Word: sportingly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...owner, however, is not. Especially an owner like Jones, who liked to think he had as keen a sense for the nuances of the sport as the man he had hired. And especially on a team that, unlike most in the N.F.L., has no intervening front-office executive -- a general manager or player-personnel chief -- to act as buffer. "I'll try to be very subtle in my influence," Jones said before a college-player draft. "I can handle Jerry," Johnson replied. Both were wrong...
...Sports movies could be much more than that. Sport, after all, makes for potent drama, brimming with passion and fear. It is a stage on which winners, who are sometimes villains, and losers, who are sometimes heroes, are clearly defined at the climax. It creates a clash of strong figures engaged in a recreation as elemental as love or war, and with just as much foreplay, anxiety, strategy, abrasion and betrayal. In The Program, one of the few movies to offer clear-eyed criticism of modern athletics, the players psych themselves up for a game by spitting in each other...
...common fan's rooting interest for the home team -- just a geographic accident really -- with moral superiority. They are not just our guys, they're good guys; in some of these pictures, the fiercest competition is about which character gets to display the highest level of insufferable righteousness. "Sports movies always draw a contrived moral," notes film critic Andrew Sarris. And that moral is: the person who wins is always the better person. "But there is no moral in real sports," Sarris says. "Somebody wins, and somebody loses, and that's it. I watch all kinds of sports...
...there are always athletes eager for this indentured servitude. In the poignant three-hour documentary called Hoop Dreams (due out in the fall), about two teenage basketball prospects from Chicago, the sport's glamour is a flicker of light at the end of a long tunnel of family troubles, daunting schoolwork, perilous street life and their knowledge that stardom is a buyer's market. But they persevere because the dream is all they have...
Winning had better not be everything, for as the old baseball maxim has it, losing hurts more than winning feels good. Losing is mostly what sport is about. There are dozens of players on nearly every team, from the Peewee League to the pros, and dozens of teams in every sport. How many of us make those teams, or become star players, or get to play for a championship, or cinch the game with a last-second score? Hoop Dreams notes that of the 50,000 or so gifted kids playing high school basketball each year, 14,000 play...