We come now to the “underdog sports comedy” subgenre, surely one of the most prescribed and formulaic movie types. It is my contention that all such generic forms have at least the potential for a good movie, a masterpiece. Consider the reviled slasher subgenre; then consider Halloween. So very often the most successful attempt is, if not the first, then the cementer of the form, the reason future rip-offs even happen in the first place.
So it is for The Bad News Bears. In its broadest strokes, this is the most basic underdog flick. You have your team of misfits and loser kids (more specifically, “a bunch of Jews, spics, niggers, pansies, and a booger-eating moron”), brought together by a down-and-out loser coach. These antagonists grow to love each other, to excel at their sport, and make it to the championship game. The season’s first game is even against that same “villain team” they must later properly face.
And the sport is baseball. Little League.
With such a basic basis, the quality of The Bad News Bears – and it is a good movie, in its minor-key way – comes more from how the story is treated. Of course, this early on, without formula already in place (though The Longest Yard beat it), The Bad News Bears actually has something to say about sports beyond some standard “winning good, sportsmanship good” pabulum. Hence the eventual formula comes naturally, while it would be far more awkward for Rudy, The Karate Kid, Major League, Hoosiers, Slap Shot, The Mighty Ducks (a total plagiary of this movie!), and now even films not nominally about sports at all!
Okay, so we pretty much know the whole story already. That means director Michael Ritchie (also known for Fletch…and, er, Fletch Lives) can play with the tone and the characterization. The result is pretty shaggy dog on its own, not quite slice-of-life, not quite a peculiar stoner comedy, but something of that nature, a laconic, lazy beast content to whittle away 90% of its existence on one glamorous San Fernando Valley baseball diamond with one adult and various kids.
Various kids with notable, but not unrealistic or obscene, potty mouths. The lazy cult of the Bears (or da Bears, as they’d say where I live) mainly loves it for this reason. It’s the PG film in all its ‘70s glory, back when that rating meant something: The likelihood of “bullshit” getting uttered on a regular basis, along with innumerable “craps” and “hells” and “damns” and “God damns” and “God damn it all to hells” and of course racial epithets. It’s strangely inviting, for this swearing never comes across as desperate puerility, but genuine; the distinction between The Bad News Bears and so very much contemporary poo-poo comedy.
The adult figure overseeing these future leaders of America is Coach Morris Buttermaker, played by Walter Matthau (nee Matuschanskayasky) in a variation of his Odd Couple schtick. Buttermaker is an inveterate slob, a slovenly, pool-cleaning wastrel, and formerly a major star for the minor leagues. That’s not much different from most subsequent coaches of the genre, so it’s something to say they never dwell upon Buttermaker’s past, summing him up simply by the fact he always has a Budweiser in his hand. But it’s not always Bud; more often, Buttermaker’s pretending his liquor is beer. The casual, uncontroversial acceptance of Buttermaker’s alcoholism is strangely bracing – What other movie features its hero drinking whiskey from the bottle as he drives a dozen pre-teens sans seatbelts in a convertible? That’s not long before the man passes out right there on the pitcher’s mound for all the children to see. Buttermaker is a role model.
The Bad News Bears is known for its child types as much as for Matthau, with all the now-expected team slots filled most effectively – and remember, as an early picture in this sports cycle, The Bad News Bears earns many breaks on its characterization.
Toby Whitewood (David Stambaugh) is the “normal” boy, the one without any eccentricities. Most underdog movies would form the bond between this type and the coach, that being where the cheap drama would come from. The Bad News Bears does not do that, letting Toby mostly vanish into the background. Instead, the importance of Toby is his father, city councilman Bob Whitewood (Ben Piazza), the psychopathic go-getter responsible for promoting this motley assembly of ne’er-do-wells to the toughest baseball league in the region. Where they totally don’t belong. He’s also the one who hires Buttermaker to lead these hooligans to victory. Yes, he’s the asshole competitive parent living vicariously through his disinterested son, and there is a lot more to this particular thread…later.
Rudi Stein (David Pollock) is the pitcher – relief pitcher, really – and an amalgamation of all possible Jewish athlete jokes. There’s not much to Rudi, beyond a similarity to his like-named Notre Dame sportsman.
