It goes without saying that I watch a lot of movies. I have a love/hate relationship with limited series and I much prefer a three hour cinematic adventure over short overtures.
My husband and I, over the years now, have coined the term “Feel Good Sports” as one of our own particular genre of movies that we love to watch.
Me: What do you want to watch tonight?
Him: How about some feel good sports?
Is usually how it goes.
Not all of these center around Baseball (or Kevin Costner as he OWNS this genre) but many of them do, and three are on a steady rotation.
The Natural.
And, Moneyball.
The common thread through all of these is, I’ll paraphrase, overcoming incredible odds to deliver on your dreams….and also recognizing and moving past childhood or situational trauma…to do what you were meant to do.
That special swirl of your skills, your talents and your passions that defines and frames your purpose.
Most importantly, YOUR purpose, no matter what others think it should be, in general.
And as I like to say, a little bit of woo-woo mixed in too.
Never hurts.
In The Natural, the main character, Roy Hobbs, played by peak Robert Redford (dreamy) is literally lightning in a bottle (or in this case a bat called Wonderboy).
He bests the Babe Ruth of the day in the film and is on his way to what anyone would anticipate as a phenomenal baseball career only to be distracted in his prime and thrown off course by a mysterious woman who lures him in and takes advantage of his naivety and shoots him.
The woman is played in the film by the national treasure that is Barbara Hershey and now, thinking of her, I immediately want to watch Beaches!
I’m not going to get too deep but much of what Roy experiences is similar to many of the things we all experience, symbolically, throughout our lives.
Moments that throw us off track and teach us lessons.
Manipulation. Ego. Injury. Grief. Guilt. Lost love. Found love. Sacrifices.
In the case of Roy, even sacrificing your own health, bleeding on a field, wanting to go left when everyone else is telling you to go right. When you are told to keep quiet and throw the game knowing in the depths of your soul that it is wrong and ultimately listening to yourself and showing everyone - in the most spectacular way possible - that what they do contributes to things that are greater than themselves.
Not just hitting a baseball so hard you break the cover off of it, that is talent.
But blasting a homer into the lighting rig and exploding it like it was a firework.
Lightning.
Magic.
As Iris says, played by Glenn Close, “You know, I believe we have two lives…the life we learn with and the life we live with after that.”
I can not ignore the incredible cast in this movie aside from those aforementioned…Richard Farnsworth who plays Matthew in all of the Anne of Green Gables! Wilford Brimley, my favorite oatmeal spokesperson. Robert Duvall. A very young Kim Basinger. And so on and so forth.
In Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella (yay, Kevin Costner!), is visited by three ghosts…wait a minute, that’s Charles Dickens…wrong book and film adaptation.
Rewind.
Okay…Ray Kinsella, while he is whiling away in his cornfield in Iowa, hears a voice and it tells him “if you build it, he will come.”
Thinking he is going absolutely bonkers because he keeps hearing this damn voice and then has visions of a ball field in his corn along with also seeing a gentlemen (who turns out to be “Shoeless” Joe Jackson) walking through it, his very understanding, and I mean so understanding she deserves to be sainted, wife, Annie, played by Amie Madigan in the film, somehow goes along with it.
Mind you, their house and farm is on the verge of foreclosure and he’s got his banker brother in law, played by Timothy Busfield, breathing down his neck.
Ray builds the field and not only does “Shoeless” Joe appear but the rest of the disgraced Black Sox - eight men out and all. The backstory being that Ray and his dad lost touch when Ray couldn’t believe his baseball loving dad would hold a “criminal” like Joe up on a pedestal so high.
Ray hears more voices… “go the distance” where he is set off on an adventure to find - err, kidnap - Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) after Annie - again, Amie Madigan - delivers the best f*ck you to censorship and burning books scene in cinematic history.
Mann, having also been disillusioned himself - “peace. love. dope!” - and once a lover of baseball, goes with Ray to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park and they BOTH hear the third voice that exclaims “ease his pain” and see Archie Graham’s name light up on the jumbotron.
Archie, it turns out, never got his chance in the field as a ball player and became a doctor.
Ray meets him in a time warp where a much older Archie is played by none other than Burt Lancaster (swoon!) where he says he’s happy about the life he chose, more or less.
Just a week or so ago I was texting with my best friend and we were going on an on and I said “I better be getting home, Alicia will think I have a girlfriend” which is a specific line that Archie (Burt) delivers. I’m too funny.
Ray and Terence end up picking up a let’s call it a ghost version of young Archie on the way back to Iowa.
When they finally get back to the field, more ball players have come out AND Terence can see it all.
Archie gets his turn at bat.
While that damn brother in law is mouthing off about foreclosure again Terence is monologue-ing about Baseball… “Ray, people will come, Ray…and they'll watch the game, and it'll be as if they'd dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they'll have to brush them away from their faces.”
I always love the part when James Earl Jones actually brushes away the memories with his hand.
Ray’s daughter (Abby Hoffman, wha?!) almost chokes on a hotdog. Archie crosses the line between the field and the grass and transforms in to old doctor Archie and saves her.
FINALLY that damn brother in law GETS IT and SEES IT.
