Page 216 - Sport Culture and the Media

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aspects of sport (from the film’s perspective the warrior-like nature of contact
sport) are being undermined by corporate commercial interests. In this regard,
as in Field of Dreams, this loss of higher moral ground and the threat of cynical
manipulation symbolizes a wider trend in the USA. Any Given Sunday covers a
familiar range of issues in sports film. One of these is inter-generational succes-
sion between players, in this case Dennis Quaid’s Jack ‘Cap’ Rooney, the
Sharks’ champion but declining quarterback and the up-and-coming Willie
Beamen (Jamie Foxx). It is also between owners and coaches in the form of Al
Pacino’s ageing coach Tony D’Amato facing the new order imposed by owner
Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz), the daughter of the late team owner who
was also a long-time friend and supporter of D’Amato. That Beamen is black
and Pagniacci a young woman complicates the equations of power. It makes
possible the airing of racial issues (like the question of ‘stacking’, or the highly
ideological allocation of sports roles according to assumed racial charac-
teristics; see, for example, Anderson 1993) and also those concerning gender
and class, with the Ivy League-educated Pagniacci bringing a ruthless, market-
oriented approach to sport that the older, less formally credentialled D’Amato
opposes. Her presence among naked athletes in the locker room echoes the ‘Lisa
Olson’ case discussed in Chapter 2, a double intrusion of sex and capitalist
management into homosocial sporting space. Beamen, like Rod Tidwell in Jerry
Maguire, has the concern with gaining material security from a short-lived and
dangerous sporting career that is characteristic of the class location of the
majority of African Americans. The film covers the politics of franchise
location (Nunn and Rosentraub 1997; Whitson 1998), with the owner threaten-
ing to move the team from its base in Florida unless it receives a substantial civic
subsidy to renovate the stadium. It addresses the decadence of professional
sports culture and the mistreatment of women (Benedict 1997) as well as the
calculated damage to the bodies of the mostly black athletes in a reproductive
cycle of exploitation and abuse.
In getting up close to sport, Any Given Sunday foregrounds corporeality –
both the brutality and, on occasions, beauty of the game (all to the rhythmic
strains of music by the likes of Fat Boy Slim and Gary Glitter), but also the
‘back stage’ management of the body that makes the visible sports performance
possible. The film shows the cold calculations of catastrophic injury, career
and players contracts, and the tolerance of needle-deadened pain, that keep the
sporting show on the road for the amusement of the paying spectators of
gladiatorial combat (as discussed below). That staple of team sports films, the
locker room motivational talk by the coach, is aired on several occasions as
an opportunity to connect homespun philosophies of sport and life. The
climactic moment, as in virtually every sports film that relies on substantial
on-field action, is an improbable, heart-stopping victory that saves the team and