THE MAKING OF Bull Durham
Like our national pastime, the movie Bull Durham is timeless. Now a new book by writer and director Ron Shelton provides play-by-play on “the best sports movie of all time.”
Baseball is a game of details. Ditto: moviemaking. So, it’s not surprising to find middle infielder-turned-director Ron Shelton smack in the middle of both.
Before he went Hollywood, Shelton was a minor league baseball player, raking doubles and stockpiling memories that eventually found their way into his surprise hit Bull Durham, released in 1988. Yes, that was a long time ago. But baseball and 24/7 streaming have a way of making the past present. It’s the American game, and nobody captured it on film like Ron Shelton.
Shelton’s smash hit—Sports Illustrated called it the best sports movie of all time—stars Kevin Costner as Crash Davis, a catcher who never quite made it in the major leagues, despite setting the (fictional) record for minor league home runs. Instead, Crash is asked to mentor Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) into a big-league dream that Crash would never experience. He’s joined in that mission by Susan Sarandon’s Annie Savoy, a baseball siren who messes with the heads, and beds, of major league prospects. And she spouts Walt Whitman while she’s at it. “I see great things in baseball,” she says, reciting a paraphrased quote attributed to the American bard. “It’s our game—the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.” Many of us were hoping for repair and blessings on April 7 this year, which was opening day for the first semi-normal baseball season in two years. It seemed like a good time to check in with Ron Shelton, a few hours before the first pitch of the first game.
“People probably think I’m one of those guys that just sits and watches TV and the games,” he says. “But I follow it the old-fashioned way. I look at the box scores. And this afternoon, I’ll sneak away from the office. My son is the catcher on a high school baseball team, and they have a game today. I can’t miss those.”
The game has always been passed down from generation to generation—a kind of DNA that’s encoded in the double helix of red, waxed stitches on a baseball. Shelton grew up as a Milwaukee Braves fan (the team moved to Atlanta in 1966), as he writes in his new book, The Church of Baseball (out July 5). It’s a detailed, nostalgic and, at times, uproarious inside story of the making of Bull Durham, and an account of Shelton’s life in and out of baseball, which led him to write and direct the movie.
Shelton’s dad bought the family’s first TV in the fall of 1957, when Shelton was 12, in anticipation of watching the Braves and their slugger Eddie Mathews in the World Series. As luck would have it, the TV was delivered on a Sunday.
“We watched the game in terror, aware that Eddie was having a terrible series. But after the Yankees tied it in the bottom of the 10th, our hometown hero hit a towering homer to win the game,” Shelton recalls. “A great weight lifted up out of the room, my father looked around, his shoulders lightened and we started going
to church less and less. The seed for the Church of Baseball was planted.”
Fans of Bull Durham will recall Susan Sarandon’s voice-over at the start of the film, when Annie—channeling Shelton—invokes the spiritual aspect of the game. “I believe in the Church of Baseball . . . . There are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I learned that, I gave Jesus a chance.”
“I don’t really worship at the Church of Baseball, but a lot of people do,” Shelton says. “If you leave the traditional church,
you start looking for other churches. There’s the church of family, there’s the church of music, there’s the church of ...all sorts of things. [Baseball] has rituals that we cling to. And there are so many things that lend a zen quality to it: It’s slow and then it’s the fastest game ever and then slow—and that’s just in between pitches.”
Shelton invokes baseball’s family ties in the book’s introduction, when he tells the story of an event he attended at the home field of the Durham Bulls, on the 30th anniversary of the film’s release. “I did a Q&A with the fans in the ballpark prior to game time, and a married couple raised their hands with more than a question. They said they had moved to Durham because of the movie, and they wanted to take a photo with their two young sons. I was happy to oblige. As
I posed with this family of four, I asked the names of the boys. ‘Tell the man,’ their mother counseled. The 10-year-old smiled and said, ‘I’m Crash.’ I looked at his younger brother and said, ‘I’m afraid to ask.’The boy looked up and said, ‘Yep, I’m Nuke.’ ”
Not only did Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins become a couple during filming, but they also produced two sons born within a few years of the movie’s release ( Jack and Miles, not Crash and Nuke).
Bull Durham’s influence continues. A recent article in Business North Carolina noted,
“What followed [the film’s release] was a burst of investment and energy in downtown Durham, as if all the attention from the movie gave investors and city officials confidence and ambition. The old bluecollar town started announcing its presence with authority, with a burst of growth that would double its population over the next three decades.” More than $2 billion dollars in public and private investments transformed Durham after the hit movie.
Meanwhile, the Durham Bulls franchise—formerly a no-hope stopover on the way to baseball oblivion—made the leap to Triple-A ball, the highest level of the minors, and moved into a glossy new downtown stadium. Durham wasn’t the only team to benefit. In the decade after the film’s release, latterday Crashes and Nukes heard the cheers of an additional 10 million fans in the stands, eager for peanuts, Cracker Jack and the ol’ ball game.
“You see?” Shelton says, “I’m like the Music Man: I go from small town to small town, and build teams up.”