1. "The
Triple Lindy," Back To School (1986)
The Grand
Lakes University diving team is down a man. They've just lost their best diver
(and state champion douchebag) to a fake leg cramp and it looks like they're
going to have to forfeit the big meet. So the coach (M. Emmet Walsh) surveys the
crowd and pulls out his trump card: A plump middle-aged businessman and
dedicated party animal, played by Rodney Dangerfield, who was once famous for
an impossible dive called "The Triple Lindy," but has, um, let himself go over
the years. (As owner of the "Tall And Fat" clothing chain, he has to look the
part.) The dive calls for a platform and three springboards, involves a series
of somewhat ill-formed back flips from one apparatus to another, and relies to
some degree on reading the wind correctly. It's probably safe to say that
Dangerfield didn't do his own stunts for this movie, but his googly-eyed
expressions do much of the dramatic heavy-lifting.
2. The
Limp-Wristed Javelin Throw, Revenge Of The Nerds (1984)
Facing a
stacked deck at the homecoming carnival, the physically puny but mentally
ripped pledges of Lambda Lambda Lambda devise an ingenious way to beat the more
athletically inclined Alpha Betas at their own game: They cheat. Spearheaded by
"master of aerodynamics" Wormser, the nerds design an ergonomically advanced
javelin that counteracts the effeminate Lamar's "limp-wristed" throwing style.
Though the sport of ancient Greek warriors typically rewards upper-body
strength, Lamar's girly toss surpasses the beefy Alpha Betas' best efforts by
several yards with a little help from science (and a dash of movie magic),
resulting in yet another triumph of mind over matter.
3. The
100-yard field goal, Gus (1976)
There's
nothing in the rulebook that say a mule can't play. In Disney's live-action
comedy Gus—billed
as "the league's leading laugh scorer" in the tagline—the California
Atoms are a hapless excuse for a professional football team, perennial
bottom-dwellers with no offensive firepower. (Perhaps ownership might have
considered replacing Tim Conway and Don Knotts on the coaching staff. Just a
thought.) By happenstance, they discover the team mascot, a mule named Gus, has
one hell of a back-kick when provoked out of his natural mule-like sloth. Now,
the Atoms don't need a decent offense: They can simply sit on the ball for three
downs and then have Gus boot it from 100 yards away with dead-on accuracy. In other words, he's
like Adam Vinatieri with a non-union, roughage-centered contract.
4. "The
Crane," The Karate Kid (1984)
"The Crane"
is an unbeatable move. How to defend against an opponent who's standing on one
leg with his arms stretched out and curled downward, in the shape of a
long-necked bird? You can try to run around it or dodge/block the only limb
that could possibly be used while the other three are occupied. But that's not
the way it works out in The Karate Kid, which culminates in a big tournament where Ralph
Macchio, a scrawny young outcast from Jersey, takes on the chief bully of Cobra
Kai dojo, which believes that mercy is for the weak and that certain situations
call for sweeping the leg. After a cheap shot cripples Macchio one point before
victory, he reaches into his back pocket for his master's peace-loving,
ass-kicking technique and his opponent does him the favor of leaning right into
it.
5. The 27-strikeout
perfect game, The Scout (1994)
At the end of the highly fitful comedy The Scout, over-the-hill baseball scout
Albert Brooks tells his number-one prospect—the preternatural, psychologically
damaged phenom Brendan Fraser—that it's okay if doesn't feel up to
pitching for the Yankees in the first game of the World Series. Touched by the
gesture of friendship, Fraser pulls himself together and wins Game One
single-handedly, by hitting two home runs and throwing 81 pitches—all
strikes—in the most ridiculously fantastical movie baseball game ever
played. Apparently no one ever told this kid that strikeouts are fascist.
6. Rocky
defeats Ivan Drago, Rocky IV (1985)
The Rocky series have served as the template
for many underdog sports movies that followed: The idea that a working-class
palooka from Philly could triumph against the best boxers in the world are a
shining example of how can-do spirit and gumption can triumph over superior
training and skills. (It's the American way!) But the tale of the tape in Rocky
IV was a little
ridiculous, even for a series that had "The Italian Stallion" outdueling Mr. T:
In the red, white, and blue corner, there's Rocky Balboa, played by a 39-year-old
Sylvester Stallone, who couldn't reach 6-feet in platform heels; and in the
hammer-and-sickle corner, there's Ivan Drago, played by an actor over a decade
his junior, and towering over him at 6'5" of pure muscle. What's more, Drago
has the most sophisticated, high-tech training regimen in the world while
Balboa still relies mainly on raw slabs of beef and whatever inspiration he can
cull from his gang of colorful losers. But hey, this is America: If a ragtag
bunch of guys could best the Soviet hockey team in the 1980 games, then surely
Stallone can go back to the well one more time.
