The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training: A Novel Approach to Cinema
Author: Josh Wilker
Date: 2011-06-14 00:00:00+00:00
Description: In 1977, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training had a moment in the sun. A glowing junk sculpture of American genres—sports flick, coming-of-age story, family melodrama, after-school special, road narrative—the film cashed in on the previous year’s success of its predecessor, The Bad News Bears. Arguing against the sequel’s dismissal as a cultural afterthought, Josh Wilker lovingly rescues from the oblivion of cinema history a quintessential expression of American resilience and joy. Rushed into theaters by Paramount when the beleaguered film industry was suffering from “acute sequelitis,” th
Publisher: Catapult
Rights: Copyright © 2011 by Josh Wilker

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter 1 - Stolen Vehicle

Flaws

Cheeseburger

All the Roads

Unstoppable Decline

The Shark

Love in the Time of Sequelitis

The Coolest Kid Who Ever Lived

The Bell Tolls for Thee, Timmy Lupus

Who to Be? How to Be? Why?

Chapter 2 - World Unraveling

Are Your Children Safe?

The Van

Running on Empty

Kelly on Foot

Ogilvie on Borrowed Time

Chapter 3 - Let Them Play

The Blue Bicycle

Refusing Disconnection

Refusing the End

Acknowledgments

Copyright Page

Josh Wilker

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training

JOSH WILKER studied writing at Johnson State College and Vermont College. He writes about his life through his childhood baseball cards at http://cardboardgods.net and in his book Cardboard Gods (2010). He lives with his wife in Chicago.

also available in this series:

They Live by Jonathan Lethem

Death Wish by Christopher Sorrentino

The Sting by Matthew Specktor

Lethal Weapon by Chris Ryan

Heathers by John Ross Bowie

1

Stolen Vehicle

Dear Looper,

This will probably end up in a cruddy post office dumpster. No one is ever where they were. I found it while clearing out some junk after my old man croaked. A billion years ago I probably wanted to send it to you from Houston but we came right back too fast. Recognize the picture on the front? It is nothing now. They want to tear it down. I remember when we first saw it from inside. We walked out onto the field and wowed like a pack of stumbling drunks. The crowd the giant scoreboard the dome roof way up high. It was the best thing and I mean ever. You should have been there Looper and you were you always will be. Thats all I wanted to say.

Your pal,
Tanner Boyle

Flaws

Love has nothing to do with perfection. The world is bandaged together, a fractured thing at best. Light leaks out the cracks. That’s how I try to see it.

So let me start with a brief, relatively inconsequential moment in the latter stages of the 1977 sequel The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. A flaw. The central figure, an under-appreciated and largely forgotten American icon named Kelly Leak, troubled and rebellious star slugger of a Little League baseball team, the Bears, is shown in full, from the side, reaching to pull back the curtain in his hotel room. The next shot shows Kelly’s arm and the view out the uncovered window.

The view is an enclosed stadium in Houston, Texas: the Astrodome. The outside of the Astrodome has been shown once before from another vantage point and will be shown once more, later, from a third, just before the film moves inside the stadium for its climactic final act. No matter the vantage point, the view always looks the same: a large, impersonal, symmetrical structure surrounded by pavement. In the earlier shot, Kelly considered the Astrodome from behind the wheel of a customized van. Later, he will gaze upon it from the parking lot at dusk. The three viewings of the Astrodome seem, considering Kelly’s pensive squint and the swelling orchestral regalia in the soundtrack, to be meant as moments of reckoning, as if Kelly is grappling with the sense that his destiny lies within the looming symmetrical construction.

I never really understood the idea of destiny. Life seems random to me, asymmetrical, entropic. It doesn’t add up. I find myself drawn to ragged narratives, bumbling human sincerity, the flawed. Which brings us back around, finally, to this: in the brief scene in the hotel room, Kelly is shown in full, from the side, pulling the drapes toward his body; then in the next shot, which is aimed out the window at the Astrodome, at the idea of destiny, Kelly’s arm is visible, and it is pushing the drapes away from his body.

It’s a continuity mistake. The interior shot was taken in a hotel in California while the view of the Astrodome was taken in Houston. And so somewhere in between the two shots, the tiny detail of whether Kelly was pulling the drapes toward him or pushing them away was fumbled. It’s probably not something you would consciously notice unless you watched the movie repeatedly, as I have. But somewhere in your subconscious an undercutting, discordant note would sound, a little jagged flicker, a minute puncturing and subsequent infinitesimal deflation of an ideal. Symmetry, destiny: illusions.

This movie, which I loved at first sight as much as I’ve ever loved any movie, is sprinkled with these subtly unsettling fuckups. It was cheaply and quickly made. Unimportant objects appear and disappear unaccountably. East is west, dusk is dawn. Shadows of camera equipment and boom mikes flicker in and out of one scene and a muffled, disembodied voice bleeds into another. The away team is the home team. The home team is the away team. Rules are blurred, batting orders jumbled. Upon close inspection, the movie begins to resemble a dream in the mind of a sleeper on the edge of waking: all these clues about the falseness of the imaginary world begin to impose themselves, yet the dream persists, an unraveling wonder.

Something is always pulling me out of one world and into another. I want to keep dreaming, and if I can’t do that, if I have to wake, I want at least to remember everything from the vanishing world of my dreams all the way down to the smallest mistakes.

Cheeseburger

In 1977, everything was unraveling. Families, hopes, economies. What to do? Some drifted, others flailed. The overwhelmed president seemed to be aging at an alarming rate. Skylab, a dull echo of the space program’s earlier glory, circled the globe in a repetitive, empty progression toward the inevitable disintegration of its orbit. Everyone stared at TV reruns.

Who wouldn’t capitulate if authorities in suits appeared and reported that time had run out? If they pointed to their watches and said, apologies, the game is over, please clear the field, who wouldn’t exhale and maybe grouse or grieve but then obey?

The climactic game in the exemplary film from an era of unraveling reaches this exact point. The Bad News Bears are waved off the plastic Astrodome turf by men in charge. Not all of the innings have been played, but the game was always really more of a product than a game, a Budweiser promotion jammed in the middle of a major league doubleheader, and the allotted time for this promotion has been exhausted. It is time, boys, to accept your inconsequentiality and give up and go home.

With varying intervals of hesitation, the Bears begin to comply. Toby, Jimmy, Jose, Miguel, Ahmad, Engelberg, Ronzonni. Even Kelly Leak, the previously untamable rebel, shuffles off the field to the dugout, passing the Bears’ new coach, his estranged father, Mike Leak, who argues with the umpires briefly, to no avail. Is this the beginning of the end for Kelly Leak? Will this capitulation in a time of unraveling be the first of many in a life that will in turn grow smaller and smaller as it goes on, the seeming infinity of roads once at Kelly Leak’s fingertips shrinking eventually to a repetitive strip of pavement from rental dwelling to wage-slavery and back, again and again until the final capitulation?

It might have been the end, for Kelly and for us all, if not for Tanner Boyle. The line score of the game on the giant scoreboard in centerfield has vanished. A message has appeared in its place thanking the Bears and their apparently victorious opponents, the Toros. The expanse of Astroturf is empty except for one small boy at shortstop.

“Hey, where’s everybody going?” Tanner Boyle yelps. Everyone else has quit, but he’s holding his ground. I’ve watched The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training a lot, repeatedly, chronically. But I still get tears in my eyes when it comes to this. Is everything unraveling? Is it all over and done? Tanner’s piercing voice rings out in the vast sterile space of the Dome.

“We’re not finished!” he says.

In 1977, the struggling Paramount movie empire attempted to hold its ground against the unraveling of its profits by putting a successful young ABC television honcho named Michael Eisner in charge. The future catalyst of a ferocious worldwide metastasizing of Disney revenue streams had a solution for his new employer’s woes. He wanted to seize on projects with demonstrable moneymaking potential and churn them out rapidly and cheaply, as he’d done at ABC.

The strategy resembled in both its mass-production-based means and its consumer-enticing ends the wildly successful business plans of transnational fast food behemoths. Don Simpson, a midlevel executive who would quickly rise up in Eisner’s revamped version of Paramount and go on to strike it rich as a producer of blockbuster crowd pleasers in the 1980s, coined a phrase for the key element in the kind of movies that would revive Paramount: these hastily assembled commodities needed to have “cheeseburger heart.”

In 1977, everything was beginning. I was finally old enough to join my brother on his Little League team. I was nine and he was eleven, a big kid, one of the stars. In one game, I poked a single into right and was standing on first when Ian came to bat.

“Back up!”

“Back up!”

“Back up!”

This was the call echoing across the outfield. I watched them all move toward the fence, then I turned and watched my brother get into his Hank Aaron stance. I didn’t want the season to end.

A couple weeks after it did, we boarded a Greyhound and the roads got bigger as they carried the two of us from our home in Vermont to our father in Manhattan. We’d been coming to New York once a year for three years, since our parents had separated. Dad visited us sometimes, but our visits to him were different from the times he came to us. Witnessing all those widening highways through the Greyhound window, all the drivers and riders in all the cars and trucks and vans, somehow made the visits to Manhattan more tentative, more fragile. By the time we saw Dad standing outside the bus in the underground terminal in Port Authority, in his glasses and blue button-down shirt and gray slacks, a New York Times under his arm, all the roads between us had made him a stranger. We got off the bus, claimed our bags, said hello. Stood there.

“Well, what shall we do now?” he asked.

This was always the question. The two of us eyed the newspaper under Dad’s arm. We always answered his question with one of our own.

“What’s playing?”

Michael Eisner decided quickly on the first cheeseburger to roll off the assembly line. The year before, The Bad News Bears had been a big hit for Paramount, and if the success in America of fast food franchises teaches anything, it’s that one good cheeseburger deserves another, as similar to that first cheeseburger as possible without seeming stale.

“Within a month of my arrival at Paramount,” Eisner wrote in his 1998 autobiography, Work in Progress, “we sat down together with the writer Paul Brickman and managed to knock out a sequel to The Bad News Bears.”

We hid from one another together in the movies. Once in a while we squeezed in a trip to a museum, Dad’s choice, or a trip to Shea Stadium to see baseball, our choice. When we stopped for meals I always wanted the same thing.

“Cheeseburger,” I said.

Empty moments kept looming. We reached for Dad’s newspaper.

“What’s playing?” my brother said.

“What’s playing?” I said.

Sequels, slapstick, gimmickry, kid stuff. The Spy Who Loved Me, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, Rollercoaster (in Sensurround).

Star Wars.

We saw them all. We saw Star Wars twice. We planned to see Star Wars a third time. We also planned to experience, finally, the wonder of Sensurround. The whole theater would become the epicenter of a terrible calamity, everything on fire, everything crumbling, everything a series of blinding explosions, and we’d be right in the middle of it all, giggling and amazed. It seemed to us in our imaginings to be the highest peak the movies had ever reached, if not the pinnacle of all human endeavor to that point.

“Sensurround,” Ian whispered.

“Sensurround,” I replied.

From my birth year of 1968 to the mid-1970s death knell rumblings of Sensurround: has there been a better period for great American directors and films? Altman, Peckinpah, Scorsese, Coppola, and many others were at the height of their artistic powers at that time. Among the Hollywood masterpieces of that brief, unprecedented flowering of personal vision: The Wild Bunch, Easy Rider, Chinatown, Nashville, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Mean Streets, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Graduate, Taxi Driver, Five Easy Pieces, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. I could go on and on.

The year I turned nine, 1977, was the end of all this, not that I noticed it at the time. The director William Friedkin (The Exorcist) put it this way in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: “Star Wars swept all of the chips off the table. What happened with Star Wars was like when McDonald’s got a foothold, the taste for good food just disappeared. Now we’re in a period of devolution. Everything has gone backward toward a big sucking hole.”

