October 13, 2022 • 25 mins
We won't spoil which movie Matt Andrews declares the "greatest," but he feels pretty strongly about it. And that's because it's the first of its kind to be brutally honest. Hint: It's not Hoosiers.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome,
and we're back on the untold history of sports in America.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Today we're staying adjacent to sports,
(00:35):
but venturing into Hollywood. So get your shades ready. Folks,
You're about to hear about the greatest sports movie ever made,
and the film Crown the Winner may surprise you. What
could it be? Rudy Hoosiers, Space Jam, Space Jam two.
Gotta listen to Matt to find out. I just realized
(00:56):
that the word great appears a lot in our course.
You know, we we've discussed Jim Jefferies as the great
White Hope. We heard how King Gustaf of Sweden called
Jim Thorpe the greatest athlete in the world. Muhammad Ali
told everyone who would listen that he was the greatest. Well,
today is more greatness. Today I'm going to tell you
(01:17):
about the greatest sports movie ever made. And by that
I mean it's the most important sports movie ever made.
So here comes my meditation on sports films and and
let me let you in on a little secret here.
Whenever someone says that what comes next is a meditation,
that's really just fancy talk for random and disjointed ideas.
(01:38):
Though I've worked pretty hard on this lecture, I think
this is going to make sense. Do you like sports movies?
I have to be honest, I'm on the fence when
it comes to sports movies. I love sports and I
love movies, but there's something about most sports movies that
just don't quite work for me. I think one problem
(01:59):
is that actors have a hard time mimicking the moves
of athletes. And case in point, we've talk about Muhammad Ali.
But when the Will Smith film Ali came out in
two thousand and one, he did a good job. I thought,
this is all perfectly fine, but I'd rather just watch
old films of Muhammad Ali's actual fights. You just can't
(02:20):
duplicate that type of greatness on film. But I think
the biggest problem with most sports films is this. They
are sacharin and and sentimental. They are syruppy sweet. Most
sports films suggest that no matter who you are, no
matter what obstacles you have been faced with, if you
(02:41):
just work hard enough, if you just do the right
thing and respect the game. You will triumph in the end,
you will win the championship and get the girl and
change hearts and minds along the way. You know, in
the standard American sports movie, winners never cheat and cheaters
never win. You know that sort of stuff. Athletes are
(03:04):
noble beings and the films about them are moral fables. Well,
in nineteen seventies six, So America's bi centennial, Paramount Pictures
released a sports movie that told a different story. It
was a film about baseball, and it was not a
film that argued that baseball and baseball players were inherently noble,
(03:28):
you know, inherently good. In fact, this film argued the opposite.
This film argued that baseball and baseball players were bad news.
In ninety six, we get the greatest sports movie of
all time, The Bad News Bears. And to be clear,
I'm talking about the original, the one with Walter Matthau
(03:49):
and Tatum O'Neill. I've actually never seen the remake, and
why would I. That would be like standing in line
to see a reproduction of The Mona Lisa. When The
Bad News Bears was released in nine seventy six, Vincent Canby,
who was a now own social critic for The New
York Times, he wrote this about the film Paramounts. Release
(04:12):
of The Bad News Bears is bound to prompt a
lot of boring thess about what baseball means in the
American system. I love it well, with apologies to Mr Canby.
Actually not really much of this lecture is exactly that.
It's a thesis about what The Bad News Bears can
tell us about baseball and American culture. And I do
(04:34):
not think it's boring. But let me get a shout
out to a historian named David Zang. He has a
book called Athletes in the Age of Aquarius, and this
was the book that first opened my eyes to the
radical text that is The Bad News Bears. So so
thank you, Dr Zang. Okay, you might still be thinking
(04:56):
that I'm joking, but I assure you I am not.
I absolutely mean it. The Bad News Bears is the
greatest or most important sports movie in a American history.
And that's because it is the first brutally honest sports
movie in American history. It's a movie that shattered myths
and told the truth. I want to widen my view
(05:18):
for a second here. The nineteen sixties and early nineteen
seventies were a time when a number of American myths
were exposed as fallacies. You know, with regard to race,
there had long been the myth of black Americans they
were content with the racial status quo. Well, the Civil
rights and Black Power movement they dispelled that myth. They
smashed the convenience of ignorance that was out there. You
(05:41):
may remember that term from our discussion of Jackie Robinson.
