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I’ve created a new section featuring all of Throwbacks’ previous essays about sports movies here.

I.

I cannot tell you if Field of Dreams is a great movie or a terrible movie, but what I can tell you is that I’ve been convinced of both things at various stages in my life, and I’ve now come to believe, in middle age, that Field of Dreams is simultaneously a terrible movie and a great movie. It is cliched and sentimental; it is well-acted but unevenly written; it hinges on a preposterous magical-realist plot, but is also eminently watchable and beautifully shot. It makes you cry, and then makes you hate yourself for crying.

It had been decades since I’d seen Field of Dreams in its entirety, but it showed up on Turner Classic Movies in March, and even the network’s genial host, Ben Mankiewicz, confessed in his introduction that he wasn’t sure if the movie belonged on the channel at all. The movie, Mankiewicz said, “has its detractors” (even if Mankiewicz wasn’t one of them), and if anything that may be understating it. Field of Dreams is an especially creaky watch at this moment, when America is in a dour mood about its future. This is a movie that plays out like the ultimate OK Boomer fantasia, a movie that telegraphs its attempt to recapture the promise of the 1960s from the very first line of narration. It’s a movie that believes America can overcome its failures and rediscover its pioneering soul, which is the kind of thing that gets you ratioed on social media these days.

I can understand why people might hate Field of Dreams, and there’s a part of me that hates it, too. Over time, that hate became palpable as baseball co-opted the movie’s earnestness to attempt to sell tickets and cling to its crumbling mythos. But at a moment when we’ve come to believe that America is too far gone to ever find its way back again, I was surprised at how Field of Dreams could still disarm me, even as a full-grown adult. Kevin Costner exudes such charming naivete that I found myself kind of envious of him; I was nostalgic for his nostalgia. When it was over, I started to wonder if my reflexive disgust at Field of Dreams’ rampant sentimentality wasn’t the movie’s problem. I started to wonder if maybe it was actually my problem.

II.

Field of Dreams arrived in theaters in April of 1989, at a moment when baseball was on the verge of curdling in the popular imagination. I was too young to know that at the time; I am almost certain I went to see Field of Dreams the week it was released in theaters, and then went to see it at least one more time after that, then bought the book it was based on, Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella, which was one of the first “literary novels” I connected to on a visceral level. And I don’t know if I was young enough to be naive about what was coming, or if we were all that naive, but either way, it was all about to change.

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I. Marty Supreme, dir. Josh Safdie (2 hours, 29 minutes)

There is a scene early in the movie Marty Supreme where a bathtub comes crashing through the ceiling of a cheap motel. I don’t think this would qualify as a spoiler, except to establish that this is not a movie that traffics in subtleties or eases you into its world. Instead, it lifts you up by the lapels and shouts in your face as the spittle flies. Marty Supreme is an epic sports film—the best sports movie of the decade, I’d argue—about an ambitious striver, a driven table-tennis player who will do anything to succeed, including debase himself, and who makes no apologies for who he is. Despite the fact that it got shut out at the Oscars last weekend, I think Marty Supreme is a sports movie that will endure, because it captures the restless and kinetic energy of a certain kind of New York hustler better than any work of art since Budd Schulberg’s novel What Makes Sammy Run.

The thing you realize, when you live in New York for an extended period of time, is that people like Marty Mauser are all around you. I found them on the one-wall handball courts of New York City, where I once spent months researching a long newspaper feature about the elite players who hustled each other for a living in a sport that only truly thrived in New York City. I found them huddled over the chess boards in Washington Square Park, where, in the midst of researching a book, I watched a delinquent high-school kid from Brooklyn attempt to squeeze a few bucks out of the tourists playing speed chess. Many of the New York hustlers you come across are fascinatingly complex characters; many of them are hopelessly toxic, the Kevin O’Learys of their respective domains, like the famed Irish chef who once opened a pulsating nightclub beneath my apartment and turned out to be kind of a con artist himself.

There is no place that breeds this energy like New York City, both for better and for worse. I viewed Safdie’s film as a kind of cautionary tale, in the same way What Makes Sammy Run—Schulberg’s 1941 novel about a ruthless Hollywood executive—became a cautionary tale about what America was in danger of becoming if it ignored the toxic elements in its midst in the leadup to World War II. As Schulberg wrote in an afterword to the book nearly 50 years later:

Individualism run rampant, an arrogant disregard for the views and welfare of our fellow man…In the closing lines of What Makes Sammy Run I had described his meteoric career “as a blueprint of a way of life that was paying dividends in America in the first half of the twentieth century.”…It’s Darwin time, survival of the fittest! Sure, all people are created equal. Only Sammy Glick is created more equal than the schleppers, get it?

O.K., that’s how they’re reading it in 1989. And if that’s the way they go on reading it, marching behind the flag of Sammy Glick, with a big dollar sign in the square where the stars used to be, the twentieth-century version of Sammy is going to look like an Eagle Scout compared to the twenty-first.

I understand why Marty Supreme came up empty at the Oscars. It’s difficult for a bleak vision like that to catch on in real time, given that we are currently living under the thumb of the most toxic New York striver in modern history—and given that its two biggest competitors were also epic (and truly excellent) films that served as allegories about fighting fascism and combating racism. I understand, as well, that Timothee Chalamet may have thrown himself so deeply into this portrayal because he could relate to Marty’s striving in ways that have now rendered him oddly toxic, and the Oscars are a political exercise as much as any kind of real reflection of artistry. And if you are feeling especially cynical, you can also make the case that movies don’t matter anymore because movies are a withering art.

But I don’t think Marty Supreme will disappear any more than Sinners or One Battle After Another will fade from view anytime soon. We are in fight for the survival of culture itself; all three movies have a place in that fight. Someday, when we come out of this, I wonder if Marty Supreme will serve to remind us of the cruelty and emptiness of the modern era, and how it’s on us to refuse to repeat it.

II. The Power Broker, by Robert Caro (1344 pages)

This is kind of a cheat, because I’m only about forty pages into this book, and I have no idea if I’ll ever muster the courage to finish it, but here is what I can say: This is already one of the best nonfiction books I have ever read, and I am embarrassed that it’s taken me so long to pick it up in the first place. The level of detail is so deep that I’m not even sure what word to use to characterize it, other than intense. Witness this paragraph about Robert Moses’ childhood home:

Dinner was served—off the finest Haviland china—in a paneled dining room along one wall of which stood a tremendous sideboard bearing gleaming crystal decanters. After dinner, the family would repair to the library, whose walls were covered with Rembrandt and Durer prints, and Old Annie would pour coffee from a silver coffeepot into French demitasse cups—each cup a different bright color—that cost twenty-four dollars apiece.