The first Bad News Bears film sprung to life just before that big hole opened and started to suck. A model film from the 1968–1976 Hollywood golden age, the original Bears movie is widely considered to be a classic. It featured funny, moving performances from both of its well-known stars, Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neal (both past winners of the Academy Award), and broke ground by bringing the gritty realism that characterized many of the best films of the era into new contexts, most famously in its use of foul-mouthed, wiseass child characters, and in being the first film about America’s national pastime to end with that most bitingly realistic of sports outcomes : a loss.

The sequel, which was notably—and many would argue damnably—absent both Matthau and O’Neal, has never been the beneficiary of similar critical acclaim. If mentioned at all in critical surveys, it is quickly dismissed as a cheap, inessential knockoff, a throwaway movie, the profit-driven cinematic equivalent of a flimsy, mass-produced toy designed to entertain a nine-year-old for a few minutes before snapping into pieces.

Near the end of our visit, after we’d exhausted almost all the movie options and were down to just Star Wars for the third time and the miracle of Sensurround, which we were intentionally holding for last, I saw for the first time the newspaper ad for The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.

It was 1977. You could say everything was unraveling. But for me, everything was beginning.

In the ad, a pack of boys my age, many in baseball uniforms, careened down the road in a customized van literally spilling over its sides with the boisterous life within, a motorcycle policeman in pursuit. A fat kid up front laughed as he readied to chomp into a chicken leg. A curly-haired, bespectacled kid leaned in next to him, loosing a Bronx cheer. Another Bronx cheer was offered by a team member leaning out the back, aiming his mockery at the cop. Other teammates shoved one another and laughed, or guzzled soda, or blew big bubbles, or brandished a bat out the window, or stared goggle-eyed at a nudie magazine. The Astrodome was off in the distance, and a banner saying HOUSTON ASTRODOME OR BUST hung from the side of the van. Another homemade banner, much smaller, hung over the license plate in the front and read, in childish lettering, STOLEN. One team member rode atop the van like a rodeo cowboy. Debris from the moving bacchanalia flew out the back. Above the image, the words “Breaking Training” were spelled out in lettering festooned with other signifiers of wild adolescent times, including a bikini top and bottom, a champagne bottle popping its cork, a piece of pizza, a burning cigar, lipstick, a high-heeled shoe, and (perhaps at the suggestion of Don Simpson) a steaming-hot cheeseburger.

The driver of the van wore a felt fedora, dark sunglasses, and a bead necklace. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, and a pack of cigarettes poked out of the rolled-up sleeve of his T-shirt. He steered with one arm. The other arm hung out the open driver’s-side window. He was completely unfazed by either the childish chaos inside the van or the dire implications of the cop in teeth-gritting pursuit.

I hadn’t seen the first Bad News Bears movie. I didn’t know the mysterious figure at the wheel. I didn’t know anyone. But I knew this was the dream I most wanted to dream. A dream of baseball, of junk food, of the most uncomplicated happiness there could ever be, on the road with no one but other boys just like me, a baseball game to play, a season still alive, the coolest kid who ever lived at the wheel.

All the Roads

All the roads of the pioneers

All the roads of Walt Whitman, pioneer o pioneer

All the roads crass and pure, all the pulses of the earth

All the roads of Woody Guthrie and the Joads, of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, of James Dean and Chuck Berry

All the roads of Hunter S. Thompson and Ken Kesey and Steve McQueen, all the roads of Easy Rider and Bruce Springsteen and Thelma and Louise

All the roads of hunger and consumption and that shiny barbed lure, the dream of freedom

All the roads of guttering star-spangled hope and embargos and ghosts

All the roads of the stranded, the wanting, the young, the old

All the roads of malaise, all the omens of empire collapse

All the roads real and dreamed, here and gone, of mine

All the roads to my loved ones, all the roads away

All the roads of cheeseburgers always the same

All the roads of flickering awe
All lead to a longhaired teen
Driving a stolen vehicle
World unraveling
To a game

Unstoppable Decline

With just a few days left of our visit to our dad in the summer of 1977, the plan was simple: Star Wars again, then Sensurround, then the dream I now most wanted to dream. Baseball, cheeseburgers, laughter, the road.

But then, like a cheap toy, the whole city broke.

One hundred seven stories high over Manhattan, a group of diners at the World Trade Center’s skyscraping restaurant Windows on the World downed their digestifs, took a last glance at the stunning lightshow below, and crowded into the waiting down elevator. The doors slid shut. The elevator didn’t budge. Somebody stabbed irritably at the button. Nothing happened. Somebody else got the doors open and the passengers free. “The elevator’s out,” one of them huffily informed a white-jacketed captain. The captain shrugged toward the nightscape outside, gone suddenly inky black. “So’s New York,” he replied.

—PETER GOLDMAN
“Heart of Darkness,” Newsweek, July 25, 1977

Since his retirement, my father, Louis Wilker, has immersed himself in the dense tomes of world-system theory. Though I don’t have a firm grasp on the particulars of this discipline, I associate it with the tendency of my conversations with my father to circle around to declarations of an ongoing and worsening worldwide collapse.

“Capitalism has reached its limits,” he told me over the phone recently.

The World Trade Center buildings on a hot July night, going dark. The World Trade Center buildings on a clear blue autumn morning, gashed, smoking, trembling. The Astrodome empty as ancient ruins. The Astrodome glutted with storm-battered people with nowhere else to go. Evidence, all of it, of a crumbling system.

This time, we’d gotten around to considering a gravely endangered civilization by way of my questions to my father about New York City in July 1977. I wanted to get his memories about those days when a power failure plunged the city and all its people, including the three of us, into darkness. I remembered how, in the first full day of the blackout, my father, my brother, and I had held hands while walking carefully down six pitch-black flights of stairs. Or did I just make that up? (I’m always inventing bullshit when I need to believe it.) My dad offered no help in the matter of sentimental details, real or imagined. He stuck pretty close to the wideangle lens of his preferred worldview.

“Yes, well, the global economy had reached the end of its postwar boom by then,” he said. “The mid- to late-1970s were the beginning of an unstoppable decline.”

So I’m on my own to envision the particulars. It’s a sweltering July that year, 1977. The electricity, or more specifically the air conditioning, comes back on in midtown first, and desperate to escape the heat we rush to a double feature in Sensurround, Midway and Rollercoaster. Sensurround isn’t as great as my brother and I had hoped it would be. It’s like riding the subway over tracks in need of some minor repairs. The next day, my brother and I get back on a Greyhound and ride away from our father, up to Vermont, the blackout having thwarted our plan to see Star Wars for a third time and then the movie about the boys in the customized van.

Back home, I spend most of my days tossing a tennis ball off the roof, imagining a giant roofball tournament leading to the championship of the world. We live out in the country, no other kids nearby. It’s one of the reasons that the ad for the movie with the customized van packed with boys my age exerted such a pull. One day near the end of that summer, my mother drives me up and over the mountain to a friend’s house for a sleepover. He lives in town, where there are lots of other kids and stores and even a movie theater. In the afternoon he grabs two mitts and an aluminum bat and we walk a couple hundred yards from his house to a grassy lot in the unclaimed corner of a cemetery.

There are kids all over the field. Standing and leaning and crouching, pounding their gloves, chattering, calling to one another, laughing. I can’t believe it. I thought baseball was over. The pitcher uses a tennis ball, which everyone lambasts. On the longest shots the outfielders have to slalom through the graves to retrieve the ball and you can run forever. Think of the sound the aluminum bat makes on contact with the fuzzy yellow ball.

Thock!

Again and again, all afternoon long, that sunlit chuckle, as if from the throat of God. I don’t want the game to end. I don’t want 1977 to end. We play into the dusk and even beyond, just a little glimmer in the sky and all of us below little more than voices calling to one another. Someone hits a shot far into the outfield. Thock. It bounds beyond the outfielders and into the cemetery. The batter rounds the bases whooping and laughing. The infielders eventually follow the outfielders out toward the graves, and then when they don’t come back the team at bat goes out there, too. All of us weave through the rows of low stone markers. But it’s gotten too dark, and no one can find the ball.

We leave the graveyard and walk through the darkened town to the movies. Fireflies. Stars. That summer feeling. As we get close I see a poster near the door: kids flying down the road in a customized van.

The Shark

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training opens with a shot of a Little League field. Players are gathering for a practice. The first time I saw it, I gave myself over entirely to its world within seconds. I fell progressively deeper in love with the movie as it went on, drawn in by the story and the wide-open sincere wonder of the boys and the charisma of Kelly Leak and, not least of all, by a progression of things. Cool things. Kelly Leak’s motorcycle, the customized van, the Astrodome, the rainbow uniforms of the real-life Houston Astros. The first of these cool things appeared before my eyes within seconds of the curtain opening at the Playhouse movie theater in Randolph, Vermont: skateboards. The third and fourth characters to appear onscreen in the sequel, Jimmy and Toby, arrive at the Little League field on skateboards. I can be fairly certain that seeing this caused me to shiver with excitement.

I have watched this opening many times since then. Most recently I watched it moments after a careful viewing of The Bad News Bears in its entirety. In such close proximity to the first movie, the second movie instantly conveyed a feeling of thinness. The first movie possesses a gravity and depth in its characters and settings, as if it has been lifted wholesale from the fabric of the life of a real suburban town. In the second movie, in this latest viewing of mine, I felt almost instantly a gnawing sense of the provisional and threadbare. I often get this feeling: deep life is elsewhere.

Before Jimmy and Toby appear on skateboards, a cheerful old man is shown tooling around on a riding lawnmower across the fields of an abandoned athletic complex. He will turn out to be an empty-headed imbecile whom the Bears prop up as a figurehead, their supposed coach. He will turn out to be, in terms of his role in the plot, a fake.

The second character shown onscreen is a fat kid laboring on a bicycle, another fake of a different, more insidious type, in that in the sequel the actor playing Engelberg, the team’s fat kid, is not the same actor who originated the role.

Indeed, fakery is a central theme of the movie, both intentionally and unintentionally, and I’ll address the two Engelbergs and all the other faking soon, but I need to first try to connect to something real. As Kerouac once said in “MacDougal Street Blues,” a poem illuminating the fakery embedded in this transitory existence: I want to be sincere. I need to try to feel how I felt when I watched and loved The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training for the first time, in a movie theater full of other late-summer superstars.

There are no straight paths back to that summer feeling. There may be no way to get back there at all. But I’ll try a detour and describe a long-gone artifact from my past. I first became aware of it while leafing through the Sears catalog. This catalog was a big deal for a while during my childhood. Since we lived in the country, leafing through the catalog was the closest I could come to shopping in a store. I got my Toughskins jeans and my Captain America sweatshirt from the Sears catalog. But the thing I wanted the most, the thing I felt incomplete without from the first moment I saw it, was a thin yellow skateboard, the Shark.

Sharks pervaded pop culture at this time, of course; indeed, you could argue that the big sucking hole that William Friedkin associated with the success of Star Wars may have actually begun opening two years earlier, like the jagged-toothed maw of a great white, when Steven Spielberg made his first massive box-office killing with Jaws. I hadn’t seen Jaws, but I’d read the Mad Magazine parody of it, and had otherwise absorbed some of the cultural mania over sharks (just about a month after I first saw the Bears sequel, Michael Eisner’s former employer, ABC, cashed in on the trend by climaxing a multipart Happy Days saga with what would years later become the very definition of irreversible pop-cultural artistic decay: Fonzie on water skis in shorts and his leather jacket, jumping a shark), so to me, the name “the Shark” gave the yellow skateboard for sale by mail order from Sears a mean, hip, dangerous, alluring edge.

Also, my brother had begun to get interested in skateboards, a poster of airborne Tony Alva going up on his wall, so getting the Shark must have appealed to me as a way to try to connect with Ian and with the whole cool, colorful 1970s world of fads.

