A grizzled coach, a training montage, a tearjerking finale, a lot of sweat … the well-worn tropes of the sports genre have been played to death on both small and big screens.
But the underdog at the centre of it all is usually male, reflecting a societal phobia of the idea that, yes, women can actually do sports as well. This staid representation might be slowly changing, though, with the launch of primetime drama Pitch, centred on the first woman to play in Major League baseball.
Taking a look back through a sparsely populated subgenre, here’s how other fictional women have fared.
A League of Their Own
Retelling the story of the short-lived All-American Girls Professional Baseball League with Madonna in one of the lead roles may sound like a terrible ploy made to cash in on her appeal during the height of her fame in the early 90s. But that’s the cynical interpretation. For those who walk on the sunny side of the street, this was an assured film directed by Laverne & Shirley’s Penny Marshall which brought America up to speed on an untold sports story from the second world war. The travails of the Rockford Peaches, managed by Tom Hanks playing the role of weather-beaten former player Jimmy Dugan, manages to pack in storylines about shifting gender roles at the mid-point of the American century, feminist solidarity and the intensely violent Pacific campaign fought towards the end of the second world war. Hanks and Bill Pullman serve as useful idiots for a female cast that do justice to women who set a precedent and started the glacial change in attitude towards women in US sport.
Million Dollar Baby
There are a couple of ways you could read Million Dollar Baby: a story of perseverance and grit, or a cautionary tale that ends so horribly it will make you think twice about going to CrossFit let alone stepping into a boxing ring. The film swept the board at the 2005 Oscars and saw Hillary Swank win best actress for her role as down-and-out waitress Maggie Fitzgerald, who believes her last chance lies in the ring but weather-beaten throwback trainer Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) “doesn’t train girls”. Except of course he does, otherwise this film wouldn’t exist. Despite the film’s flaws – Eastwood hogs much of the screen time, the other female boxers include a rather un-nuanced German ex-prostitute – Swank’s portrayal is still one of the most compelling of any female athlete on the big or small screen.
Whip It
Unlike most other films in the subgenre, Whip It doesn’t deal with a woman trying to thrive in a field typically dominated by men. In Drew Barrymore’s energetic directorial debut, the sport of roller derby is filled with nothing but women, marking this out as something of a greased-up unicorn. The grungy world was one that ultimately proved a bit too niche for audiences (the film crashed with $16m worldwide) but critics agreed that it was fertile and untapped ground for an updated tale of against all odds achievement, as Ellen Page’s spunky teen swapped her pageant crown for a pair of skates. Sexism was still on the agenda but rather than a bitter male contingent, it came from Marcia Gay Harden’s small-town mother who wanted her daughter to embrace a more traditional concept of femininity.
Love & Basketball
A muted release back in 2000 might not have been the slam-dunk that producer Spike Lee had hoped for, but this romantic drama has developed a curiously large cult following ever since. It’s easy to see why, given writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s unique and authentically realized story of a couple (Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps) falling in and out of love while trying to reach their separate dreams of basketball stardom. Up until that point, women shooting hoops on the big screen was unheard of (it’s been equally unexplored ever since) and it remains refreshing to see a sports movie playing out from a woman’s point of view and especially one that refuses to indulge our more traditionalist view of the genre, focusing on the long game rather than the easy win.
Hang Time
Hang Time was not a particularly sophisticated show but in the barren wasteland of fictional female characters playing sports on the small screen, it stands out as an important one nonetheless. It was a Saturday morning comedy that ran on NBC from 1995 to 2000 and focused on Julie Connor (played by Daniella Deutscher), who moves to Deering high school in Indiana from Chicago. She wants to join the basketball team and of course the boys have a major problem with that – so their coach and real-life former NBA player (played by Reggie Theus) has to convince them all that Julie is talented enough to join. Because this was essentially a show for kids, she manages to make the team in the very first episode. It’s a crude oversimplification of what would be an incredibly difficult process but it helped to show the captive young female audience that they could be something other than cheerleaders. Given that there are still so few examples of women as successful athletes on screen now, Hang Time deserves applause for attempting to change the game in 1995.
Bend it Like Beckham
Released during a period in British cinema when most comedies came with the word romantic attached, Gurinder Chadha’s breakout hit played out on a very different field. While protagonist Jess (played by Parminder Nagra) does have a very dashing love interest (played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers), her biggest passion is soccer, against her traditional Indian family’s wishes. It’s notable that her camaraderie with fellow team-mate Jules (played by Keira Knightley) is also what shines brighter than her romance. They don’t fall prey to a catty competitiveness that so often plagues women portrayed onscreen. They provide support and stability when outside characters are doing everything to break that. They are both actually good at soccer and integral to the team. Admittedly, there is a dramatic argument over a man but it’s swiftly resolved and the ultimate satisfaction at watching two young women excel on the soccer field is worth the odd quibble.