With regard to sex, there was the myth that all
women were perfectly happy staying at home and taking care
of the children in their kitchens. But the feminist movement
and athletes like Billy Jane King, they demonstrated that there
was restlessness and discontent in many American homes. For many Americans,
(06:04):
the Vietnam War exposed yet another myth, the myth that
the United States was an altruistic nation that roamed the
planet fighting the name of freedom and liberty. Well maybe sometimes,
but many saw what was going on in Vietnam as
proof that this was no longer true. And certainly when
word of the Meli massacre surfaced, when it was revealed
(06:26):
that American soldiers murdered as many as five hundred unarmed
Vietnamese peasants. This myth was exposed. I mean, this was
not all truism. This was many Americans said, savagery. And
then in the mid nineteen seventies, yet another myth was exposed,
the myth of our good and honest political leaders. Lyndon Johnson,
(06:50):
a Democrat, he lied about Vietnam. Richard Nixon, a Republican.
He got caught up in the Watergate scandal. Watergate confirmed
once and for all that American politicians, of presidents, even
they would lie and break the law in order to
maintain their power. So as the sixties turned into the seventies,
(07:11):
and as the seventies progressed, many American myths lay shattered
across the national landscape. Well, look, it's not the level
of Watergate or Vietnam. But when The Bad News Bears
was released in nineteen seventy six, more myths were shattered.
Myths about baseball, myths about sports in America. The Bad
(07:35):
News Bears was a very different type of baseball movie.
The Bad News Bears is not a movie about glorious
baseball and our noble national character. It's about the opposite.
It's a movie that uses baseball to expose our national shortcomings,
a lot of them, and I'll and I'll tell you
what those are. So it's a revolutionary film to begin
(07:58):
with you using baseball as the vehicle for a critique.
But what makes it truly radical, I think, is that
it doesn't just use baseball to expose our national problems.
It uses children playing baseball. Nothing is supposed to be
more pure than American children playing baseball, but in this movie,
(08:21):
nothing is more corrupt. Let me put the Bad News
Bears in the context of other baseball movies, and then
in the context of American cinema more generally. Before the
nineteen sixties, Hollywood made a lot of movies about baseball,
a lot of them, and the specifics changed, of course
(08:41):
from film to film, but the general idea was always
the same. Every one of these movies told the story
that baseball developed character. Maybe it was Gary Cooper as
Luke Garrig and the Pride of the Yankees, or Ronald
Reagan playing the picture Grover Alexander in the Winning Team.
But in all of these movies, baseball players were depicted
(09:04):
as an ex tension of our noble national character, and
they were said to represent all that was best with
this country. Baseball players. They're honest and hard working baseball
and baseball players good. Hollywood did not make any baseball
films between nineteen sixty two and nineteen seventy three. None,
(09:26):
And I think this is telling. Baseball films with their
apple pie good guy characters suddenly seemed out of place
in the context of the rebellious sixties. So movie studios
they shied away from the game. They just stopped making
baseball films entirely. Baseball was just seen as too traditional
to establishment, and Hollywood was moving towards anti establishment films
(09:50):
in this era. This was the era of what's known
in cinema studies as the New Hollywood. The New Hollywood
refers to films that were made in the late sixties
in the early nineteen seventies, and these were films marked
by innovative angle and styles, but they were also films
that were anti authoritarian and an anti establishment in character.
(10:13):
Outlaws were the heroes of many of these films, films
that I'm sure many of you have seen, you know.
I think of films like Bonnie and Clyde and Butch
Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, that the bank robbers were
the heroes. Or films like Easy Writer, which was about
rejecting the mundane nous of American materialism and hitting the
(10:33):
road in search of real freedom, or two of my
all time favorites, Cool Hand Luke and One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest. Both are films about what happens when
three thinking individuals get trapped in in heartless, cruel, absurd systems.
(10:54):
Movies like these spoke to a younger, more radical generation
of Americans, you know, Americans who were questioning the old
way of doing things. They were questioning conformity and the
thought already. Maybe the absolute best of the anti establishment
films was the Robert Altman movie Mash. This was a
film that seemed to be about American surgeons in the
(11:17):
Korean War, but released when it was in the early seventies,
it was really a critique of Vietnam Boy. The movie Mash.
It is anti war, anti authority, anti religion, anti establishment.
It is not the same as the TV show. If
you have never seen the film Mash, I recommend it
(11:39):
and mashes the film that I see as the most
Like the Bad News Bears, both films use hollowed American
traditions to make critiques of American life. Mash uses the
setting of the military to skewer American culture to critique
American culture, and The Bad News Bears uses baseball and
(12:01):
once again, children playing baseball. After the break spoiler alert,
we ruin the plot of The Bad News Bears. Okay,
(12:27):
the plot of The Bad News Bears is not complicated.
Allow me to summarize it and make some observations, and
then I'm going to tell you what happens at the end.