There is something almost subversive about even attempting to immerse yourself in a book like The Power Broker in the year 2026. It is a way of forcing your brain to slow down, to focus, and to appreciate the efforts of a single writer who has spent his entire adult life researching two unbelievably complex men (Moses and Lyndon Johnson) who epitomized the 20th-century yearning for power and influence in America. It takes energy to ignore the shallow and superficial temptations of the outside world—the endless algorithm with its twelve-second videos of dancing chihuahuas—and throw yourself into any book, let alone a book that weaves a thousand-page tale of an urban planner. But just as Marty Supreme rewarded the act of walking into a theater and spending two-and-a-half hours watching a young man become a cautionary tale about individualism run rampant, The Power Broker does the same thing.

Recently, The New York Times ran a quiz which asked you to compare two short literary passages. One was written by A.I., the other written by a human; it did not tell you which was which. And I will admit, in several cases, I preferred the A.I. writing, because it is very good at cobbling together four or five sentences that carry a certain musicality.

But I’ve also seen what A.I. becomes when the prose stretches out and the ideas grow more complex. It lapses into wooden cliches that are often laughable. It is not built to sustain complex literary ideas, or to research as deeply and carefully as Robert Caro has. That’s what books are for, and that’s what epic films like Marty Supreme and Sinners and One Battle after Another are for. And if it is an act of insurgency to continue to embrace these supposedly dying mediums—to throw yourself into a thousand-page book or a two-and-a-half hour movie while distractions rage all around you—then count me in on the rebellion.

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I.

Sometime in the mid-1980s, a screenwriter named David S. Ward happened upon the hook he was seeking for a long-gestating project. Ward had grown up in Cleveland, and he was playing around with a wish-fulfillment story in which the town’s long-suffering baseball team—then known as the Indians—would win a pennant. Then, Ward—who knew something about grifters and con artists, having written The Sting, one of the best films of the 1970s or any other decade—read about the efforts of the owner of the Minnesota Twins, Calvin Griffith, to move his team from Minneapolis to Tampa, Florida, and the script came together from there.

Griffith had built an escape clause into his contract with the Metrodome if the Twins drew under 1.4 million fans for three successive years, and this inspired Ward to center his script, titled Major League, around a miserly female owner of the Indians who is doing everything she can to sabotage her own team so she can get the hell out of Cleveland. Learning about this connection between fact and fiction led me to read this 1983 Sports Illustrated profile of Calvin Griffith, which opens with the saddest lede I’ve read in quite some time (I’d like to credit the writer here, but SI so completely botched its archival pages that the writer is no longer listed on the page):

Calvin Griffith gets up from his desk with a groan and stretches black rubber half-boots over his shoes. He limps out of his office into the darkness, moving carefully across the parking-lot ice to the royal-blue Bonneville with the miniature baseball glove dangling from the rearview mirror.

Sometimes on the way home he stops at a grocery store. "I like that because you run into people who talk to you," he says. He drives to his suburban Minneapolis apartment and there mixes himself two vodka and tonics. "I try to keep it to two." He gets out the cocktail rye bread, toasts it and spreads it with cheese and maybe a little taco sauce. He turns on the TV. "Dynasty, Dallas, Falcon Crest, Knots Landing, Magnum, P.I., Dance Fever. I love to see those nimble bodies move."

And somehow, it only gets more depressing from there.

II.

I wanted to focus this newsletter more on the plot and characters of Major League itself, a film I find myself thinking about more and more these days. But I also recognize that pretty much everyone reading this newsletter knows the story by now; over the course of roughly 35 years and countless re-airings on basic cable, the archetypes in Major League have become infused into the culture of baseball itself. Every loose-limbed base stealer of the past four decades now evokes memories of Willie Mays Hayes; every erratic and hard-throwing reliever carries the DNA of Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn.

(I might argue that perhaps the greatest three minutes of the film are the first three minutes, the opening credits sequence soundtracked to the sheer acerbic brilliance of Randy Newman’s “Burn On.” It is perhaps the second-greatest opening montage that captures the grungy and resilient spirit of a city, right behind the credits of Dog Day Afternoon, scored to Elton John’s Amoreena.)

Major League is a broad fairy tale, but it works because it’s also grounded in reality. Ward based the character of Ricky Vaughn on hard-throwing pitchers like the Yankees’ Ryne Duren; he based Willie Mays Hayes on Rickey Henderson; he based the superstitious slugger Pedro Cerrano (stereotypical tropes aside) on the equally superstitious Alou brothers; and he based his miserly owner’s attempt to move the team on the pathetic saga of Calvin Griffith, a perpetually dissatisfied man who once proclaimed at a local Lions Club meeting that he moved the franchise from Washington, D.C. because there were more white people in Minnesota.

For those reasons, I’d always liked Major League—it is an almost impossible movie to dislike, especially when you factor in Bob Uecker—but if I’m being honest, I’d always liked other baseball movies of the era better. Bull Durham was a more highbrow and literary product for an aspiring writer to emulate; so, too was Eight Men Out. Yet I’ve been thinking more and more about Major League lately, and I’ve been admiring its subtle craft and Ward’s excellent writing and direction, and I presume this is for two reasons:

1.) Because stories about the wealthy and comically evil have become so prevalent, and

2.) Because I live in Oakland, California—a city worthy of its own Randy Newman song—and every so often I stumble onto a broadcast of the baseball team that used to reside here, and that feels increasingly as if its crossed over into the realm of fiction.

III.

The other day I happened upon the tail end of a broadcast of an A’s game, which always feel surreal, because the A’s now play their games at a tiny park in Sacramento, a city that they refuse to officially acknowledge as their temporary home. (This is probably one reason why they cannot even fill the seats of a minor-league stadium.) But these are the sorts of inexplicable facts that do not get mentioned on A’s broadcasts; in fact, in A’s World, the the city of Oakland has essentially been stricken from the map. (Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia, dude.)

The A’s lost this particular game; they lose a lot of games these days, despite having yet another infusion of intriguing young talent that they will no doubt either squander or give away for virtually nothing, as they have done over and over again in recent years. And then the postgame show began and it was anchored by a former major-leaguer named Steve Sax, who played one season for the A’s and grew up in Sacramento—and who, I presume, was willing to prostrate himself at the altar of a broadcast that feels increasingly like North Korean state television.

Steve Sax was a decent ballplayer who had a long career, and I imagine he’s a decent guy, but there was something remarkable about seeing him there, and realizing that the A’s were employing as one of their signature voices in this transitional era a guy who literally has a psychological disorder named after him—for a time Sax had what are known as The Yips, which means he couldn’t throw the ball from second base to first base. And the A’s are owned by a man named John Fisher, an owner who has his own version of The Yips, which mostly means he has a lot of big dumb ideas that he cannot see through to their completion.

Fisher is the heir to bumbling and miserly owners like Calvin Griffith; he is the real-life iteration of Rachel Phelps, the cruel fictional owner in Major League. The other day, Fisher held a groundbreaking ceremony for a new stadium he plans to build in Las Vegas, which he still does not seem to have secured much actual financing for; the groundbreaking was held indoors, which involved wearing hard hats for no apparent reason, then using gold shovels to unearth “red gravel on a raised baseball-diamond shaped platform inside a well-appointed tent,” according to longtime San Francisco Chronicle baseball writer Susan Slusser.

