An Exultation of Sports: Nine Iconic Films

There are lots and lots (and lots!) of movies about sports, and many of them reside in my DVD collection. But every once in a while, a movie comes along that glorifies its sport in such an essential, thrilling way, it almost becomes an icon of that game. 

These are the films that do that for me, in alphabetical order by sport.

BASEBALL: The Natural, 1984

I had many other choices in this category—1989’s Field of Dreams is the obvious alternate here. But the sheer heroics of The Natural‘s protagonist, Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford in one of his best roles), and the sharp delineation of good and bad, right and wrong, and real players versus wannabes, lift this film to my list of icons. If you don’t thrill to the crash of Hobb’s home-run ball into the backboard, if the lightning-flash doesn’t make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end, then probably nothing from a real diamond will, either.

BOXING: Rocky, 1976

Okay, Rocky is iconic already, for so many things. Who can hear that theme music and not see Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa? But what makes this movie my icon for boxing is the way the very brutality of the sport becomes part of the growth process for Rocky. It isn’t Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) whom Rocky must defeat, but himself. See if the hair doesn’t rise on your neck when Rocky says, “I was thinkin’, it really don’t matter if I lose this fight. It really don’t matter if this guy opens my head, either. ‘Cause all I wanna do is go the distance.”

CYCLE RACING: American Flyers, 1985

In the ’80s, the bicycle race for American cyclists was not the Tour de France, but the Coors Classic, in Colorado, thinly-disguised in this movie as the "Hell of the West" stage race. My first glimpse of the tactics and strategy involved in stage racing came from this movie, which captures the competition quite well. The story is almost a sideline, but Kevin Costner’s Marcus talks his brother David (played by David Marshall Grant) into coming along for the Hell of the West. When Marcus collapses from a growing brain tumor, it’s left to David to hold up their side against “Cannibal” Muzzin (Luca Bercovici). And while it’s not a hair-raising scene, the training session with “Eddie” is my favorite. (Eddie is a large dog who provides motivation for David to ride faster.) Cycle-champ Eddy Merckx appears as himself—now that’s hair-raising!

GOLF: Pat and Mike, 1952

This classic film starring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made waves in the early ’50s for its portrayal of a woman athlete whose competitive edge was ruined whenever her patronizing fiancé showed up. It makes my shelf as the essential golf-flick (just barely passing 2000’s The Legend of Bagger Vance for the same reason, by the way) because the golf-play is realistic. Hepburn’s character makes a coolly rational decision to play golf because she accepts her trainer (Tracy)’s assessment that more money is to be made there. Like Bagger Vance, though, this movie really is about the soul-searching and continuous re-commitment that is required for a champion in any game.

HOCKEY: Mystery, Alaska, 1999

This movie was billed as a black comedy, but for glorification of a sport, it tops my list. For the residents of Mystery, Alaska, ice hockey isn’t so much a game as a way of life. When a pro team (The New York Rangers) comes to play, the entire town gets involved. Russell Crowe’s Sheriff John Biebe sometimes takes a backseat to the antics of “Skank” Marden (Ron Eldard): “I play hockey and I fornicate, ’cause those are the two most fun things to do in cold weather.” But the ice hockey—the game itself—is the central character in this movie, and it’s real enough that the Rangers win. The most thrilling moments come in the face-offs between Mystery players and Rangers.

FOOTBALL: The Replacements, 2000

There are so many iconic football movies. You could argue with me that either version of The Longest Yard, or perhaps 2000’s Remember the Titans, would be a better choice for football. These reside on my football shelf, along with The Blind Side, We Are Marshall, When the Game Stands Tall and more recently, Draft Day. Yet I place this Keanu Reaves outing on my icons shelf for a simple reason: this movie, more than any other, glorifies the game as a game. I love Shane Falco (Keanu Reaves)’s synopsis of why football is worth playing: “Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory… lasts forever.” There’s also the essential concept for any team sport, that the team must become more to the player than himself. The hair-lifting scene comes as quarterback Falco jerks the ball away from field-goal kicker Nigel Gruff (Rhys Ifans) to save him from the consequences of a team-versus-me choice.