7. The Pediatric Cancer-Curing Home Run, The
Babe Ruth Story (1948)
When
John Goodman starred as Babe Ruth in the 1992 stinker The Babe, he tried his damnedest
to make the worst baseball biopic the world had ever seen. Unfortunately, he
was up against one film that will hold on to that title long after all of
Ruth's records have been forgotten: 1948's The Babe Ruth Story, in which a hopelessly
out of his league William Bendix plays the Sultan Of Swat. Fans will dispute
until the end of time whether or not Babe actually called his shot in the 1932
World Series, but according to The Babe Ruth Story, he could do a lot more
than that. In one of the movie's most infamous (and oft-parodied) moments, Ruth
visits a dying child in a hospital, and not only promises that he'll hit him a pair of home runs, but
delivers on his promise. So mighty is the force of Babe Ruth's wallop that the
little boy is immediately cured of whatever was ailing him and, presumably,
grows up to be Mr. Rogers.
8. "The
Pamchenko," The Cutting Edge (1992)
In The
Cutting Edge,
spoiled literal ice princess Moira Kelly and working-class former hockey star D.B.
Sweeney need something to make their Olympic pairs ice-skating routine really
sing—besides, of course, their undeniable feelings for each other. What
they need is a killer move that will send them skating right to the gold medal.
What they need is "The Pamchenko," a move so dangerous, so bold, so utterly
awe-inspiring, that we only see reaction shots to it, and a sequence of blurry,
slo-mo skating shots clunkily edited together. But even though we never get to
actually see the entirety of the Pamchenko, it sounds like a pretty astounding
feat. Here is what we know about The Pamchenko:
1. Their
Russian coach has been working on it for 20 years, and has the old, yellowed
notebook pages full of skating diagrams to prove it.
2. It's a
bounce spin into a throw twist, and Sweeney is supposed to catch her.
3. It
might be illegal.
Take all
of those facts, combine them with a grueling training montage that nearly
cracks open Kelly's (or her stunt double's) head, and the Pamchenko is
basically as dangerous as pairs ice skating gets.
[pagebreak]
9. "The
Iron Lotus," Blades Of Glory (2007)
In pairs
skating, the only evidence of the mythic "Iron Lotus" comes from a bootleg
cassette out of North Korea, perhaps the only nation rogue enough to sanction
such a deadly maneuver. With Kim Jong-il looking on, a couple tries to pull off
the harrowing swings and twists that go into the move, and, in the words of
American coach Craig T. Nelson, "they almost had it" before the routine ended
with the male skater accidentally beheading his female partner with his flying
blade. Nelson believes that with a pairs skating team of two men (super-macho
sex machine Will Ferrell and feathery-haired finesse guy Jon Heder), they might
have the combined strength to pull it off. He's right, of course, and they
manage to pull off the Lotus by a neck whisker. Good thing, too, because the
rest of the routine doesn't match the peerless form of the previous pair, who
brought the passion and drama of the JFK-Marilyn Monroe affair to life.
10. The game-winning putt, Happy Gilmore (1996)
In Happy Gilmore's climactic golfing
scene, Adam Sandler must sink a lengthy putt in order to beat the evil Shooter
McGavin and save his grandmother's house. (Don't ask.) The shot is complicated
further when, just as he's about to putt—using his modified hockey stick—a
giant metal viewing tower, which had been precariously perched on an old VW
Beetle (don't ask), falls right in his way. His arch nemesis insists that
Sandler "play it as it lies," and the tournament director agrees. Instead of
two-putting around it and sending the match into "sudden death," Sandler takes
all the knowledge that he learned while mini-golfing and sends the ball through
an incredible Rube Goldberg device—off the Beetle, down a conspicuously
placed Subway restaurant sign, down several lengths of broken grandstand, and
eventually out a piece of pipe, right into the hole. It's not totally
outlandish, though—Sandler credits the ghost of his mentor Chubbs (played
by Carl Weathers) for helping him sink it.
11. A
12-year-old with a Nolan Ryan fastball, Rookie Of The Year (1993)
Thomas Ian
Nicholas is the worst little-leaguer around, one of those kids that coaches sub
into games for the obligatory inning or two and stick in left field, hoping
that nothing gets out of the infield. So it's an act of mercy when Nicholas
slips on a ball and ruptures his shoulder, even though the doctor has situated
his cast so it looks like he's always raising his hand. Shortly after he
recovers, his dad takes him to a Chicago Cubs game, where he catches a home run
in the bleachers and (as is customary in Wrigley when the visitor hits a
dinger) throws it back onto the field… all the way to the catcher's mitt. It
seems the tendons in his right arm has reset in such a way that he can throw
the ball at bionic, 100 m.p.h. velocity. The Cubs sign him, he becomes an
instant sensation, and he gets the starting job in the standard "big game,"
where he finally gets his girly arm back at the most inopportune moment.