I got it for my ninth birthday just a few months before seeing The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. That first moment of holding it in my hands! That moment is worth something, isn’t it? Before all the other moments of dissolution, of discovering the inherent fakery of life, there was that first moment, and it is as worthy as any other. And in that first moment, holding the hard yellow plastic, touching the pebbled surface, the sharp-tipped point, and the finned upturned back of the board, spinning the bright red rubber wheels, and hearing the oiled ball bearings purr, in that first moment I felt the beautiful American bliss of having. It doesn’t last long, and it’s a fake, I guess, but tell that to my little nine-year-old body humming from head to toe with happiness.

This feeling turned quickly enough to apprehension as I put the board down on the floor and got on it and was barely able to stand on the thing for fear of flying off of it and shattering my skull. I was and would always be a timid, careful bookworm at heart, unwilling to take physical risks if I could help it. The dream of getting the Shark had been a dream of being someone I wasn’t, a kid who flung himself headlong at life, like the coolest kid in my grade, Mike, our version of Kelly Leak, who swore and smoked and got into trouble and bombed around on minibikes all summer and snowmobiles all winter. My attempt to fake my way into being a kid like that was doomed the moment I got on the Shark for the first time. After that, the Shark sat propped in the corner of my room, tip-side up, a yellow exclamation point to a blazing daring sentence I had to swallow down inside me.

My brother got his own skateboard soon enough, and it was quickly clear that his, unlike mine, was “real.” Unlike the Shark, Ian’s board was made up of separate components that had all been rated for quality by Skateboarder Magazine, which Ian subscribed to. Real skateboards didn’t come in one piece from a catalog that also sold bras, lamps, and cutlery. They had to be assembled brand-name component by brand-name component: deck, wheels, trucks. Once in a while I picked up the Shark and spun the wheels, listening to the ball-bearing purr that I’d loved so much in that first moment, but the feeling I got when holding the spinning wheels up close to my ears was diminished by the knowledge that a real skateboard didn’t have wheels that sounded like that. Ian’s “setup,” which he actually put into use, had Sims wheels that he’d bought separately from the Alva deck and the Tracker trucks, and they made barely any sound at all, which transformed the once-beloved ticking whirr of the Shark’s wheels into something like derisive snickering.

But that first moment of holding the Shark was real, as real as any later disillusionment. And so was my experience of the first moment of The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, and really, since I didn’t once think about any world outside the world of the film for its duration, that first moment lasted the entire movie, the whole thing one perfect unbroken instant flashing with coolness and color and excitement from the arrival on the scene of Toby and Jimmy on skateboards similar to the Shark to the first breathtaking appearance of Kelly Leak on a motorcycle, to the arrival in the film of the customized van, to the elation of the open road, to the magnificent splendor of the Astrodome, to the blinding rainbow colors of the uniforms on the real live Houston Astros, gods among us, to the refusal of Tanner Boyle to leave the field until the whole game had been played, to the moment when I leaped to my feet with every other late-summer superstar crowding the theater and cheered, all of it one invincible blast of happiness, new red rubber wheels purring a dream of pure motion, the feeling that Kerouac described of “all that raw land that rolls in one long unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it” right there in front of me, for a second close enough to touch, and I joined America that day, a dreamer among dreamers, all dreaming roads.

Love in the Time of Sequelitis

In August 1977, the same month I saw The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training for the first time, Elvis Presley, bloated and drug-addled, collapsed in a bathroom in Graceland and died. So the story goes, when the news made its way to Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s famously ruthless and opportunistic manager, Parker kept his focus on business. Others wept or wondered how to go on.

“This changes nothing,” Parker said.

I feed on franchises as much as the next guy. I don’t want to die. I hate endings. I hate when shows get cancelled. I hate when characters in shows get older. I have for the last twenty years relied in my daily life on The Simpsons. It is my soothing balm. Sometimes I even rush home from work so that I will be on the couch, wolfing down numbingly voluminous and starchy piles of food, in time for an episode of a cartoon that

I’m almost guaranteed to have already seen. Everything stays exactly the same. No one gets a day older. It is the perfect entertainment formula. It goes on and on and on.

There is something inherently cancerous about sequels. The cell of the original is doubled, often with an eye toward a further doubling, tripling, quadrupling, and so on: action figures and clothing and cereal and cartoons, novelizations and trading cards and Happy Meals and video games. The ultimate success, in economic terms, would be that these lesser, misshapen mutations of the original proliferate exponentially, spreading through the culture like an epidemic.

At the outset, however, the success of the extension of a single film toward that metastasizing economic entity, the franchise, is predicated on the ability of the makers to mask the tendency of a sequel to resemble a pocked, leprous version of its predecessor. The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training presented more challenges in this regard than most other repetitions of an original, because of the volatile physical properties of the cast. Other sequels have had to limp forward despite key disappearances like the absences of Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neal in the Bears’ second offering. Other sequels have also had to deal with the issue of the actors in the main roles undergoing changes in their appearance; for example, in the most anticipated sequel in history, The Empire Strikes Back, the scars on Luke Skywalker’s face—due to a car accident involving the actor, Mark Hamill—had to be explained by a late addition to the sequel’s script.

But other sequels do not rely on actors so prone to change. Many of the child actors in the first Bears movie were perched on the cusp of puberty; by the time shooting started for the second movie, they had begun the freakish contortionism of that physical transformation from boyhood to manhood. In the context of the movie itself, the viewer is immediately aware that something seems to have gone wrong. In reality, some of the Bears would be too old for Little League, but the dictates of the sequel have trapped them in childhood. Ogilvie elongated, Toby’s voice a deepening hormonal croak, Stein transformed from a pre-adolescent nerd to a balding fortyseven-year-old mashed into children’s clothing. And Engelberg. Anyone who’d seen the first film would have to notice that something was seriously off about Engelberg.

Of course, Engelberg is not really Engelberg. Gary Lee Cavagnaro, the actor who played Engelberg in the first movie, grew taller and much thinner before the shooting of the sequel and was in essence given an ultimatum: keep wolfing cheeseburgers or get lost. He decided he liked his new, healthier body. He was replaced.

So the Engelberg rolling toward the action in the first moment of the sequel is not the original Engelberg but a new actor, Jeffrey Louis Starr, who had never acted in a film before and who was discovered by the filmmakers at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Starr didn’t bear any kind of an overwhelming facial resemblance to Cavagnaro, and his smiling, goodnatured version of Engelberg was sunnier and blander than Cavagnaro’s prickly, mouthy original, but the replacement actor did fulfill the primary requirement of the role: he was visibly suffering the effects of childhood obesity. He was, in fact, even fatter and less mobile than the original Engelberg, as if the second Engelberg ate the first, perhaps causing on a subliminal level for some viewers familiar with the first Bears film the horrifying feeling that something was missing and that what was missing had been devoured and obliterated by what was present.

Elvis kept selling records and merchandise from the grave. Jaws spawned Jaws 2 and so on. Happy Days jumped the shark and kept going for years, a prime-time behemoth devolving increasingly into an ongoing call and response of inane catchphrases and rigidly enforced studio audience hysteria.

“Sit on it!” Haaaa!

“I still got it!” Ha-harrr!

“Wah, wah, wah!” Ho-hooo!

The characters became walking glossy collages of catchphrases, and their entrance into each episode was often greeted with cheers. Fonzie, the star of the show and a cartoonish apotheosis of a central strain in American hero iconography—the leather-clad, lady-killing, 1950s greaser (pioneered by the perennial biggest seller in Colonel Tom Parker’s death-defying entertainment concern: Young Elvis)—rated cheers not only in his first appearance but also when he materialized just in time to resolve the complications of a given plot with the superpowers emanating from his unparalleled coolness.

I watched every episode of Happy Days. Shit, I watched most every episode of the mutations of the Happy Days universe: Laverne and Shirley and Mork and Mindy and even Joanie Loves Chachi. More tellingly, I began developing, in my daydreams, a TV show based on my life as a grade-schooler, and though, even deep into my show’s long run as America’s most beloved sitcom, I only ever imagined (repeatedly) one opening scene, the nature of this scene showed its roots in my willful submission to the Happy Days universe (in addition to revealing the troublingly megalomaniacal inner world of a lonesome boy). Here’s as far as I ever got:

INT. Classroom—Day

The clock above the door shows that it is 8 am, the beginning of another school day. JOSH enters and stands in doorway. The studio audience cheers loudly.

JOSH

Well, here we go again.

The studio audience laughs uproariously, segueing into prolonged ovation.

Many would argue, if they ever had cause to think about it, that one Bad News Bears movie was enough. But no nine-year-old baseball-playing boy in 1977 would agree, not even one who had, unlike me, seen the first movie. The sequel came out that summer, after Little League season had ended all over the land, and who wouldn’t want the season and the summer to somehow go on and on?

The makers of the Bears sequel keyed in on this need to go on and on. Really, the premise of another Bears movie couldn’t have been otherwise: there would have to be another game. But whether by design or happy accident, or some combination of the two, the sequel not only centers on the idea that the season can go on but continually frames it as an urgent question: can the season go on? It is, in a way, the prototypical sequel. Its plot mirrors the very question of its existence. One story has ended. Can there be another?

What helped make the sequel a popular success (“nearly as successful as the original,” Michael Eisner confirms in Work in Progress) was that the members of the team aptly and with sincerity channeled the desire of the target audience for the season to go on and on. Tanner Boyle personifies this aspect of need in a film about need. Though the other guys all seem genuinely excited about another game, and genuinely troubled whenever that game seems to be in doubt, Tanner stands alone among his cohorts in the intensity of his devotion, as evidenced by his dogged habit of wearing his Bears uniform in contexts outside official games. He wears it in the film’s first scene, as they gather for a practice, and he wears it when they arrive at their first motel room, and he even still has it on later that night as he watches the old Notre Dame football weeper starring Ronald Reagan while everyone else but a late-arriving Kelly is asleep. He doesn’t ever want to take his uniform off. He doesn’t want anything to end.

This may explain his otherwise incongruously intense doeeyed attachment to the member of the team unable to accompany his teammates on the trip to Houston, Timmy Lupus. Lupus has had to take the uniform off, due to injury, and is, it seems, himself at an end. Considering him, Tanner sees everyone’s end, and he identifies with Lupus in a way that he never did before (for most of the first film, before finally accepting Lupus, Tanner openly loathed him for his weakness and passivity, even as he stuck up for him against bullies), and though none of this is explicit in the movie, Tanner seems like he’s running from his own deathbed even as he heroically attempts a symbolic rescue of Lupus in his.

The end is always near for the Bears. A sequel can be a capitulation to the cancer coming for all of us (as the absolutely heinous third installment in the Bears trilogy, The Bad News Bears Go to Japan, turns out to be) or it can subvert that seemingly preordained destiny and transcend its own inherent limitations, affirming the possibility of survival even in a greed-based, cancerous world. Or, most likely, it can be a messy combination of the two.

The sincerity of the cast’s performances, the honest mantra of wow, cool in their reactions to the world they are discovering, help the film rise above the pure lifeless economics in the origins of the sequel. The Bears are often shivering with excitement at their freedom to go on the road and to do whatever they want and to play baseball and to be together and to wear their uniforms and to go on.

One story has ended; can there be another? Can the Bears go on? This primal existential questioning forms the dramatic heartbeat of the film. Will the Bears be spiritually pulverized into nonexistence by a militaristic coach? Once they rid themselves of that coach, will their plan for a lie-based escape to the road be found out by their parents? Will they be done in on the road by suspicious highway cops? Will they be unable to play once they get to Houston because of further troubles with the law and their lack of a coach? Will they be unable to play because of the crass insertion of a substitute team? Will they be doomed in the big game before they begin by the absence of Kelly? Will the bureaucrats end the big game before it’s supposed to officially end?

Each time one of these situations came up, it created a tension that every boy in 1977 felt in his gut, and each time the hurdle was cleared a cheer went up, often audibly, in the theater. It kept on seeming that things couldn’t go on, but they went on.

