We've already run the rule over Slap Shot, The Wrestler, The Hustler, Breaking Away and Friday Night Lights. Now get acquainted with the other runners and riders...
The Bad News Bears - Since there isn't a great movie about school football (except for Ken Loach's Kes, of course) or mini rugby, the junior sporting experience remains best captured by Michael Ritchie's bawdy celebration of little league baseball. Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau) used to play in the minors, but now he's a drunk (try matching him beer for beer) reduced to coaching the most foul-mouthed kids in Southern California. Remade - rather pointlessly - by Richard Linklater in 2005, the original Bears is still the best thanks in no small part to a charismatic performance by the young Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach in Watchmen), a nice turn for eternal tomboy Tatum O'Neal ("Grab a bat, punk!") and the ever excellent Matthau, a man who once described himself as resembling a melted rubber bulldog. Like we said, head to the fridge and find out if you can go can for can with the man.
Without Limits - Steve Prefontaine might be the greatest athlete to compete at the Olympics and come away without a medal. The German-speaking, Oregon-raised distance runner had the misfortune to come along at the same time as the Finn-tastic Lasse Viren. And as Robert Towne's picture explains, before he could grow into one of the world's great athletes, tragedy paid a visit to the Prefontaine house. Featuring spot-on recreations of Pre's most celebrated races, Without Limits - which was produced by one Tom Cruise - also finds Donald Sutherland on-song as Bill Bowerman, the legendary coach who made Prefontaine’s prototype Nikes with a waffle iron. As for the man who said "I don't want to win unless I know I've done my best, and the only way to do that is to run out front, flat out," Jared Leto made for a pretty decent Steve in Prefontaine but Billy Crudup wins this particular contest with plenty left in the tank.
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