Alfred Ogilvie (Alfred W. Lutter) is the sort of guy for whom baseball is nothing but statistics and calculations. A sort of nascent Nate Silver, really, highlighting one of the very great problems with baseball as a sport qua sport.
Mike Engelberg (Gary Lee Cavagnaro) is the fat kid, because every sports comedy needs a fat guy. And every group of children has the one tubby lad with a supernaturally enormous gut. Due to his bulk, Engleberg is catcher. He is also seen (oh so briefly) enjoying delicious chocolate at his base, meaning this is where that overplayed damn joke in 3 Ninjas Kick Back came from!
Timmy Lupus (Quinn Smith) is a booger-eating spaz. Seriously, his chief trait is a culinary preference for his own nasal waste. Tasty! He’s also shrimpy, underdeveloped (as a physical human being, at least), and the worst player on the Bears. And that’s saying something!
Ahmad Abdul-Rahim (Erin Blunt) isn’t simply the necessary token black. He’s a militant Black Muslim, in a non-caricatured sort of way, and Hank Aaron is his baseball god. Never mind he knows less about Hank Aaron than…er…me. Ahmad is known to take humiliation so strongly, he will strip off his hated Bears uniform right there on the field.
There are very many more players with less solid personas, of note a couple of Mexican boys who don’t even speak English (but who are short enough to have essentially no strike zones, which Buttermaker will figure out come the championship).
And then there’s Tanner Boyle (Chris Barnes)! In a sense, Tanner is the real star of Bears, a loudmouthed conduit for the greatest comic vulgarities on display. He is the one who famously boils his teammates down to discriminatory categories. He’s also the one who gets the final word in against the Bears’ hated rivals, the Yankees (of course the villains in a baseball movie are the Yankees, as anyone outside of New York would understand). To spoil ahead to the ending (oh come on!, whattaya think’ll happen in a sports comedy?): “Hey Yankees! You can take your apology and your trophy and shove it straight up your ass!” This is the child we all wanted to be growing up, had we any sense…Except for his constant suffering at the hands of others, I guess.
As per the genre, it’s no surprise these Bears, with their Chico’s Bail Bonds-sponsored uniforms, are pretty terrible at baseball. But in real world terms, they’re not that bad at the sport…Okay, they are, but how many 9-year-olds do you expect to competently play a game they don’t understand yet. I doubt I’ve seen very many Little League games raise above the play level the supposedly incompetent Bears start at – this is of course ignoring the Dominican Republic entirely.
Really, the problem with baseball is the incredibly specific roster of skills it demands. It isn’t athletics, in the sense of a sport like soccer or basketball or hockey, where there’s some physical grace to what the athlete does beyond simply having the physically precise form needed to do a thing with a bat and a ball and – God, baseball’s just chess with children, and not in the fun sense like on a gigantic checkered board or anything. It’s golf in a less bucolic setting, with more steroids! Precisely why my fellow Americans think excellence at this particular sport is what distinguishes the evolutionarily advantaged from the weak is beyond me!
So I don’t blame the Bears for sucking; baseball is problematic (but thoroughly effective on screen). But The Bad News Bears being the kind of movie it is, they will undergo a turnaround, and become undefeatably good!...Sorta. Buttermaker realizes that even with some improvement, the team’s record won’t rebound quickly enough for the season. So he brings in some ringers.
First up is the most promising pupil Buttermaker ever tutored, Amanda Whurlitzer. She is played by the young Tatum O’Neal, who’d already won herself an acting Oscar (for Paper Moon) at age 10. That’s the Tatum O’Neal who became Michael Jackson’s first “girlfriend” – and, okay, he too was young then. She even shares top poster billing with Matthau, so big was this child actress in 1976.
To the inestimable credit of The Bad News Bears, nothing is ever made of the fact that Amanda’s a girl. She simply plays good baseball, that’s that. But it takes Buttermaker quite some time to coerce her, as she’s struggling to escape her former tomboy ways. Some degree of legitimate drama comes of his relationship with Amanda, as she’s the daughter of a woman Buttermaker once dated. Expect a lightly-sketched arc where Buttermaker, er, butters her up, only for Amanda to later realize how selfish he’s been this whole time. Couched within the endless baseball games and practices, one after the other, there’s not much time for this subplot to grow beyond its proper bounds. It never irritates, but serves to humanize Buttermaker somewhat.