So if you've never seen it and you don't want
the ending ruined, this is my spoiler alert, So stop
this lecture, go watch the film, and then of course
come back immediately. A California city councilman sues the local
(12:51):
little league because the league is excluding the least talented kids,
and his lawsuit forces the little league to admit one
more team, and this will be a team made up
of all the rejects, all the players the other teams
did not want, and this team is the Bears. So
right away we have the story of baseball and exclusion,
(13:11):
and we have baseball and litigation. Baseball and sports are
a messy legal battleground. This movie tells us the city
councilman needs a coach for these players. No one wants
to do it, so he secretly pays a former minor
league picture to coach the Bears. So we have money
(13:31):
and professionalism in little league baseball. That cherished notion of
amateurism in American sports. It doesn't even exist in little league.
The coach is Marris, Buttermaker. He's a drunk. He doesn't
care about his job. He loafs around the infield. He
leaves the pictures mound littered with beer cans after throwing
(13:54):
drunken batting practice. Buttermaker doesn't have a designated hitter on
his team. In the dugout, one of his players is
his designated Martini stir and so it is no surprise
that his team, the Bears, they're awful. They quickly fall
into last place, and they get teased by the other kids.
They get picked on and get into fights. The other
(14:16):
kids are merciless. The Bad News Bears as many things,
but one of those things is this. The film is
a critique of the culture of bullying in American sports.
In this film, sports do not build character and foster
mutual respect between competitors. No sports foster nastiness, They foster cruelty.
(14:40):
The Bad News Bears says that American sports are about
beating someone up and kicking them when they are down.
But sensing how much losing is hurting his players, butter
Maker finally begins to care. The kids want to win,
so he decides he's going to try to win. In fact,
he's going to try to win at all costs. He
(15:02):
lures Amanda Wurlitzer, a strong, ungarmed girl, to be his
team's pitcher. And I think it's unclear in this film
whether she's Buttermaker's daughter born out of wedlock. Buttermaker has
to bribe Amanda to play for the Bears. She wants things.
She wants fashionable jeans and ballet lessons, so we have
player management negotiating in little league. Buttermaker teaches Amanda how
(15:29):
to cheat. He shows her how to throw a spitball.
She smears vassiline on the underside of her cap and
then applies it to the baseball. Buttermaker also wrangles Kelly
Leak to be his clean up hitter, and Kelly Leak
is the town's number one juvenile delinquent. Here's the point.
Character is not an issue. Playing by the rules is
(15:50):
not important in American sports. It's all about winning, winning
at all costs. And so, with this new attitude, this
win anyway you can mentality, the Bears start to win.
They serves up the standings into second place and into
the championship game against the Yankees, the best team that
(16:12):
has beat up on and mocked and bullied the Bears
all season. And it's no coincidence this team is called
the Yankees. The New York Yankees are the greatest dynasty
in baseball history, the greatest dynasty in professional sports history.
They represent tradition, and so in this movie, they represent
(16:33):
Baseball's past. They represent America's past. In the Bad News Bears,
every player on the Yankees is white, and they're all boys.
You know, today, someone might say that they use white
male privilege. The Bears, by contrast, well, they're America's messy reality.
(16:53):
They're both sexually integrated, well at least their star pitcher
is a girl, and they are a racial and ethnic mix.
They have a black player, ah Mod, He's a black
Muslim who channels the fashionists of Muhammad Ali. The Bears
have Mexican American players. They don't speak any English. They
are completely segregated from the rest of the team. I
(17:15):
think we might see this as a commentary on the
treatment of Latin American ballplayers at this time. There's a
Jewish player, there are hot tempered California surfer kids. The
Yankees all look the same. The Bears all look different
now they are fat, skinny, short, and worst of all,
one of the Bears Ogilvie. He's a statistician. But this
(17:38):
diverse and modern mix of players, they somehow managed to
work their way into the championship game. And so the
stage is set. As we enter the final game. We
are ready for the upstart and underdog Bears to win,
because the underdog always wins in American sports movies. Right,
(17:59):
the final game is hard to watch. Now, I show
the ending in my Baseball is the recourse where I teach,
and my students are shocked. Actually it's it's brutal. In
this championship game, both coaches are putting immense pressure on
their kids. First of all, they sit their worst players,
and they verbally abuse the ones who do play and
(18:21):
don't do exactly as instructed. And one especially awful scene,
the adult manager of the Yankees. He belts his son
and knocks him to the ground when he does not
follow orders and pitch the ball low and inside. And
so that's another thing that The Bad News Bears is.
In fact, this may be the film's most explicit argument.
(18:44):
The film is a critique of adults who take children's
sports way too seriously in this country. I won't recount
the ending pitch by pitch, but we get that classic
baseball situation. You know, the Bears are losing, but they're
at bat, the bases are loaded, bottom of the sixth.
