Football as a Means: A Review of Undefeated

The best football movies focus on high school. The players still possess a raw idealism and capacity for self-sacrificing commitment. This visceral passion infuses the game with social power and camaraderie. High school teams are still anchored in real communities where people know your name. These loyalties and sacrifices erode at higher levels. High school players exhibit the devotion and attention to authority that makes 16-20 year olds ideal soldiers. High school movies rule supreme for capturing the power and complexity of football.

Undefeated, an academy award winning documentary, follows the Manassas high school Tigers in North Memphis for one season. The moviemakers earned a level of trust and invisibility that opens windows into the compelling stories and tropes that give football such a unique and compelling American narrative. While the documentary can sometimes feel like Blind Side and sometimes like Friday Night Lights, it follows the true and serendipitous story of a poor and downtrodden football team that had not won a game in 15 years and not won a playoff game in mover 100 years. The story unfolds neither as fairy tale or nursery lessons, but as an abiding portrait of what football can sometimes accomplish through community, authority and challenge to the characters of young men. 

North Memphis exists as an independent character. Roving cameras and inside homes reveal a profoundly broken community abandoned by its job generator Firestone. Dilapidated and abandoned houses, cracked streets and left behind people populate the background and foreground. The young men slouched in a team meeting when we first meet them are cast offs with no future and seldom a real family. Mansassas coach Bill Courtney announces at the meeting:

“ Starting right guard shot, one linebacker shot, two players fighting right in front of the coach, star center arrested for shooting someone in the face with BB gun. For most coaches that would be pretty much a career's worth of crap to deal with. I think that sums up the last two weeks for me."

When the team meets with an ex-NFL player Aaron Hayden and he asks how many of you have two parents who went to college, no hand go up. When he asks  “how many have a relative in jail” every player raises their hand. Welcome to North Memphis.

Six years ago Bill Cartney shows up as a volunteer coach. He throws himself into coaching and trying to save the young men of the Manassas team. He loves coaching; this is clear, and would gladly give up his successful wood products business to do in it full time. His passion drives him at home, and interviews with his resigned and exasperated wife and a few shots of home life with his kids reveal how consuming and costly his coaching obsession can be. One of the film’s untouted strengths is its no nonsense revelation of how hard on family committed coaches can be. I watched Cartney struggle with his own sense of not being there for his own kids. Cartney reflects on how his own father had not been there for him and his coaching other fatherless men help to redeem that absence. I am also reminded of associate head coach telling me, “I spent 22 years being a better father to my players than my kids.”

His coaching extends who he is at work and home. His blunt, outspoken tough love drills through to the abandoned and cast off players of his team. By accident he has become the only caring male model in their lives. He knows it and feels the responsibility deeply. So deeply it starts to undermine his responsibilities to his family.

When Courtney started Manassas had only 17 players. Although the school is brand new replete with state of the art security and metal detectors, the sports facilities are a weed spotted afterthough. A local reporter points out how the real money has flown to the private schools and suburbs, so none of the public schools, despite new buildings, has any real resources to face their massive task of rescuing generations of minority students left behind and cast aside by society.

The only way the team can finance itself is to sell itself to play fodder games with richer schools. They travel hours to go get a payday of 5,000 dollars to support the program. Just like an underfunded FCS team, they make themselves a punching bag for rich suburban teams for the money. After several early season slaughters, the team is usually broken physically and psychologically before playing their district games.

No external motives, no race fairy tales, not story of black white reconciliation here; just a committed guy who loves football and loves coaching.

He spends hours with the team and spends his own money and recruits other white well off assistant coaches to drill and plead for discipline. He organizes fund-raisers to get the team off the treadmill of early season games. He and his cadre of white assistant volunteer coaches truly believe that if the students let it, “football can save your life.” It sounds like the worst form of paternalistic coach-speak. But, in this case, football provides an identity, place of safety away from streets, sense of efficacy and above all male authority figures to young men who have none of the above.

When Courtney and his coaches lose a player, they believe they also lose a soul.

This infuses the football quest with a sense of urgency that all the best high school and college coaches carry—they “to build a platform of character” from which the young men have a chance to forge a life. Courtney and the film prove what players have known forever, what sounds like clichés to outsiders, becomes truth to insiders. Good leaders create mantras and repeat and model them endlessly until they become truths for the players and the coach. In Courtney and the team’s case:

"Young men of character and discipline and commitment end up winning in life. Football doesn't build character. Football reveals character."

