SPORTS IN THE MOVIES
Fastball earns top reviews
It’s been six short months since the world seemed to stand still as we marvelled at the sheer magnificence of one Usain St. Leo Bolt of Jamaica, he of the three gold medals in the 100-metre, 200-metre and 4-x-100-metre relay at Rio 2016.
The performance locked in Bolt’s status as the best sprinter of all time and among the greatest Olympians in history, with eight career gold medals (plus a ninth that was revoked last year when a relay teammate was found guilty of doping).
It’s also been just over 80 years since American track and field icon Jesse Owens not only matched Bolt’s modern-day dominance but took it 8.06 metres farther, adding the gold medal in the long jump to golds in the 100-metre, 200-metre and 4-x-100-metre relay at the controversial Berlin 1936 Olympic Games.
Owens famously spoiled the day for German Chancellor Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. The fact that the “Buckeye Bullet” — as a black man, a product of the segregated, Depression-era United States and a sprinter from Ohio State University — did what he did in the context of pre-war Nazi Germany adds so many layers to his remarkable story, and in many ways overshadows even the unfathomable achievements of Lightning Bolt eight decades later.
It is an epic story chronicled in the 1938 film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl, commissioned by Hitler and Goebbels to promote the rise of the Third Reich. The four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics are also the piece de resistance of the 2012 documentary entitled simply Jesse Owens.
Multiple books and essays have reminded us how Owens fashioned all of this — including what he did one year earlier in a span of 45 minutes in an NCAA meet on May 25, 1935, setting three world records and tying a fourth in what is arguably the greatest accomplishment in track and field history — while having to live off campus with other black athletes, eat in blacks-only restaurants and stay at blacks-only hotels.
Considering the social and political impact of his exploits in Berlin, there is surely not a greater sports story in history.
Yet that’s why it’s so difficult to peg the sports drama Race — released Feb. 19, 2016, and one of the prominent exhibits in this year’s edition of The Sport Market Movie Awards. Simply put: It is a good movie about a great story and hence a disappointment. It thrills us by showcasing Owen’s biggest athletic achievements but leaves out the brilliant theatre of a personal visit to the Berlin Olympic Village by German sportswear tycoon Adolf “Adi” Dassler, who persuaded him to wear adidas shoes in what was the first-ever sponsorship endorsement of a male African-American athlete.
Race intrigues us by acting out the politics of the near-boycott of Berlin 1936 by the United States without properly delivering on the suppression of American blacks at home, although the closing credits do remind us of the dysfunction inherent in the fact Owens was never invited to the White House to be publicly acknowledged by his own country.
The movie pleases us by detailing the brave sportsmanship of German athlete Luz Long, whose technical tip helped Owens defeat him in the pivotal long jump, but sells us short with one of the weaker portrayals of Hitler in modern cinema, hence squandering the opportunity to give us the full intensity of the social and political combat of the Nazi leader versus Owens and the rest of the world.
All of that combined to produce a tepid response to Race among critics and at the box office as it settled for US$25.1 million in ticket sales (a distant second to this year’s box office champion, the 20th Century Fox-produced Eddie the Eagle and its $46.2 million). By failing to be bigger than the sum of its parts, it is less satisfying than Eddie the Eagle (starring Taron Egerton as Eddie Edwards and Hugh Jackman as the Brit’s burnt-out coach), the boxing movie Bleed For This and even The Phenom, the baseball-themed story of father-and-son conflict starring Paul Giamatti and Ethan Hawke.
In the end, Race and the others are overshadowed this year by a much simpler sport movie, the baseball feature Fastball, which is both the best picture and best documentary in the genre of sport movies in 2016.
Fastball is as basic as its title. It compares and contrasts the fastest-throwing pitchers in baseball history, from Walter “Big Train” Johnson of the old Washington Senators and Bob Feller of the 1936-1956 Cleveland Indians to 1970s New York Yankees reliever Rich “Goose” Gossage and 1960s Los Angeles Dodgers southpaw Sandy Koufax, along with the imperfect Aroldis Chapman and Steve Dalkowski, who could have been the fastest hurler of all time were it not for an injury that prevented him from throwing a single pitch in the majors.
It ultimately acknowledges Nolan Ryan — the former New York Met, California Angel, Houston Astro and Texas Ranger — as the author of a remarkable seven nohitters, the all-time record for career strikeouts and the fastest fastball of all time.
It does so by interviewing a cross-section of baseball greats and a bevy of sport scientists and physicists devoted to tracking the comparative speed of thrown baseballs in every era of the game. The simple elegance of the baseball documentary — released two weeks before the start of last season — is reflected in the way it beautifully incorporates all of the relevant archival footage, including a smart computer integration of current day Detroit Tigers star pitcher Justin Verlander into 80-year-old black-and-white film in the movie’s opening sequence.
The final touch in Fastball is the voice of narrator Kevin Costner, fittingly cast as such after himself starring in several of the best baseball movies ever made in Bull Durham in 1988, Field of Dreams in 1989 and For Love of the Game in 1999.
It’s ironic that a baseball documentary about fastballs wins in what is the most prolific year of sport movie production history, with a total of 45 releases in the genre in calendar 2016. There is certainly no shortage of compelling subjects — from Owens and Pele (Birth of a Legend) to Lance Armstrong (The Program) and Eddie Edwards (Eddie The Eagle). There are also several terrific individual performances, among them by Miles Teller, best actor in a sport movie in Bleed for This.
Yet in allowing us to marvel in the flame-throwing of Ryan and others of his ilk, none delivers the way Fastball does. Right down the middle.