I’ve been living with acute sequelitis since childhood. The main symptom is a feeling that there is a hole inside, a gnawing sense that something is missing, that one moment has ended and the next has yet to begin. I self-medicate. That is to say, I attempt to fill the hole inside, generally the same way I did when I was nine: with mounds of food and enough television to blind several eagles. I try to do more constructive things, too, try to connect with humans and practice acceptable hygiene and crack a book and jog around the block once in a while, etc., etc. But sometimes it just feels like there’s a hole anyway.

Something is always missing. This may never have been truer, in a cultural sense, than in 1977. The growing awareness of the fundamental definition of modern American life as that which seeks to fill the hole inside was still in its infancy then. The proliferation of addiction-treatment programs and rehab facilities and flamboyant dieting gimmickry and overflowing self-help aisles in bookstores and multinational-corporation-backed prescription medication for all manner of hole-filling had not really begun to crank into its present society-defining level. There were whispers of this development, as 12-step programs began to take hold, but these were still somewhat in the shadows and only considered to be for alcohol addiction. There were also the beginnings of new age philosophies and quasi-cults like est, which later became the Forum, organizations in which individuals were reduced to rubble by the indoctrinators of the cult and then built back up into nodes of cultish affirmation.

The sequel at the heart of my own acute sequelitis opens with a similar stab at that kind of behavior control. The Bears’ new coach, a strict disciplinarian named Coach Manning, orders his new team to sit down and shut up and berates them for not following rules. He picks on the sweetest of the boys, Miguel, for chewing gum, roaring not only about the particular infraction but using it to illustrate the point that he will now rule the players’ every action.

If the coach’s plan were to be followed all the way through to its conclusion, as it presumably has in his previous efforts with his high school teams, the Bears would become something other than the Bears. They would be a silent, lockstep machine. (Later in the movie, the first sight of the Bears’ opposition for the game in the Dome shows the Toros engaging in quasi-military calisthenics, chanting in unison. They would be the dream team of the coach shown in the movie’s opening scene.)

This is one way to address the hole inside: by dehumanizing all that surrounds it. Only humans—wanting, weak humans—can feel that something is missing. A team of robots would have no such feeling.

It’s no wonder that the first clash between the militaristic coach and the team that has something missing comes over the issue of consuming emptiness itself, gum-chewing being—after the first blast of empty-calorie sugar—a ghost of consumption. And it’s definitely no wonder that the second clash comes with the team’s icon of hole-filling consumption, Engelberg, who has already been shown wheezing on the fringes of a heart attack as he arrives on a bike and then waves several chocolate bars menacingly at a teammate who derides his modes of “training.”

Engelberg runs afoul of the militaristic coach by muttering in an aside to a teammate that the coach was sent to them from Hitler. The coach may or may not hear the comment, but he certainly catches the tone of transgressive muttering that has no place in his vision of a team becoming a machine. With stunning alacrity, he throws Engelberg off the team. Engelberg is the team’s catcher and its three-hole hitter (in all but the bizarre tatters of the lineup in the team’s climactic rally at the end of the film), and it had been established in the first film that he is the best position player on the team after Kelly (and so the best player on hand). But there is no place for any kind of dissent or unbridled id-fulfillment or sloppy relentless Engelbergian consumption on the Coach Manning version of the team.

So: something is missing. No Amanda, no Buttermaker, no Engelberg. Even Lupus, the weakest and so in a certain sense most definitive of the Bears, is absent. How can the Bears be the Bears? How can they possibly go on?

And is that the sound of a motorcycle off in the distance?

The Coolest Kid Who Ever Lived

You talkin’ ’bout Kelly Leak? That dude is a bad mutha.

—AHMAD ABDUL RAHIM,
The Bad News Bears (1976)

You talkin’ to me?

—TRAVIS BICKLE, Taxi Driver (1976)

You talkin’ to me?

—KELLY LEAK, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977)

It all depends on Kelly Leak. For the story to go on, he will have to arrive. And he will have to be more than what he was in the first movie. In that incarnation, he was important but marginal, a juvenile delinquent coaxed into uniform to carry the Bears’ otherwise anemic offensive attack while also solidifying the team’s status as a gathering of rejects and throwaways. He was tough but runty and a little weird-looking, his head too big for his body, his plastered-down side-parted hair dull, uncharismatic. He was “a bad mutha” in that first incarnation, but for the Bears to survive in their diminished, sequelized state, he will have to become the coolest kid who ever lived.

There was a Kelly Leak in every town, and in every grade. Or versions of Kelly Leak, echoes of the prototype, but still figures of awe. The one in my grade, Mike, had a white coral choker necklace kind of like Kelly’s and hung out with older kids and had dominion over mechanized things—not only minibikes and snowmobiles but even, somehow, knowing how to drive. He partied.

There were older versions of Kelly Leak, too. There was one a few grades ahead of me, a quiet guy with shoulder-length feathered hair who I once heard talking about “getting fucked up.” I didn’t know what this meant but it seemed like the most mysterious, dangerous, and coolest thing ever. This guy, Kevin, had a reputation for being the baddest motherfucker in the school, but he was almost gentle in his bearing, never bullying anyone, as the lesser tough guys did. People just knew to give him respect.

These characters were often among the best athletes when they were kids but gave it up as soon as they hit puberty and started partying. This seems to be the stage Kelly Leak has arrived at by the second Bears movie, judging from his longer hair (now parted in the middle and faintly feathered) and his new, more grown-up, hippie-inflected wardrobe. He has augmented the bead necklace and shades seen in the first movie with jeans that have more of a bell-bottom billow to their cuffs and a fringed suede leather jacket that suggests glancing cosmic kinships with the mysterious Noble Indian and the psychedelic hippie adventurer.

He looks like someone much more likely to reach for a smoldering one-hitter down under the bridge than for a baseball on a well-mown Little League diamond. Also, his aloofness from the other boys seems deeper now, more authentic. In the first movie, he haunted the margins of the Bears universe, telegraphing through his surface toughness and apathy that he was really aching to be let into the little boy world. In the sequel, from the start, he seems to have grown older, changing from something like the local Kelly Leak of my grade, Mike, into the older, quieter, cooler local Kelly Leak, Kevin. But beyond merely being someone likely to be overheard talking about “getting fucked up,” Kelly Leak in the sequel seems to have transcended his earlier persona as a runty tough kid to become a version of the primordial American hero: He Who Stands Alone.

In American mythology, the hero stands alone until called reluctantly from solitude to action. Kelly Leak was like the Kelly Leaks in every town, but he was also like Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name or Billy Jack or Kwai Chang Cain. Even Fonzie avoided the shenanigans of the gang on Happy Days until the need arose for him to materialize and make everything all right. Being cool means being tough and able and strong and apart, but being an American hero depends on some greater need from the culture as well as some yearning for connection in the heart of the cool.

I picture Kelly Leak before his arrival onscreen in the sequel, riding his motorcycle up and down all the roads of his California town. An in-between feeling hangs in the air. One story has ended; the next has yet to begin. Can there be another?

He could go anywhere. He could do anything. Hustle some pool, maybe. Or ride by the house of a pretty girl and rev his engine until she appears in her bedroom window and smiles.

But it seems like it’s all been done a million times, life a rerun, a rehash sequel. He isn’t in the mood. He isn’t in the mood for anything. He sure as hell isn’t in the mood for baseball.

And yet, as he rides, he finds himself wondering about those turkeys in their little yellow caps.

When I first saw Kelly Leak appear onscreen, I associated him with the hairy motorcycle-riding hippies on an album cover in my parents’ collection, The James Gang Rides Again. In subsequent years I came to notice that he was dressed very much like Dennis Hopper’s character in Easy Rider while projecting the charismatic-outsider-as-leading-man aura of Peter Fonda’s character in the very same epochal film, a synthesis that hints at the ability of the sequelized version of Kelly Leak to embody an abundance of American roads.

This reaching for iconic status in the person of Kelly Leak was embedded in the script. Later in the film, a description by a teammate of Kelly as “the last lone eagle” is illustrated by a comparison to James Dean. But the apparent intentions of the filmmakers are actually exceeded, thanks in part to the abilities of Jackie Earle Haley, the actor playing Kelly Leak, and to Haley’s physical idiosyncrasies. Unlike the undying classic Olympian beauty of James Dean’s visage, Haley’s face is wholly mortal, vaguely pocked and cratered, his teeth crooked, his blue eyes a little too narrow, his shoulder-length hair lank and seemingly in need of a wash. But this is what cool guys looked like in the 1970s, and Haley’s Kelly Leak belongs to that awkward, homely decade. More significantly, Haley’s ability to project a confident, wise, able, magnetically troubled presence allows the central figure of the sequel to transcend the times. The sequelized Kelly, if framed differently in the script or portrayed less ably by the actor, could have been a laughable mutation of transitory 1970s fads, a CB enthusiast in rainbow suspenders, a streaker with a perm, a disco-dancing primal screamer hawking pet rocks. Instead the lost, scattershot era’s inevitable collision of influences produced an elemental American hero.

In the moment just before Kelly’s arrival, the Bears’ militaristic new coach is in the middle of rage-scrawling the word “discipline” on the chalkboard, surely the prelude to another bellowed lecture on the need for the Bears to become a depersonalized machine. He stops writing in midword at the sound of the approaching motorcycle.

“Discipl,” the chalkboard reads.

The very idea of discipline thusly imperiled, the coach tries to bring Kelly under his control by shouting at him, but Kelly revs the engine of his motorcycle to drown out the words.

“You talkin’ to me?” he yells back at the coach.

This exact phrase had been uttered the previous year by Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in the film Taxi Driver, an artistic high point of the three stellar Hollywood careers of lead actor De Niro, director Martin Scorsese, and screenwriter Paul Schrader. In Taxi Driver, the phrase had been uttered by Bickle as he stared at himself in a mirror, imagining confrontations, one of the most memorable moments in the history of American film and, eventually, the most iconic moment of a movie that would, after some years in which it was too raw to exist inside any traditional critical canons, take its place among the greatest films ever made. The phrase from the profoundly lonely and troubled Bickle was both menacing and impotent, a desperate and perverse plea for connection of any kind, even violent and vengeful. Kelly Leak hijacks the phrase and tames it, making it a part of a monochromatic, unambiguous rebellion.

If this easily digestible Happy Meal cheeseburger of rebellion were the only component in Kelly’s sequelized persona, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training may have long ago faded from my mind as just one in an extensive string of wolfed-down fast food offerings, taking its place alongside Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo and Freaky Friday and Goin’ Coconuts . But the channeling of Travis Bickle by Kelly Leak, however decontextualized and declawed, speaks to Kelly Leak’s transformation from the singular tough kid of the original into a character who has become in his appearance and abilities and demeanor and deeds an almost mystical gathering point for all manner of hero and antihero imagery from the deepest veins of American mythology.

For example, after taunting the coach he begins to menace him by darting at and away from him with expert motorcycle stunting. The stunts suggest an advancement in Kelly’s riding from the first film (in which his on-field motorbike ride ended in a moment of laudably anticlimactic realism, Kelly crashing awkwardly into an outfield wall) to a level bordering on the superpowered. This kind of borderline hyperreal mastery would naturally appeal to a comic book–saturated target audience, but the deeper hook in Kelly’s expert wheelies is in how they add some shadings to Kelly of a wildly popular figure of the time, daredevil Evel Knievel, who himself was bringing the American love of risky, record-breaking stunts and pageantry to an explosively colorful apex.

Coach Manning might have had a chance against the Kelly Leak of the first movie, but what chance does he have against (among a litany of others) Evel Knievel, the grizzly, heavy-lidded stars of 1970s rock, Travis Bickle, James Dean,

the iconoclastic hippies of Easy Rider, and every local teenage cool guy with shoulder-length feathered hair and a predilection for “getting fucked up”? Now the Bears, freed from discipline by this dense concentration of heroic American cool, cheer and flee. Now the coach roars, but stripped of the illusion of authority he’s empty, powerless.