Little league baseball games are only six innings, and so
(19:04):
I'll say it again. The stage is all set. We
are all ready for the underdog Bears to win, because
the underdog always wins in American sports films. But the
Bears do not win. They fall short by one run.
But that sports, right. The good guys don't always win
in sports, and it's often the bad guys who wins.
(19:27):
You know, as the real life baseball manager Leo Durocher
famously said, nice guys finished last, and the film The
Bad News Bears knows this, unlike all the other baseball
movies that came before it, And for the record, Leo
Durocher actually said, nice guys finished in seventh place, but
we Americans turned it into an even better quote. Then
(19:51):
comes the very final scene, the trophy presentation, and those jerks,
the Yankees, they get their massive trophy, and then one
of the Yankees offers a somewhat heartfelt apology for the
way they treated the Bears the whole season. He says
to the Bears, we don't think you guys are very good,
but you got guts. And then one of the Bears speaks.
(20:16):
Now he's supposed to say thanks, you guys are swelled too,
but instead he says, hey, Yankees, you can take your
apology and your trophy and shove it straight up your ass.
And then the pathologically shy Timmy Lupus he chimes in
with the classic baseball line and another thing, wait till
(20:37):
next year. Then it's children guzzling beer. Yep, little leaguers
drinking beer, and then George Beza's waltz of the tortoors
kicks in. The camera pans out and focuses on the
American flag waving over the ball field. The only way
the ending could have been more perfect is if the
flag had been on fire. Here's what the film critics
(21:02):
had to say. In Variety magazine said the film offered
quote gentle social commentary. The Washington Post said, quote the
script is thin and the ending shaky. I'm sorry, gentle
social commentary. I'm sorry a shaky ending. A ten year
(21:23):
old kid tells the championship team to take their trophy
and shove it straight up their ass. And that's gentle
and shaky. No, no, no, no. The critics were dead
wrong on this one. This film is not gentle and shaky.
This movie is a revolution. For over one hundred years,
Americans had been telling themselves that sports bred good character,
(21:47):
patting themselves on the back and saying sports and noble
the individual. But in nine six, The Bad News Bears
was the first film to come along and tell us
the opposite. American sports too often are nasty, They are
hyper competitive, they are corrupt, nice guys. Finished last, The
(22:10):
Bad News Bears, I think tells it like it is,
and I think it's interesting. The film. Often voted the
best sports movie of all time is the movie Hoosiers,
which came out in six and is about a small
town Indiana high school basketball team in the nineteen fifties.
(22:32):
All right, here is where some of you are going
to decide once and for all that you don't like me.
I don't really like Hoosiers. There I said it, and
I know I am in the super minority here. Years ago,
my younger brother Kyle, he told me that my opinion
about Hoosiers is proof that I am, in his exact words,
(22:53):
a total butt head. And maybe he's right. But Hoosier's
is the opposite of the bad News bears. Hoosier is
a movie that suggests that sports are all about character
and and dedication and brotherhood among teammates. If you do
the right thing, and you listen to your coach, and
you play the game the correct way, you will triumph
(23:15):
in the end. Hoosier's is a classic example of a
nostalgia film. Now, I was just talking about the new
Hollywood of the sixties and the seventies, with its emphasis
on modern anti establishment themes. Well, another type of film
that was very popular in this same era was the opposite.
(23:36):
It's the nostalgia film. These were films that took Americans
back into the past, back to a more simple time,
they said, back to a better time, they said, before
all the rebellion. Think of films like American Graffiti, a
very fun movie and a classic nostalgia film. Well, Hoosiers
(23:56):
was released in a decade the nineteen eighties in which
black Americans were beginning to dominate basketball pro basketball, college basketball,
and Hoosier's took Americans on a nostalgia trip. It took
them back to a time when white basketball players were
still on top. And Hoosiers is based on a true
story when the tiny, rural, all white Milan High School
(24:19):
they won the Indiana High School basketball championship in ninety four.
In the movie, they changed the name to Hickory High School.
You know, in the movie, I've seen it in the
championship game, Hickory High beats a team powered by black players.
But in the real story, the team that Milan High
School beat in the finals, that team was all white.
(24:42):
Why did the filmmakers change it and have them beat
black players in the movie. I think that's weird. The
film seems to be saying that if you come together
as a team, if you become a band of brothers,
you can do the impossible. You can even beat black
players in basketball. I find Hoosier's a little ikey for
(25:04):
this reason, Give Me The Bad News Bears, a film
that uses Little League Baseball to explore a nation whose
sports are too often rife with racism and sexism, and
cheating and a win at all costs mentality. The Hoosiers
is based on a true story, The Bad News Bears, unfortunately,
(25:26):
I guess, is much closer to the truth in my opinion.