It takes time, patience and endless passion pouring into what can seem like a black hole of emotional apathy and resignation in the team. But Courtney has been at this for five years now. He has a core of seniors who stayed with him and slowly committed and grew to trust this large passionate white guy from far away.

The team possess O. C. Brown a large easy-going and very talented player who could earn a scholarship. OC lives with his grandmother and as he says “I’m not very smart…Football is my way out.” But he struggles with grades and above all the dreaded ACT. Almost without noticing it, the film points out how he ends up moving in part time with an well off white assistant coach where he gets tutoring. In the end after failing the ACT once,  he squeaks by with the minimum 16 and earns a scholarship to Southern Mississippi. It felt eerily like scenes from Blind Side without the fairy tale aspect. The coach is direct and to the point, “if I were a piano teacher and found a great talent, I’d try to help.”

I kept expecting the black-white dynamic and subtext of the idea of well off white guys plying their coaching passion with a bunch of underprivileged black kids to dominate the story and reveal the insidious racial paternalism that this could represent. Courtney feels absolutely authentic with the kids. Certainly his blunt language and his “us” against them motivation about how the kids have to overcome the rep of inner city teams who “quit” drives home. We see him visiting the kids in their homes and hugging, cajoling, demanding and helping them keep together during the craziness of high school years.

In the case of Chavis Brown, a talented but troubled young man, the coach suspends him for attacking his own teammates. But Courtney literally chases Chavis to stay with the team and endure a suspension. Chavis does and in one of the profound and wrenching scenes complete with subtitles to help with the kid’s thick north Memphis accents apologizes to the team and gives the teams coveted “uncommon man” award to his teammate Money Brown.

Money is an undersized player who succeeds because of his “mental toughness.” He has a 3,8 but no money to get to college. Worse he injures himself and in scenes reminiscent of every football injury film ever shot. he meets with caring and honest doctors who tell him he cannot play but has a chance if he can rehab.

Money despairs and struggles with losing football and facing the inability to get into college for lack of money. He quits coming to school. Again Courtney’s mantra, “you can’t quite because you are frustrated,” matters. Courtney goes to his house and literally drags him back. Courtney demands and models to them all that “character is revealed in failure.” He knows there are not second chances in North Memphis, if the kids quit, it is all over not just for the team but for their futures.

Character and discipline and team before self. He desperately screams, yells, cajoles and loves them to internalize this in the  hopes they can carry that beyond the high school. At the end it all comes out in football where he yells, “Please remember discipline. Please remember character, and let’s go kick their ass.”

At the end the coach knows he has to leave coaching at the school for the sake of time with his family. His solution, ironically, is to coach at his son’s school and coach his kid’s teams. The documentary really reveals how coaches really are coaches. Coach-speak grows from deep inside and what people may consider clichés, remain deep truths when spoken by a passionate and smart and caring coach to young men struggling, “Success does not reveal character. Character is revealed by failure.” We all hear this ten times in the movie. The coach lives it and the players struggle with it and now and then understand and live it when Chavis returns and Money gets to college and plays in the last game. The team hears it after the first defeat in their first game.

Courtney believes that one way to cut through the apathy and despair is to “reach hearts through something you love.” In this case football is all  he and these young men have. The coach never stops demanding that the kids “get their heads on right” and pay attention to “character” and put “team before individual.” It slowly sinks in to the reluctant and cynical, no cynical is to optimistic, resigned team and to those of us who watch. The coach and team capture the real lesson of football at this level. In a close game, Courtney looks at the team and exhorts them to act with “mind with heart and bodies. Let’s finish this thing.”

The team loses the first game of the season. The team loses the last game of the season in the playoffs to one of the teams that used to pay them as mercenary punching bags. In between they win nine games and OC garners a scholarship; Chavis begins the journey to becoming a functional person and Money rehabs and plays in his last game.

The title reminds us that losing a game is not the same as being defeated. One’s heart and mind and spirit can remain unbroken and undefeated even amid defeat. The coach and players learned the lesson so dear to Courtney’s coaching heart—character endures. To repeat, the true test of character is “not success, but failure.” Character endures, character gets back up, character continues to work and achieve after set-backs.

