THE SPORTS FILM GAMES PEOPLE PLAY B RUCE BABINGTON WALLFLOWER LONDON and NEW YORK Sports_film_pages.indb 3 15/1/14 15:03:46 INTRODUCTION: START OF PLAY A few introductory words about Invictus Invictus (Clint Eastwood, 2010) is a useful point to begin a short account of the sports film. A recent, high profile production, with two actors (Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon as François Pienaar, the cap- tain of the South African rugby team) nominated for Academy Awards, and a major contemporary American director in Eastwood, it attests both to the contemporary prestige of the proliferating sports film, and to the interna- tionalising of the genre. Films such as Cry Freedom (Richard Attenborough, 1987), Cry the Beloved Country (Darrell Roodt, 1995), The Power of One (John G. Avildsen, 1992), A Dry White Season (Euzhan Palcy, 1989), and Goodbye Bafana (Billie August, 2007), demonstrate the contemporary cinema’s fascination with the South African apartheid regime and its fall, and with the figure of Nelson Mandela, widely seen as one of the political heroes of our time. Another film about this era might have been expected, but hardly a Hollywood production based on the 1995 Rugby World Cup, rugby being a lower tier sport in the US (the largely forgotten progenitor of American football), and Hollywood faithfully reflecting American parochial- ism as regards other nations’ sports. Like many of the most memorable sports films, Invictus through its sports narrative addresses not just sporting matters but wider issues, not implicitly as many do, but very explicitly, thus providing an overt opening example of the genre’s workings. Its narrative centres on Mandela’s attempts as the new first President of post-apartheid South Africa (1994) to create a moment of reconciliation and popular unity in the newly designated ‘Rainbow Nation’ around the national team in the 1 Sports_film_pages.indb 1 15/1/14 15:03:47 SHORT CUTS 1995 Rugby World Cup played in South Africa, an unlikely project because the ‘Springbok’ rugby team had throughout the century been a preemi- nent icon of Afrikaaner white supremacy. Given this, the segregated non-white sections of crowds at test matches against other rugby play- ing countries notoriously supported the opposition against the national team. Mandela, in pursuit of his seemingly impossible vision, enlists the unlikely support of François Pienaar, and through him, slowly, the backing of the overwhelmingly Afrikaaner team, with its one black player, Chester Watson. The desired change in attitude among the minority but economi- cally powerful whites and the numerically dominant black population (football rather than rugby supporters) is microcosmically shown through the interactions of the President’s security men, an unwilling mixture of ANC Africans and apartheid-era whites, and of the Pienaar household of the captain’s conservative parents and their black maid. As this précis suggests, Invictus – and in this it is typical of the great majority of sports films – is an example of conservative, classical filmmaking, employing strategies (like the larger thematic being relayed through individuals and small groups) familiar to the viewer. Like many sports films, Invictus also drives to a final encounter in which the South African team faces the all-conquering New Zealand All Blacks, with their seemingly unstoppable giant winger Jonah Lomu. The final is won narrowly by the Springboks, leading to national rejoicing, rep- resentatively individualised in the cameo of the black boy trying to listen to the initially hostile white policemen’s radio broadcasting the game, and joyfully celebrating with them at its end. That many of the All Blacks were suffering from the effects of food poisoning that some have claimed was a deliberate act is not mentioned in the narrative, which might be more complex with it, but would certainly be less forceful and exemplary. Released fifteen years after the events of 1995, as South Africa struggled with seemingly intractable socio-political, economic and racial problems, the film was in some quarters accused of suggesting naïvely that momen- tary feelings generated by a sporting victory had banished the nation’s many troubles. That the film, like many sports films, is an inspirational story, drawing on the not wholly rational emotions aroused by national sporting success, is obvious, but it is intelligent enough to know that it is celebrating a symbolic moment of unity that may be hard to sustain and live up to, as indeed it has been. If one might point a moral for this book 2 Sports_film_pages.indb 2 15/1/14 15:03:47 THE SPORTS FILM through the film and its reception, it is that sports films should be read with the same intelligence given to, indeed demanded for, other forms of popular generic cinema. A very abbreviated history of the sports film The moving photographic image and organised sport as recognised today, both developments of the late nineteenth century and dominating features of life since, have had a continuingly close relationship. Sports films, either ‘actualities’ or brief fictions, appear early in the American, British and French cinemas (and those of Australia and New Zealand, both profoundly sports orientated British colonial cultures), reflecting the late nineteenth century rise in spectator sports: e.g. The Leonard–Cushing Fight (Edison Kinetoscope, US, 1894), The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race (Birt Acres and Robert W. Paul, UK, 1895), The 1896 Derby (Paul, UK, 1896), The Melbourne Cup (Australia, 1896), Football (Lumière Brothers, France, 1897), The Ball Game (Edison, US, 1898), Auckland Cup (NZ, 1898), Races at Poona (India, 1898), Blackburn versus West Bromwich (UK, 1898), Dr. [W.G.] Grace’s Jubilee Procession (UK, 1989), Casey at the Bat (US, 1899), Comic Boxing Match (UK, 1900), Boy’s Cricket Match and Fight (UK, 1900), Leçon de Boxe (Lumière Brothers, France, circa 1901–3), Ping Pong (UK, 1902), The New Zealand Footballers: The All Blacks’ Reception and Arrival at Auckland (NZ, 1906), fragments of the England v South Africa cricket test at Newlands (South Africa, 1906), and, most extraordinarily, the ninety-minute-long Veriscope Corbett–Fitzsimmons Fight (Enoch J. Rector, US, 1897), now recognised as the first feature length film. (Some of these, with others, are listed in McKernan, 1996). New as they were, these early films are part of a historical continuum of visual representations, which includes many classical Greek examples of runners, throwers (e.g. Myron’s ‘Discobolus’ statue which memorably comes to life at the begin- ning of Riefenstahl’s Olympia), boxers, wrestlers, and horse racers, with the javelin throwing sequences by the ‘Carpenter’ and ‘Colmar’ painters, pre-motion picture capturing of action sequences, and nineteenth century British paintings, as well as literary records of sports from Pindar’s fifth century BC Odes to winners at the various Panhellenic Games, to nine- teenth century English writing (e.g. Hazlitt’s essays ‘The Fight’ and ‘The Indian Jugglers’, and Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays). 3 Sports_film_pages.indb 3 15/1/14 15:03:47 SHORT CUTS Zucker and Babich’s Sports Films: A Complete Reference (1987) lists around 2000 feature length and early short films. Since the 1960s, the genre’s output has accelerated tremendously, until in the last few decades more sports-based features have been made, especially in the US, than ever before, underwriting the domination sport and the discourse of sport have over daily life, and the sports star’s status as the time’s most central ‘hero of consumption’ (Leo Lowenthal’s oft-quoted phrase from his essay ‘Biographies in Popular Magazines’). Clearly, no short book could cover such a large, constantly expanding genre. Thus this one, though wishing to demonstrate the genre’s extensiveness and multifacetedness, attempts depth rather than impossible comprehensiveness, concentrating on a small proportion of the 170 or so films in its filmography (itself highly selective), chosen to demonstrate patterns and preoccupations, changes and developments across the genre. Some preliminary definitions Whether seen as a genre, or as a looser grouping with a ‘special relation to narrative’ (Gary Whannel 2008: 81) which can be attached to a multitude of genres and sub-genres, the sports film’s longstanding contemporary boom reverses Hollywood’s traditional views of its doubtful viability. Against the claim that sports films lack such generic attributes as a typical mise-en- scène, a characteristic style, and auteurs, there are various answers: that the typical mise-en-scène is the sports stadium or games playing site, the ‘field of dreams’, that a major part of the genre’s iconography consists of the materials of and surrounding sport, and that to define a genre by whether or not highly regarded individual directors have made careers in it is eccentric. However, the list of distinguished film makers who have made sports films is a long one, running from Lindsay Anderson, Robert Aldrich and Anthony Asquith to Leni Riefenstahl, Robert Rossen, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Robert Towne and David Williamson, the Australian writer of The Four Minute Mile (Jim Goddard, 1988) and The Club (Bruce Beresford, 1980). The further claim that sports films lack ‘a consistent set of themes, images or tropes’ is demonstrably mistaken, with Whannel, the source of the arguments disagreed with above, himself contributing his master theme of gaining and losing ‘respect’ or ‘acceptance’ to the sports film’s primary thematics. Additionally, it is doubtful that other genres exhibit 4 Sports_film_pages.indb 4 15/1/14 15:03:47 THE SPORTS FILM more characteristic styles (outside of fixed periods) than the sports film. This book then treats the sports film as a genre, but claims that its analyses will still be found relevant if the reader disagrees. It also finds the sports film, for all its variety, the ‘coherent category’ Whannel denies, a curious position given that his insightful particular analyses characteristically imply its coherence rather than incoherence (Whannel 2008: 80–2).