That's all for now. Next time on the Untold History
of Sports in America, presented by One Day University. The
fitness Revolution of the nineteen seventies
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome,
and we're back on the untold history of sports in America.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Today we're staying adjacent to sports,
(00:35):
but venturing into Hollywood. So get your shades ready. Folks,
You're about to hear about the greatest sports movie ever made,
and the film Crown the Winner may surprise you. What
could it be? Rudy Hoosiers, Space Jam, Space Jam two.
Gotta listen to Matt to find out. I just realized
(00:56):
that the word great appears a lot in our course.
You know, we we've discussed Jim Jefferies as the great
White Hope. We heard how King Gustaf of Sweden called
Jim Thorpe the greatest athlete in the world. Muhammad Ali
told everyone who would listen that he was the greatest. Well,
today is more greatness. Today I'm going to tell you
(01:17):
about the greatest sports movie ever made. And by that
I mean it's the most important sports movie ever made.
So here comes my meditation on sports films and and
let me let you in on a little secret here.
Whenever someone says that what comes next is a meditation,
that's really just fancy talk for random and disjointed ideas.
(01:38):
Though I've worked pretty hard on this lecture, I think
this is going to make sense. Do you like sports movies?
I have to be honest, I'm on the fence when
it comes to sports movies. I love sports and I
love movies, but there's something about most sports movies that
just don't quite work for me. I think one problem
(01:59):
is that actors have a hard time mimicking the moves
of athletes. And case in point, we've talk about Muhammad Ali.
But when the Will Smith film Ali came out in
two thousand and one, he did a good job. I thought,
this is all perfectly fine, but I'd rather just watch
old films of Muhammad Ali's actual fights. You just can't
(02:20):
duplicate that type of greatness on film. But I think
the biggest problem with most sports films is this. They
are sacharin and and sentimental. They are syruppy sweet. Most
sports films suggest that no matter who you are, no
matter what obstacles you have been faced with, if you
(02:41):
just work hard enough, if you just do the right
thing and respect the game. You will triumph in the end,
you will win the championship and get the girl and
change hearts and minds along the way. You know, in
the standard American sports movie, winners never cheat and cheaters
never win. You know that sort of stuff. Athletes are
(03:04):
noble beings and the films about them are moral fables. Well,
in nineteen seventies six, So America's bi centennial, Paramount Pictures
released a sports movie that told a different story. It
was a film about baseball, and it was not a
film that argued that baseball and baseball players were inherently noble,
(03:28):
you know, inherently good. In fact, this film argued the opposite.
This film argued that baseball and baseball players were bad news.
In ninety six, we get the greatest sports movie of
all time, The Bad News Bears. And to be clear,
I'm talking about the original, the one with Walter Matthau
(03:49):
and Tatum O'Neill. I've actually never seen the remake, and
why would I. That would be like standing in line
to see a reproduction of The Mona Lisa. When The
Bad News Bears was released in nine seventy six, Vincent Canby,
who was a now own social critic for The New
York Times, he wrote this about the film Paramounts. Release
(04:12):
of The Bad News Bears is bound to prompt a
lot of boring thess about what baseball means in the
American system. I love it well, with apologies to Mr Canby.
Actually not really much of this lecture is exactly that.
It's a thesis about what The Bad News Bears can
tell us about baseball and American culture. And I do
(04:34):
not think it's boring. But let me get a shout
out to a historian named David Zang. He has a
book called Athletes in the Age of Aquarius, and this
was the book that first opened my eyes to the
radical text that is The Bad News Bears. So so
thank you, Dr Zang. Okay, you might still be thinking
(04:56):
that I'm joking, but I assure you I am not.
I absolutely mean it. The Bad News Bears is the
greatest or most important sports movie in a American history.
And that's because it is the first brutally honest sports
movie in American history. It's a movie that shattered myths
and told the truth. I want to widen my view
(05:18):
for a second here. The nineteen sixties and early nineteen
seventies were a time when a number of American myths
were exposed as fallacies. You know, with regard to race,
there had long been the myth of black Americans they
were content with the racial status quo. Well, the Civil
rights and Black Power movement they dispelled that myth. They
smashed the convenience of ignorance that was out there. You
(05:41):
may remember that term from our discussion of Jackie Robinson.
With regard to sex, there was the myth that all
women were perfectly happy staying at home and taking care
of the children in their kitchens. But the feminist movement
and athletes like Billy Jane King, they demonstrated that there
was restlessness and discontent in many American homes. For many Americans,
(06:04):
the Vietnam War exposed yet another myth, the myth that
the United States was an altruistic nation that roamed the
planet fighting the name of freedom and liberty. Well maybe sometimes,
but many saw what was going on in Vietnam as
proof that this was no longer true. And certainly when
word of the Meli massacre surfaced, when it was revealed
(06:26):
that American soldiers murdered as many as five hundred unarmed
Vietnamese peasants. This myth was exposed. I mean, this was
not all truism. This was many Americans said, savagery. And
then in the mid nineteen seventies, yet another myth was exposed,
the myth of our good and honest political leaders. Lyndon Johnson,
(06:50):
a Democrat, he lied about Vietnam. Richard Nixon, a Republican.