Nobody knows if Fisher will ever actually build the stadium he just “broke ground” for; nobody knows what he’s doing, or what he wants, or why he won’t just sell the team to Bay Area interests and put everyone out of their misery. In Minnesota, in 1984, Calvin Griffith eventually gave in and sold the team to a local owner who kept the Twins in town; as of now, Fisher seems to have no interest in doing the same, and Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, the Roger Dorn of sports executives, is completely dug in on this entire idiotic scheme. “One official at Monday’s event said that Manfred was so irritated by negotiations during former Mayor Sheng Thao’s administration,” Slusser wrote, “that ‘he will never allow another team in Oakland.’” (If that kind of comical grudgery isn’t straight out of Major League, I don’t know what is.)

It is hard to take any of this A’s stuff seriously, because it all feels increasingly cartoonish. But then again, so does a lot of real life these days. And maybe that’s why it feels so comforting to settle into another re-watch of Major League—because it is a broad story where the underdogs prevail over the rich and the miserly and the obscenely cruel. It is a vision of a world where the worst people actually get their comeuppance. And maybe it’s just a fairy tale, but I suppose there’s a reason fairy tales exist, even—or especially—at a moment like the one we’re living through.

The Sports Movie Archives

The Program/Rudy

https://throwbacks.substack.com/p/the-programrudy-1993

Rollerball

https://throwbacks.substack.com/p/rollerball-1975

Semi-Tough

https://throwbacks.substack.com/p/semi-tough-and-the-age-of-bullshit

Moneyball

https://throwbacks.substack.com/p/moneyball-2011

The Bad News Bears

https://throwbacks.substack.com/p/all-we-got-on-this-team-are-a-bunchaapril

Dazed and Confused

https://throwbacks.substack.com/p/itd-be-a-lot-cooler-if-you-did-july

This newsletter is very much a work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe and/or share it with others.

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I.

Hollywood doesn’t make many movies about college football, but in the fall of 1993, two of them were released within weeks of each other. This is one of those odd and inexplicable entertainment-industry convergences that I presume defies rational explanation, kind of like when all those body-swapping movies came out at the same time in the late 1980s. The interesting thing is that these two college football movies had very little in common: One was a saccharine tale inspired by real life about a walk-on at Notre Dame, and the other was a cynical tale of a fictional program riddled with moral failings.

“They haven't made a good movie about college football since ‘Knute Rockne -- All American,’” wrote Washington Post columnist Norman Chad, in reviewing both films at the time, but I would go further than that, because, as I’ve written in the past, Knute Rockne: All-American is not a particularly good movie, either. There have been great documentaries about college football, of course, but I would argue that there has never been a great feature film about college football. And I think it’s because the view of college football is so often shrouded in these polar cliches: Either it is a sentimental throwback to a nostalgic past, or it is a dark pastime that reflects America’s ugly and exploitative underbelly.

II.

Such was the polarity of those two 1993 movies, both of which were helmed by undeniably talented artists: Rudy, about a Notre Dame walk-on who refuses to quit, was created by the team behind Hoosiers. The Program, about the misdeeds and ethical lapses of a fictional football program, was written and directed by David S. Ward, who wrote both The Sting and Major League. Rudy is, I guess, most notable for Sean Astin’s performance, which toes the line between maniacal determination and painful naivete; The Program is most notable for a scene in which several players lie down in the middle of a road divider, which spurned real-life copycat incidents that resulted in at least one death. (I have a college friend who, whenever he got several beers into a Friday evening in 1993 and 1994, would lie down at the edge of the road and shout, “What movie is this?”)

But the truth, for those of us who love college football, lies somewhere in the vast gray area in-between Rudy and The Program. College football can be beautiful and college football can be terrible; college football can lift people up and college football can break people down; college football is both moral and immoral, often at the same time. In recent weeks, horrifying sexual-abuse revelations at Michigan have tarnished the reputation of legendary coach Bo Schembechler; a decade earlier, the same thing happened to Joe Paterno at my alma mater, Penn State. It is now possible that of the three legendary coaches who came to define the Big Ten in the late 20th century, Woody Hayes—who ended his career by punching an opposing player—may be the only one not tarnished by a staggering off-field scandal. This is college football: Just when you think you’ve made sense of it, you realize you haven’t even come close.

III.

College football is my favorite sport; it is the sport I grew up with, and the sport I’ve written the most about over the course of my career. Yet so much has happened over the past year that it’s been hard for me to focus much on college football, which, last fall, served largely as a proxy in the ugly culture war that defined the tenure of a failed president of the United States. Over the past few weeks, so much new shit has come to light that its impossible to digest what it all means. The Supreme Court has essentially forced the NCAA’s hand, meaning players will immediately begin to profit off their names, images and likeness; the path toward further paying players, and perhaps creating a free-enterprise system in a sport that has fought against this system for over 150 years now seems closer to reality than ever. The NCAA itself might even be a dead organization walking.

What does this mean for college football? I have no idea. I’m not sure if any of us knows. The question becomes, How do we reconcile the Rudy-ishness of a sport that traffics on sentimentality and nostalgia with the Program-ness of a sport that has always felt a little dirty and skeevy in its attempts to maintain that air of nostalgia. Can we reconcile these two poles? Can college sports exist in that vast gray area? What happens if college football becomes a more honest version of itself? Does it somehow lose its charm?

There are no great feature films about college football because none have ever explored that gray area the way that certain documentaries about college football have, and the way that films about other sports have. There is only one pole or the other. But we don’t live in that world anymore. College football is far more complex than it’s ever been. The cliches don’t measure up. In a way, all of this is a mirror of the larger conversation we’ve been having in this country about our own history, about how we reconcile the ugliness and the beauty of a nation that has long struggled to honestly come to terms with its own complexities, its own flawed ethics, its own moral failings. What movie is this? I’m not sure we really know anymore.

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I.

Many years ago, while lounging in a hotel room in Prague under the influence of a surfeit of absinthe, I turned on the television and came across a sport that I had never seen before. That led me to write this strange column for ESPN’s late and lamented Page 2, which I cannot guarantee I did not also write while under the influence.

The sport I was watching, I later learned, was called team handball. It has since developed a cult following among a certain sect of weirdos on social media; but in the moment, it took me entirely outside of myself, and it made me wonder just how in the hell a sport becomes a sport in the first place. This may have been the absinthe talking, but it also raised legitimate questions about how and why the sports we love become the sports we love in the first place.

I think about this from time to time when I am watching football, or baseball, or basketball. I think about how the rules of every one of these sports are entirely made up, and yet they were crafted almost unconsciously to represent some aspect of the American experience: Football as a violent embodiment of this country’s manifest destiny, baseball as a metaphor for our laborious and complex bureaucracy, basketball as a proxy for our improvisational creativity. Sports represent some larger idea about who we are, and yet very few sports movies explore this idea, and even fewer explore what happens when these ideas come to reflect the ugliness of society itself, and even fewer translate those ideas into science fiction. But I suppose there is at least one.

