by Kevin Bresnahan, Contributor

An English novelist, Martin Amis, wrote: "Intellectual football-lovers are a beleaguered crew, despised by intellectuals and football-lovers alike.” 

He was talking about soccer, but the lesson applies here in the colonies as well. Baseball, not football, is our “national pastime,” and it’s considered to be the sport of thinkers, scholars and poetic types. The Old Game has produced some terrific films: Pride of the Yankees, Bang the Drum Slowly, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams. Football not so much. There’s never been a really great football movie.  Baseball is suited for art and poetry. Football is for rednecks, thugs, and the bastard sons of the gentry. 

The reality is of course much different. With twenty-two players doing twenty-two different things on every play, and then adjusting those twenty-two actions on the fly in response to what the other players are doing, football’s level of complexity makes baseball look like checkers. Baseball might be poetry, but football is engineering. 

The fans don’t really understand it, nor do the drama majors at ESPN. Only the mad monks who coach the game get how it really works. This is why football is the most modern of games, because its intricacies are only understood by a clued-in few. I certainly don’t claim to get it. 

That said, here are my five favorite football movie tropes.

1. The Pep talk

The coach standing in the center of the locker room, his team arrayed around him, grass-smeared and bloody with half time. Now listen up, boys.

In Knute Rockne: All-American (1940) Pat O’Brian, playing the title coach, gives the most famous football pep talk of all time, telling the Notre Dame squad about the death of the legendary George Gipp.

“I'm going to tell you something I've kept to myself for years,” Rockne begins. “None of you ever knew George Gipp.  It was long before your time.  But you know what a tradition he is at Notre Dame... And the last thing he said to me – ‘Rock,’ he said – ‘sometime, when the team is up against it -- and the breaks are beating the boys -- tell them to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper.’”

And they sure do. 

Now we can laugh at this sentimental tripe if you like. But when I was twelve I had a dog and I named her Gipper. 

Rudy has a pretty good speech, too, not from a coach but from the groundskeeper Fortune. In Any Given Sunday Oliver Stone writes a banger for Al Pacino: “Life is the six inches in front of your face.”

But then there is Billy Dee Williams doing Gale Sayers’s pre-game speech from Brian’s Song (1971).

“Brian has cancer,” Sayers tells the team before the big Rams game, and a roomful of broad shoulders slump with pain. But then he trails off. Sayers is not a talker. For players like him it isn’t about language. Great athletes are not inclined to introspect or neurotically second guess themselves. (One of the many reasons I was not a very good football player.) But it’s just this kind of detachment that is needed to use language to create a vision, to do what O’Brian does in Knute Rockne. 

Yogi Berra once said, “Half this game is ninety percent mental.” And the speech scene tells us that all that is needed to beat the adversary is a change in attitude, and all that’s needed for that is the power of language, of one man’s words.

2. The Coach

If you grew up on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer you know this guy, Comet with his ballcap and that whistle around his neck, barking platitudes at the players and enforcing social norms. Football coaches get a bad rap in pop culture, often portrayed as bellowing bullies – like the sinister Craig T. Nelson in All the Right Movies – but in truth the best football coach I ever played for, with several state titles under his belt, almost never raised his voice.

In Any Given Sunday Al Pacino takes on the role of Coach Tony D’Amato, a former “Pantheon Cup” champ fallen on hard times, both on the field and off. Now, I love Pacino – I’d pay $12 to watch Al Pacino paint a chair – but he’s not a football coach. A college basketball coach, yes, a scrappy little New Yorker Italian guy. But the football coach comes in two basic types. Big boys, walruses; and tight, squared away Southerners with nice hair. The foreman and the manager. For the Philadelphia audience I will describe them as the Andy Reid and the Dick Vermeil. Both types have had success. But Pacino’s crazy emotive introspection does not jibe.

In Remember the Titans, I think about Denzel Washington, the dominant actor of this generation. I love him for a lot of reasons, not least his James Stewart-like affinity for playing bad guys (“King Kong ain’t got shit on me!”) but here he is pure Denzel. The strong man, the father figure, the one whose eyes never stray from the prize. 

3. Race in America

Football, like the military, has been one place where Black and white people came to know each other more closely than in almost any other venue of American life. 