The other ringer is…is…Holy schnikeys, it that Jackie Earl Haley?! Indeed it is! Eventual player of child molesters Jackie Earl Haley, playing an honest-to-goodness child! (Also the non-Englund Freddy Kreuger.) This is Rorschach, enjoying the childhood I never thought he actually had!
Haley plays Kelly Leak, neighborhood bad boy – rider of motorcycles, smoker of reefer, seller of…unstated illicit substances. He’s also the best athlete in the area, and so instantly happy to join Buttermaker’s ragamuffin brigade, it’s astounding that none of the league’s more mercenary coaches swept the hoodlum up first. (Of course, league manager Cleveland hates Kelly, and is generally a bad person overall in a petty sort of way, which explains it.)
Amanda and Kelly are talented enough to carry the Bears to the league championship against the hated Yankees. They might even be enough to win the game, though at the cost of numerous underhanded injuries from the Yankees’ aggressive play. And there lies The Bad News Bears’ true heart.
Coaching the Yankees is Roy Turner (Vic Morrow), familiar to many not as the exaggerated villains of later in the genre, but as a believably competitive adult who cares a little too much about Little League. The true point of Bears, in its light satirical underpinning, is to expose the futility and pettiness of this attitude. Buttermaker aside, all the adults in The Bad News Bears have overcomplicated and flat out bad reasons for investing their lives in kids’ baseball. It’s serious business, and these people are all assholes. Roy, for instance, goes so far in his drive to win at all costs that he actively smacks his own son around on the pitcher’s mound for all to see. Roy crosses a line. No one says anything, but the point is clear.
Contrast that with Buttermaker. There are moments where he seems to take Roy’s persona, screaming filthy tirades at his players all in favor of victory over all else. But then he sees the hypocrisy and inanity in all that, and makes a vital decision: All those worthless benchwarmers, those poor players he’d replaced early on, they’re playing the ninth inning. And with the Bears down by five! But even though all think Buttermaker is throwing the game away, instead this is a chance for all the screw-ups to earn redemption, make good plays, and in the end –
The Bears lose anyway.
Man, leave it to the 1970s to let the heroes in a feel-good family comedy lose. This is not in isolation; that same year’s Rocky does likewise. Perhaps it was a crippled nation soothing wounds from Vietnam. But it wouldn’t make sense to take a stance against competitiveness in American sports unless you underplay the value of victory. For The Bad News Bears, it’s not about winning, but it’s neither about something as bland as “for the love of the game.” It’s about the kids’ self-confidence, even in the face of failure. That’s a much more wholesome final message than the later era underdog comedies, which say rather “Only by a series of bizarre and unrealistic flukes shall your sad sack team win, and winning is still all that matters.” That’s why Roy’s bad sportsmanship is so important, and why Buttermaker’s own life failure holds sway where other generic failed coaches don’t.
Curiously, the film The Bad News Bears most resembles, in its laconic easiness, is Meatballs, which was itself a proto example of a soon-to-be-ossified subgenre (the camp comedy). Ostensibly, Meatballs can seem a sports comedy as well, with its mantra (“It just doesn’t matter.”) fitting in nicely with The Bad News Bears. Both movies are exceedingly simple. The Bad News Bears is much more realistic, without the abstract excesses of Meatballs (which indicate its relation to nuttier things like Animal House and Ghostbusters).
And in a movie so strongly allied against victory as an end, what do the Bears instead claim as their ultimate prize? Well, to celebrate a well-played game, and a thorough taunting of the Yankees, these children all drown themselves in booze (which naturally populated the ice cooler in the dugout). A legitimate beer frenzy breaks out on home plate, as parents simply look on happily. I love it! Soul-rotting competition = bad. Alcohol and swearing = good. This is actually a much more wholesome message than in most family films (ignoring Buttermaker’s almost guaranteed eventual liver failure). If one can lose sight of the surface offenses, the proliferation of bad language, one will find a far less cynical (but not remotely mawkish) movie at the core.
Related posts:
• No. 2 The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977)
• No. 3 The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978)
• No. 4 Bad News Bears (2005)
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