II.

I don’t know if Rollerball, the 1975 science-fiction sports thriller starring James Caan, could be considered a “good” movie. But it is an unquestionably weird movie, with a cult following akin to all those quirky 1970s dystopian visions like Logan’s Run and Soylent Green, manifestations of a nation wallowing in its own shortcomings and self-flagellation in the post-Watergate era. Directed by Norman Jewison, based on a short story and script by a creative writing professor named William Harrison, I doubt this movie could have been made if Jewison hadn’t been in the midst of hot streak during the 1970s, having just directed the smash-hit musicals Fiddler on the Roof and Jesus Christ Superstar.

The story goes that Harrison wrote his short story after witnessing a fight during a college basketball game. In the film, the sport of Rollerball—a cartoonishly violent fake sport involving motorcycles, roller skates, and football helmets, with meticulously demarcated rules that I do not fully understand—serves as a way to placate the masses in a dystopian society in 2018, in which a corporation led by oligarchs rule the world. The lead oligarch, in fact, is played by John Houseman, and if you’re going to submit yourself to authoritarianism, you might as well submit to someone with John Houseman’s voice. The game of Rollerball, Houseman’s character admits, was “created to demonstrate the futility of individual effort,” and this is the thematic thread of the film: In a world that’s been deprived of individualism in order to benefit the greater good—a world in which everything else is spit-shined and polished and where all the women happen to resemble supermodels—the game of Rollerball serves as an outlet for society’s violent urges.

Wrote Vincent Canby in The New York Times:

All science-fiction can be roughly divided into two types of nightmares. In the first the world has gone through a nuclear holocaust and civilization has reverted to a neo-Stone Age. In the second, of which "Rollerball" is an elaborate and very silly example, all of mankind's problems have been solved but at the terrible price of individual freedom.

III.

Maybe it’s because we’ve just spent the past year engaged in an often disingenuous debate about the meaning of “individual freedom” during a pandemic, but all the ideas that ground Rollerball in its all-too-serious sense of self seem more muddled than ever before. As Rollerball progresses, the rules of the game are broken down in an attempt to break down James Caan’s character, and to punish his insistence on his own individualism. And I’m sure there are people for whom this idea would resonate, at least a few of whom reside in places like rural Oregon.

But the truth is that these people only favor these ideas when it suits them. They are selective individualists who were willing to vote for a president who revolutionized the notion of “incompetent authoritarianism.” Very often, individualism in sports is frowned upon by the same people who have spent the past several years fixated on the collapse of their own individual freedoms. They are the ones who criticize Colin Kaepernick for asserting his individualism, the ones who would prefer if it LeBron James and other prominent black athletes would merely shut up and dribble. Their hypocrisy is completely invisible to them, but sports tend to expose it, because sports are often viewed by certain people as things that should exist outside of society itself, as if in a vacuum—which I guess is how Rollerball is meant to exist in Jewison’s fictional society.

And I suppose this is the part of Rollerball that still resonates: That as much as we would like to believe that sports exist above the ugliness of our cultural divide, they do not. They are just things we made up to entertain ourselves and to placate ourselves, and they reflect both the beauty and the ugliness of who we are.

This newsletter is a perpetual work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe and/or share it with others.

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This is Throwbacks, a weekly-ish newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports history, culture and politics. Welcome to all new readers/subscribers, and if you like what you’re reading, please subscribe and share, however you feel comfortable sharing. (It’s still free to subscribe: Just click “None” on the “subscribe now” page.) The best way you can help out is by spreading the word as much as possible. That said, I have set up payment tiers, if you wish to give something—I’ve made them as cheap as Substack will let me make them, which is $5 a month or $30 a year.

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Share Throwbacks: A Newsletter About Sports History

I.

I had an idea a few weeks ago about how to evolve this newsletter, and that idea was to start writing more regularly about sports movies, both iconic and obscure, both great and terrible. I’ve done this a few times in the past, but if I was going to turn it into an ongoing series, I figured I might as well start by writing about the tenth anniversary of the most improbably great sports movie of the 21st century, a movie that went through dozens of iterations helmed by a handful of talented people before it settled into its final form. That movie is 2011’s Moneyball, directed by Bennett Miller and co-authored by two of the best screenwriters in Hollywood, Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, based on a book by perhaps the best American non-fiction writer of his era, Michael Lewis.

Moneyball now lands regularly on the lists of best sports movies of all-time, but if anything, I think it is underrated. I think it’s the most improbably great movie of the 21st century, period, and arguably the best performance of Brad Pitt’s career. And I will get to the movie in a moment. But first, I’m going to write about a dog.

II.

I apologize in advance for writing about a dog, because stories about dogs are so often trite and sentimental, and I’m sure this one is no different, so if you want to stop right here, I won’t blame you. Then again, I guess I felt that way about dog stories before I got a dog of my own—which is not a decision I made actively, but one that fell into my arms, almost as if by some divine course of fate. I’d never owned a dog in my life until five years ago; when I was a very small child, we adopted a Siamese cat who got into so many fights around the neighborhood that we literally nicknamed her “Trouble,” and after that, my parents were no longer pet people.

But five years ago, on my third date with my girlfriend, we were walking through Golden Gate Park when she mentioned that she was considering adopting a 12-year-old chihuahua from a senior dog shelter called Muttville. This dog had been found wandering the streets of Rancho Cucamonga, California, all by herself; after the shelter performed surgery on her, she had roughly three teeth remaining. At this mention, I had two opposing thoughts: Either this woman is nuts, or she is one of the kindest and most loving people I’ve ever met. (Fortunately, it turned out to be the latter.)

The dog’s given name at the shelter was Meredith, but she was not really a Meredith. She was neurotic and headstrong and stubborn, an alpha dog trapped in a nine-pound body. (She intimidated the other, larger dogs in her walking pack so much that they steered entirely clear of her.) So my girlfriend named her Frida, after the painter Frida Kahlo. It was perfect.

Frida was not a particularly dynamic dog at age 12. Her favorite pastime was to wander around a pungent patch of grass that overlooked the San Francisco Bay that was frequented by so many other dogs that we dubbed it “the poop knoll.” If you threw her a toy, she’d glare at you like you were an utter moron, as if to say, “What the hell I am supposed to do with this squeaking spheroid if I cannot consume it for sustenance?” She growled at strangers. She growled at other dogs. She growled at friends sometimes. She urinated and defecated in all the wrong places. She slept with her tongue hanging out, like an aspirant Michael Jordan. Her sole motivating factor in life was food. One day, I led her around the room with a piece of cheese in my hand, and she began barking more excitedly than she had since we met her. She would do that for hours, if she could. We called it “Chase the Treat.”

One thing you learn when you have a dog is that they are all entirely unique. And all utterly strange. And it is odd how often their difficulties and neuroses seem to mirror your own difficulties and neuroses, and it is wild how often their odd predilections and enjoyments also seem to wind up mirroring your own. “She doesn’t really do much,” my girlfriend’s brother said upon meeting her, and that only led me to love her more.