He got caught up in the Watergate scandal. Watergate confirmed
once and for all that American politicians, of presidents, even
they would lie and break the law in order to
maintain their power. So as the sixties turned into the seventies,
(07:11):
and as the seventies progressed, many American myths lay shattered
across the national landscape. Well, look, it's not the level
of Watergate or Vietnam. But when The Bad News Bears
was released in nineteen seventy six, more myths were shattered.
Myths about baseball, myths about sports in America. The Bad
(07:35):
News Bears was a very different type of baseball movie.
The Bad News Bears is not a movie about glorious
baseball and our noble national character. It's about the opposite.
It's a movie that uses baseball to expose our national shortcomings,
a lot of them, and I'll and I'll tell you
what those are. So it's a revolutionary film to begin
(07:58):
with you using baseball as the vehicle for a critique.
But what makes it truly radical, I think, is that
it doesn't just use baseball to expose our national problems.
It uses children playing baseball. Nothing is supposed to be
more pure than American children playing baseball, but in this movie,
(08:21):
nothing is more corrupt. Let me put the Bad News
Bears in the context of other baseball movies, and then
in the context of American cinema more generally. Before the
nineteen sixties, Hollywood made a lot of movies about baseball,
a lot of them, and the specifics changed, of course
(08:41):
from film to film, but the general idea was always
the same. Every one of these movies told the story
that baseball developed character. Maybe it was Gary Cooper as
Luke Garrig and the Pride of the Yankees, or Ronald
Reagan playing the picture Grover Alexander in the Winning Team.
But in all of these movies, baseball players were depicted
(09:04):
as an ex tension of our noble national character, and
they were said to represent all that was best with
this country. Baseball players. They're honest and hard working baseball
and baseball players good. Hollywood did not make any baseball
films between nineteen sixty two and nineteen seventy three. None,
(09:26):
And I think this is telling. Baseball films with their
apple pie good guy characters suddenly seemed out of place
in the context of the rebellious sixties. So movie studios
they shied away from the game. They just stopped making
baseball films entirely. Baseball was just seen as too traditional
to establishment, and Hollywood was moving towards anti establishment films
(09:50):
in this era. This was the era of what's known
in cinema studies as the New Hollywood. The New Hollywood
refers to films that were made in the late sixties
in the early nineteen seventies, and these were films marked
by innovative angle and styles, but they were also films
that were anti authoritarian and an anti establishment in character.
(10:13):
Outlaws were the heroes of many of these films, films
that I'm sure many of you have seen, you know.
I think of films like Bonnie and Clyde and Butch
Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, that the bank robbers were
the heroes. Or films like Easy Writer, which was about
rejecting the mundane nous of American materialism and hitting the
(10:33):
road in search of real freedom, or two of my
all time favorites, Cool Hand Luke and One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest. Both are films about what happens when
three thinking individuals get trapped in in heartless, cruel, absurd systems.
(10:54):
Movies like these spoke to a younger, more radical generation
of Americans, you know, Americans who were questioning the old
way of doing things. They were questioning conformity and the
thought already. Maybe the absolute best of the anti establishment
films was the Robert Altman movie Mash. This was a
film that seemed to be about American surgeons in the
(11:17):
Korean War, but released when it was in the early seventies,
it was really a critique of Vietnam Boy. The movie Mash.
It is anti war, anti authority, anti religion, anti establishment.
It is not the same as the TV show. If
you have never seen the film Mash, I recommend it
(11:39):
and mashes the film that I see as the most
Like the Bad News Bears, both films use hollowed American
traditions to make critiques of American life. Mash uses the
setting of the military to skewer American culture to critique
American culture, and The Bad News Bears uses baseball and
(12:01):
once again, children playing baseball. After the break spoiler alert,
we ruin the plot of The Bad News Bears. Okay,
(12:27):
the plot of The Bad News Bears is not complicated.
Allow me to summarize it and make some observations, and
then I'm going to tell you what happens at the end.