Formulaic wackiness ensues.
12. The Flubber Dunk, The Absent-Minded
Professor (1961)
In
this Disney kid-flick, Fred MacMurray—a long, long way from trading
salacious quips with Barbara Stanwyck—plays a chemistry professor at
Medfield College who invents a super-energetic, physics-defying goop called "flubber,"
or "flying rubber." Unfortunately, his first attempt to market it, by bouncing
a superball made of the stuff, is sunk by his profoundly boring presentation,
so he has to do something a little bit showier. At Medfield's big game, he
coats the soles of the basketball team's sneakers with flubber, and the next
thing you know, they're sailing over the heads of their opponents on the way to
lucrative NBA endorsement deals. The
Absent-Minded Professor was remade twice—once with Harry Anderson and once
with Robin Williams in the title role—proving that there's nothing
producers ad moviegoers alike want to see more than a white guy who can jump.
13. Angels in the Outfield, Angels in the
Outfield (1994)
In
1955, a musical called Damn Yankees appeared on Broadway in which a frustrated
Washington Senators fan sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for his team
unseating New York and winning the pennant. (Presumably, the dismal history of
baseball in Washington since then has been Satan collecting his due.) In 1994,
Disney produced a movie called Angels in the Outfield—itself a remake
of a 1951 film—in which God personally intervenes in the pennant race of
the Angels in order to bring happiness to the life of a scrappy lad played by a
young Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In
order to help the kid realize his broken dreams, God sends down a bunch of
angelic figures who help the crappy southern California team get to the
post-season. While it's nice that God occasionally helps out like that, He
could have just waited a while for Vladimir Guerrero to show up; and the
continued existence of Bud Selig proves that, even today, Satan is a far more
powerful influence in baseball.
14. Home
run off the lights, The Natural (1984)
The ending
of The Natural—a
perennial baseball-movie favorite, adapted from Bernard Malamud's
novel—adheres to the logic that if you're going to sell out the source
material, you might as well go all the way. Malamud's book about a hot pitching
prospect (here played by Robert Redford) who gets shot down in his prime and
stages a comeback as an aging slugger evokes such baseball legends as "Shoeless"
Joe Jackson, Ted Williams, Branch Rickey, and Babe Ruth. Only in the Malamud
version, the hero strikes out in the end. In the movie, directed by Barry
Levinson, he instead hits perhaps the most dramatic homer in film history, a
towering shot that smashes through the lights (estimated distance: 600 feet)
and causes a chain reaction that showers the field in sparks. With Randy
Newman's unforgettable score hitting crescendo, it's a moment that's as
thrilling as it is fraudulent.
15. Outrunning
a cheetah (among other things), The World's Greatest Athlete (1973)
The cheetah
is the fastest land animal, capable of reaching speeds upwards of 70 m.p.h. To
put that in perspective Summer Olympics sensation Usain Bolt, the fastest man
ever to run the 100m dash, did so at around 23 m.p.h., not factoring in the
chest-thumping braggadocio that might have slowed his closing speed slightly.
But neither cheetahs nor Bolt have anything on Jan-Michael Vincent's Nanu in
the Disney live-action comedy The World's Greatest Athlete, which turns on the discovery of a
Tarzan-like super-athlete in the African brush. All sorts of inane, vaguely
offensive hijinks ensue, as Nanu gets recruited by a tiny college and shatters
records in every track-and-field event he enters, thanks in miniscule part of
Vincent's athletic prowess and in much larger part by the Benny Hill effects.
16.
"The Flying V," The Mighty Ducks (1992) and D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994)
The
problem with hockey: Fun in person, boring on television. Perhaps that's why
Disney relied so heavily on ridiculous gimmicks to keep kiddies glued to the Mighty
Ducks series, so
much to the point that it becomes known in the film as "Duck trickery." The
most memorable example is, of course, "The Flying V" (no, it's not related to
the guitar), where all five players skate up the ice in migrating-bird
formation, passing the puck back and forth between them and confusing the hell
out of the defense (presumably because of the speed of passing, not the
preposterousness of the strategy) until one shoots and scores. By the sequel, D2, the Ducks were only able to milk
this gag for two goals overall, until Disney realized it has ran its course and
opposing teams learned how to defend it. That's okay, there was plenty more
where that came from, including the triple deke, the shotgun slapshot, and,
most ludicrous, the "knuckle puck."