III.

Moneyball is not really a baseball movie. It’s a movie about a man who challenges the entrenched ideas of the establishment. It is about a man who sees something worthwhile in flawed athletes who are otherwise viewed as as castoffs. As mutts. Pitchers with side-armed deliveries that make no logical sense; career catchers who are wedged in to the lineup at first base. Aging veterans whose careers are considered over.

But it is also a movie about a man trying to chase away his own failures: Most notably, a divorce and a disappointing baseball career. That he does all of this in the Bay Area, I would like to think, is not entirely a coincidence: Long before the tech-bros took over the culture and the housing prices soared, the Bay Area was the place you came to reinvent yourself, to challenge the status quo, to do things your own way, to embrace who you really were. It was a place for lost dogs of all kinds. Including me.

When I moved to San Francisco not long after Moneyball’s release, I had no intent of reinventing myself. But then came my own divorce, and the repeated collapse of the journalism industry under the weight of the Internet (particularly when it came to the sort of long-form work that had been my strength). I was forced to re-examine who I was, and what mattered to me, and how I wanted to live the second half of my life. I was truly lost; for a couple of years there, I felt as if I was wandering the streets entirely on my own. But man, did I love walking the streets of San Francisco, absorbing the city’s fickle weather, contemplating its deeply rooted problems, studying its fascinating history. Then I met a girl and I met a dog, and everything changed.

There it is. The trite and sentimental part.

And maybe I’m overstating things. Maybe Moneyball is just a goddamn baseball movie. But to me, Moneyball is about reinvention. It is about facing our failures and our tragedies and our weaknesses and using them to make ourselves stronger. And those are things we’re all confronting these days, as we emerge, exhausted, into a brand new world.

IV.

We’re saying goodbye to Frida at a strange time, at the exact moment when my girlfriend and I will be fully vaccinated, as we stumble out of one of the darkest and most contentious periods in American history with no real clue of what might come next. There is so much to mourn, as this recent This American Life episode makes clear; there is so much baggage that we’ll have to parse as we attempt to plow forward with our lives. And there is, it would seem, a desire to reinvent so many elements of our society that have proved utterly dysfunctional at least over the past four years, if not since the founding of America itself.

They say when grieving that you should not minimize your loss in comparison to others. Still, I’m a rational human being. I know that losing a 17-year-old dog who spent her first 12 years on the street is a loss worth mourning, but it is not a tragedy. A tragedy is what happened to Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, whose teenaged daughter recently died in a car accident. I cannot imagine that kind of pain and loss, just as I cannot imagine the kind of pain and loss that comedian Rob Delaney describes in that This American Life episode, upon losing his two-year-old child to a brain tumor—just as I cannot imagine what it must have been like this past year for the thousands of people who lost loved ones without even being able to spend their final moments with them.

But I guess what I’m trying to say, very clumsily, is that we’ve all been forced to come to terms with suffering in some way this past year. Unless you’re a sociopath, this year has heightened your sense of your own fragility. And in the midst of all this emotion, we’ve all had to re-examine what exactly it is we’re going to value in the short time we actually exist on this earth.

V.

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It’s true: Frida didn’t really do much. Especially these past couple of years. But she didn’t have to do much. There was no reason she should still have been here at all; her ongoing survival was in itself a miracle. She was a mutt who suddenly served a purpose, because we saw the value in her. Turned out she was a market efficiency that no one realized how to take advantage of; you merely had to alter the way you viewed her strengths, and in so doing, just by watching her sit there and roll on her belly for dinner and sniff grass and roam around the kitchen floor for hours in search of a single crumb and occasionally chase a pigeon twice her size, she would allow you re-evaluate your entire outlook on life.

There is a scene at the end of Moneyball that might have veered into the trite and sentimental with lesser writers and with a lesser director and with lesser actors, but here, it does not. It culminates with the line, “How can you not be romantic about baseball?”

I suppose the same goes for dogs. Even old and misshapen and irascible dogs. That dog was there as I climbed into the rebuilt second half of my life. And I always knew that she wouldn’t be here for long. But it was long enough.

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I.

In May of 1971, in a hotel ballroom in San Francisco, a man named Werner Erhard (birth name: John Paul Rosenberg) launched one of the strangest movements in modern American history, a hybrid of vexing Zen Buddhist mantras, relentless Dale Carnegie positivity, and a disdain of bathroom breaks. It was called EST—Erhard Seminars Training, and it was one of the first iterations of the “Me” Decade, an era when Americans, in the wake of the idealism of the 1960s and the disillusionment of Watergate, began to look inward in an attempt, as Tom Wolfe wrote, to “dwell upon the self.”

By the late 1970s, the Me Decade was in full bloom, a peculiar tic of a culture so full of itself that people would pay money to lock themselves in a room with men like Werner Erhard and scream at the top of their lungs and release their repressed frustration about their hemorrhoids until they vomited into air sickness bags.

Maybe you thought EST was all bullshit. Maybe you thought EST could change your life. Either way, out of this absurdity—out of this uniquely American tendency to embrace varied forms of their own personal bullshit and then quibble over the very nature of what bullshit actually is—one of the strangest and funniest football movies of all-time was born.

II.

Now, you are probably asking yourself what the hell a dude like Werner Erhard has to do with football, and I will get to that in a moment. But first, let me make this uncontroversial declaration: There are a tremendous amount of terrible movies about football.

This was true in the first half of the twentieth century, when the best football movie the Hollywood studio machine could produce was a piece of mythical pablum like Knute Rockne: All American. This was true when I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s and we watched and re-watched terrible films like Necessary Roughness and The Program merely because they were the only football movies we got. It is true even now with a few rare 21st-century exceptions, like Friday Night Lights. Consider, for instance, the best football feature we’ve gotten over the course of the last decade is Draft Day. (I am not speaking of documentaries here, which are in another class entirely, especially the early iterations of the 30 for 30 series.)

But something happened in the 1970s, amid the glory years of film and thanks in part to the rich source material of books like Thomas Harris’ Black Sunday and Peter Gent’s North Dallas Forty and aided by the presence of Burt Reynolds: A series of movies about football, or set in the world of football, emerged that were actually pretty damned good.

Some of those films—like North Dallas Forty, arguably the best football movie ever made—were potent critiques of the sport in an age where trust in institutions had crumbled in the wake of Watergate and the series of crises that followed. Some of them were barely about football at all, like Black Sunday and Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait, which for many years when I was small child had me convinced that Vince Ferragamo was a ghost. And then there was perhaps the strangest football movie ever made, a film that seemed to straddle both of those poles, because it was ostensibly about football, but it wasn’t really about football at all.

III.

That movie was Semi-Tough, directed by Michael Ritchie—who had earned his counter-cultural sports-film rep by directing the original Bad News Bears, as well as the Robert Redford skiing film Downhill Racer—and written by Walter Bernstein, who died last weekend at the age of 101 after surviving nearly a decade on the Hollywood blacklist to forge a varied and brilliant career.