So if you've never seen it and you don't want
the ending ruined, this is my spoiler alert, So stop
this lecture, go watch the film, and then of course
come back immediately. A California city councilman sues the local
(12:51):
little league because the league is excluding the least talented kids,
and his lawsuit forces the little league to admit one
more team, and this will be a team made up
of all the rejects, all the players the other teams
did not want, and this team is the Bears. So
right away we have the story of baseball and exclusion,
(13:11):
and we have baseball and litigation. Baseball and sports are
a messy legal battleground. This movie tells us the city
councilman needs a coach for these players. No one wants
to do it, so he secretly pays a former minor
league picture to coach the Bears. So we have money
(13:31):
and professionalism in little league baseball. That cherished notion of
amateurism in American sports. It doesn't even exist in little league.
The coach is Marris, Buttermaker. He's a drunk. He doesn't
care about his job. He loafs around the infield. He
leaves the pictures mound littered with beer cans after throwing
(13:54):
drunken batting practice. Buttermaker doesn't have a designated hitter on
his team. In the dugout, one of his players is
his designated Martini stir and so it is no surprise
that his team, the Bears, they're awful. They quickly fall
into last place, and they get teased by the other kids.
They get picked on and get into fights. The other
(14:16):
kids are merciless. The Bad News Bears as many things,
but one of those things is this. The film is
a critique of the culture of bullying in American sports.
In this film, sports do not build character and foster
mutual respect between competitors. No sports foster nastiness, They foster cruelty.
(14:40):
The Bad News Bears says that American sports are about
beating someone up and kicking them when they are down.
But sensing how much losing is hurting his players, butter
Maker finally begins to care. The kids want to win,
so he decides he's going to try to win. In fact,
he's going to try to win at all costs. He
(15:02):
lures Amanda Wurlitzer, a strong, ungarmed girl, to be his
team's pitcher. And I think it's unclear in this film
whether she's Buttermaker's daughter born out of wedlock. Buttermaker has
to bribe Amanda to play for the Bears. She wants things.
She wants fashionable jeans and ballet lessons, so we have
player management negotiating in little league. Buttermaker teaches Amanda how
(15:29):
to cheat. He shows her how to throw a spitball.
She smears vassiline on the underside of her cap and
then applies it to the baseball. Buttermaker also wrangles Kelly
Leak to be his clean up hitter, and Kelly Leak
is the town's number one juvenile delinquent. Here's the point.
Character is not an issue. Playing by the rules is
(15:50):
not important in American sports. It's all about winning, winning
at all costs. And so, with this new attitude, this
win anyway you can mentality, the Bears start to win.
They serves up the standings into second place and into
the championship game against the Yankees, the best team that
(16:12):
has beat up on and mocked and bullied the Bears
all season. And it's no coincidence this team is called
the Yankees. The New York Yankees are the greatest dynasty
in baseball history, the greatest dynasty in professional sports history.
They represent tradition, and so in this movie, they represent
(16:33):
Baseball's past. They represent America's past. In the Bad News Bears,
every player on the Yankees is white, and they're all boys.
You know, today, someone might say that they use white
male privilege. The Bears, by contrast, well, they're America's messy reality.
(16:53):
They're both sexually integrated, well at least their star pitcher
is a girl, and they are a racial and ethnic mix.
They have a black player, ah Mod, He's a black
Muslim who channels the fashionists of Muhammad Ali. The Bears
have Mexican American players. They don't speak any English. They
are completely segregated from the rest of the team. I
(17:15):
think we might see this as a commentary on the
treatment of Latin American ballplayers at this time. There's a
Jewish player, there are hot tempered California surfer kids. The
Yankees all look the same. The Bears all look different
now they are fat, skinny, short, and worst of all,
one of the Bears Ogilvie. He's a statistician. But this
(17:38):
diverse and modern mix of players, they somehow managed to
work their way into the championship game. And so the
stage is set. As we enter the final game. We
are ready for the upstart and underdog Bears to win,
because the underdog always wins in American sports movies. Right,
(17:59):
the final game is hard to watch. Now, I show
the ending in my Baseball is the recourse where I teach,
and my students are shocked. Actually it's it's brutal. In
this championship game, both coaches are putting immense pressure on
their kids. First of all, they sit their worst players,
and they verbally abuse the ones who do play and
(18:21):
don't do exactly as instructed. And one especially awful scene,
the adult manager of the Yankees. He belts his son
and knocks him to the ground when he does not
follow orders and pitch the ball low and inside. And
so that's another thing that The Bad News Bears is.
In fact, this may be the film's most explicit argument.
(18:44):
The film is a critique of adults who take children's
sports way too seriously in this country. I won't recount
the ending pitch by pitch, but we get that classic
baseball situation. You know, the Bears are losing, but they're
at bat, the bases are loaded, bottom of the sixth.
Little league baseball games are only six innings, and so
(19:04):
I'll say it again. The stage is all set. We
are all ready for the underdog Bears to win, because
the underdog always wins in American sports films. But the
Bears do not win. They fall short by one run.
