David Durham, RIP

A friend of mine, David Durham, died as a result of a bout with cancer today at age 59. David was a life long fan of Ohio State football, and all things Ohio State as it goes.




Dave was brought up in Galipolis, Ohio, and like any resident of there would tell you he's from the same hometown of the breakfast and comfort food giant Bob Evans. After spending much of his life in Ohio and close to the Horseshoe, Dave later made his life in his second hometown of Chicago, where his business practice and acclimation for public service drove him to get involved in civic duties. Most recently, Dave took up the role as President of The Rotary Club of Chicago, the world's oldest service club.

Morever, and most important to me is that Dave was the kind of guy you could lower your guard around; a normal guy for a good conversation.

As a sports fan, and a particularly enthusiastic one, he was comfortable both in extolling his love for OSU and the Big Ten and poking a little fun in the arena of sports conversation. Often, if you ventured into conversation about college football, he might lend a little levity to the discussion of football with some trash talk toward the around upcoming football battles.

I remember one time asking him about the Michigan fight song "The Victors" and moreover why it seemed that every Ohio State fan I met knew the song by heart. Dave then met my question with the parody version of the song including its more colorful language. So that answered my question in full.

His enthusiasm for life and sport brings back that old Bill Shankly saying that has popped up in my mind a thousand times:

“Some people think that football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.”

Certainly that's an exageration, and one laced with humor, poking fun at the football fan's fervor. But the words do hammer out a simple fact: That besides life and family, love for the experience of life can take many forms.

Furthermore, cheering for your team, as Dave did amply, is a noble thing. Also, enjoying a good football game, built up by the experience of witnessing it with family and friends throughout a lifetime can make for a passion that does, so it seems, become a matter of life and death.

Rest in peace, Dave.

Sports in film: 4 Big Fumbles

As a sports enthusiast and amateur athlete, I’ve spent a lot of hours watching film about sports. I’m always looking for good films that nail it…the love of sport, passion, and what ABC's Wide World of Sports best captured as the “Thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat”.

Earlier this year I gave my bit on the ten best sports films of the last 20 years. Here are the “Big 4” in my opinion that fumbled it the worst.

1. Ali (2001) - Boxing

Michael Mann’s 3-hour epic about one of the greatest and most charismatic athletes of the 20th Century was an ambitious project and a noble venture, but falls hard. Too bad this film, Ali, was boring and almost as hard to endure as Oprah’s Beloved. Sadly, this film, with bold aim and a careless hand largely missed the mark.

Will Smith displays his best and most studied acting as Muhammad Ali himself, along side other great actors who play titan roles. Jon Voight as sportscaster legend Howard Cosell, and Mario Van Peebles as Malcolm X shine, along side other greats like Jeffrey Wright, Jamie Foxx, and comedian Paul Rodriguez as boxing voice Ferdie Pacheco. Still the dramatic potency of the cast is weighed down by the storyline’s inertia.

Ali: Acting a knockout, but the storyline has rubber hands.

Perhaps what doomed the film was that the timeline stuck militantly to Ali’s life between the years of 1965 to 1975. Unfortunately, much of what was shown of this decade focused less on boxing and more on personal affairs, as it spent much time on Ali being banned from the sport and scorned by the establishment for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. And while (in real life) Ali’s court case went on for years during his ban from the sport, the film didn’t go the route of The People Versus Larry Flint, focusing on intellectual ventures surrounding the legal fight.

Besides the great acting, the only high spike in Ali is the scene surrounding the Rumble in the Jungle fight that took place between Ali and George Foreman, in Zaire in 1975. Here, Mann does deserve some credit for transitioning his underlying assertion –that Ali was a universal and influential American icon—to the build up and anticipation about this legend challenging and beating the new champ Foreman.

Biased I may be, but like most sports fans, I wanted to see this charismatic, inspirational man and prolific athlete fight titans in the ring, not fighting sociopolitical causes or punching wind against partisan apparitions. Maybe shame on me for wanting Ali to be more like Rocky and less like Against All Odds.



2. Friday Night Lights (2004) - Football

When asked about this film by another sports fan, I couldn’t help but and say that, to me Friday Night Lights is little more than Melrose Place of a football field. Even worse it reminds me of some of those horrid, catty British shows like Footballers’ Wives. Or maybe the better put, the last time this film came out, it was called Varsity Blues.



Go figure, Billy Bob Thornton is a Texas high school football at Permian High; a school with a huge stadium and a bigger tradition for football. Permian’s coach who, like every high school football coach in every film about football, has as his task coaching the underdogs to the state championship. The herd of football boys practice, play, win, and win more, then get interviewed by local media and generally get put on a pedestal as the sole means of inspiration for a small Texas town.

In chatting about this film, a friend of mine put it this way: “I never knew how big high school football is in Texas”. That may be true, but football is big everywhere in the United States, so who cares? Why does Texas get special recognition for loving football, I wonder.

Carrying the film’s predictability further, the successful season for coach and the boys leads them to play the top team in the state. Egos enflame and partying leads to some unruly behavior amidst the backdrop of social disparity and minor racial tensions.

More predictable --given today's trash TV and the need to do what you can to keep people watching-- is the amount of open sexuality and hook ups availed to these high school football players. After all, according to this film, high school football players claim instant celebrity status and have the physique of 26 year old men. Of course, only in a special place like Texas.

Sure there’s a place in popular American film for a movie like Friday Night Lights, and an appetite among moviegoers. And the trashy, kitchy veneer is a standard part of the sales kit. Much of this appetite comes from America’s love of film and sport both, and especially when movies and football are combined. However, the makers of the film seem to think that slick southern accents and “go get ‘em” speeches stapled to pretty boys strutting around like NFL pros is something that is supposed to lift us up for life.

