Word: jock
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sports movies. With a very few exceptions, these films don't aim at bringing any important theme to an audience. In an era of incredibly mindless films, sports movies remain in the fore of anti-intellectualism. The people who go to these films have to be sports fans, and jock-sniffers as a general rule aren't very concerned with internal meanings, just the final score...
Benson, who doesn't even look like a jock, plays a heavily recruited high school hoop star who chooses fictional Western University in Los Angeles, a perennial basketball power. Any parallels to UCLA, it seems, are purely intentional. The coach, played by one W.D. Spradlin, even clutches a rolled-up program during games, a quirk college hoop fans will immediately recognize as the trademark of John Wooden, UCLA's fabled Wizard of Westwood...
...young jock fighting to overcome shortness of stature, a tendency to hotdog, and a blank-slate mind, Benson gives an engaging performance, sweet without being cloying. As the "older woman"-a senior who is hired by the athletics department to tutor him-Annette O'Toole has the film's best tough talk to handle, and her verbal style contrasts piquantly with her fresh, natural good looks. Finally, there is G.D. Spradlin as the martinet coach to consider. He is not so much a molder of men as a stamp press, mean and implacable. The role may be overwritten...
...House system was well-established by then, and stereotypes apparently haunted the various Houses then as much as now. Some characterizations changed in 25 years; others are remarkably persistent. Harding says Winthrop was known as a jock house; although Harding adds that he was not a jock. Trustman recollects that Lowell House was "significantly homosexual and History and Lit." Eliot House, as Brody remembers it, was the home of the "white shoes," which are roughly the equivalent of today's Lacoste T-shirts. He always felt Eliot was a place in which he didn't quite belong, finding the cocktail...
...shoe manufacturer that he wanted a new car. A few days later he was given the cash to pay for it. At the U.S. Olympic trials last summer, some track and field stars first ran their qualifying heats, then dashed into the stands to dicker with representatives of warring jock-shoe companies. While the athletes and the shoe companies settled on prices for putting brand names into the starting blocks at Montreal, U.S. Olympic officials played with their stop watches...