Sports Films

SPORTS FILMS AND RACE

With the exception of two 1930s films, Spirit of Youth (1938) and Keep Punching (1939), which were made for black audiences, African Americans appeared only as secondary characters (if at all) in feature-length sports movies from the coming of sound through the beginning of the civil rights movement. Until the 1950s most of the infrequent appearances by black characters were in films about prizefighting, such as Golden Boy and Body and Soul , probably because it was the least exclusionary professional sport for reasons of race. Similar to the representation of women in classic Hollywood films, blacks functioned in these narratives of white, male self-definition through athletic competition as either supportive—but self-negating—helpers, or occasionally (along with Mexican or Chicano characters) as opponents: obstacles which the protagonists overcome in order to realize their heroic identities. A cycle of Hollywood films in the early 1950s, including The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), The Harlem Globetrotters (1951), and The Joe Louis Story (1953), featured black athletes and followed closely on the opening of previously all-white professional sports to African Americans just after World War II, but these were stories of self-reliance and white paternalism that attempted to deemphasize social determinants of racial identity.

In the 1980s and 1990s the National Basketball Association (NBA) became an important part of an increasingly spectacular, globalized, and racialized American popular culture. Broadcast revenues for the league rose 1,000 percent between 1986 and 1998 as the NBA's bursts of action highlighted by dunks and three-point shots fit smoothly into the fast-paced flow of spectacle that has come to dominate television and increasingly the movies. During this period Michael Jordan replaced Muhammad Ali as the best known American athlete worldwide. A big part of the NBA's greater appeal both in the United States and abroad came from its spectacle of black style, headlined for most of this period by Jordan; because more than 80 percent of the players are African American, the league exemplifies how cultural difference has become a hot commodity.

Several movies about basketball made during the period of the NBA's ascendancy incorporate the new difference. Michael Jordan figures in several of these films, starring in Space Jam (1996), appearing in He Got Game (1998), and invoked by White Men Can't Jump (1992), Hoop Dreams (1994), and The Air Up There (1994). With Jordan leading the way, what sold the NBA and the basketball movies made during the 1980s and 1990s was what Nelson George calls an "African American aesthetic." (p. xv). This aesthetic features constructions of black masculinity that correspond roughly to traditional positions about identity in the African American community. On the one hand there is Jordan's creative improvisation, grounded in black cultural tradition, yet also distinctive in the degree of its crossover appeal and in its use as proof that (some) blacks have access to the American dream. Almost as widely commodified, but with a less sanguine view of race in America, has been its flip side, the hypermasculine menace and intimidation represented in professional basketball by Charles Barkley, Shaquille O'Neal, and others, their "gangsta" personae overlapping to some degree with those of certain rap performers. Basketball films that portray this latter version of black manhood include White Men Can't Jump , Space Jam , and Above the Rim (1994).