For Courtney and the committed coaches of high school and college football, that remains the abiding truth, the end for which football is but a means. One hopes the kids when they leave and face that bleak unforgiving neighborhood can remember.

Bull Durham—the Costner Baseball Movie Trilogy

Well the baseball season has reached the 30.9% mark. Interleague play has begun and the Mariners are on their way to another 90 game loss season. I thought I would celebrate by reminding myself of another great baseball movie and the middle movie of the Costner baseball trilogy—Bull Durham.

Baseball is a discipline of failure. The greatest hitters fail two-thirds of the time, and the greatest pitchers fail to throw strikes half the time. Succeeding in a world saturated by failure takes self-mastery and resilience. The protagonist Crash Davis of Bull Durham, one of my absolute favorite moves, embodies the stoic dignity of failure.

Kevin Costner as Crash Davis, a little thicker, still carries his lanky handsome athletic build and grace (he actually hit two home runs in the making of the movie) plays a professional minor league player. Crash has earned his skill as an accomplished catcher and manager of pitchers who could not quite master major league hitting. He’s grizzled, cynical, self-educated and droll. Unlike the Costner character in Field of Dreams, but similar to his character in For Love of the Game, Crash lives alone with baseball as his path and profession. He has been known to “howl at the moon.”

Crash lives in the shadows of the glory of the major leagues in the grubby perpetual minors. Annie (Susan Sarandan), the movie’s narrator and muse, upholds upholds baseball’s mythical status. As part time community college lecturer in Durham, she introduces the movie with a reminder, “I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. …I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball...You see, there's no guilt in baseball, and it's never boring…It's a long season and you gotta trust it. I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.”

At this Triple A graveyard for perpetual veterans and launch pad for hotshots, Annie picks one player each year to initiate into the church through reading poetry and love-making. In Bull Durham she has adopted to mother and play with Eby Calvin LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) an immensely talented fire-balling air-head with the focus of an amoeba.

Crash Davis is approaching the end of his baseball career having once been blessed 21 wondrous days in the show, the Major Leagues.  By a fluke of longevity and talent he needs only 1 home run to achieve the minor league record of 247 home runs. The Durham Bulls bought his AAA contract to tutor the incredibly talented picture and Annie’s protégé “Nuke” LaLoosh. Nuke has just pitched a game in which he walked 18, hit, stuck out 18 as well as hitting the sportscaster, public address announcer and the mascot bull—he has “serious shit.” More to the point Crash announces he has “a million dollar arm with a five cent head.”

As the “player to be named later,” Crash enters just as the manager of the Bulls tells a young player “the organization has decided to make a change,” and a very young player’s dreams end. The movie highlights how genuinely young all the players are and how many will fall by the wayside trying to gain the holy grail, the Bigs, the Show, the Majors.

The cold ruthless culling of all elite sports looms in the background just as the incredibly fine difference between making it and failing. Yet the players are playing a game that flows from joy, fun and intense competitiveness. A desperate player points out it beats selling appliances at Sears. Crash recognizes the man-child in them all. He can still sneak out with the very young players one night to flood the field, slide in the mud and create a rain day. When the manager complains that the team is not paying attention, Crash reminds him, “they’re kids, scare’em.”

The manager follows his advice with one of the greatest explanations of sport in movie history. Throwing bats on the floor in the shower and cowering the team in the shower stall, the manager screams,

“it’s a simple game, you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball .”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is baseball, pure and clean. I mean how hard can it be hit a rotating 2.78 inches ball at 97 mph with a 2.75 inch piece of ash?

You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball.

The movie reminds us that at the core of sport is simple, based upon natural human actions. Yet like great baroque music, these singular themes permit infinite variations that demand high skill from players and induces joy and satisfaction in the spectators.

Crash reluctantly becomes big brother to the young players. With Nuke, Crash has to break Nuke of the habit of relying on talent with no discipline and teach him how to learn. In one memorable incident, Nuke repeatedly shakes off his catcher to throw his “heater.” Crash smiles and lets Nuke throw, of course Crash tells the batter what is coming and the batter hits it a mile, a country mile. Crash gloats over how far the home run travelled and alerts Nuke that Crash let the hitter know to prove to Nuke who is boss. Nuke will have to relearn the lesson constantly.

