How much competitiveness is too much for kids? The Bad News Bears dared to ask.
So why is this being updated to write about a 47-year-old baseball movie? It was part of a pre-MLB season project with a friend to get into baseball mode.
The Bad News Bears could have only been made during Hollywood’s second golden age of the 1970s. The cringe provides ample kindling for a roaring hot take that maybe the movie should have remained there.
But as Tanner Boyle would have said, it is so friggin’ funny — only he would not have said friggin’, and there would have been some slurs. It is such a gleeful double-bird to North America’s toxic triple play of classism, whiteness, and winner-take-all-ism. It calls out the right people for the right reasons. Hell, right now I am picturing Keegan-Michael Key’s substitute-teacher character breaking out $10 words to describe it — “irreverent, and insouciant!” — after telling Boyle to get his ass to Principal O’Shag Hennessy’s office.
Walter Matthau’s Morris Buttermaker is rarely seen without a beer or a dart in his hand, even when he is driving other people’s 11- and 12-year-old children in his rundown convertible with the cracked windshield. Sometimes the movie gets off so much on children cussing that you wonder if director Michael Ritchie was a real-life Dennis Reynolds experiencing the thrill of wearing another man's skin. There is so much on screen that it evokes a meme about another ’70s comedy classic. You probably have seen that one about Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974)… "an edited-for-modern-tastes will air on TV tonight from 8:00 to 8:07 p.m."
That. 👏 Does. 👏 Not. 👏 Make. 👏 It. 👏 Cancellable. 👏
Why The Bad News Bears works, still, is that it was well ahead of its time in questioning how much competitiveness is too much for children and long-term development. Being a Xennial who was cut from 10 out of every 11 teams he tried out for as a child and teenager might make me uniquely suited to seeing it from both sides. I well remember defining myself as a loser because I played “house league” instead of “rep,” and cluing in that the attention other children got for being a Good Guy At Sports put the lie to that epigram about how it’s not whether you won or lost.
But I wanted to be competitive, and wanted to win, and always thought it was chintzy when the mum keeping the scorebook at our ball games tried to conceal the score from us. Even those among us in the Rejects group — cue Moe Szyslak asking “why do we have to stand here, this is so humiliatin’!" — because coordination and aggressiveness were unbestowed still want to know The Score. That is our acculturation, and prove me wrong that it is going away in my lifetime.
One year — I was 12, so 1989 — the youth fastpitch league decided the year-end trophies would all have the same inscription. YOU’RE ALL CHAMPS! It points up why Boomers’ (artificial) knees start jerking about participation ribbons and such. Getting that trophy after my one-win (and two ties!) team was ousted from the year-end tournament felt like a kick in the testicles. And then the players on the winning team got the same trophy. C’mon, man.
I loath, with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns, that ESPN and TSN broadcast the Little League World Series from Williamsport, Pa., every August. Generally, any sporting competition that becomes big business by promoting that the performers are not being paid should be shunned.
The Olympics, over my lifetime, has walked back amateurism. The NCAA is also slowly figuring it out with name-image-likeness rights. The Canadian Hockey League, because hockey, stickhandled around it by lobbying for exemptions from minimum-wage laws, and it took me a year to un-shun the OHL and go to games again. (My protest is I no longer call the OHL, whose players are 16 to 20 years old, major junior hockey. It is beginner pro hockey. They pay coaches and hockey operations, hold player drafts, make trades, and accept gambling sponsorships. That is beginner pro hockey, pass it on, please. As Peter Gent wrote, “Amateur sports ends when you pay the coach.”
Children’s baseball and hockey, more specifically, are about as explicit in projecting classism as it gets. A child has to have access to equipment, coaching, practice time, and places to play — well-kempt ball diamonds and hockey arenas.
This has deviated from the deviance in The Bad News Bears a bit, eh? That might be an effect of writing off of memory. What makes it wonderful is that the script by the late Bill Lancaster and the directing by the aforementioned Ritchie are devoid of sacred cows.