Terence gets to go visit the outfield. Ray is peeved. But then, he gets to meet his dad. They play catch one last time and they make amends.
A line of cars pulls into the parking lot and more are in traffic as far as the eye can see.
Saved.
Magic.
Despite all the odds, Ray’s efforts got people to believe in things they could not yet see for themselves…until they suspended disbelief and then did.
I HIGHLY urge you to watch this, below, from 2021 when the MLB actually built the Field of Dreams field in Iowa (added to the bucket list) and Kevin Costner threw out the first pitch and if there is a narrator to the movie of my own life please have it be Kevin Costner.
Perhaps my favorite one of all three of these is, Moneyball.
While Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, he still plays Brad Pitt, eating in almost every scene as he tends to do as some weird character quirk in many of his films.
Now you will notice this all of the time. You’re welcome.
Moneyball is the story of a down on their luck Oakland A’s team who are in a move it or lose it year where the ball club is on the verge after losing against the Yankees in the American League Series and also losing a string of their players to free agency.
They have little money to offer to score anyone bigger or better.
“There are rich teams and then there are poor teams. Then there’s is fifty feet of crap and then there’s us” as Billy says to his OK with the status quo scouting team stuck in the stone age when he meets an unlikely ally in Peter Brand, an economics major, who urges Billy to look to buy runs, not players.
(Sidebar: if more organizations thought about hiring in terms of runs vs. players oh what the world would look like! right?)
In a series of risky moves Billy and Peter build a misfit team including an aging David Justice and Scott Hatteberg … a former catcher who he moves to first base.
Billy and Peter face opposition from Art Howe (R.I.P Philip Seymour Hoffman), the manager, and trades a multitude of players to beat Howe at his own game to get the line-up to follow Peter’s strategy and subsequently picking up Ricardo Rincon along the way.
If you need to learn know how to negotiate watch this scene.
They start winning. They keep winning. 19 games in a row.
Magic.
“It’s hard to not be romantic about baseball.”
Billy is superstitious (I get it) and never watches a game from the clubhouse and he believes he almost throws the streak by showing up on the field in game 20 but they squeak out that win and go on to take the American League West.
They lose the Series.
Billy thinks about his own trajectory that was cut short after being recruited by the Mets. Peter wouldn’t have drafted him.
But, he’s proved himself as a GM and gets invited to interview at the Red Sox and made an offer.
A big one.
He turns it down and stays in Oakland.
The next year, by employing the strategy the A’s used, the Red Sox win the world series after an 86 year wait!
I’ve summarized A LOT here with these three but what I think is…if we all spent a little bit of time thinking of our life like it was a feel good sports movie we’d be better off.
It should be hard not to be romantic about your own life.
The epic hero scene.
Smashing the lights off the scoreboard.
Building a baseball diamond in a cornfield in Iowa.
Turning down an offer from the Red Sox.
Whatever you need to get done to follow your own path versus the one everyone is telling you to.
Practicing hot yoga and the occasional Tracy Anderson Method aside, I generally do not consider myself “athletic”.
I never played organized sports growing up.
I played one season of pee-wee soccer. I got a black eye in game 2 when the soccer ball hit me in the face. Bam! I wasn’t invited back after that season.
Yet, believe it or not, one of the few memories I have of my father is him taking me into the recreation area to wipe the dirt off my face and comfort me.
So, I certainly understand the power of these moments.
I suppose I found my teams in the arts and music - marching band, holla! I dare you to think that isn’t a sport when you are carrying an alto saxophone around a field for hours on end.
Bu ya know, this is also likely an indication of why I chose a career in sales which is largely independent at it’s core.
Perhaps these movies give me a glimpse of what it’s like, or what it would have been like, to be on a sports team - winning or losing.
So, I get inspired.
I was listening to the soundtrack to The Natural the other day on the train into New York City.
The sun was shining on my face and right when I was pulling into Harlem 125th the crescendo to the End Title song kicked in, the part where Ray hits the scoreboard lights.
It sure made ME feel like I could hit the cover off a baseball.
Also, Billy Joel starts his concerts with this song and it plays before he takes the stage at, at least, MSG.
(Billy Joel will be like my version of Brad Pitt eating in every movie. I will mention Billy Joel in every post.)
Note: Much of this essay was inspired by Cam Booser who was recently called up from the minors to pitch for the Red Sox at 31 after years of injuries and retirement led him down a different path.
You can read his story here but “this is the type of improbable story that’s born in Hollywood. It seems almost unbelievable––the type of script that doesn’t make it through the meetings with production studios. But that’s the beautiful thing about baseball. Even the forces of nature are no match for the universal pull that a 112-year-old building like Fenway Park can have on a ballplayer.”
As Terence Mann says in Field of Dreams, “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game -- it's a part of our past..it reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.
Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.”
Need a Feel Good Sports Movie to watch? The Duchess Life recommends the following in no particular order:
The Rookie
Miracle
Draft Day
McFarland, USA
The Boys in the Boat
Million Dollar Arm
Hoosiers
Air
Remember the Titans
Rudy
Hustle
The Legend of Bagger Vance
The Big Year (bird watching is a sport)
For the Love of the Game