Now Kelly Leak rules.

The Bell Tolls for Thee, Timmy Lupus

The first scene in the movie that is not bolstered by the charismatic presence of Jackie Earle Haley’s performance as Kelly Leak occurs in a hospital room. The scene unfolds with the clumsy pacing, stilted dialogue, wooden acting, and mawkish soundtrack of a lesser after-school special, that species of oneoff television melodrama in the 1970s and early 1980s targeting an adolescent and pre-adolescent audience and generally slanting some issue affecting them in a way that telegraphed a leaden, pedantic moral. The after-school special trappings of the hospital room scene made me think, on my first viewing, that I was now watching a story about a little boy bravely suffering from some incurable disease. In truth, the boy, Timmy Lupus, had only broken his ankle skateboarding. But I didn’t absorb that information, which had been quickly related by Tanner and Jimmy Feldman in the first scene of the movie, as I didn’t know at that time who “the Looper” was. It passed me by in the flood of other sense-impressions from a movie I was falling instantly in love with. One way or another, I was clueless enough to perceive the gathering of some team members around Timmy Lupus’s hospital bed as a deathbed scene.

Objectively speaking (which is impossible, but I’ll take a quick stab at it anyway), that scene, well, it’s just awful. It starts with Ogilvie marching stiffly into the room, greeting the bedbound Timmy, and then announcing the entrance of Engelberg.

“Here he is now,” Ogilvie says, clearly not in a position within the room that would allow him to see Engelberg coming. But Engelberg enters on cue, suggesting more strongly than ever the flimsy, artificial nature of the fictional world of the sequel, these Bears not Bears at all, not really, but awkward pawns of a hurriedly assembled commissioned script.

Once the contingent of Bears has entered the room (and why Ogilvie announces Engelberg and not the other visitor, Tanner, is further evidence of a haphazard, distracted hand behind the universe of the sequel), the guys present Lupus with a photo of him holding a ball in his glove, a nod to the previous movie’s joyous pinnacle, when his improbable catch saved a shred of hope for the Bears’ season, at least temporarily. He smiles at the picture and smiles up at the guys. He is, as in the last movie, seemingly incapable of regular conversation, a meek, benign dufus. The remainder of the scene then relies, to a smotheringly heavy degree, on an understated but heartwarming development in the previous movie: Tanner’s loathing of Lupus changing to acceptance. However, since this development has already occurred in another movie, there is in the moment at hand no real cinematic spark in their seemingly greatly strengthened bond. Hence, the strangest, most uncomfortable moment in the entire movie occurs: Lupus and Tanner stare and smile at one another for a long, long, long time as the score floods the room with the cloying aural equivalent of the smell of a truckload of aging roses.

My confusion over Timmy’s proximity to death was not altogether my fault. The makers of the sequel were, it seems to me now, consciously tapping into a recurrent theme in American sports narratives, the deathbed scene. The desire for the film to be a kid-friendly fast food cheeseburger must have prompted the stripping out of the core element of such scenes—the explicit specter of death—but virtually everything else (the hospital bed, the teammates, the lugubrious score, the looming knowledge that a game will soon be played without the poor sick kid) remains.

The theme surfaces in the two most famous early baseball movies, The Babe Ruth Story and Pride of the Yankees, the former pioneering the version of the myth (so ingrained in the culture that it would be spoofed endlessly, most notably in comic riffs on SCTV and Seinfeld) in which a visit to the sickbed of a kid concludes with a promise to hit a personalized sickbedtribute home run, the latter pioneering the version of the myth in which the star himself, and not an inspirational peripheral figure, is dying. A third version, involving the death of a teammate, had enjoyed a heyday in the early 1970s in two popular sports movies, Bang the Drum Slowly and Brian’s Song.

I hadn’t seen those movies by 1977, but I had discovered my all-time favorite baseball book, Hang Tough Paul Mather, by Alfred Slote. Slote avoids the potential dangers of venturing into cliché-ridden waters by presenting his young adult novel in the understated but passionate and sincere voice of a Little Leaguer who loves baseball. I didn’t understand death or cancer, but I understood that when Paul Mather held a baseball while lying in a hospital bed he was holding with his weakening grip life itself. When I saw Timmy Lupus, I assumed I was looking at a wimpier, simpler Paul Mather.

Later in the movie, Tanner stays up late in a motel room to watch a film about George Gipp, a star player for Notre Dame who died young. All of Tanner’s teammates are asleep (though Kelly does arrive in the room as Tanner watches so as to bear witness to Tanner’s devotion); he is going to have to carry the load himself. One teammate even yells at him to turn the movie off. Showing a rare restraint—in all other situations he would meet such an order with at least a volley of obscene invective and more likely by rushing the speaker and getting into a fight (while hurling obscene invective)—that is evidence of the unusually quiet depths of emotions he is feeling, Tanner turns down the volume. He is still wearing the Bears jersey that he seems unwilling ever to take off, but it is unbuttoned, showing his pale, vulnerable-looking little kid chest rising and falling with his rapt breathing.

He watches the scene as Kelly splits his attention, it seems, between watching the scene and watching Tanner. Both are perched on the edge of the crowded beds in the dark room. The scene is the classic locker room speech scene, Knute Rockne encouraging his Notre Dame squad to win one for the deceased Notre Dame legend George Gipp, who had been played in the movie by Ronald Reagan.

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training was created and released during the political ascendancy of Ronald Reagan (much of the movie filmed in California, where Reagan had just finished serving two terms as governor), an ascendancy that reached the beginning of its eight-year apex just three years later with Reagan’s election as president. While campaigning for the presidency, Reagan galvanized supporters desperate for an alternative to the depressing complexities of the modern world and all its problems by presenting a front of simple heroism and rah-rah inspirationalism. His approach was epitomized in the slogan he came to rely on (referring to himself as a character he once played in a movie and more or less quoting Knute Rockne), urging voters to “win one for the Gipper.”

Reagan had not officially begun his campaign for the 1980 presidential election by the time the Bears sequel was made, but it’s impossible to view the movie now, specifically the scene of Tanner watching the movie, and not think of Reagan, the Gipper, and the pernicious simplification of America looming on the horizon.

Like Reagan, Timmy Lupus is literally absent from the scene but looms over it upon later reflection. Tanner, it will become clear, is thinking of Timmy as he watches another team down on its luck come together in memory of the player taken away from the field of play. The next day, Tanner sends a postcard to Timmy that mentions the movie, saying, “You’d like it.” And later, in the Astrodome locker room, Tanner presents his own brief version of the Rockne speech, replacing the nickname of George Gipp with Timmy’s nickname.

Being unable to play baseball is not only a chief drawback of dying, it is, in the logic of a baseball-loving kid, one and the same with dying. Timmy Lupus, so I believed, is dying and thus becoming unable to play baseball, but that phrase could have been flipped—he is becoming unable to play baseball and thus is dying—and to my nine-ear-old’s ears it would have meant exactly the same thing. Tanner clearly sees things the same way. For him, as for Paul Mather, baseball has always been everything. As will become clearer as the film goes on and Tanner continues to keep Timmy’s presence central to the life of the team, Tanner’s unwavering devotion to his friend and to the idea that the team must “win one for the Looper” transforms the sequel, for all its flaws, into something akin to a matter of life and death.

Who to Be? How to Be? Why?

You start seeing in the 1970s an increasing amount of falseness.

—LOUIS WILKER

After the deathbed scene, Kelly Leak appears once again on his motorcycle, even cooler than before, incredibly, as now he has a girl with him, as mute and as pretty as the feral knockout who rides off on a horse with Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. Kelly Leak will zoom away with this girl momentarily, no doubt to do non-childish things with her (or, judging from her muteness and cheerful passivity, to her). Before going, he will scoff at the boys’ question about whether he will play with them. But the primary purpose of this scene is to pave the way for the introduction of a new character into the Bears’ universe, and such an introduction needs, if it isn’t going to be doomed from the start, to lean on the unshakable authority of Kelly Leak.

“His name’s Carmen Ronzonni,” Kelly says. The implication in this pronouncement is that Carmen Ronzonni is from Kelly’s world. Ergo, he must be cool.

But Carmen Ronzonni turns out to be more complicated than that. Carmen Ronzonni is an unruly bundle of contradictions: an echo, an attempt at something new, a replacement for What Is Missing. The first Bears movie boasted as its most memorable and innovative element the twist that a girl, Amanda, was the team’s most important player, a pitcher able to dominate all the boys. I’m not sure if her absence from the second movie was because the filmmakers accurately anticipated that multidimensional femininity would be of absolutely no interest to the movie’s core audience of young boys, or because the actor playing Amanda, Tatum O’Neal, already with an Academy Award to her credit, perhaps decided a cheap Bears sequel was beneath her, artistically and/ or financially. Whatever the reason for Amanda’s absence, it necessitated that the filmmakers fill a huge blank—the role of pitcher—and the solution they came up with, Carmen Ronzonni, serves as a veritable personification of the pathology of sequels.

In a certain light, Carmen Ronzonni is the sequel itself, caught in a jittery crossfire of tenuous, overcompensating selfconfidence and barely concealed self-doubt. If a sequel could go backstage and look itself in the mirror and wonder why it even existed, it would see something like Carmen Ronzonni staring back.

A sequel is a repetition, a bit of mimicry. It does not know what it is because it is trying to be just like its predecessor while knowing that it can’t be just like its predecessor. This is a problem that we all have, born into this world a copy of what preceded us, our identity a wrestling match between repetition and nothingness. To be or not to be is not really the question. Who to be? How to be? Why?

In addition to inhabiting the space left by glaring absences in the world of the first movie, Carmen Ronzonni has to grapple with how to bring originality to a narrowly one-dimensional type long familiar in Hollywood: the New York City–area Italian kid. This primary cinematic signifier of urban white ethnicity had been entrenched for years, at least as far back as the World War II films featuring soon-tobe-grenade-confetti dark-haired fellows saying “youse guys” and chattering about the Brooklyn Dodgers. At the time of the Bears sequel, the stereotype was in the early stages of a feathered-haircut renaissance that would include (just off the top of my head) John Travolta in both Welcome Back, Kotter and Saturday Night Fever, the tough, dark-haired kid in Caddyshack who challenges Noonan to a fistfight, Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid, Salami’s cousin Nick “New York” Vitaglia in The White Shadow, and, of course, Chachi in Happy Days.

This last character, never identified explicitly as being from the New York area despite the clear hint of northeastern U.S. megalopolis in his accent, was played by New Jersey–born actor Scott Baio, one of the top teen heartthrobs of the day and the cousin of fellow actor Jimmy Baio. Jimmy held his own for a while against his slightly older cousin in terms of celebrity, landing roles in the critically acclaimed sitcom Soap—and in a big studio sequel, playing the part of Carmen Ronzonni.

In years to come, as Scott Baio followed his long stint on Happy Days with another extended run carrying the sitcom Charles in Charge, Jimmy’s screen-acting gigs dried up. He became “the other Baio” on his way to the borderlands of the public’s consciousness. This last development, being eclipsed by Chachi (especially given Scott Baio’s twenty-first-century doings, which give him the appearance of an aging, increasingly desperate Hollywood marginal), adds another layer, retrospectively applied, to Jimmy Baio’s portrayal of Carmen Ronzonni as a kid faking it as though his tenuous existence depended on it.

Carmen Ronzonni had instant credibility the moment he came onscreen by virtue of his introduction by Kelly, and his credentials as a denizen of Kelly’s dark, exciting world beyond the baseball diamond prove to check out (he is as much, if not more, a part of the “borrowing” of the van as Kelly is, and later he shoplifts some nudie magazines), but his credentials as a pitcher turn out to be much shakier. And in this movie, what counts is how you play the game, which is shorthand for remaining a kid and remaining innocent and sincere and alive. Carmen has somehow lost his connection to that world, beginning an adolescent’s indecisive experimenting with adulthood. Carmen Ronzonni is a bad pitcher throughout most of the movie because he only knows how to imitate. He imitates major leaguers in their motions, and plays off these imitations as evidence of his expertise. While doing this, he acts like a carnival barker lauding his own skills and mastery.