LUGE: Cool Runnings, 1993

When I learned that a Jamaican bobsled team would compete in the 1988 Olympics in Calgary, I thought it was a joke. This movie is a comedy based on the team’s first entry into the Olympics, but it earns a place on my shelf of icons by showing the real heart and effort that made this team a winner. Okay, they came in last—but they didn’t quit. This Disney film takes that almost-universal initial reaction, and uses it as fuel to show why the Jamaican bobsled team could come back and finish 14th in 1994 in Lillehammer—ahead of both sleds from the United States.

RUNNING: Chariots of Fire, 1981

I nearly picked 1988’s On the Edge (the Bruce Dern film) for this shelf, for its thrilling depiction of a marathon event, but Chariots edged past it. Ian Charleson as the Scottish Christian runner, and Ben Cross as the Jewish Cambridge student, both of them competing in the 1924 Olympics, give us a real feeling for each runner’s motivation. Charleson makes no secret of his faith, while Cross is never allowed to forget his. Interestingly, it is Charleson’s faith that brings him into conflict with his Christian country’s Olympic team.

SOCCER: Victory (AKA Victoire, Escape to Victory), 1981

The plot is simple: a WWII soccer-player POW (Michael Caine) conceives a plan to escape with his entire team during a match between German players and the POWs. The game turns into a metaphor for the war itself, with real soccer legends (Pelé, Bobby Moore, Osvaldo Ardiles, Werner Roth) playing Allies and German kickers. Until the break in the game, this is a typical escape-from-German-stalag film, with soccer thrown in. What sets this story firmly on my shelf of icons is the refusal of the players to escape by tunnel from their Paris locker-room, when “we could win this game!” One hair-lifting moment here comes with the in-your-face singing of the banned national anthem, La Marseillaise, by the French crowd, another from the astounding over-top kick by Pelé. Even a re-written ending that lets Sylvester Stallone make the winning play can’t detract from the solid soccer action provided by legends of the game.

And if I have to chose one single film that represents the glory of sport for me, it is, always and forever, Victory.

Indomitable (Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge)

Teaser from Ken Cummings' memoir Meant to Be Here (I am helping him write it.)

On the way back to Santa Rosa by car [in 1967], we visited the Prairie Creek Salmon Hatchery in Humboldt County, situated on a surviving clear-water creek. It had been built to mitigate the massive loss of salmon habitat caused by mechanized logging.

A huge wooden carving at the hatchery immortalized a coho salmon named Indomitable. The tale was that one morning the hatchery workers had found a single adult salmon swimming with the newborn fish in one of the hatching pools. They discovered a screen-cap knocked off an overflow pipe into the pool; this was the point of ingress for the salmon.

Tracing downstream along the pipes and flumes below the building, they found scores of salmon ready to spawn, packed into ever-smaller flumes. All these fish had returned upstream to their point of origin—the hatchery—to spawn. “Indomitable” had been just determined enough, just strong enough, and possibly just small enough, to get up the overflow pipe and manage to knock away the cap and enter the pool.

The workers happily harvested eggs and sperm from all the adult fish, and released them back into the stream.

When I read the Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge this morning, I knew it was time to bring the ghost-writing and the flash fiction together:  

May 13, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that shows a hard place and a connection. It could be a prisoner who discovers friendship; a cedar that grows from a crack in a cliff; an abandoned dog rescued by a homeless teen. Maybe it is a reconciliation or connecting with students during a turbulent time. Is the hard place part of something larger in the scope of a character’s development? Or is it a plot twist?

What is more about difficulty of connection than the determination of a salmon spawning?

______________________________

Indomitable

The crowded racetrack surges with imperative: we must return. Each mile upstream also means climbing a body-length vertically, darting past the rocks, and the other racers. Our run has the ultimate prize, but there is no call to win. There is only the urgent invitation of the water upstream.

Closer and closer we come to the finish. Suddenly the water almost disappears. The final lap is a tight tunnel, full of racers. Has someone already won?

No, there is one more obstacle, a leap to a tighter passage. I alone make it home, one salmon of thousands hatched here.

The Luggage Problem in Ferguson and Baltimore

As hypochondriac Joe Banks prepares to go off on his epic trip of self-discovery in Joe Versus the Volcano, he meets a strangely-intense, focused person who hears his needs, and nods sagely. “That’s very interesting,” he assures Banks. He pauses a beat, then, stressing each word, says, “as a luggage problem.”