Despite his callow flakiness, Nuke does not have a bad heart but is spoiled by a world that has value his talent and never asked that he grow up or mature. When Nuke tells Crash “you don’t like me.” And Crash lays out a professional’s credo, “Because you don't respect yourself, which is your problem. But you don't respect the game, and that's my problem. You got a gift….When you were a baby, the Gods reached down and turned your right arm into a thunderbolt. You got a Hall-of-Fame arm, but you're pissing it away.”

Slowly, with pain and wit, Nuke learns these lessons, sort of. He even learns Crash’s famous critique of strike-outs and defense of off speed pitches, “Relax, all right? Don't try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they're fascist. Throw some ground balls - it's more democratic.”

The slow comic arc of learning to grow up and take a child’s game seriously is held together by a fun and sexy romance. The movies draws us into the world of aspiring dreams and uneven talent. Not everyone we meet will make the major leagues, in face most will fail. Crash and the movie teach about about resilience and about failure while reminding us, like Field of Dreams, that beneath the game lies the reality and importance of love.

Costner provides a tired lonely dignity to a man who has found his path. He purused it with passion, skill and dignity only to just miss. He scored a “cup of coffee” in the majors and remembers it as a shining moment he can share with the rookies whom will never see the promised land,  “yeah, I was in the show. I was in the show for 21 days once - the 21 greatest days of my life. You know, you never handle your luggage in the show, somebody else carries your bags. It was great. You hit white balls for batting practice, the ballparks are like cathedrals, the hotels all have room service, and the women all have long legs and brains.”

The movie reminds us that desire, effort and practice are NOT enough. A player needs a gift, a talent from the gods. Even that is not enough, you need the talent and the discipline and respect to make it all come together. This becomes the lesson that Crash must hand on to Nuke. In the end Nuke does get called up with his gift and the seeds of maturity that Crash has planted, he may have a chance.

At the end the depth of Costner’s own loss and failure are revealed. After Nuke’s call up, Crash ends up at a bar—alone, drinking, ruing his loss. Nuke comes by to thank him, and Costner explodes in fury at the merciless statistical cruelty of baseball. His monologue spits out that the difference between 250 and 300 is 25 hits. 25 dying quails, flares. 25 hits that’s all kept him from the promised land, and he can only stare with awe and anger at the world Nuke will enter with his gift, a world Nuke neither understands or appreciates.

Throughout the movie the triangle among Nuke, Annie and Crash has unfolded with Annie and Crash realizing they belong together in a relation of mature equals, but they can’t act on it during the season to protect Nuke's own fragile ego and burgeoning success.

In the end Crash experiences what we saw at the beginning, “management has decided to make a change,” his manager tells him as he is released. But the manager also tells Crash that he will recommend Crash to be a coach next season, a perfect fit for Crash and baseball. Crash leaves, picks up with the Ashville Tourists and breaks the record, only Annie notices. The movie ends with Crash returning to Annie to begin a real relationship with a woman he can love.

The movie accepts the mythical sense of baseball’s uniqueness and inner joy but does not fall in bloated allegory like The Natural or reverence like The Lou Gehrig Story. Instead it weaves the joy and beauty of the game with the flawed, loopy and intense folks who inhabit its reality. Crash Davis learns and so does Annie that baseball can sustain you but it cannot fulfill you. 

Crash still loves the game and respects its incredible difficulty. He can hand this wisdom on to the next generation and others have seen this. His manager recommends him for a coaching job even as he must cut him. But baseball will be woven into the texture of his life, not be his life, as he move sin with Annie.

As Annie reminds us, “Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it's also a job.”

Handling Success Harder than Handling Adversity

One of the wisest coaches I know, Lorenzo Romar, was asked during one of his team’s nerve-racking midseason turnarounds, “which is harder to handle adversity or success?” Lorenzo laughed and replied “well when you are drowning, most of us will fight to say alive. It’s deep within us to struggle to survive. But it is way too easy to get complacent or take your press clippings seriously. Handling success is harder.”

Lorenzo hits on a powerful reality of life. Jim Collins in his superb book Good to Great argues that the good can be the enemy of the great. Organizations get good enough to succeed in their market. Too often they plateau at that point. They are doing well, very well, but they do not become great. Paradoxically their very success saps their motive to become great.