Tanner, the team’s conscience, immediately sees through Carmen’s smoke and mirrors, and the two clash repeatedly. Their initial confrontation comes when Kelly first brings Carmen by to meet the team. Upon seeing Carmen’s pantomime display of major league pitcher impersonations, Tanner looses a racist litany ending with a special word-bomb directed at Carmen: “a wop who throws airballs.”

Tanner’s screed is the sourest note in the entire movie, and not coincidentally it is the instance of most direct mimicry of the first movie (even as it is a diatribe against mimicry). In the first film, Tanner has a very similar speech, in which he disparages the team’s chances, saying, “All we got on this team are a buncha Jews, spics, niggers, pansies, and a booger-eatin’ moron!” He is then immediately confronted by Ogilvie, of all people, who looms over Tanner menacingly, pointing out that little white-boy Tanner, a minority within such a collective, would be wise to watch his language. When it comes up again in the sequel, the team seems used to, and even complicit with, this language, Tanner preceding the debut of “wop” among his litany with an exact replica, in sequential order, of his listing of Jews, spics, and niggers. Before Carmen can react to Tanner the team intervenes, surrounding the shortstop and murmuring stock, toothless disapproval; meanwhile, Kelly assures Carmen that Tanner “is cool.”

In the first movie, the litany came across as another pungent, if ugly, detail of the fabric of a wholly believable fictional world. The relative flatness and artificiality of the world of the sequel can’t likewise support the bit of unexamined regurgitation from Tanner’s mouth, revealing it for what it is: a gratuitous stab at trying to hold on to some of the first film’s organic edginess, authenticity, and innovation. As mimicry, the epithets just hang in the air like the cheap, rancid stench from a fast food Dumpster.

But there is a moment earlier in that scene that I love, and it’s not even anything I consciously noticed until I’d seen the film many, many times. Carmen dismounts from the back of Kelly’s bike, then enters the field of play by vaulting over the fence. The beauty of this action is that he vaults over a part of the fence immediately adjacent to an open gate. He would have had to move a matter of inches to walk through it simply and easily. Instead, he vaults, and not in a particularly graceful way, either. It’s not something anyone in their right mind would have done, ever, in the history of earth, and I love it.

A similar moment occurs in the 2008 comedy Tropic Thunder . Ben Stiller’s character, action movie hero Tugg Speedman, needs to move from point A to point B to rejoin his cohorts, and though the direct line between those points is clear and would require him only to move straight ahead, he veers slightly to the right to leap over a chunk of burning scenery. It’s a brief hilarious moment in a very funny movie about film fakery, but the moment itself comes out of an extremely mannered and deeply entrenched sense of irony that is part of the cultural air we now breathe. When Carmen Ronzonni unnecessarily clambers over the fence, it’s not done as a commentary on the laughable fakeness of cinematic poses but as the sincere, creative expression of a fictional character who is completely, beautifully full of shit.

Carmen Ronzonni’s affliction, that is, his inability to pitch in any way other than direct impersonation, is immediately recognizable and attractive to any baseball-loving kid. Every kid knows that this kind of imitation is the only way to fake your way through life (and faking your way through is the only option), and more than that the boyhood love of baseball finds perhaps its most intimate line of connection through the imitation of major league baseball heroes. Every kid in my town knew how to look like Yaz at bat. It’s the same everywhere, the only variable being which player is the one imitated.

Another attractive element of Ronzonni’s spiel about his own talents is that he mentions several actual major leaguers, a harbinger of the film’s eventual arrival in the heaven of the major leagues, when the team gets to the Astrodome. The filmmakers seemed to know that the existence of this heaven would be a key element of the film’s fantasy universe. This heaven is not only mentioned and strived toward but shown backed by full awe-inspired gasping when the boys get to the Dome and, moreover, when heaven’s most dazzling angels, the rainbow-clad Houston Astros, make a galvanizing appearance. Carmen Ronzonni is the first to allude to the angels of heaven, and he does so in a way that any boy could recognize, by an imitation that expresses, whether he intends it or not, just how far he actually is, how far we all are, from the angelic mastery we mimic.

2

World Unraveling

Dear Looper,

So here is another hello to nowhere. From nowhere. But if not do you ever hear anything? Ogilvie that spaz I can see a billionaire with computers. Stein maybe a doctor making big fake boobs. Toby a politician shaking hands. Some just gone who knows. I thought I saw Ronzonni once on a late-night TV ad, the kind that go on and on. It was for the cruddy music of a billion years ago and he was one of the real people who came on to say how great it was to hear the songs and remember the good ol days. I called the toll free number. Let me talk to Ronzonni I said. Let me talk to that full of shit wop with his cruddy gray hair! Sir I am being happy to assisting you the guy said. Forget it I said and hung up, I mean at some point I hung up. But where is everyone Looper? I look in the mirror and even I am gone. I just want to talk to Ronzonni I was screaming. I really wanted to talk to him. Sir sir he kept saying all the way from India. Where is Kelly I may have also screamed where is Kelly. Looper do you know? Because sometimes it gets late and I wonder.

Your pal,
Tanner Boyle

Are Your Children Safe?

Are your children safe? This question opens the 2006 movie Little Children by way of a crudely assembled flyer that features, besides the question, two stark black-and-white mug shots of a gaunt middle-aged man, one in profile and one with the subject staring balefully out at the viewer.

Anyone who remembers Kelly Leak, let alone looked to Kelly Leak as a hero and leader, felt a chill at the sight of the mug shots, which were of a criminal, predatory character played by Jackie Earle Haley. Haley’s long absence from the public eye prior to his appearance as the serrated rhetorical edge in a question about the safety of the children of America had preserved and even enhanced the status of Haley’s most famous creation, Kelly Leak, as an icon of cool, the powerful and fearless American prince of the open road. His sudden harrowing reappearance in Little Children, after so many years away, forged jarring connections to his earlier role, not only because physical echoes of Kelly Leak could be seen in this middle-aged man’s features but also because of strange and powerful negative-image resonances between the two roles. These resonances marked the distance between our current narrowing world and the wider horizons of Kelly Leak’s bygone era of fearless adventure.

As Little Children progresses, the character in the mug shots, Ronnie McGorvey, is not seen onscreen for a long time, but he is mentioned periodically by the unsettled parents of the dreamily quiet suburban town in which the film is set. McGorvey has recently returned to live in the town after serving time in prison for exposing himself to a child. As the mothers at the playground murmur about him—one of the mothers advocating for his castration—and as one slightly unhinged ex-cop (the author and disseminator of the flyers) rails about the danger of the convict’s mere presence in the town, the offscreen character becomes more and more monstrous, an almost mythic creature, a symbolic receptacle for all the unnamed and unnamable fears of being a parent and being at the mercy of the crippling whims and dark desires of a dangerous world.

The foreboding atmosphere in the film reflects that in the years separating Haley’s Kelly Leak from his Ronnie McGorvey, America changed, becoming more fractured, factional, atomized, a land of locked doors. It wasn’t safe out there anymore. The fundamental American trait of adventurism, still at the heart of The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training , had curdled, and a sense of America as an entity capable of being a sunny sea-to-shining-sea collective had buckled under the weight of routinized political corruption and its side-effect and abettor, voter apathy. In the years just before the appearance of Haley’s Ronnie McGorvey, a president had seized power on the heels of a highly dubious election, which threw the entire political process into more doubt than ever; a major terrorist attack on American soil had been engineered by murderous fanatics who had been living undetected in America for some time, which cast suspicion on anyone who seemed the least bit out of the ordinary; and the outrage and grief over the attack—and fear of another attack—had been used opportunistically, and with erroneous information as to the would-be foe’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, by political forces to gain support for the American invasion of Iraq. The “we” in “we the people” had been so demoralized and disempowered as to become an entity that seemed able to exist only insofar as there was a “they” to demonize, torture, and attack. The kind of sunny carefree adventurousness that still could exist in Kelly Leak’s time had become so remote by the era of Ronnie McGorvey as to be little more than an undistinguished portion of the big, scary unknown outside the locked door.

When Kelly Leak first appears onscreen in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, his charismatic arrival signals that a joyous, exciting life beyond rules and restrictions can still exist. When Ronnie McGorvey makes his first appearance onscreen in Little Children, at the town pool (it is a brutally hot day and he has come, he explains at the end of the scene in his first line of dialogue as police are leading him away, because he “just wanted to cool off”), his presence in the midst of the people of the town, and more specifically among the children of the town, elicits a hysterical response evocative of scenes of mass terror in the first gargantuan blockbuster of the 1970s, Jaws. In that earlier film, the people of a community are sketched with the thinnest brushstrokes of characterization, becoming a crowd that is either at peace or in fear, and the fear that would otherwise remain generalized as an unnamable fear of the unknown collects around the arrival on the peaceful shores of a giant killer shark. When the shark is sighted from the beach, hysteria reigns, parents screaming and rushing to snatch their children from the suddenly dangerous water. The same thing happens in Little Children when the identity of the new arrival at the pool is revealed to the crowd via murmurs that escalate rapidly to shrieks.

There is in the scene, as in the movie in general, a bracing sense of irony deriving from a heightened superreality, the town a less obviously strange neighbor of the suburban fever dream in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. It seems to be a realistic movie, but the behaviors of the characters reveal everything in the town to be a dream, a dream willfully kept afloat by the deluded and self-deluding main and supporting characters (all except for Ronnie McGorvey, who knows exactly who and what he is). The dream is of a safe place, a suburban oasis. The American dream. The feeling that the dream is being infiltrated and compromised by one who would prey on the heart of the dream—the notion of unassailable childhood in-nocence—prompts a reaction of, in the case of the scene at the pool, mass hysteria. It is Ronnie McGorvey’s last foray into the public space of the town, at least in the daylight when others can see him.

But we do begin to see Ronnie McGorvey more, in scenes set at the home he lives in with his mother. Jackie Earle Haley’s portrayal of Ronnie McGorvey seizes the reins of the movie. It is a gripping, insidious performance. The night after I watched the movie I dreamed about Ronnie McGorvey. He was putting a clammy hand on my shoulder. I could hear him breathing as his sunken chest rose and fell. There was some kind of need in the dream, some gulf between the desire for and the satisfaction of that need, a gulf that could never be bridged. I woke up in a cold sweat. It’s that kind of a performance. Haley, likely unknown to all those too young or too old to have been paying attention to youth-focused movies in the mid- to late 1970s, was deservingly nominated for an Academy Award.

What’s left of childhood after adults are through tampering with it and manipulating it? This is the question asked by the first Bad News Bears movie. The sequel strips the intellectual weight from the question and uses the remains as a foundation for the key component of its plot. In essence, the question gets dumbed down to a statement: grown-ups stand in the way of fun.

Once the first grown-up in the film, Coach Manning, has been jettisoned, the Bears decide that the only way they will get to the Astrodome intact, as the untamed Bad News Bears, is to con all the adults in their lives into letting them go on the road alone.

It was a more plausible scenario then than it would be now. In the late 1970s, kids were often left on their own. Raising a child in America in the twenty-first century is a whole different endeavor than raising a child in the 1970s. Now every minute of the day is scheduled and supervised. Fear seems to play a strong role in this. There is the fear that one’s child will fall behind other children if he or she is not involved in every activity and learning opportunity available. And there is the deeper, more primal fear that Ronnie McGorvey is everywhere. It is not an entirely irrational fear to have—a check of the nationwide sex offender list shows that these predators are as ubiquitous as Starbucks cafes. A child cannot be simply let loose to roam the neighborhood on his or her own. Such a child, presumably separated momentarily from a parent, was the victim of Ronnie McGorvey’s convictable offense. Short of executing or imprisoning for life all child sex offenders, the solution seems to be constant scheduling and supervision of children.