After hearing of Bernstein’s death last weekend, I re-watched Semi Tough, which was based on the novel by the wonderfully caustic and irascible Sports Illustrated writer Dan Jenkins (who died in 2019). Here is what I can say about it: It is very funny, and it is almost purposefully politically incorrect. There are scenes that make you cringe—Brian Dennehy as an oafish offensive lineman dangling a helpess woman over the ledge of a building, for instance—until you realize that everything in this movie is a satire of toxic masculinity, of self-help, of athletes and media and intellectualism and wealth and pretty much everything else. Semi-Tough is far from a perfect film—it is an overly busy attempt to make a movie that is simultaneously a love triangle, a satire of the Me Decade, and a parody of professional football, and some of those cringe-worthy scenes really don’t hold up—but it is one hell of an enjoyable movie, which can be expected when you throw Burt Reynolds, Kris Kristofferson and Jill Clayburgh together in a room.

But Semi-Tough also holds up as something more, thanks in large part to Walter Bernstein’s script (which so diverged from Jenkins novel that he wrote several pages in Sports Illustrated bemoaning the movie’s existence): It is an insightful parody of bullshit itself. This is true of the scenes that directly parody Erhard’s EST training, in which Burt Convy (“Assholes!”) plays a wonderfully smarmy and straight-faced version of a self-help guru; it’s true of the football scenes, which are unglamorous and workmanlike, the polar opposite of the glossy Friday Night Lights game action; it’s true of the locker-room scenes, in which a devoutly religious head coach is utterly ignored by his team as it works its way to the Super Bowl.

IV.

There no sacred cows in Semi-Tough. There is only a world of bullshit, and Reynolds is in on the joke the whole time. As Richard Schickel wrote in his Time magazine review, “The picture suggests that if salvation is to be had, it lies in that pragmatic resistance to the con that has traditionally characterized the American spirit and is so charmingly exemplified by Reynolds.”

And I think that’s what worked so well about those ‘70s football movies, particularly North Dallas Forty and Semi-Tough: Instead of buying into the mythical elements of the sport, the characters questioned every single stupid football cliche. In a way, it made me think of Aaron Rodgers, who, after losing another NFC Championship game last weekend, may forever be branded as a quarterback who was too smart and/or self-aware for his own good—who, in other words, didn’t buy into the bullshit enough to win the way Tom Brady did.

That in itself is a bullshit line of criticism. But this is the world we live in now. We’ve survived an era replete with bullshit—an era where a reality-TV host rode a wave of bullshit to the presidency—and then the bullshit artists conjured even more bullshit to cover for their original wave of bullshit, and the bullshit piled so high that it nearly fomented an insurrection, and now we have to work our way out of it. There won’t be any easy answers, but I guess the good news is we’ve been through this before. Walter Bernstein went through it for nearly a decade, blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer by that titan of mid-20th century bullshit, Joseph McCarthy.

Maybe that’s why, when commissioned to write a movie about football, Bernstein wound up writing a movie about the American predilection for bullshit. Yet through it all, Bernstein never lost his pragmatic sense of resistance to the con, which is why I will leave you with the last two paragraphs of his Washington Post obituary, proof that even bullshit has its upside:

This newsletter is very much a work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe and/or share it with others.

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I am keeping this newsletter free for now. The best way you can help out is by spreading the word as much as possible so I can expand my audience, because I am a terrible self-promoter. That said, I have set up payment tiers, if you wish to give something—I’ve made them as cheap as Substack will let me make them, which is $5 a month or $30 a year. If you do wish to pay, I’m happy to send you a signed copy of any one of my books as a thank you. Just shoot me a screenshot and a book title (preferably a book I wrote, but if you prefer me to send you a copy of The Corrections, I’ll do that, too), and we’ll work something out.

Welcome to Throwbacks, a weekly-ish newsletter by Michael Weinreb about sports history, culture and politics. If you like what you’re reading, please subscribe and share. (It’s still free: Just click on the free option on the “subscribe now” page.)

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Share Throwbacks: A Newsletter About Sports History

I.

In 1972, a former University of Texas football player named Gary Shaw published a memoir titled “Meat on the Hoof.” Shaw was an all-state tackle from Denton High School in suburban Dallas when he arrived in Austin to play for the Longhorns in 1963. By 1966, after struggling to break into the lineup, he quit the team and decided to write a book about the brutality of college football—the hazing rituals, the lack of medical attention, the brutal practice drills (known as “shit drills”) designed to drive marginal players into quitting, thereby freeing up their scholarships for new blood.

Shaw’s coach at Texas was Darrell Royal, a reedy and tough man from rural Oklahoma who won more games than any other coach in school history. The book hit Royal’s program hard at the time, but he did not question the accuracy of “ninety five percent” of Shaw’s recollections. The way Royal saw it, Shaw simply didn’t get it; he was an exemplar of the Generation Gap, a young man shaped by the sixties who simply couldn’t comprehend the draconian methods that Royal utilized while attempting to win championships. Maybe, Royal later wondered, Shaw was too sensitive—he spent nearly a decade homeless in the 1980s and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia before his death in 1999. The sixties had changed so many things, particularly in a quirky city like Austin, and to Royal and compatriots like former UT sports relations employee Bill Little, Shaw’s memoir was a harbinger of those changes.

“He said in the book that he didn't want to play football,” Little told a reporter in 1999. “And football is hard enough when you do want to play it.

“Gary Shaw was a product of the times. It was popular to attack the establishment.”

And so it was still popular to attack the establishment in the summer of 1976, when a sensitive and creative kid named Richard Linklater served as the backup quarterback at Huntsville High School, on the top-ranked football team in the state of Texas. Linklater would transfer to a different high school for his senior year in order to focus on baseball. He would play baseball at Sam Houston State University before dropping out to work on an oil rig and read novels, until eventually he found his passion, and decided make a low-budget anti-establishment film set in Austin, called Slacker.

II.

If you are of a certain age and a certain sensibility—if you are cool, man—then you probably remember where you were the first time you watched Linklater’s teen-stoner-coming-of-age masterpiece, Dazed and Confused. I was living in a sprawling frat house in State College, Pennsylvania, amid the dusty third-hand furniture and the stacks of empty kegs. Many of my fraternity brothers were aimless stoners, and I watched the movie with a handful of them, once we could finally score a copy on VHS from the local video store’s branch in nearby Bellefonte.

We watched it once, and then we watched it again, and at some point, I lost count, because we just kept watching it, over and over again. We had never seen anything quite like Dazed before. It was a movie about young people living in 1976, in Austin, Texas, but it felt entirely relevant to our own lives. It bore none of the ‘80s sheen of John Hughes; it was about teenagers who drank and smoked copious amounts of weed and openly questioned what the hell they were supposed to be doing with their lives. It is a movie I have watched more than any other since then. It is a movie that’s grown up with me, and grown older with me, the way nostalgia itself tends to do.

