In honor of the tremendous athletes who will swarm the city this Monday to run the Boston Marathon, The MUSE offers you a list of some of our favorite flicks featuring remarkable athletic feats in variety of different sports.
Rocky ‘-‘- Boxing: Adriaaaaaaan! One of the most well-known boxing movie franchises of all time. Actually, the only one, but who’s keeping track? Yeah, that theme song is totally playing through your head right now.
The Sandlot ‘-‘- Baseball: Scotty Smalls moves to a new town and meets the beast that lives next to the local baseball field. ‘The Sandlot’ is, hands down, the best movie of 1993. OK, maybe not better than ‘Schindler’s List,’ ‘The Piano’ and ‘Philadelphia,’ but definitely the only one about baseball’ that’s worth watching.
Little Giants ‘-‘- Football: Forget Rudy, you can’t go wrong with a kids-sucking-at-sports-but-then-becoming-merely-passable-at-them-but-somehow-still-winning-a-championship movie.
Bend It Like Beckham ‘-‘- Soccer: The movie that caused adolescent boys all over the country to fall in love with Kiera Knightley. She ran around in her sports bra and was good at soccer ‘-‘- take that, Miley.
Bring It On ‘-‘- Cheerleading: This movie, despite its cheer-ocracy, actually showed the athleticism and drive that it takes to succeed in competitive cheerleading — plus we’ve heard some dudes liked watching it with the sound muted . . . or something.
Space Jam ‘-‘- Basketball: Michael Jordan + Looney Tunes = cinematic gold. Kudos to writers Leo Benvenuti and Steve Rudnick who would go on to write such similarly award-winning pieces as ‘The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause.’
Forrest Gump ‘-‘- Running/Football/Ping Pong: Maybe his knack for picking up sports wasn’t what we were supposed to get out of the movie’s ‘message,’ but you have to hand it to Forrest — that guy knew how to compete and the movie is nothing short of inspirational.
Cool Runnings ‘-‘- Bob-Sled: Based on the true story of four Jamaican guys competing in Olympic bob-sledding, these guys are another implausible underdog to cheer for (and watch loose). If you do not love this movie, please re-think your taste in film, `mon.
Caddyshack ‘-‘- Golf: Golf was given its chance to shine in this classic and we think that, over the years, more people have watched and cared about ‘Caddyshack’ than the actual game of golf.
The Karate Kid ‘-‘- Karate: OK, kind of a sport, but more of a martial art, but who’s counting? This movie could not be left off the list. Four words: Wax on, wax off.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
