“I see great things in baseball. It’s our game — the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.” —Walt Whitman
With the All-Star Game right around the corner, I suggested to Kelly Stitzel that she feature Bull Durham for this week’s Soundtrack Saturday. I was shocked — shocked, I tell ya! — to find out she’s never seen writer-director Ron Shelton’s 1988 summer hit, one of the best sports movies of all time, if not the best movie about baseball. It’s also one of the finest romantic comedies of the past 25 years.
First-time director Shelton drew from his own experiences as a minor-league ball player for Bull Durham’s screenplay, and he was blessed with a stellar cast that brought his richly drawn characters to life. It’s a movie full of smart dialogue and character-based comedy that celebrates the lunacy, hijinks, and joy of America’s two favorite pastimes — baseball and sex.
Susan Sarandon, radiant as ever, flew on her own dime from Italy to audition and win the role of Annie Savoy, a part-time teacher in Durham, North Carolina. Annie dedicates each summer of her life to tutoring a player on the Durham Bulls, the local minor-league team, that she believes has the best potential to get a call up to the majors. However, Annie isn’t interested in improving the players’ reading and writing. And she isn’t a coach, although she knows as much about baseball as any manager. No, she’s more of a spiritual and sexual adviser: “You know how to make love, then you’ll know how to pitch.” She reads Walt Whitman to her lover-players and puts on Edith Piaf records in the hopes of making them well-rounded human beings and therefore better ball players. At the top of the film she chooses as her new student Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, the Bulls’ latest gifted pitcher, who has a million-dollar arm but a five-cent head on his shoulders.
The role of Nuke went to Tim Robbins in a career-breakthrough performance. Shelton had to fight to get Robbins cast in the part; up to that point he’d been in Howard the Duck, an infamous flop, and mostly blink-and-you-missed-him bit parts (raise your hand if you recall him in Top Gun). In addition to his lack of experience onscreen, executives at Orion Pictures felt that a woman as classy as Sarandon would never fall for a guy like Robbins. Luckily, Shelton prevailed, and the two actors not only worked wonderfully on the set but fell in love and remain a devoted couple to this day. Shows you how smart those movie execs can be.
The other night I let Sophie stay up past her bedtime to listen to the last inning of the game between the Red Sox and Indians. One of the things I love about the Internet is the ability to listen to every Indians game with the Cleveland radio play-by-play announcers making the calls — it’s really kept me in touch with my hometown. Ironically, baseball was not a huge part of childhood in northeast Ohio; during the ’80s, there was little to root for when the Indians took the field. Oh, each year there was a glimmer of hope for the home team that lasted until the end of April, by which time the Tribe was usually in the basement of their division. In addition to the woes of the Indians, baseball was just never a presence in our house, which is strange, because if you ask my dad about the ’48 and ’54 championship Indians teams, he can rattle off players and some of their accomplishments. The radio was always tuned to music in our house, though, and I found televised games a bore. I took in the occasional game, but the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium was a dungeon: cold, damp and cavernous. It wasn’t a lot of fun to sit in the stands.