What this fellow’s internal life is like, one can only guess, but so sincere is his regard of anything worth thinking about as “a luggage problem,” that it passes with scarcely a chuckle. To him, luggage is the central concern of life.

We live now in a society of such fellows. Oh, each has his own particular baggage, to be sure, but each proclaims with equal stress and sincerity that his luggage is the critical, essential part of any journey, not to be left behind in the pursuit of any other goal in life.

In the wake of any disaster, there comes a raft of baggage-salesmen. Some are selling police, the POTUS or Congress as bad guys. Some are selling gun-control to solve the wreckage left behind by riots, others want more cameras to watch us all as we navigate the waves of violence. There will be trunks of relief concerts, duffels of oil-price conspiracy, pullman cases full of the dreck that washes up after any disaster.

Like Joe Banks, we can accept the assessment of someone else, take on baggage until the ship sinks beneath us, nearly drown in the rain of day-to-day living in the global media storm. We can, as he did, swear that, wherever we go, we’ll take this luggage.

Or we can cast it away, make our own assessments of what is important and real. We can live our own lives, instead of throwing them away for someone else’s goals. We can stop trying to convince each other that our luggage is the best.

Then we can regard the power of nature (including human nature, of course), as Joe Banks does when he has nothing left in his life but his luggage, and say

Oh, Lord! I forgot how big…

Repression and Bloody-Mindedness

Review: The Radleys by Matt Haig

Matt Haig tells us right up front that "vampire" is "a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichés and girly novels." But for the very middle-class British Radleys, with their two children, the cliché is their life in hiding, a colorless droning buzz of hunger repressed and desires denied.

Rowan Radley is an anemic teen with skin rashes, yearning for the courage to talk to his sister's friend Eva. Clara Radley's walls are covered with "Save the Whales" posters; she is a vegetarian whose only friend is the new girl at school, a beauty who she senses will probably not speak to her any more once she is fully accepted by the other students. 

Helen and Dr. Peter Radley are helpless to assist their children to fit in, any more than they can assimilate themselves. They are too busy hiding their nature, not only from the neighbors, but also from their children. They are Abstainers: vampires who refuse to drink blood.

Despite years of residence in their quiet community, all four Radleys are simply existing day-to-day. Suffering, in a blunted, relentless way.

Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these "normal" human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? 'Course not. It's just the same. We're middle-class and we're British. Repression is in our veins.

In a single brutal event at an overnight party, Clara will open the gates for all of the Radleys to revert to their true nature. And the advent of Uncle Will, a long-practising blood-drinker with the power to cloud men's minds, will at first seem a blessing. He can help them divert the attention of the police.

It is another unsolved mystery in a world full of unsolved mysteries. Now stand up and walk out the way you came, and the moment that fresh air caresses your face, you will realize that that is what makes the world so beautiful. All those unsolved mysteries. And you won't ever want to interfere with that beauty again.

As always, though, when long-held feelings are repressed, they eventually burst forth with explosive power. The secrets the Radleys have been hiding go far beyond blood-drinking. And when they are no longer suppressed, the results will change the Radleys and everyone involved with them irrevocably.

It's an intense novel, about much more than the girly cliché of vampire romance. This story is about living the life you were born to live, rather than the one defined for you by society. It's worth the read.

That is what the taste of blood does. It takes away the gap between thought and action. To think is to do. There is no unlived life inside you as the air speeds past your body, as you look down at the dreary villages and market towns...

A Badly Written Account of a Bad Career

Review: Inside the Spam Cartel by “Spammer-X”

With cyber-terrorism trending in the news, and a recently-purchased stack of “obsolete” paperbacks from a local second-hand bookstore, I was most eager to read Inside the Spam Cartel. 

My eagerness persisted only into the second chapter—the self-professed spammer is coy in his presentation of examples, leaves out more information than he gives, and (by far the worst sin) seems unable to mate subject and verb number, use apostrophes or adverbs rationally, or spot abject incoherence in his own writing.

Aside from that, the book is intriguing in a creepy way.

The topic is one every Internet user will find interesting, and Spammer-X delivers a lot of detail about the process, purpose and payback of spamming. He has been somewhat careful about removing actual IP and eMail addresses and usernames, although this, like all his proof-reading, is not thorough. He includes a number of examples of using HTML tags to encode spam messages that will slide through spam filters, while telling us his philosophy of spam. 

