictorian to laud Ryan Coogler for making Adonis Johnson’s two-round debut feel like an out-of-body viewing experience, or feel the warm fuzzies when James Earl Jones delivers his speech near the end of Field of Dreams.
It meant we got to look at and analyze some of the greatest fictional teams of all time—Shane Falco’s Washington Sentinels, Jess Brahma’s Hounslow Harriers, and Peter LaFleur’s Average Joe’s Gym. These are the teams we love as much as real-life teams. (Frankly, we probably love these sports movie teams more than our real-life teams because they don’t let us down every postseason. We’re talking to you, Dallas Cowboys.) The same goes for athletes too good to be real, like Scott “Teen Wolf” Howard, the ballad-inspiring Ricky Bobby, and, of course, Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez.
Nearly all these films lead up to one game, match, or showdown, and that’s how we chose what event that fictional ticket stub would’ve gotten you into. We also analyze and break down the gameplay in these climactic moments—walking through the peak big chill moment of Roy Hobbs knocking out the stadium lights in The Natural, commenting on Johnny Lawrence’s choke job in The Karate Kid, and applauding how Hot Rod managed to make a catastrophic motorcycle accident one
of the funniest climaxes in sports movie history. Some sports movies don’t have “The Big Game” as a finisher, à la Major League, so for those that don’t (such as The Sandlot or White Men Can’t Jump), we still do our best to break down and discuss the actual fake gameplay.
We’re not just here to blindly support these movies—we’re also here to ask the essential questions, and call in experts to help break them down when needed. Not fancy stuff about camera angles or score or scriptwriting or anything like that. No, Movies with Balls dives into critical thinking, pondering important questions such as: “How exactly did Jake Taylor from Major League beat out that bunt single to walk off the Yankees?” “Is Caddyshack’s Carl Spackler actually a good greenskeeper?” “Could Happy Gilmore actually have scraped up enough short-game skills to pair with his prodigious driving to compete in professional golf?” In Movies with Balls we debate the sports movie Hall of Fame candidacies of multimovie headliners like Woody Harrelson and Adam Sandler, and we wonder if White Goodman’s lawyers from Dodgeball should have ever passed the bar exam.
In the end, though, everything in this book—the tickets, play maps, breakdowns, questions about job suitability, and naming of MVPs—is all an appreciation. It’s a tribute to movies we love and will always love. Every single word of analysis or discussion in this book comes from pure enjoyment, and much of it the kind of stuff one only thinks of on
viewing number 472.
You’re welcome—cue the opening credits.