In Brian’s Song, much is made of the two leads, African-American Sayers and Italian-American Brian Piccolo, rooming together at camp. When asked what the two found to talk about, the real life Piccolo said, "Oh, the usual racist stuff. He calls me by my nickname, 'Honky'. We get along fine as long as he doesn't use the bathroom. He sleeps in the lampshade."

This movie doesn’t actually say it doesn’t care whether you are Black or white or purple, but it does partake of the old liberal myth that racial disparities would go away if only we just stopped talking about race. 

By the time we get to the based-on-truth Remember the Titans (2000) things have changed, and race is front and center. Washington is Coach Herman Boone, tasked with leading the first racially integrated high school football team in Virginia, facing opposition from the local proto-Proud Boys and business community, as well as the long-time assistant played by Will Patton, who has never not delivered a good performance in anything, ever. 

In the end, believe it or not, the boys come together across the race line and learn to work together toward a common goal. It’s a nice thought. 

4. Man vs Machine

Many traditional football movies, like the fantastic early Tom Cruise picture All the Right Moves, tell the story of the star player learning to give up his individuality and arrogance and to play the team game. But the ones I like, especially a couple made in the 70s, are about the opposite. About the individual fighting back, refusing to be ground up in the gears of the machine.

In The Longest Yard (1974) Burt Reynolds, as Paul “Wrecking” Crewe, a convict and disgraced former NFLer, must give his fellow inmates something to live for, some flicker of hope in their lives of incarceration under the cruel warden – played to a tee by Edward Arnold. The warden proposes prisoners should play a football game against the guards, as a way of having some fun and, not incidentally, using violence to ensure the criminals know who is in charge. But the inmates, led by their wily leader Burt Reynolds, have something else in mind. 

In North Dallas Forty (1979) the prison for aging star Phil Elliott, played by a divinely gruff Nick Nolte, is pro football itself. The team, un-loosely modeled on the Dallas Cowboys, is owned by a corporate tycoon and coached by a sadistic martinet, played by the terrifying G. B. Spradlin. Spradlin was a fantastic character actor, embodying the darkness in the heart of Southern Christian masculinity. 

The fight for Elliott – as for Paul Crewe – is the fight for any last scrap of humanity dignity and individuality in the face of powerful systems of oppression. In the 70s such heroes did not win, but they did manage, at least for a moment, to throw a monkey wrench into the machine. 

5. Boys don’t cry

Brian’s Song was a tear jerker that ran on TV as an ABC Movie of the Week every year in the 1970s, starring Billy Dee Williams and James Caan. Billy Dee and Jimmy Caan. In a made-for-TV movie? Are you serious? The picture played off our love of football, and of a good death scene. Caan gives us one of these lovely cancer deaths – trust me, it’s not that pretty in reality – with his gorgeous wife crying, and Billy Dee Williams clenching his cheek muscles evocatively. 

This is not the story of how Brian Piccolo died. This is the story of how he lived. How he did live.

And now I’m crying.

There may be no crying in baseball, but football is where a particular kind of American gains access to full gushing emotion. Generally speaking, this kind of thing is frowned upon among what we used to call grown men, but football opens up that side. (It is also where straight men go to admire the bodies of other men wearing brightly colored satin pants and codpieces, but that is for another day.) 

The thing about Brian’s Song, like Field of Dreams, is that it gives us permission to cry, to feel, because the hearty masculinity of football offers a kind of indemnity against softness and sensitivity. Confronted with, say, the horrific death of Caretaker in The Longest Yard, we know what to do.

Extra Point

Football came to cultural dominance in America after World War II and the modern NFL game is a product of the Cold War. Everything about it reflects the martial spirit and the black/white morality of that era. The times required a particular version of masculinity that was suited to the long twilight struggle ahead of America. We were uniformed, we were helmeted, we cast away of our petty personal needs for the needs of the country. 

Football exemplified this. But at the same time football movies undermined this view of life. The best football pictures find a way to celebrate the sport and its cult of masculinity while at the same time interrogating and critiquing it. Football is a complicated game, after all, with twenty-two players doing twenty-two different things on every play. There is always the chance to audible to a different call.