This philosophy boils down to: “I can do it, and you can’t stop me, so it’s all right. Besides, I get paid to do it.”

Even so, Spammer-X is aware how his activities are viewed by others. Some chapters seem to be an effort to excuse his actions, others are almost apologetic. He will carefully spell out how to “hijack” a Web page for spamming purposes, as if to provide useful information for the IT crew of that site. Then he will add in one of his Notes from the Underground, “I think I will keep this [next] bit secret in case I want to use it again…”.

The book’s theme wavers back and forth between these two extremes, as if the author doesn’t really want to give up his behavior (as long as he’s getting away with it), but does want to be respected as an expert who offers help. He extends that help to would-be spammers and those who oppose their efforts with equal detail.

I found most interesting the chapter detailing phishing and eMail scams, including the “419 scam”. You probably have encountered the 419 scam as the Nigerian Finance Minister scheme: an eMail promises you part of a multi-million-dollar sum for your assistance in setting up a bank account to move the funds into from overseas. The scam gets its name, according to Spammer-X, from the code 419 for Fraud in Nigeria, the source of more than half of all such scams.

Inadvertent humor from typos and misapplication of the spell-checker supplies some lighter moments. Occam’s Razor is cited as “Akum’s Razor,” for example, and “hearsay” is rendered as “heresy”.

Aside from that, and one or two tricks for avoiding and reducing spam in your own personal mailbox, I came away with a mental image of Spammer-X as a petty psychopath. He coldly sets out which spam topics generate the greatest return to the spammer:

…I have broken into and stolen e-mail contacts from many self-help Web sites. Web sites designed to help people with gambling addictions are a great example. These people are prime targets for spam. If even one person signs up to a casino I promote, I stand to make serious money since I know they will gamble everything they have and undoubtedly lose it all… Preying on vulnerabilities ensures a highly effective return.

And he adopts a cool stance to justify himself to his friends:

I often go for walks with friends of mine, stopping off at every ATM on the way… By the end of the night I am carrying at least $10,000.00 in $20.00 bills. My friends… don’t really know where the money is coming from… When asked how I earned the money, I… even told a friend I was dealing drugs… I don’t want my friends to know that I am the one that sent them all that spam.

Spammer-X would rather have his friends believe him a criminal than a spammer. Perhaps he knows in his heart (despite all his sophistry to the contrary) that there is very little difference.

Inside the Spam Cartel is available—but decided overpriced—for Kindle. Obviously, Spammer-X has learned another way to fleece the online public. I can't recommend the book, unless you can borrow it for free. Try the local library.

A Mother’s Day Garden: Sweet, Beautiful, Nurturing, Fertile and Seductive

Review: The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

This interesting treatise is a four-part examination of mankind’s interaction with plants, with its main premise that man and domesticated plants have formed a symbiotic link of the same kind enjoyed by flowers and bees. Indeed, the author's view seems to be that plants have taught man to cultivate them.

Pollan examines four specific plants in his exploration of this theme. Sweetness (the apple), Beauty (the tulip), Intoxication (marijuana) and Control (the potato) are all desires of man that are satisfied by plants. For each desire, Pollan makes his case that man and plant have mutually adjusted each other, leaving us to ask, “who is really domesticating whom?“

The four plants whose stories this book tells are what we call “domesticated species,” a rather one-sided term… that leaves the erroneous impression that we’re in charge. We automatically think of domestication as something we do to other species, but it makes just as much sense to think of it as something certain plants and animals have done to us, a clever evolutionary strategy for advancing their own interests. The species that have spent the last ten thousand or so years figuring out how best to feel, heal, clothe, intoxicate and otherwise delight us have made themselves some of nature’s greatest success stories.—Introduction to The Botany of Desire

Sweetness: Once, sweetness stood for all that satisfied desire: wholesomeness, freshness, fertility and purity. Women, good farm plots, economies and philosophies were “sweet” to the extent that they were productive and good. Even now, though sweetness has lost most of its power, it is still a highly desired quality for food, especially fruit. Pollan tells the story of the apple tree, from its roots in Eurasia as a bitter shrub to its spread across the American frontier by John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) in an early American capitalist success story.