Unfortunately, while the thrill of the football play is there in the film --for die hard football fans-- the whole of Friday Night Lights is a canned, predictable stock movie we’ve seen a hundred times before. Maybe the TV show is better.


3. Vision Quest (1985) -Wrestling

This film, which features Madonna about the time she hit it big, stands as the only major studio work about high school or collegiate style wrestling. The film tells the story of Louden Swain, a high school senior who has been wrestling for barely two years. Because of his “balance” and natural gifts, he’s already a state champion and the best in his weight class. But that’s not enough. The tall and lanky wrestler, played by Matthew Modine, decides that the path to glory is to starve and sweat himself down two weight classes so that he can challenge the unbeatable 3-time state champion, Brian Shute. Shute trains by walking up and down stadium bleachers holding an 18 inch wooden telephone pole.

For Swain, making weight is a long and arduous process, consisting of constant running and frequent nosebleeds. Swain’s sanity and competence are questioned by everyone else in his drab suburb of Spokane, WA. Meanwhile his only inspirations come from a beautiful, feisty 20-something wild flower named Carla, played by Linda Fiorentino, who randomly rolls into town and bunks with Swain and his dad for a while.

1985's mish mash wrestling film, Vision Quest. Awful.

All in all there are a lot of problems with this film. First off, the script writer (or the producer / director) seems to have little understanding of Wrestling as a sport. Matches end for no reason and scoring is inconsistent. In one scene, the home team forfeits the match simply because the away team has taken the lead, meaning the last couple wrestlers forgo their matches. Anyone who knows Wrestling remotely knows that this doesn’t happen. Imagine your hometown baseball team is down 10-0 in the 3rd Inning. Even the Cubs would finish that game.

Also, like with Chess, champions in Wrestling are never made in a matter of two seasons. Having wrestled myself in high school in Pennsylvania, which is –granted—a very tough wrestling state, I can tell you that most of the champions I competed against started at age 4 or 5, not 16. But inaccuracy and uninformed fantasy aside, there’s more.

When not starving himself and risking his health to reach his goal, our “hero” is babbling on about virtues and character. Yet in one scene he tries to force himself sexually on his houseguest/love, Carla, before she punches him in the face (prompting nosebleeds, again), only to have it brushed under the rug when she shows up to cheer him on at his wrestling meet.

As a wrestling lad, I was forced to watch this movie more than I could bear. But at least I learned what kind of things make a terrible movie terrible.

In the end, boy wins girl, boy beats the unbeatable champion, and returns to high school and a normal diet. But Vision Quest will leave you and anyone who’s not an anorexic, nerdy, sexually deviant excuse for an athlete wondering what the hell you’ve just watched for two hours.

But social issues and my hang-ups aside, Vision Quest is just a bad, bad film.


4. He Got Game (1998) – Basketball

He Got Game, a Spike Lee film featuring NBA star Ray Allen foretold the coming future of a high school phenomenon and basketball virtuoso, so skilled that he was as better than almost all professional players as an 18 year old. Sort of an accidental story version of the rise of LeBron James, 10 years early, but one with greedy people hanging on everywhere.



Director Lee has done a great job of depicting the experience of urban African-American youths while throwing on the table the valid issues. He’s done this in films such as Malcolm X and Crooklyn to better effect. Typically every Spike Lee joint forces the viewer to have a conversation about racism, opportunity in America, and economic disparity along with both the savory and unsavory sides of success, fame and fortune.

Jake Shuttlesworth, played by Denzel Washington, is a prison inmate who has been incarcerated for killing his wife during an argument. His son, Jesus Shuttlesworth, played by Allen is the god-like basketball prodigy who is being recruited by every big college in the country.

Jake can get an early release from prison and a pardon from the governor if he can only convince his son to play for Big State, the governor's alma mater. Meanwhile, Jesus faces temptation by big money, beautiful women, super agents and money men who want to take him away from the Brooklyn projects but make him sign on the dotted line.

NBA players Shaquille O'Neal, Reggie Miller and Michael Jordan, make appearances in the film as well as top coaches and spunky broadcaster Dick Vitale. As always, Denzel is impressive and Allen, who is not a professional actor, shows that he could be. If you're a basketball nut, there’s a lot to get excited about here.

Yet too often in this film, the protagonist, Jesus is portrayed as the victim of every single advantage he gets and every good thing he has going for him. Sure, his mother is dead and his dad is in jail…he’s had it rough. And everybody’s trying to sell Jesus out, to get their piece of money, power, and influence for pointing Jesus to this college or that pro team.

But by the time the film reaches it’s conclusion, you realize that the theme is less about basketball in America and less about talent and hard work and prevailing. He Got Game is largely an essay about how athletes, especially the ones who become celebrities and make millions upon millions of dollars, spend their entire life getting victimized and screwed by everybody in the sports business, while being objectified by the fans too.

Not that some pro athletes don’t get screwed, or big money hasn’t tainted sport. These are valid issues. But looking back since in the 12 years since this film came out, many a sports fan would be hard pressed to feel sorry for pro athletes as some sort of repressed, misunderstood group in need of fair play or a more just system of commerce.

He Got Game is not a dud like Vision Quest, but not a slam dunk either.

Andy Frye writes about sports and life here and via My Sports / Complex on Facebook and Twitter. He doesn't have a film degree but, like your dog, knows more about film than Richard Roeper.

Writings © 2010. pics courtesy of The Internet Movie Database www.IMDB.com