Dazed is a surprisingly profound movie crammed into a simple package, which is why it holds up over repeat viewings. And in a way, it is also a sports movie, a kindred spirit of ‘70s movies like The Bad News Bears and North Dallas Forty and Slap Shot, all of which questioned our societal relationship with sports. The two primary characters—both based on Linklater—are an incoming freshman baseball star who seems not to care that much about baseball, and a soon-to-be-senior quarterback who’s wrestling with whether he’s willing to sacrifice his ideals and sign a loyalty and sobriety pledge just to please a draconian football coach (who is not based on Darrell Royal, but who I now associate almost completely with Darrell Royal). There is only one short scene of an actual sporting event in Dazed—in which the incoming freshman baseball pitcher, played by Wiley Wiggins (who was apparently incapable of actually throwing a baseball in real life), finishes off a game while facing an inevitable hazing ritual—but the entire movie is about the choices we make to embrace sports, and to play sports, and whether sports really mean anything at all. Can an athlete be an individualist, or does he essentially have to sacrifice his youth for sports? Who was ultimately right, Darrell Royal or Gary Shaw?

Given these truths, there is little question that I am the optimal reader for Melissa Maerz’s new oral history of Dazed and Confused, the aptly titled Alright, Alright, Alright. (Author’s Note: The fact that she has allowed me to sit in her varied living rooms for hours and play a now-defunct video game and watch hundreds of actual football games with her husband only heightened my interest slightly more.) But I’ve never read an oral history quite like this one, because it is not just a book about a movie, or about the making of a movie, or even just a book about the battle between art and commerce that surrounds the making of nearly any creative work. It is a book about an entire generation, and how we came of age in that in-between era of the 1990s clinging to our nostalgia in real time, and how, like the athletes in the movie, and like Linklater himself, we wrestled with the notion of attacking the establishment or selling out and joining it.

III.

In the midst of this odd juncture in American history, we are also at an odd juncture in sports history: A hollow college football season is clinging to life, and the NFL, clinging once more to the notion that it is bigger than American society itself, seems determined to plow forward without cancelling a single game. We are even getting college basketball, whether we want it or not, but as the pandemic rages, those of us with consciences have been wondering what’s worth it and what isn’t, and perhaps we’ve even been wondering what the place of sports should be in a functioning society.

This year, we’ve seen athletes boycott and protest; we’ve seen them question the very nature of the system, and often get pilloried by the president himself for questioning the nature of the system, for using their voices rather than deferring to the establishment. And very often when these things happened, I would think back to the choice faced by the quarterback in Dazed and Confused, Randall “Pink” Floyd, who is both the coolest guy in his high school and the most well-liked, able to flit from one social circle to the next without a hint of friction. When Floyd’s football coach confronts him and declares he’s in need of a “serious attitude adjustment,” you can see Floyd wondering: Is this the kind of man I want to spend the rest of my life working for? Is it worth playing football if I have to sacrifice my youth?

I think this is why Dazed and Confused appealed to me so much back then, and why it still does today: Because it is ultimately a story about finding your place in the world, and about searching for your own values. For Randall “Pink” Floyd, for Gary Shaw—and, I’m assuming, for Richard Linklater—the push toward an organized sport made sense, until it didn’t anymore, until it led them to compromise their values in ways that they simply couldn’t live with.

As I was reading Maerz’s book, I was also listening to the second season of Michael Lewis’s outstanding Against the Rules podcast, which is about the role of coaches in society. And at one point, as he’s interviewing Bette Midler, of all people, Midler tells him this when speaking about her voice coach:

I do think that a coach has to be…you can’t have someone who’s gonna be abusive…You have to trust them. And trust is absolutely imperative. If you don’t trust your coach, you’re not gonna make it.

Coaching has already changed immensely since the era of Darrell Royal, and many of Royal’s tactics would now be viewed with horror if they were revealed in a book like Gary Shaw’s. There are two ways to look at this: The first is that this is yet another example of a world gone soft, and that the generations of Americans who grew up after the 1960s are less and less equipped to handle the real world. But the second way to look at it is that maybe those methods were never really that effective in the first place. What if Gary Shaw didn’t want to play football because he he didn’t trust the people who wanted him to play football? This is the choice Randall “Pink” Floyd makes at the end of Dazed, while smoking a joint on his own football field: By tearing up that loyalty pledge, he’s declaring that he’ll only play football on his own terms. And maybe that can be viewed as selfish, but maybe it’s also a failure of a coach to build trust in his players.

Such is the story-within-the-story of Alright, Alright, Alright: It’s about Linklater trying to produce a script about a character coming to terms with how much he’s willing to compromise—even as Linklater himself was dealing with the inevitable compromises of moviemaking within the studio system. Throughout Alright, Alright, Alright, Linklater insists that he wants the process to be collaborative, that he wants his actors to improvise their scenes and search for the soul of their characters. He wants the movie to find its own heart, rather than force it into a series of shit drills to make it work.

It turned out that Linklater had the immense talent to do this. But it also turned out that Linklater himself embodied the new paradigm of a coach who largely refused to be an asshole (except when he was punching upward at studio execs), and who coaxed transcendent performances out of people without bullying them into submission. Thirty years after the fact, some of the actors from Dazed have gone on to be stars, and others have quit acting altogether. But for a short time, they trusted one man enough to make a work of art that feels like a timeless meditation on what it means to work within a group to find your true self, even if only for a moment. And perhaps that’s the reason why sports exist in the first place.

This newsletter is very much a work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe and/or share it with others.

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A couple of people have asked me about paying for this newsletter. As of now, I am keeping it free until I establish a better idea of where it’s headed. The best way you can help out is by spreading the word as much as possible so I can expand my audience, because I am a terrible self-promoter. THAT SAID, I have set up payment tiers, if you wish to give something—I’ve made them as cheap as Substack will let me make them, which is $5 a month or $30 a year. If you do wish to pay, I’m happy to send you a copy of any one of my books as a thank you. Just shoot me a screenshot and a book title (preferably a book I wrote, but if you prefer me to send you a copy of The Corrections, I’ll do that, too), and we’ll work something out.

Welcome to Throwbacks, a weekly-ish newsletter by Michael Weinreb about sports history, culture and politics. If you like what you’re reading, please subscribe and share.

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Share Throwbacks: A Newsletter About Sports History

I. Flipping the Bird

There is a scene roughly thirty minutes into the 1976 movie The Bad News Bears—and I’m speaking of the original here, and not the ramshackle sequels or the less offensive and less interesting 2005 Richard Linklater remake—where a local marching band plays the national anthem to kick off the Little League baseball season. This band does not play the anthem particularly well, the way you’d expect a marching band in a movie might; they just belt out an off-key version as a bunch of little league teams stand on the baselines and director Michael Ritchie slowly reveals the back of each team’s jerseys, bearing the name of a local sponsor—Pizza Hut, Denny’s—until we come to the Bears, who are, of course, sponsored by a bail bondsman named Chico.

