If you pay attention to sports for long enough, you will see history repeat itself. You will see players whose career paths are reminiscent of past legends and teams whose playing style brings back memories of champions of yore, and you will see the same wonderful wholesome storylines play out: the Cinderella story, the comeback kid, the greatest last-second shot ever and the dignified, heartbreaking defeat.
It’s hard not to get redundant in a world based around a dichotomy of winning and losing. You win a certain variety of ways, you lose a certain variety of ways. Once every blue moon, Dennis Rodman will go to North Korea and you’ll have an utterly inimitable sports story, but for the most part, the roller coaster only goes up and down.
Most of what I know about the arc of a sports season or storyline I learned before I had the attention span to watch a full game, let alone trace the narrative path of a series of games through an entire year. Most of what I learned, “Space Jam” taught me.
Of the previous four wonderful wholesome storylines I referenced, “Space Jam” included three. As for the dignified, heartbreaking defeat, I had “Bring It On.”
And so you have sports movies. That’s why it’s hard to care for sports movies; by the time you’re 12, you’ve just about seen them all. Once all the cliches are in your lexicon, it’s hard to find joy as you consume more of the same.
The majority of sports movies are catered toward young audiences because they serve as an introduction to narrative concepts in sports and because that’s who still believes movies as a legitimate and credible representation of reality.
Sports have a dark side in their opportunity cost. What are you giving up to pursue your athletic aspirations? That’s what the movies for younger crowds don’t focus on, and how a sports movie can become relevant to a mature audience.
But in the end, no matter what side of the age fence you’re on, you’re still watching the work of Hollywood, where every hung gun goes off and people aren’t people, but characters. It’s a haven for false ideals, such as “Rudy,” “Miracle” and “Invincible,” romanticized tales based on true events. No matter how much a movie production crew seeks to close the gap between the source material and the film depiction, it never closes. Fictional film representations of historical sports stories never recreate the emotion brought about by the original event, they can only remind you of how it felt. To recapture that emotion, you need the journalistic backing of a documentary film.
Even documentaries aren’t 100 percent reliable because time changes the way we see everything. However, their authenticity sets them apart as a superior medium. The line between journalism and researched fiction is often blurred, but it’s pretty clear cut when it comes to cinema. Documentaries are journalistic. Fictional movies are for entertainment. The whole appeal of fictional movies is based on the thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if this actually happened?” Documentaries are amazing because they’re based on the thought, “Isn’t it cool that this actually happened?”
That’s why documentaries are preferred. Our movie panel for this week’s March Movie Madness let out a collective sigh when it was declared that documentaries, such as those from ESPN’s magnificent “30 for 30” series, would not be featured in the bracket.
Most of the movies in the bracket were ones we remembered from childhood, though some were more adult-themed. Most of them are from at least 10 years ago because most of the good sports narratives have already been told one way or another. All of them brought something special, though, that made the sensationalist aspect one of secondary importance.
Fictional sports movies have their different brandings. There’s the three wonderful wholesome storylines from before, there’s the Greek hero rise-and-fall saga and the sports-affect-the-real-world story.
If there’s one sport that should thank Hollywood for its existence, it’s boxing. The career arc of a boxer is bound to the Greek hero story. Boxers can’t go out on top — unless they’re Rocky Balboa, I guess — because once you have the title belt, the only thing left to do is lose it. Muhammad Ali was the original greatest of all time, but at the price of his well-being. He’s also a prime example of the sports-affect-the-real-world story because of how he famously dodged the draft. This type of storyline must be preceded by civil unrest, creating barriers to be broken through athletic competition. But I don’t think Hollywood would be crazy enough to create a story in which Dennis Rodman employs “basketball diplomacy” with North Korea to ease tensions between America and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
That’s why if you truly love sports, you prefer reality to scripted scores and speeches. Because without the makeup, the perfect lighting, the slow-motion finish and the famous faces, sports manage to turn the unthinkable into history, and the story always unfolds differently, even if it brings back the same memories of seasons gone by.
Eliot is a junior in Media. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @EliotTweet.
