20 Years Later, ‘Bull Durham’ Is Still a Classic

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↵This weekend marked the 20th anniversary of the release of Bull Durham, a movie that has become over the course of two decades one of the true stalwarts in the pantheon of great sports films. In fact, a number of polls across the internet sports universe have listed it as THE greatest sports movie of all time, with Rocky just as routinely listed as a close number two.↵
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As a Philly boy obsessed with boxing, I can’t abide this order of merit. But I come to praise Bull Durham not to damn it, and on that score the finest thing I can write is that in general I like Kevin Costner even less than I do Susan Sarandon and yet I still have enjoyed the movie every one of the thirty or so times I’ve watched it. I’ve come to feel that it’s The Great Gatsby of its genre, the perfect American baseball film, trading in every cliché in the book – from baseball Annies to hard-luck (hard-drinking) catchers to hard-throwing hotshots with their heads up their asses – and yet trading in them so effortlessly and with such an eye for detail and nuance that it’s as if all the sport’s great literature and cinema was condensed into this single light-hearted romantic comedy, one that in the end turns out to be just as much about getting old as it is about baseball.↵↵In fact, it’s not entirely clear on first viewing whether the sensibility that created Bull Durham even likes baseball, which to my mind is one of the film’s cardinal charms. This wasn’t a story cooked up by a Harvard boy drunk on Ken Burns and nostalgia, but an insider who’s been burned by his romance and now wields the secret bitterness of a broken heart.↵

↵↵You’re probably aware that Ron Shelton, who wrote and directed Bull Durham, was a minor league baseball player before he was a writer, which is one of those facts that once you know it you realize simply had to be true. Depending on how you feel about Cobb, Shelton has hit only one home run during his tenure as The Svengali of The Smart Sports Movie, while peppering in a few singles (White Men Can’t Jump, Tin Cup and, in my book, the aforementioned Cobb), and more than his share of miserable pieces of crap (The Best of Times, Blue Chips, and The Great White Hype to name a few).↵

↵↵But hey, Hollywood isn’t baseball. Artists don’t need to hit .300 to become immortal. Hell, you could argue that other than writing The Great Gatsby, ole Scott Fitzgerald never did anything but waste his time and drink a lot of beer. No matter, though – he’s a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer going away. Likewise for Shelton, who cooked up Crash Davis out of the embers of his dying flame and, well, knocked it out the park forever and all time. ↵

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