The first-act setup, for instance, throws shade at the neoliberal white saviour complex. The Bears are created as an extra entry to a Southern California Little League after a city councillor and lawyer named Ben Whitewood (Ben Piazza) sues so there can be a team for his son Toby, who is “an unassuming boy who plays first base.”
So, right away, the Bears are what people around Junior A hockey used to call ‘Daddy Teams.’ And it is unclear whether Whitewood has any stretch goal besides just getting his child into the North Valley Little League. If there was anything about giving the other Types who populate the Bears roster some training so they have a puncher’s chance on the ballfield, I do not remember it from my viewings over the decades. Equality of opportunity is meaningless without supports. It is one thing to say an activity is open to all, but it falls short if there is no acknowledgment of the inequality of opportunities.
The movie, incidentally, came out at a time when Black representation between the lines in MLB was at its peak. Around 1976, around 27 per cent of major leaguers were African-American. Today, that representation is around 7 per cent. Those are the facts. Royal Ugly Dudes are far better represented in MLB, especially if Bradley Zimmer is on someone’s 26-man roster.
Whitewood clandestinely pays the down-on-his-luck ex-minor leaguer Buttermaker to coach the Bears. What ensues, really, is a celebration of chaos and finding grace with your status in life.
As a weird ginger lefthanded kid in Gifted programming, TBNB spoke to me. Here I was fortunate to have a mum who rent any cassette from Video Shed that was about baseball, and trust that I was mature enough that I could hear the F-word and self-regulate.
The Bears are a bit of an assemblage of types. The rotund catcher, Mike Engelberg, who hits a ton but also gets chocolate on the ball. The shortstop Tanner Boyle (Chris Barnes) is a community sports archetype in the purest form. There was always that small-for-their-age, big-mouthed kid who carried 50 per cent of their body weight in the chips on both shoulders. They knew they could get away with it, because what was the point of smacking around someone so small?
Other players include a Henry Aaron-worshipping small fast kid named Ahmad Abdul-Rahim who is too hard on himself, and tries to quit after the first game. Buttermaker finds Ahmad sitting up in a tree, stripped down to his underwear in shame. He climbs up there, lights a dart — what forest fire risk? In California? Nah! — and coaxes Ahmad into returning by telling him a story about his hero Aaron.
He also talks to Ahmad, one of the team’s Black players, about converting him to switch-hitting in order to take advantage of his speed. That did happen a lot in the game in the ’60s and ’70s as teams took a lead from L.A. Dodgers speedy leadoff man Maury Wills, who started switch-hitting when he was a 28-year-old stuck in the minors and became a league MVP. Overall, though, Bill James once called it the worst idea in the history of coaching.
The roster also includes quiet and bullied Timmy Lupus (“a booger-eating spaz” — Tanner Boyle), who plays right field, the position for every youth team’s worst fielder. And there is also the nerd Alfred Ogilvie, who is thoughtful, boasts an elephantine memory for baseball facts, and knows that the more he plays, the more he can only hurt the Bears’ chances.
INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: OH, WHICH KID WERE YOU SAGER?!
At this stage, one should lift a glass of something malty to the greatness of Walter Matthau. He left this realm 23 years ago, so there is a chance he has been forgotten, since as Albert Brooks once said on Conan O’Brien's talk show, everyone gets forgotten.
With anyone else, The Bad News Bears might have gone horribly, horribly wrong. Or it might have just been vulgarity with nothing redeemable behind it (hello, Half of Eighties Comedies). Matthau was so good at playing characters who viewed the world through the What Is lens. His best work always brings to mind Marge Simpson saying she loves Homer’s in-your-face humanity. That is not because Dan Castellaneta based the early Homer voice on Matthau.
A favourite is his first collaboration with Jack Lemmon, portraying personal injury lawyer William H. (Whiplash Willie) Gingrich in Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie (1966). The real-life inspiration of that comedy’s premise to that one still draws a legit keyboard chuckle.
