Part 2 of the Best Fiction Sports Movies Ever Made
What are the best movies about Soccer, Martial Arts, Bicycling, Skiing, Ice Skating, Rollerskating?
Wow! What an amazing response I had from Part 1 of “The Best Fictional Sports Movies Ever Made.” We’ve had five times the usual number of comments, making this one of the most popular columns for subscribers. I loved hearing your suggestions for sports movies you thought I’d missed, even though I actually had already been writing about them in Part 2. Nevertheless, reading your enthusiastic comments is one of the reasons I cherish this Substack community so much. Your knowledge, intelligence, and passion make this all so enlightening and a lot of fun.
Just to clarify a few things that were brought up by subscribers: 1. I did include stories based on real people and real events. They are still fictional because they change events and characters to suit the story. 2. I did not include documentaries because that is an entirely different genre. Maybe in the future I’ll do a list of “Best Sports Documentaries.” 3. Some of your favorites that I didn’t include are still good movies that are memorable, touching, and exciting. But there were others that were just a bit better.
So, let’s get to the rest of my suggestions. I know you’ll have opinions, and I look forward to reading them.
Best Bicycling Movies
Breaking Away (1979)
This would be on my Top 20 movies ever made, not just sports movies. It is one of the best coming-of-age stories, one of the best sports movies, and one of the best character-driven movies. Once you’ve seen Breaking Away, you’ll never forget it or the four working-class boys whose lives are forever changed by that one summer.
The story focuses on four “loser” townies who have been drifting aimlessly for the past year since graduating from high school. The small Indiana town is struggling financially ever since the local quarries closed, making the boys’ futures seem hopeless. Each boy’s story is so original and compelling as he tries to find some way to reach for a future that is perpetually beyond his grasp.
They finally come together to challenge the smug university biking team in a climactic race. If you haven’t seen it, watch it today.
Runner-up: American Flyer
Also Recommended: The Flying Scotsman
A note on why so many movies on my list are from the twentieth century. You may have noticed that most of the best movies are from before 2000. This may lead you to think I’m just being a cranky old codger chasing kids from my yard while shouting about the good old days. Not really. The reason so many of the best films are from the seventies and eighties is because there was a Renaissance in filmmaking that started in the late sixties and continued into the eighties.
The traditional Hollywood movie machine was sputtering: Big budgets and big stars weren’t bringing people to the theaters. The executives blamed the rise of television, but the real culprit was that they were trying to churn out the same old formulas for a younger audience looking for new stories and new ways to tell them. When Easy Rider came out in 1969, everything changed. Made for about $400,000, it earned over $60 million. Suddenly, everyone with long hair and frayed jeans was handed a camera, a crew, and a small budget and told to do something original. From that desperate seed bloomed many surprising movies (Five Easy Pieces, Taxi Driver, Eraserhead, Harold and Maude, The Godfather, Jaws, Star Wars) and a new generation of daring filmmakers (Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Lynch, etc.). They set out to turn familiar genres on their heads—and some of these selections are the results.
The 2000s have produced some good and very good sports movies: Moneyball, Friday Night Lights, Million Dollar Baby, The Wrestler, Miracle, Remember the Titans—all of which I mention as Runners-Up or Also Recommended. While I like them all, none quite rise to the level of greatest film in their specific sport. Part of the reason is that they may stick too closely to the expected tropes of the genre without varying enough into originality. The best sports movie of the 2000s is I, Tonya (2017), precisely because it dares to be original, still makes the sport exciting, and has thematic depth beyond, “Let’s put aside our differences and pull together as a team.”