You may not recall this scene other than the brilliant punchline, and I don’t blame you for that, because nothing much happens in it, and because it is preceded by the moment in which an alcoholic little league coach played by Walter Matthau—who had already established himself as the archetype of the cynical sportswriter in The Odd Couple—passes out drunk on the mound, and by the moment in which a pre-teen named Tanner launches into a foul-mouthed and offensive rant about how the Bears’ ethnic diversity is part of what’s rendered them outcasts.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten the premise that the Bad News Bears is based on: A rich and powerful guy files a lawsuit so his son and those outcasts can play in a highly competitive little league in which no one wants them. Then he hires Matthau’s character, the brilliantly named Walter Buttermaker, a failed baseball prospect and a failed father, to coach this team. The movie was released in 1976, in the wake of Watergate and amid the collective self-loathing of the Ford presidency, so its cynicism about the American dream is not exactly subtle. As Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times when reviewing Linklater’s anodyne sequel:

Released three years after the wits at National Lampoon threatened to shoot a dog unless you bought the magazine and two years before "Animal House" hit the zeitgeist with yucks and mashed potatoes, the first "Bad News Bears" seemed very much a product of its anarchic times. In some ways, the irreverence of that film is best expressed by a string of epithets lodged at the team by one of the Bears themselves, Tanner, a towheaded squirt with a vocabulary as blue as that of Lenny Bruce. In the mid-1970's, when almost everyone but angry women and a few bomb-throwers seemed worn out by dissent and was rushing into narcissism, this sly sports comedy championed our cherished tradition of flipping the bird to anyone and everything, and during the bicentennial no less.

That brief national anthem scene in the original Bad News Bears is about as patriotic and sentimental as the movie ever gets, and even this moment feels like a mockery of our attempts to impose patriotism on even the most insignificant sporting events. This is the beauty of The Bad News Bears: It is one of the most angry and profane sports films of all time, and yet at the same time, it is also one of the most cathartic, an extended middle finger to the whole idea of competitive sports in America, and the way we put all of it—and particularly baseball—on some exalted pedestal. It is an anarchic film that came along at an anarchic moment in American life, and when I think about the return of sports in 2020, I want that feeling to course through my veins.

II. Middle Finger Emojis

According to a Pew poll released this week, 71 percent of Americans are angry about the state of the country, which—if you are among that 71 percent, and not among the 29 percent of Americans who apparently consider themselves “pandemic incompetency enthusiasts”—is probably not something you needed a poll to tell you. We’ve fucked everything up, and there is very little hope in sight at the moment, and because of that, all of our nation’s priorities are now being called to our attention in ways that they haven’t before. This is what happens when you fail: You start to question everything. You ask yourself things you might not have asked before, like, What the hell are sports supposed to be? Do we really need them in the midst of a pandemic, or are we just being selfish and greedy?

Here is where I could give you some gauzy speech voiced by Kevin Costner about why sports matter, and how they bring people together, and how winning can buoy communities and how losing can build character. But give me a break, because no one’s in the mood for that bullshit right now. Sure, there’s something about a great sporting event that catches me in ways few other things can; for that same reason, I’m not immune to the charms of Friday Night Lights, a television show which so brilliantly captured the feeling of what football meant that it made some people uncomfortable to watch it. But let’s be real: That’s not what we’re going to get out of sports in 2020.

A few days ago, NBA commissioner Adam Silver intimated that players might be able to replace the names on the back of their jerseys with a political message when the season (possibly) resumes in late July. That’s cool, but unless LeBron James posts a middle-finger emoji on the back of his jersey, I don’t care. I’m not particularly interested in the kind of look-at-me activism that’s engineered for an Instagram post. If we’re going to do this—if we’re going to force athletes to take risks that they might not feel entirely comfortable taking—I want them to embrace the kind of cynicism and anti-heroism that defined sports in the 1970s. I want to hear them swear at each other in empty arenas; I want them to rage at ownership, at management, at the media, at a president who uses athletes as pawns whenever he sees fit. I want them to question the very purpose of it, every single night, and to reflect the anger that’s coursing through this country. I want everything to feel like The Bad News Bears.

III. Drop Dead

Most of the best sports movies of the 1970s did not exactly embrace the gauzy traditionalism of their predecessors: Slap Shot (1977), about a failing minor-league hockey team, is arguably an even better and even darker movie than The Bad News Bears. In North Dallas Forty (1979)—based on Peter Gent’s excellent novel—Nick Nolte plays an aging football player who questions the cruelty and feudalism and brutality of the sport long before all those things worked their way into the mainstream. (Nancy Dowd, who wrote Slap Shot and did uncredited work on North Dallas Forty, might be the most underrated screenwriter of her era.) Breaking Away (1979) is about a bunch of scalawags who ride bikes; The Longest Yard (1974) is about a prison football team; Semi-Tough (1974) is a profane satire of both football and the new-age movement. Even the original Rocky (1976) is about a failed boxer who succeeds by failing on a grander scale; and Linklater’s masterpiece Dazed and Confused, while made in the 1990s, is set in 1976 at a high school where the star football player refuses to conform to authority.

But then, sports in the 1970s were kind of like that, too: A mirror of our own national failures. The American Basketball Association was an odd comedic mess that merged with the NBA the same year The Bad News Bears was released, and then the NBA was a struggling league until Larry Bird and Magic Johnson set it on a path to commercialism in the 1980s. The NFL in the 1970s was a slog, a boring sport in which the forward pass had essentially been locked down and the greatest franchise was owned by a maverick named Al Davis whose teams took pleasure in brutalizing their opponents.

And baseball in the 1970s was gritty and angry; baseball in the 1970s was epitomized by the pugnacity of Earl Weaver and the erratic profanity of Billy Martin. The Yankees of the late 1970s were a dysfunctional mess, fitting of a city that had essentially dropped dead.

Here is something else Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, said a few weeks back: The NBA’s return—in its Disneyworld lockdown bubble, without fans, without several players who are declining to participate, in a limited-series run that may feel more like an AAU summer league than the actual NBA playoffs—might prove “a respite from enormous difficulties people are dealing with in their lives right now.” I will say here that Adam Silver is one of the smartest men in sports, but this, to me, feels like some sentimental horseshit. I don’t want sports to be a respite; I want them to feel like an angry and cynical catharsis.

I want managers to kick dirt on umpires (from six feet away, of course); I want pitchers and hitters to scream about brushback pitches (from six feet away, of course). I want hardcore ugliness. I don’t want shiny uniforms and corporate messaging; I want hard slides and broken bats and scuffed baseballs and raised middle fingers. The same is true in football and basketball and soccer and hockey and everything else: If we’re really going to do this, let’s make it ugly as hell. Let’s fight authority on every level. Let’s flip the bird to anyone and everything.

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Share Throwbacks: A Newsletter About Sports History

This newsletter is very much a work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe and/or share it with others.

Additional Reading:

Big Hair and Plastic Grass, by Dan Epstein

Loose Balls, by Terry Pluto

North Dallas Forty, by Peter Gent

Badasses, by Peter Richmond

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, by Jonathan Mahler

Alright, Alright, Alright, by Melissa Maerz