Supposedly, some producer was watching a Cleveland Browns football game where a running back was pushed out of bounds and trucked a CBS cameraman, pinning him under his heavy 1960s camera and tripod. Someone said, “That’s a movie, and the guy under the camera is Lemmon!”
So they made the movie, with Lemmon’s Harry Hinkle getting knocked ass-over-teakettle over a tarpaulin by a Browns star named Luther (Boom Boom) Jackson. Matthau, Harry’s brother-in-law, sees an opportunity and convinces him to fake his injuries so they can sue for $1 million in damages. (Remember, this was 1966, so there were not even 100 billion dollars in the world — what, you didn’t have Mike Myers as your economics professor in 1999?)
Matthau earned his first Oscar nomination for that role. As Buttermaker, he plays another character whom you would think is all about winning. After all, he was a pro player, and people who have been truly good enough to play at the highest levels sometimes have trouble toning it down.
And, for much of the story, he is. Buttermaker recruits his ex-girlfriend’s daughter Amanda Whurlitizer (Tatum O’Neal, three years after winning an Oscar as a child actor in Paper Moon) to be the Bears’ No. 1 pitcher. He convinces dirt bike-riding ruffian Kelly Leak (Jackie Earle Haley, Watchmen) to become the Bears’ power-hitting outfielder.
The Bears gel, more or less. The way Buttermaker bonds with these misfits involve keeping them from listening to automatic thoughts. Buttermaker sees the boys beating themselves up over their shortcomings and encourages them to stay with it. One intuits is he sees them going down the same dark path he did. And, in perhaps a bit of someone born in 1920 who experienced the Great Depression coming through, he shows the children should be shielded a little from the harshness of life, at least until they are old enough to shave.
“You’re a damn good bunch of kids,” he tells them. “You probably deserve it better than me. Looks like we’re stuck with each other.”
Matthau was also lethal on-screen at delivering a savage burn. Take his riposte to Whitewood when he walks on the field to question Buttermaker’s decisions: “Get back in the stands before I shave off half your mustache and shove it up your left nostril.”
With Amanda on the mound and Leak blasting home runs, the Bears start to win games. They become, if not a cohesive group, at least one who will stick up for each other as long as they are stuck with each other. It hits home for anyone who was ever excluded during their childhood, even if one has a relative amount of privilege. Being picked on never leaves you, tro mig.
In the movie, the antagonists are, of course, the Yankees. They do not just want to beat the Bears: they want them out of their orbit entirely. I can see where they are coming from: that is the deal my TV and I have with Jay Onrait.
A pivotal, and heartbreaking scene, comes when two of the Yankees, including the coach’s son and pitcher Joey Turner, bully Timmy Lupus. As Toby Flenderson would mewl, “Why?” Well, ’cause they can get away with it.
The outcast Lupus has got some food from the canteen and sits down at a picnic table next to Tanner Boyle, who moves away from him. The much bigger Joey and another one of the Yankees show up and smear Lupus’ cap and baseball uniform with condiments.
It is a big moment. Tanner Boyle may be able to call Timmy Lupus and his teammates every name in the book, but he knows an injustice when he sees it. Boyle, a head-and-three-quarters shorter than Joey, stands up for Lupus. He gets tossed in a dumpster for his trouble, but it is worth it. Now the Bears are a team.
And it establishes that the Moppet movie Yankees have likely no more than three honorable people in their entire crew. Just like the real Yankees in almost any season during the last 104 years. And that generalization takes in that Yogi Berra was part of the Normandy invasion in World War II. (Matthau was a radioman-gunner who saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge, by the way.)
There is so much great dialogue, 83 per cent of which is not safe for a group text chain in 2023. The one-sentence summary, voiced by Amanda, is that if someone can play ball, they can play ball, and we still need to hear that in 2023.
One could run through a litany of examples of how there is still pushback against that. Those oh-so-manly NHL teams back out of hosting Pride Nights. Reply bros ooze out from under their rocks to ask someone to make them a sandwich when Sarah Nurse or another hockey woman breaks a barrier, and so on.