But that sports, right. The good guys don't always win
in sports, and it's often the bad guys who wins.
(19:27):
You know, as the real life baseball manager Leo Durocher
famously said, nice guys finished last, and the film The
Bad News Bears knows this, unlike all the other baseball
movies that came before it, And for the record, Leo
Durocher actually said, nice guys finished in seventh place, but
we Americans turned it into an even better quote. Then
(19:51):
comes the very final scene, the trophy presentation, and those jerks,
the Yankees, they get their massive trophy, and then one
of the Yankees offers a somewhat heartfelt apology for the
way they treated the Bears the whole season. He says
to the Bears, we don't think you guys are very good,
but you got guts. And then one of the Bears speaks.
(20:16):
Now he's supposed to say thanks, you guys are swelled too,
but instead he says, hey, Yankees, you can take your
apology and your trophy and shove it straight up your ass.
And then the pathologically shy Timmy Lupus he chimes in
with the classic baseball line and another thing, wait till
(20:37):
next year. Then it's children guzzling beer. Yep, little leaguers
drinking beer, and then George Beza's waltz of the tortoors
kicks in. The camera pans out and focuses on the
American flag waving over the ball field. The only way
the ending could have been more perfect is if the
flag had been on fire. Here's what the film critics
(21:02):
had to say. In Variety magazine said the film offered
quote gentle social commentary. The Washington Post said, quote the
script is thin and the ending shaky. I'm sorry, gentle
social commentary. I'm sorry a shaky ending. A ten year
(21:23):
old kid tells the championship team to take their trophy
and shove it straight up their ass. And that's gentle
and shaky. No, no, no, no. The critics were dead
wrong on this one. This film is not gentle and shaky.
This movie is a revolution. For over one hundred years,
Americans had been telling themselves that sports bred good character,
(21:47):
patting themselves on the back and saying sports and noble
the individual. But in nine six, The Bad News Bears
was the first film to come along and tell us
the opposite. American sports too often are nasty, They are
hyper competitive, they are corrupt, nice guys. Finished last, The
(22:10):
Bad News Bears, I think tells it like it is,
and I think it's interesting. The film. Often voted the
best sports movie of all time is the movie Hoosiers,
which came out in six and is about a small
town Indiana high school basketball team in the nineteen fifties.
(22:32):
All right, here is where some of you are going
to decide once and for all that you don't like me.
I don't really like Hoosiers. There I said it, and
I know I am in the super minority here. Years ago,
my younger brother Kyle, he told me that my opinion
about Hoosiers is proof that I am, in his exact words,
(22:53):
a total butt head. And maybe he's right. But Hoosier's
is the opposite of the bad News bears. Hoosier is
a movie that suggests that sports are all about character
and and dedication and brotherhood among teammates. If you do
the right thing, and you listen to your coach, and
you play the game the correct way, you will triumph
(23:15):
in the end. Hoosier's is a classic example of a
nostalgia film. Now, I was just talking about the new
Hollywood of the sixties and the seventies, with its emphasis
on modern anti establishment themes. Well, another type of film
that was very popular in this same era was the opposite.
(23:36):
It's the nostalgia film. These were films that took Americans
back into the past, back to a more simple time,
they said, back to a better time, they said, before
all the rebellion. Think of films like American Graffiti, a
very fun movie and a classic nostalgia film. Well, Hoosiers
(23:56):
was released in a decade the nineteen eighties in which
black Americans were beginning to dominate basketball pro basketball, college basketball,
and Hoosier's took Americans on a nostalgia trip. It took
them back to a time when white basketball players were
still on top. And Hoosiers is based on a true
story when the tiny, rural, all white Milan High School
(24:19):
they won the Indiana High School basketball championship in ninety four.
In the movie, they changed the name to Hickory High School.
You know, in the movie, I've seen it in the
championship game, Hickory High beats a team powered by black players.
But in the real story, the team that Milan High
School beat in the finals, that team was all white.
(24:42):
Why did the filmmakers change it and have them beat
black players in the movie. I think that's weird. The
film seems to be saying that if you come together
as a team, if you become a band of brothers,
you can do the impossible. You can even beat black
players in basketball. I find Hoosier's a little ikey for
(25:04):
this reason, Give Me The Bad News Bears, a film
that uses Little League Baseball to explore a nation whose
sports are too often rife with racism and sexism, and
cheating and a win at all costs mentality. The Hoosiers
is based on a true story, The Bad News Bears, unfortunately,
(25:26):
I guess, is much closer to the truth in my opinion.
That's all for now. Next time on the Untold History
of Sports in America, presented by One Day University. The
fitness Revolution of the nineteen seventies
Host
Matthew Andrews
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