The solution seems to be, in other words, the exact opposite of the dream of life away from the authoritarian coach and away from parents and away from rules of any kind and off on the road with Kelly Leak.

The most exhilarating passage in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, which spans the planning and execution of the team’s escape from home, begins at the tail end of Carmen Ronzonni’s first scene, when Kelly is asked once again if he’s going to join the team.

“Yeah,” he says. When the exultation over this terse revelation dies down, Toby prods Kelly for an explanation.

“But why did you change your mind?” Toby asks. (Perhaps he is hoping for an ego-soothing retraction of Kelly’s previous pronouncement on the subject: “Play with you turkeys? You’re kidding.”)

“I got my reasons,” is all Kelly will say, keeping to himself the information that his long-absent father, Mike Leak, lives in the city where the Bears are scheduled to play their next game. When I first watched the movie as a nine-year-old, this was a moment of irresistible attraction, Kelly throwing in with the “turkeys” (and by extension, with me) at the same time as he illustrates his difference to us by virtue of his mysterious, unknowable depths. He lives in a whole other world, more exciting and more adventurous and more dangerous than ours, and now we will, through him, have access to that world.

Kelly follows up his news that he will rejoin the team by suggesting a way to get to Houston without a coach. This plan will require the boys to move beyond the safe familiar world ruled by their mommies and daddies. Kelly makes this clear by prefacing his plan with a bracing command: “All chickenshits go home.”

To get free, the Bears use the idiot groundskeeper to pose as a coach. Kelly teaches him to say “Hello, how are you?” and the groundskeeper says it over and over as the parents drop the boys off at his house, where Kelly and Carmen have brought the vehicle that will carry the boys to Houston, a wow-inspiring customized van. The parents are cheerful and completely oblivious, happy to be passing their boys off to the gray-haired stranger for a cross-country trip. Within minutes, all the parents have arrived, discharged their human cargo, and left. The boys are on their own. Kelly is in charge. The road is open and childhood rules. Kelly looks at Carmen and says, “Let’s jam.”

The sense of simple exhilaration found in abundance in that scene had become elusive, if not altogether nonexistent, by the time of Jackie Earle Haley’s stunning reappearance in Little Children. The spirit of adventurousness once seemed accessible even to kids (as long as they weren’t “chickenshits”). Anyone could take the wheel. By the twenty-first century, however, taking the wheel had become much more complicated and perilous. Also, there was an increased sense that “taking the wheel” was not—and never really had been—a possibility for the masses but only for a privileged, reckless few.

This increasing sense of societal powerlessness that accompanied the devaluation of the myth of the open road is embodied by Haley’s Ronnie McGorvey in Little Children: Ronnie McGorvey is never shown operating a motorized vehicle. He is shown at one point with a bicycle and at another riding in the back of a cab, and in a particularly disturbing scene he is the passenger in a car operated by a woman he is on a blind date with. Being a passenger, especially with a woman at the wheel, is an emasculating position to be in when compared to the general tendency in movies to signify male capability by putting men behind the wheel. In The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, for example, Kelly’s precocious manliness is underscored repeatedly by his ability to drive. An even more concentrated example of this tendency comes midway through the film, when Mike Leak’s girlfriend meets Mike at his work in a convertible and then without prompting shifts hurriedly over to the passenger seat so that Mike can take the wheel.

Little Children, unlike the Bears sequel, does not draw heavily on the genre of the road narrative, but it seems that even in an ironic suburban fable reflecting the society-wide recoiling from the unknown, the road narrative beckons. For example, the two central characters having an extramarital affair dream of solving their complicated grown-up problems by just going, just getting in a car together and running away. This dream of escape to the freedom and power and restorative innocence of the American road is not even a possibility for Ronnie McGorvey. He is, according to American movie shorthand, trapped forever within the borders of childhood: he can’t drive.

The actor playing Ronnie McGorvey once claimed the polar opposite point in the American road narrative continuum of powerful and powerless.

“Are you sure you know how to drive this thing?” Rudi asks Kelly in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. The Bears have just made their escape in the van.

“Hey, listen, dude, I’m from Van Nuys,” Kelly says. I never understood this part of his answer (Van Nuys?), except as more evidence that Kelly was from a whole different world than I was, but I understood the next thing he said: “I was born to drive.”

In Little Children, there is a pull on the adults to find some way to hold on to the moment of recklessness and abandon that characterized their lives before they became adults. The male lead, played by Patrick Wilson, tells his wife every night that he is going to the library to study for the bar exam, which he has failed repeatedly and which is the barrier keeping him from becoming a full-fledged adult. But instead of going into the library, he lingers outside and watches teenage boys ride their skateboards. Their recklessness and directionlessness and idling, daring joy entrance him. This pull toward adolescence grows stronger when he is taken by an acquaintance who spots him outside the library to a football field, and he holds a football in his hands, and he remembers the feeling of being a teenager whose life revolved around such things. Wilson’s character, one of the bigger meatheads in cinematic history, reaches the end of his story arc on the night he has agreed to run away with his mistress: on his way to their rendezvous he stops by the teenage boys and they convince him to take a turn on the skateboard; he agrees and knocks himself unconscious. Your children are not safe and neither are your adults who act like children.

Ronnie McGorvey takes the attempt to return to some version of childhood innocence the furthest. His mother’s dying words, delivered in a note, are that he “please be a good boy.” Ronnie can’t see any way to follow this request, especially now that he’s without the one person who ever saw any goodness in him at all. In utter desperation, he attempts to literally cut the corrupted adult out of himself by performing a selfcastration with a kitchen knife. The movie concludes with him bleeding, likely to death, in the back of a vehicle racing toward a hospital.

The vehicle carrying the dying, neutered passenger is, of all things, a van.

The acclaim for Jackie Earle Haley’s performance in Little Children inspired many stories about the actor’s reappearance in the spotlight. For a number of years, he’d been out of the public eye, and during that time the question came up for those who remembered him as Kelly Leak: whatever became of Jackie Earle Haley? That question, unlike most similar questions lobbed into the wasteland of pop culture nostalgia, had finally been answered, and it was, unlike the police blotter or obituary notice answers that more often seem to materialize in these cases, a happy answer: Jackie Earle Haley had come back.

But it’s not possible to know what became of Kelly Leak. One can only guess. After the game in the Dome there was that trip to Japan, but any mention of that trip to Japan in this book tallies in my mind as a personal failure on my part, so the less said the better, but suffice it to say that nothing significant or lasting happened in Japan. Kelly Leak went there, along with several teammates, most of them complete imposters, and once there was barely focused on except for some nauseating love scenes as the action, or lack thereof, centered for some reason on an adult figure played by Tony Curtis. Kelly Leak went to Japan and came home. Maybe he mentioned it from time to time as a kind of badge of his worldliness. But that’s it. Then what?

Then, inevitably, he enters the 1980s, that time of increasing individualism and empty Reaganite patriotic posturing. The hair gets shorter, the drugs get harder, the myths of the open road get scarcer, sillier, paler.

Really, we can’t know what becomes of Kelly Leak. Or maybe we can know, but we all have to decide for ourselves. The first and perhaps easiest visualization of Kelly beyond the Bears is to see him as something like the hard-partying muscle car and jailbait aficionado Wooderson in Dazed and Confused. The willful walking 1970s anachronism. But this supposition is based less on the sequel, however, than on an exchange between Amanda and Kelly in the first movie, in which Kelly claims that the only reason he hangs around the Little League field is because of “the ass.”

But by the end of The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training it’s clear that there’s something else besides “ass” that draws him to the field. So who knows? Maybe he went on to a major league career. Maybe he became a motorcycle racer. Maybe he ... but I don’t even want to know, to tell the truth. Kelly Leak must be for me Kelly Leak as he was in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training: the center of the fundamental questing element of the American dream. The other element of the American dream, the settler’s part, the bucolic part, the heaven on earth behind white picket fences part: Is there any place for Kelly Leak there? Or is he, in the light of that part of the dream, to be deemed something that makes us worry whether our children are safe?

A movie that came out a couple years after The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, and just one year before Ronald Reagan became president, suggests a wider sense of what America might have had in store for Kelly Leak after his heroics in the Bears sequel.

Over the Edge focuses on a community like the one in Little Children, one that seems to be built on the American dream idea of perfect peace and harmony, far from the dangers of the city. A place where your children can be safe. But the community in Over the Edge (which is set in a Colorado town about ten miles away from Columbine) is not well: The teens of the town are not given anything to do or anywhere to go. They have been left out of the plan of the planned community. They use drugs, drink, vandalize. In an early scene, one hooligan shoots out the window of a cop car.

It is not too difficult to imagine Kelly Leak among these kids. In the Bears films he is a loner, but that is only in the context of the boys on the team and their childish pursuits. In the first Bears movie, before he has joined the team, Kelly tells Amanda that the Bears are “fags”; early in Over the Edge there is a prominent piece of graffiti on the school that reads “jocks are fags.” The kids in Over the Edge and Kelly Leak seem to speak the same language and seem to be oriented the same way toward the world.

The scene of greatest exhilaration in Over the Edge occurs when the two main characters, played by Michael Kramer and Matt Dillon (the latter in his film debut), steal a car and sail down the open road. The moment of freedom is brief and is bracketed on both ends by the sight of a cop car in pursuit (the first sight of the cop car is only for the audience; the boys are blissfully, albeit just momentarily, unaware that they are still enclosed within the confining rules of the town—they think they have broken free).

Though Over the Edge is much more grounded in reality, the scene reminds me of the getaway in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training; in both films there is joy on the part of boys who believe that the world is finally at their command, and they’re going to go and be high and get free. However, the escape scene in Over the Edge ends not with the gentle con of a policeman (in the Bears sequel, Kelly dons his hat and shades and jams a cigarette in his mouth to look more like an adult as the suspicious cops pull alongside and then eventually drive on), but with a policeman shooting Dillon’s character dead. Things become grimmer from there, as you might imagine, and the movie climaxes with a scene of a wildly destructive spree by the kids, who lock the parents in the school and smash and blow up all the cars in the parking lot. The scene reminded me of Disco Demolition Night, the infamous 1979 promotion at a White Sox game in Comiskey Park that turned into a riot. In both end-of-the-1970s scenarios, longhaired white kids set shit on fire and got high and rampaged in an impotent, useless rebellion, the last flare of mass dissent before the coming of Reagan and the disappearance of the likes of Kelly Leak.

The Van

I have this theory brewing that certain late ’70s movies can be seen as inadvertent chronicles of America’s shift from the soulful idealism of the post-hippie days to the bleak conformity of the Reagan years.

—LEON CHASE,
from a review of Supervan (1976)
at http://rockinvan.com

The phenomenon of customized vans was wholly indigenous to the 1970s. Before then, vans were not often given customized designs and individualized paint jobs. But in the 1970s, the image of the van became closely associated with a lifestyle of sex and a kind of easy, almost amoral freedom. A popular song centered on the idea of sex in “a Chevy van”; a popular saying/bumper sticker warned that IF THE VAN IS A ROCKING, DON’T COME KNOCKING.

It is the perfect and only choice of vehicle to convey the Bears cross-country to their game. The van makes the Bears sequel into something the first movie was not: a road film. And if film can be called America’s greatest indigenous art form, the road film may be its most fully American genre. The Bears sequel, then, could be called the most American of films: not only a road film, but a road film that is also a baseball film—America’s greatest art meeting its national pastime. And not only that, but if any one demographic can be said to represent the American spirit, well, it would have to be the twelve-year-old boy, heedlessly getting and consuming and throwing tantrums and slobbering with ravenous glee for life. So, the most stereotypically American image ever committed to film is that of a customized van filled with boys cresting into puberty as they hurtle without supervision down the wide-open highways of the West.