One barely needs to revisit what was the state of play in 1976. But the movie came out only two years after Little League was litigated into allowing girls to play, and it was only four years after the American government created Title IX. The U.S. Open tennis major had established equal prize money for female and male players by that point — tack så mycket, Billie Jean King.
Anywhoodles, the OG The Bad News Bears is perfectly realized. The director, Ritchie, helmed a lot of good, rewatchable movies over a roughly quarter century, from his début in Downhill Racer (1969) with Robert Redford to Cool Runnings (1993), the comic take on the Jamaican Olympic Bobsled team that starred John Candy.
Scanning the filmography of Ritchie, he has at least a half-dozen old movies still worth watching. He directed the two Chevy Chase Fletch movies, collaborated with Redford on The Candidate (1972), and reamed out the beauty-pageant circuit in Smile (1975, with Melanie Griffith and Annette O’Toole).
Yours truly is particularly fond of the boxing caper Diggstown (1992), where characters played by James Woods, Louis Gossett Jr., Oliver Platt, and a young Heather Graham pull off the ultimate revenge long-con. And just to get it on record now that Brendan Fraser has an Academy Award, I have been The Scout stan (28% on Rotten Tomatoes) for almost three decades.
The screenwriter, Bill Lancaster, seems like a haunting figure to read about on Wikipedia at 2 in the morning. He was the son of Hollywood giant Burt Lancaster, and he survived the mid-20th century polio epidemic. In his short life, before dying at age 49, he was credited with four screenplays. But one was The Bad News Bears, and the other was an adapted screenplay for John Carpenter’s sci-fi horror classic The Thing (1982). Reportedly, some of the character touches of Morris Buttermaker were based on Burt Lancaster, so yeah, a dark path is this movie's driveway.
If surface-level elements of The Bad News Bears have aged poorly, well, that has nothing on the Oscars’ best original screenplay nominees from 1976. A presumption was that the category that year must have been more stacked than the lineup of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine.
Network and Paddy Chayefsky — now there is another movie that predicted everything that was to come in a realm, TV news — held off the Rocky hoopla to win. But the other three nominees validate my quite lowbrow movie tastes — never heard of ’em, and two ain’t even in English.
Plot-wise, The Bad News Bears moves along the normal underdog arc. Being shot on sun-dappled California ballfields, with the children’s play set to classical music, hides the barbed criticism of Little League.
Clear lines
The movie has a clear moral line, and it really comes out through the adult protagonist, Matthau, and the antagonist. The latter is Yankees coach Roy Turner (Vic Morrow), who stands in for everything wrong with the Little League experience.
In the final act, the Bears and Yankees have their inevitable championship confrontation. It affirms that sometimes it is great to get caught up in the chase of winning until a line is crossed. I will go a bit vague here but the decisive moment comes through Morrow.
Turner, in his zeal to win, instructs Joey Turner — of course the coach’s kid is the pitcher! — not to challenge power-hitting Engelberg, who could tie the game with a solo home run. Joey disregards the order, and Roy Turner does something unthinkable.
Silence is powerful. After 90-some minutes of profane dialogue and hearing kids catch fly balls to the arias from Carmen, nothing but the breeze rustling through the pennants is heard for 21 seconds after that line is crossed. Turner / Morrow looks around. Here one is reminded that hurting people hurt, and it shows the innate risk in living vicariously through your children’s sports.
The actor Morrow met a sad end, as you might know. Six years after Bears was released, he and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen were killed in a helicopter crash during John Landis-directed filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). John Landis eternally wears the shame of that negligence, which led to improved safety standards for filming stunts and ended up in the courts for years.
Back to the story. Buttermaker has been letting out more of the red-ass that likely served him well as a ballplayer. Bertolt Brecht, I believe, called that behaviour the ‘black addiction of the brain.’ Winning becomes everything, yet somehow it is not enough. It is even enjoyable, or just an alternative to losing?
