Thoughts on The Bad News Bears on this Fourth of July [View all]

[fishwax]

On Monday I watched the original version of The Bad News Bears, from 1976, with my eleven-year-old son. He liked the movie, because it’s about baseball and there are some good laughs and you have fun cheering for the underdog and you wind up feeling good even though (as with the original Rocky, which came out a few months later) the underdog doesn’t actually win in the end.

But while he liked the movie, he was not impressed with the 1970s: he commented on the cavalier attitude towards things like smoking in the dugout and drunk driving; the way that everybody just sort of shrugs it off when the hyper-competitive, poor-sport opposing coach just smacks his son in the face and knocks him down right on the pitcher’s mound in the final inning, and the various forms of casual bigotry displayed not only by the film’s villains but by kids on the team we’re rooting for.

“It was a good movie,” he said at the end. “But what was up with the ‘70s?”

I just said: “I mean, it was the 1970s. There were a lot of things that we didn’t know and a lot of things we were still figuring out. We were trying to learn and improve, and sometimes that process looks messy from the other side. But it’s worth it.”

And I don’t know how satisfied he was with the answer, but I’ve been thinking about the conversation over the last couple of days, because the subtext of the movie is that the reason all these kids are on the same team is that in previous years the league wouldn’t even let them join, and one of the dads (a city councilman, who like every other adult in the film, is deeply flawed as well) had to sue the league to guarantee that every kid had the right to play, and then all those rejects wound up on the Bad News Bears (sponsored by Chico’s Bail Bonds, lol). Because, yes, the process of self-reflection and improvement is messy, but worth it—individually and culturally. (It’s the best path to making America great.)

So Happy Birthday, America!

And please don’t give up on the process.