The Best Sports Movies You've Never Seen

Soul of the Game (1996)
Director: Kevin Rodney Sullivan
Starring: Delroy Lindo, Blair Underwood, Mykelti Williamson
HBO Pictures, 94 minutes






It should be an interesting baseball season. As the game celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, Barry Bonds, a member of the shrinking club of African-Americans playing ball today, will in all likelihood become the new all-time home run king. (Something tells me that Bonds isn’t exactly what Robinson had in mind when he steeled himself to become the first of a long and celebrated line of black superstars in the big leagues.)

As the 2007 season unfolds, you can bet a handful of six-dollar hot dogs that Commissioner Bud Selig and company will look to maximize the amount of attention paid to the Robinson anniversary, and minimize the amount of attention paid to Bonds’s 756th homer. Which is a good thing, no doubt – what happened in Brooklyn in 1947 is still probably the most important single episode in the history of the game. But like any piece of history that ages, it starts suffering from the disease of simplification. I’m not so much talking about loose facts that get forgotten and distorted, but rather a neglect of the circumstances and context that existed before a great event like Robinson debuting for the Dodgers changed everything. In other words, as players wear the number 42 jersey for a day, and video tributes to Branch Rickey & Co. fill the jumbotrons, we’ll have to work hard to keep our minds on what came before 1947: segregation; the Negro Leagues; and the fact that there were hundreds of players before Jackie Robinson who could have played in the Majors, but were robbed of the opportunity because their skin was tan or darker. Here’s one way to do it: screen Soul of the Game, another in our list of great sports movies you probably haven’t seen.

It’s a film about three men: Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Jackie Robinson. The script contrives a fictional friendship between them in 1945, Robinson’s one year with the Kansas City Monarchs, in the months before he’d sign with the Dodgers. But just as I prepared to make a long list of other historical inaccuracies in the film, I actually found myself being impressed by the story’s repeated good-faith efforts to make allusions to small nuggets of the actual history (chronicled in Jules Tygiel’s essential Baseball’s Great Experiment, among others) surrounding the signing. Further, in most work on the screen, if the actors are good and they’re buying it, usually the viewer follows suit. Delroy Lindo as the cool and delightful Paige, Mykelti Williamson as the tortured and fading Gibson, and Blair Underwood as the brash and bright Robinson are all real good, and the rest works out accordingly.

Soul of the Game ends when Branch Rickey signs Robinson to a contract, which, in truth, was the beginning of the end for the Negro Leagues, which were soon rendered extinct by integration, and also a bittersweet event for the veteran Negro Leaguers who weren’t chosen as the player to break the color barrier. The film shows with dramatic effectiveness why the two most celebrated players of this category – Paige and Gibson – had a right to feel like they had been robbed, even if the younger, college-educated, Army veteran Robinson was undoubtedly the right choice.

And while Paige did eventually make it to the Major Leagues, and both legends were elected to the Hall of Fame, some six decades later, Barry Bonds’s journey to Home Run Number 756 calls to mind, in a way, the great tragedy of Paige and Gibson that the film conveys. The argument goes that Bonds’ questionably-earned place atop the career home run list will be corrupt among men like Henry Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Willie Mays in baseball’s holy bible, the record book. But isn’t it a much greater injustice that Josh Gibson isn’t among those names, and that Satchel Paige isn’t among the names of the game’s greatest pitching winners and strikeout artists? Robinson’s integration of Major League Baseball was a wonderful thing, but it couldn’t undo the damage already done by segregation. Soul of the Game makes that point clear.
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Aaron Cohen is a writer and producer at various joints in the sports television universe, most frequently HBO and NBC. His greatest sports memory is meeting Muhammad Ali at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney (ed. note - at Sydney he also met a lesser-known but no less proud fighter, a.k.a. DLarge). A close second is meeting Keith Hernandez at a Junior Mets Club event at a Queens YMCA in 1987. We've been trying to get him on the No Mas tip for a while - now we got him batting fifth and he's no doubt growing himself a bad moustache for the occasion.
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This post is part of our ongoing partnership with The Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival which runs from April 25 to May 26 right here in NYC.