That is where Ritchie, Bill Lancaster, and the entire team on both sides of the lens refuse to take the easy way out. The latter would have involved the Bears winning the championship. But Buttermaker has a moment when he clues in that he has let competition bring out the worst in him. He shifts his focus to, quoting a line from one of the film’s cash-grab sequels, “let the kids play.” The final score of The Big Game At The End ultimately does not matter.
That is a What Should Be of it all, what everyone says they want to see in kids’ sports even if actions usually say otherwise. A lot of what The Bad News Bears displays could not be shown now, but its message is a champ in any era.
1982-1996 / 22-23 March 2023
Various ball diamonds in Lennox & Addington County / Hamilton, Ont.
What else?
Even the Kingston Frontenacs curse is consistently inconsistent.
The buzz of the OHL playoffs is that No. 8 seed Kitchener is up 3-0 on No. 1 seed Windsor, who made the blockbuster trade to add Seattle Kraken NHL lottery pick Shane Wright from Kingston. The zinger writes itself. However, Kitchener’s airlift also included a scorer from Kingston, Francesco Arcuri (48 goals in the regular season).
In any event, a No. 8 seed has not won in the first round in the Ontario league since 2005. And the historical tidbit that the juggernaut 2010 Windsor Spitfires — who had six players with world junior championship experience — surmounted an 0-3 deficit against the Kitchener Rangers in the playoffs sets up an obvious Rick Pitino reference, at least for me.
Outlined against blue-sky thinking, a Canadian university football team was drop-kicked through the goalposts of life.
It is a rough day when a university sports program in Canada is discontinued. Need one say more without sounding prolix? Loss of a community, loss of connection, a severance from something that fixes you in a time and place.
Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., has never been able to decide who it should play in football. It was in the U.S.-based NAIA for decades. In the early aughts it moved to the Canada West conference, within what is now U Sports, and even won one conference championship in 2003. Their women’s basketball team was also a multiple national title-winning powerhouse. There was some friction, though, and around 2011 SFU left to become the first Canadian member of NCAA Division II (or D2).
Long story short, no D2 football conference wanted Simon Fraser as a member past the 2023 season. So the school folded the team on April 4.
A TSN reporter who is part of the SFU football alumni expressed a desire that the school would have asked U Sports about becoming a “football-only member.”
Would that they could. Maybe someday they will. That day is not necessarily coming up fast.
Presently, member schools cannot put their football team in U Sports while remaining in the NCAA or NAIA “in sports that are offered by U SPORTS.” At a minimum, the school also has to have two female and two male sports.
Whelp sir, like Walter Sobchak said in The Big Lebowski, THERE ARE RULES. But rules are made to be broken, too.
The time-stamp on that two-female, two-male team rules is unknown. But in our Book of Forgotten Lore, one can take it to the hoop that it was created to try to stop Jerry Hemmings’s Brandon Bobcats basketball powerhouse.
Brandon was a bit of a Prairie answer to Jerry Tarkanian-era UNLV back in the day. And all of the energy and funding for hoops, especially after Brandon discontinued men’s hockey, went to the men’s. (The standing line was that Hemmings’ phone bill was larger than the entire budget of the women’s team.)In the early 2000s, the university did have pressure to fund teams in another sport. It added volleyball teams, and U Sports now offers curling, so obviously a Manitoba school is good to go there.
Until there is a Planet B, there is no both-siding on sustainability.
Whatever I do will be focused on sports, comedy, and writing, but with a clear political viewpoint. And the open griftofascism in ONTerrible needs to be emphasized every day. Here is The Narwhal explaining how the Ontario government will not release the documentation of how it decided to un-protect all that Greenbelt land which just happened to be owned by politically connected types.
Oh, and I need a job.
This athletic supporter is unemployed again, for the second time since 2020. The path forward to regaining gainful employment is not yet clear. This space, at least, is a chance to be authentic and write about sports in a way that implies a clear view in regard to news, nerd-outs, and politics. One promise, or two promises, is there will be no game analysis, or useful sports betting information of any kind. Let’s have fun in our mutual misery.
That is more than enough for today. Please be kind, and stay safe.