Bob Cook

“Rocky Balboa,” the sixth and presumably final installment in the 30-year saga of a Philadelphia boxer, got serious advance buzz because its doddering-boxer plotline, sight unseen, clues everybody that unlike the other “Rocky” sequels, it contains at least three of the five essential factors of a classic sports movie.

Those factors are: Feature an Underdog or Underdogs, Stick it to the Man, Make Men Cry, Provide Memorable Quotes and Inspire Real Athletes. Hit three out of those five factors, and you’ve made a good sports movie. Hit four, you’ve made a great one. Hit five, as the original “Rocky” did, and you still have a large reservoir of goodwill even as your sequels go, in order, from boring to cheesy to unintentionally hilarious to plumbing unfathomable depths of awfulness.

The top 10 sports movies listed below hit either four or five of these factors. Or if they hit only three, they hit No. 3 so hard it makes up for not including factors four and five. But first, an explanation of what these factors are, and why they matter.

The Underdog and Stick It to the Man factors are mostly a given, because without them, it’s hard to build dramatic tension. That’s why no one is going to make movies based on the 1998 Chicago Bulls (movie-trailer voice guy: “They were expected to win — and they did”). The Man doesn’t have to be an authority figure. The Man could be a disease, another player, an astrological system out of alignment, or whatever is keeping the main character an Underdog.

Any hack filmmaker, except for Stallone in Rockys II-V, can come up with a Man that needs to be Stuck by an Underdog. It’s the other three factors that are tricky. Making Men Cry is a big achievement. As much as sports-movie fans profess to hate romantic movies in which a dying character or a love fulfilled is supposed to bring a tear to the eye, men can cry like Adam Morrison at stories of an athlete cut down in his prime or overcoming the odds to win a title. (Sorry to be man-centric here, but getting a man to cry about anything is usually a great accomplishment.) Men will Cry at “Rocky Balboa” because watching this old Underdog Stick It to the Man (old age) will cause many of them to weep with nostalgia over the end of a character they’ve known longer than anybody but their parents.

Men who would shout, “NERDS!” at some geek spouting Monty Python lines relish the opportunity to do the same with their favorite sports movie, which is why Provide Memorable Quotes is a necessary factor for greatness. And if you have Real Athletes who claim to be inspired by the movie you have a big-time endorsement of legendary status. These two factors need time to develop, so we won’t know for at least a few more years whether “Rocky Balboa” will meet them.

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One more note on this list. I have discounted documentaries, because it’s much harder to pull off these five factors in works of fiction, or even a biopic. Also, this list also reflects my biases. That means any melodramatic film about how baseball is the soul of our country uniting generations that would otherwise be set apart by their own differences immediately gets taken off the list. I am not George Will.

10. MIRACLE (2004)
“Miracle” has a serious disadvantage in the Inspire-Real-Athletes department: the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team on which the movie is based was so inspiring on its own, it doesn’t take a movie to make their story any more compelling. Still, Kurt Russell channels coach Herb Brooks right down to his plaid jacket in an emotional case study of how one man’s belief was strong enough to drive a ragtag group of collegians into crushing the Soviet hockey machine, thus doing more for winning the Cold War than Ronald Reagan ever did.

If that isn’t enough to Make Men Cry, then watching the scene in which Brooks, the last cut from the gold-medal winning 1960 U.S. Olympic team, cuts the last guy from the 1980 team is excruciating to watch. As for Memorable Quotes, maybe not enough time has passed, but a clipped “again” (Brooks’ stoic order for his beyond-exhausted team to do more sprints immediately after a sloppily played game) has potential.

9. SOMETHING FOR JOEY (1977)
The story of football star John Cappelletti and his leukemia-stricken brother is so off-the-charts gut-wrenching, it would make even Dick Cheney cry. The Underdog trying to Stick It to the Man is Joey, an 11-year-old going through excruciating treatments to get to his brother John’s Penn State games on Saturdays. Just when it seems like Joey is going to get better, just as John is fulfilling his little brother’s request to score four touchdowns for him in one game, just as you feel like the happy ending is coming … well, Joey doesn’t die, but you know he’s gonna get it.

And the waterworks really open up when future Beastmaster Marc Singer, as John, accepts his Heisman Trophy, gives it to Joey, and says: “They say I’ve shown courage on the football field, but for me it’s only on the field, and only in the fall. Joey lives with pain all the time. His courage is ‘round the clock.” (Joey never saw this movie — he died in 1976, at the age of 14.) The movie has gone beyond Inspiring Real Athletes — John Cappelletti and “Something For Joey” Inspired Real People.

8. CADDYSHACK (1980)
“Caddyshack” is the gold standard of Providing Memorable Quotes. How many times on the golf course, even the miniature golf course, have you heard someone shout out, Carl Spackler-sty le: “Cinderella story!” or “It’s in the hole!” Or you’ve had someone advise you to “be the ball.” But even if you’ve heard your friends do their Rodney Dangerfield impersonation (“This steak still has marks from where the jockey was hitting it!”) a million times over, the movie is still funny.

I guess caddy Danny Noonan would be the Underdog trying to Stick It to the Man, but who cares, when there’s so much great stuff to quote?

“You’ll get nothing, and like it.” “While we’re young.” The Carl Spackler Dalai Lama speech…

Did you know that “Caddyshack 2” is still the worst sports movie sequel ever? And I’m counting “Slap Shot 2?”

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