I believe Romar’s insight captures well the motivation of teams. When a team is down or struggling, they hate it. They want to get better. A team can respond with a chip on their shoulders. They have something to prove each game, and coaches can exploit this underdog, upset-minded, prove yourself approach. No one enjoys feeling bad or failing, so coaches can exploit the desire to prove themselves better.

Competition signals very clearly when a team fails. Losing confirms that a team needs to get better if they don’t want to lose again. Continuous losing can erode a team’s confidence in itself or its coach. It leaves no doubt a team failed. It leaves do doubt that a team and players must work harder to get better.

Winning poses a very different problem. Winning reassures everyone that they are doing the right thing. The media reinforces this with praising coverage and feel good stories. The paradox of winning is that it proves what you are doing works.

Incessant improvement is hard. Looking yourself in the mirror each day and realizing you need to continue to work harder than anyone and never being satisfied is hard. Having a coach dog you to get better and constantly demand effort and improvement in small things like footwork, ball handling, position, reading defenses, is hard. It feels good to revel in your success and how good you are.

The danger in victories lies in getting complacent. It leads players to become comfortable in what they are doing. They expect to win, which can be a good thing. You want teams to be confident and even have some swagger. If confidence bcomes arrogance and leads to cocky taunting and resentful learning, a team overestimates itself or under estimate its opponents, then it can be disastrous for a player or team.

1.   This attitude ignores the fact that every other team is working harder. In conference play where teams play multiple times, the beaten teams target the team that beat them. Winning teams become targets, so at the very time it might become complacent, other teams are working harder, nursing chips on their shoulders, plotting upsets and innovating to counter a winning team’s strengths
2. Winning can take the edge of a player or team. When players are hungry to win, they work harder. They enter each game on an edge pushing and fighting. They play at the edge of their talent and their emotions. Winning can erode that edge because a player gets comfortable doing what they do. They believe their present or past effort is enough, and that they can call it up as needed. Each game does not become a challenge or require the dynamic self-motivation of pushing oneself to one’s best or pushing boundaries.
3.   Winning can harm learning. Coaches can tear their hair out, if they have any left, when players begin to think they know better. Coaches need teams to adapt to each team and listen to the scout. They need the team to focus upon the keys to winning and make special efforts to push their strengths or stop the other team’s tendencies. Each game requires learning and anticipation. The problem arises when players misdiagnose why they are winning. Success lures players to believe they are winning simply because they are really good, not because they work harder and study harder and practice harder.
4.   Winning leads to a sense of entitlement. Winning tempts players to believe all they have to do is show up. Players begin to think they deserve to win. They not only expect to win, they expect it to be handed to them. Other teams and the referees are supposed to know how good they are. They make a run or get a lead, and this should prove to the other team it is time to give up. When referees go against them, they express outsize anger, even outrage, because as winners they should not have to deal with such things as fouls or bad calls. Modern players have enough issues with entitlement and winning just compounds it. This reinforces the learning lapses.

The need to counteract these tendencies accounts for some of the mad hatter behavior of college coaches. Professional teams seldom fall prey to complacency, but 18-21 year olds succumb much easier. They have less experience, judge on much smaller samples and have lived an entitled life for along time.

Collins talks about the need for a “ferocious” approach to greatness and the need to face brutal facts and incessantly learn. To counteract the attractions of success, coaches try to demand, cajole, or terrify teams into keeping an edge. Coaches have to remind teams that anyone can beat them if they do not “show up” in the full sense of bringing their focus, talent and skill honed to its highest level. More than a few coaches handle this with relentless schedules that demand teams respond. A loss now and then can keep teams receptive to learning. Modern power ratings now reward rather than penalize this in most sports and seedings.

The best coaches lay out clear metrics that enable players to see, measure and understand their progress. The metrics define goals that focus behavior and permit players to grow incrementally and see their growth and success. The metric driven approach to coaching reaffirms success but reminds players in a clear way that they can and must always get better. Nothing stands still in life and athletics. The best response remains appreciating one’s strengths but never giving up on getting better.

I think coach Romar is right.

Ironic isn’t it that success breed failure? While Kipling reminded us they can both be "impostors," endless failure can break us. Success in any area of life can generate arrogance combined with complacency--jerk in simple terms. A great  team and leader see hrough the illusions of success to the core demands of excellence and realize the path of personal and professional growth never ends, never stops.

 The journey, not the destination.