Beauty: The tale of man’s desire for botanical beauty is told through the story of the tulip, which “has been reinvented every century or so to reflect our shifting ideals of beauty.” Pollan contrasts his “boyish view” of flowers as pointless with the frenzy of passion for them in Dutch history, a passion that literally made and broke banks in Holland in the 17th century.

This stands for that: flowers by their very nature traffic in a kind of metaphor, so that even a field of wildflowers brims with meanings not of our making. Move into the garden, however, and the meanings multiply as the flowers take aim not only at the bee’s or bat’s or butterfly’s obscure notions of the good… but ours as well.

Intoxication: From the medieval gardens of wizards to the herbal gardens of the country chef, plants that provide toxins and intoxicants have always had a place. Even our tame residential borders are likely to contain catnip, especially if we have a family feline to indulge. Pollan follows the discovery of marijuana in the ancient East (from the loopy behavior of pigeons eating cannabis seeds), through the incremental increase in sturdiness and resin production driven in North America, ironically enough, by the war on drugs.

With the solitary exception of the Eskimos, there isn’t a people on earth that doesn’t use psychoactive plants to effect a change in consciousness, and there probably never has been. As for the Eskimos, their exception only proves the rule: historically, Eskimos didn’t use psychoactive plants because none of them will grow in the Arctic. (As soon as the white man introduced the Eskimo to fermented grain, he immediately joined the consciousness changers.)

Control: Why the potato for Pollan’s thesis on the desire for control? Because this plant is his experience with genetically-altered plants. Monsanto looked at the devastation wreaked in Ireland by the potato blight, and the crash of potato production in America’s high plains following the advent of the Colorado potato beetle, and decided to create a resistant strain of the plant. Pollan looks closely at the whole topic of biotech crops with a fairly even-handed approach.

Today’s gain in control over nature will be paid for by tomorrow’s new disorder, which in turn will become simply a fresh problem for science to solve. We can cross that bridge when we come to it.

As well as being an enjoyable book to read, The Botany of Desire has a substantial bibliography, with plenty of suggestions for further reading, and is liberally indexed. Pollan unravels the complex interconnections of history, botany and human nature to give us a satisfying and unique perspective on desirable fruit, flower, weed and food plants.

Green and Blue Survival (Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge)

Northern California, even in a drought, has a wet winter. The frogs begin their mating calls in moist December, and sing through January's downpours. Even the tiniest pool becomes a potential tadpole nursery. 

When the temperature rises enough, these pools will also form breeding grounds for mosquitos.

Soon after the rains cease, the spring plants begin to peek out. Adult deer know what they like the flavor of: ceanothus and native oat grass top their list of browse. But the fawns nibble everything—they have to learn what tastes nice. Enough fawns come through our hillside property to seriously impact the landscaping.

Still, we collect the rainwater when it fills the gutters, streaming down from our uphill-neighbor's pavement and the turn-around at the end of the street. Runoff from roof and street gutters is channeled into a linked series of 55-gallon repurposed olive barrels. Our oaks and native plant landscaping will not lack for water this summer.

At the communal garden plot, loads of compost and horse manure mark the beginning of spring planting. We harvested the last of our fava beans for pickles last week, but have not decided what crops to plant at "the farm" for the coming season. In the midst of this burgeoning growth, the Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge is a timely diversion.

May 6, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that is a snapshot of spring. I realize that some Rough Writers are riding into autumn, and I hope this isn’t a disadvantage to focus on a season we are not collectively sharing. We could think of it as “spring eternal.” Warm, renewing, new life, hope.

Hope springs eternal, and so does life. From the bitterest (or dryest) winter, we always welcome the renewal of spring.

____________________

Green and Blue Survival 

Dumping condensation that has collected on the lid of the makeshift rainbarrel, I set it carefully back over a full container that once held olives, and move downline to the next.

This one holds a nascent green frog. Its tail still reveals its tadpole nature. Scooping it gently from its tiny pond, I walk it downhill to the sump pool. It can survive here long enough to sing next winter, unless the crows eat it.

"Hon!" An excited voice floats from the side yard. "Our ceanothus came back!" The tiny blue blossoms have survived another winter of deer depradation.