They could not all have fit into a car. And Kelly’s motorcycle, that other potent American symbol, certainly couldn’t fit more than the lone mute girl who shows up with Kelly during an early scene, mainly to signal the adult heterosexuality of the motorcyclist. They could take a bus, perhaps, but a bus would be unwieldy, and anyway a bus speaks of rules and schedules. It’s important that the Bears be entirely free, not counting their own self-created modes of measurement (Engelberg’s bowel-driven internal clock and Ogilvie’s elaborate charts and tables). They, like the psychedelic adventurers of the previous decade, the Merry Pranksters, must find their own way, beyond the reach of assigned seating and rigidly scheduled arrival and departure. But the Pranksters’ hippie model of painting over a school bus with Day-Glo acidinspired colorings was outdated by 1977, and would have made the message of the Bears’ flight too explicit. (And not deep enough in the grain of America itself to matter as much as it did, to resonate as much as it did. As much as it could, if looked at with the same eyes that saw it in 1977, child eyes, open to certain inextinguishable glows.) The van is a commodity, a perfect intersection of individuality and commerce: not the radicalized doodling of a hippie pack trying to reinvent the way everyone looks at the world, but the stylized, craftsman rendering of industrial design, a deep orange color, like some dream of a perfect and perfectly promising eternal sunrise, highlighted by clean-lined curlicues of fire. This van is a rocking. This van can roll. When it first enters the movie it is like an extension of all the worldliness and cool emanating off of Kelly. The members of the team who have yet to see it—everyone but Kelly and Ronzonni, who is toughly on top of the van, securing luggage—all stagger in amazement.

Wow, cool.

This is the constant mantra of the film. And all the actors who support the story of Kelly on the road stagger constantly in enthusiastic wonder. They wow the van, and wow the road, and wow the motel room, and wow girls both real and rendered in photographs, and wow junk food, and wow the outside of the Astrodome, and wow being able to run out onto a practice field to play baseball, and wow the inside of the Astrodome (even that tough cuss Tanner wows himself flat onto his back in that instance), and wow the arrival of the rainbow-clad Astros, and wow and leap and cheer the chance to play some more baseball when it seemed that no more baseball could be played, and embrace all of life with one big inextinguishable wow.

By the 1970s the freedom of the road was greatly imperiled. All the going and searching of the beatniks and their hippie progeny had led nowhere, and now the gas tanks were all running empty—quite literally, given the oil crisis gripping the nation. Instead of going anywhere, the better thing to do, the only thing to do, would be to park and to, while parking, fuck. Grim. But not if the van had been customized. Made to order. Metal and chrome sculpted to articulate the singular essence of Me. The center of the American experiment in unbridled individualism was the 1970s, the Me decade, and the center of the Me decade was that fossil fuel consumer and supposed ally in seduction singing the song of its owner: the customized van.

And with Kelly at the wheel, that Me becomes a We, and forward we go into all we ever could want without losing all that we have, which is each other, a team, shared childhood, innocence. In the van we can have it all. In the van, with Kelly at the wheel, we can be as free as we could ever dream of being.

Running on Empty

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training reveals, mostly unconsciously, accidentally, and with the broad strokes of unexamined fantasy, the fractured, problematic attitudes toward various minority groups in an America that by 1977 was running out of gas. The Bears’ cross-country ride can be seen as a fantasy in puerile defiance of the national reality. The nation was not only undergoing an energy crisis but was fragmenting. The vision of a team together in a van, a collective banding together, soothed the anxiety that kids soak up unconsciously. Everyone best knows what his or her nation is as a kid because when you’re a kid, you feel it. Later on, as an adult, you have a better intellectual understanding, maybe, but the feeling isn’t as direct. I know America in the 1970s because I was a kid in America in the 1970s, and there was no better time for a youthful fantasy of collective adventure, especially one that touched on some of the deepest strains in American culture: the road quest; the search for home (that is, Kelly’s search for his father); the desire to hold on to youth (Tanner’s tenacious devotion to the team and to being able to play); and simple unbridled consumption (the poster boy for this being, of course, Engelberg). America in the 1970s was feeling old and exhausted, stranded and alone, adrift and aimless. We kids breathed this air. We were primed for any means of escape, and while many more kids then and in the years to come chose the 1977 blockbuster Star Wars as their primary means of escape to a far-off, yet less ambiguous, world of adventure, there were plenty of kids who also got in the customized van.

I was one of them. I looked like an amalgamation of a few of them—curly hair like Jimmy Feldman’s (though darker), glasses like Ogilvie’s (though I hadn’t yet experienced his rapid change of height), attachment, like Tanner’s, to my Little League uniform. And like most of them, I was white.

The Bears were presented as a diverse group, especially in the first movie, when the inclusion of Amanda allowed them to check one more significant demographic box. They had a girl, a few Jews, a couple WASPs, a black kid, two Mexicans, a kid suffering from childhood obesity, a booger-eater with unnamed cognitive problems, and a juvenile delinquent. They lost the girl in the second movie but gained, as Tanner put it, “a wop.” In the first movie, Tanner’s summation of the makeup of the team, spiked as it was with racist terminology, not only illustrated the team’s diversity but was another of the film’s many leveling blasts against the pretension and hypocrisy that previously limited how children could be presented on film. In the second film, when Tanner reprises his speech, it lands awkwardly, shoehorned into a place where it shouldn’t be, in a film that is in essence a fantasy; but in doing so it unintentionally reveals some of the inner workings of that fantasy, which is at its heart the dominant fantasy of the nation: that of the white American male.

For further illumination of the nature of this fantasy, consider Ahmad. The changes in Ahmad’s character between the first and second movie are the product of the differences in the two films, one being an effort in comedic realism and the other a fantasy that cannot weigh itself down with much in the way of characterization of its team members. In the first movie, Ahmad is one of the most sensitive players, his desolation over the Bears’ early defeats leading him to toss his uniform and hide up in a tree; this desolation is further complicated and made more intimate and human when it turns out that it is based, in part, on Ahmad’s feeling that he will never be able to measure up to the athletic triumphs of his older brothers. In the second film, Ahmad is reduced to a thin caricature, one that borders on a racist stereotype: besides slapping fives and paraphrasing the rhyming boasts of Muhammad Ali, Ahmad most often gets screen time by fearfully squawking about “going to the joint” whenever the Bears seem in danger of having their fantasy trip derailed by authorities. These scripted, directed paroxysms on his part may have been inspired by the comedic and unsettling highpitched expressions of terror by Richard Pryor in his wildly popular standup act at that time, but stripped of the complexity of Pryor’s efforts, Ahmad’s outbursts come dangerously close to the eye-bulging mugging of minstrelsy.

This has always been a nation in which the greatest expression of freedom was going out on the road, the first such road being the transatlantic route that brought the pilgrims and other early settlers, and then the road west, and then all the crisscrossing real and imagined roads of Whitman and Guthrie and Kerouac and Easy Rider. But this tradition is primarily a white male fantasy, i.e., one that generally excludes everyone who isn’t white and male. It’s no wonder, really, that Ahmad is constantly worried about going to the joint the moment the team sets out on the road. A black man had no place going out on the road. He’d be eyeballed and shunned and barred from entering and arrested and worse.

And it’s no accident that Amanda is not along for the ride—women did not enter in any lasting way into the modern American myth of the road until the 1991 release of Thelma and Louise. Even in that film, the central characters were only able to act out the fantasy of freedom by violently blasting their way into it, and once they did so, a web began closing around them, freedom constricting from all directions, even from above (the once wide-open sky filling with martial helicopters), until the only way out, the only way to remain connected to freedom, was to embrace something like suicide.

We’re still very far from Thelma and Louise in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, of course. With Amanda out of the picture, women can be reduced to objects of consumption no more complicated or human than the bucket of chicken Engelberg orders for delivery from the team’s motel room. (He is later, in perhaps the most lowbrow moment of the film, shown devouring the contents of the bucket “blumpkin” style, i.e., while taking a dump.)

Here is a list of the females of any prominence whatsoever in the sequel: one mute girl on back of Kelly’s motorcycle; a female hitchhiker who ends up running in terror from the spilling-over-with-hungry-boys van; the implied naked women inside the porno magazines Carmen swipes from a convenience store; the two Texas girls whom Ogilvie uses to get information on the opposition; a couple of bimbos on the arm of the police detective who gets free tickets to the game in the Astrodome; and a big hotel desk lady (the only black character besides Ahmad and his family in the film). Besides those women, there are also a few glimpses of some of the mothers of the Bears as the Bears are shown spinning the lie about their new coach, the idiot groundskeeper. Tellingly, the 1977 novelization of The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, by Richard Woodley, which seems to be based on an earlier version of the script, features Ogilvie’s mother in a much larger role; this somewhat fearsome female character in the novelization has been all but eliminated in the movie, suggesting that the filmmakers keenly sensed what kind of fantasy they were creating. In the finished product, the combined lines of dialogue among the women of the sequel barely amount to more than those spoken by the absent Amanda.

My full-fledged willingness to participate in the general strain of American fantasy life that marginalizes all femininity of any complexity or consequence can be seen in my conspiring to kill off Princess Leia in the fall of 1977 while cowriting a sequel to Star Wars with a couple of buddies. There was, in our opinion, no need for her in the first movie, or for any girls, and so the sooner she was erased the better, and then we could get on with the adventure.

The actual sequel to Star Wars, which wouldn’t arrive for years, did not follow our lead, and in fact showed Princess Leia as an even more integral part of the story by romantically involving her with Han Solo, a development that repelled me even though by then I was interested quite avidly, if only in an extremely distant, theoretical way, in girls. It just seemed sappy and unnecessary. This is the case with almost all of a certain kind of movie, a genre that Star Wars includes in its monstrous embrace of genres (sci-fi, fantasy, western, comingof-age): the movie in which grown men act like boys.

Movies about a sports team, the core subgenre in the family of movies in which grown men act like boys, customarily involve the shoehorning in of a few scenes, often strikingly different in tone from the rest of the movie, in which the men interact with women in serious, “grown-up” ways (for example: Slap Shot, Bull Durham, and Major League). I suppose these shoehorned scenes serve some kind of a purpose (I imagine that they are there at the implicit or explicit request of studio executives aiming for “broad appeal”), but for the main target audience of the films, they are “cigarette break” scenes, so named by me for the practice of some friends of mine who watched their favorite film Diner repeatedly but always went out for a cigarette during Tim Daly’s completely nonessential, serious talks with a female character—having never paid close attention, I don’t recall what the problem between them was exactly—and the movie suffered no ill effects whatsoever for their editing. My attempt to revise Princess Leia out of the Star Wars universe—a revision that, as an adult, I can see would have robbed the film of an absolutely essential character—follows the same impulse my friends used when they exited Diner to wait out the romantic entanglement scenes.

I did not see the first Bears movie until after I saw The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, but if I’d seen them in order, I may well have been moved to do a similar kind of revision in my own version of a sequel. There would have been that same kind of love of a film’s universe that I had felt toward Star Wars, I’m sure, so there would have been the same desire to stay in that universe, that same almost prayerful wanting of more, that desire for things not to end, and so I could definitely see myself applying my very early tendency toward trying to stop the world to the goal of allowing the Bears to keep playing. And if I had done so, I would, I’m sure, have found a way to get rid of Amanda. I wouldn’t have cut her down with a light saber or given her any other such violent end. Probably it would have been something along the lines that she no longer cared about baseball. She had gone over to the other side, growing boobs, becoming someone to drool over at a distance, and not an individual whose life revolves around the dream of being able to keep playing.

Star Wars didn’t answer my prayers in their sequel, but Breaking Training answered my prayers without my even knowing I had them. It was every boy’s dream of a movie, a wild road trip toward a big game with no adults and no girls except those who could be ogled at, objectified, used, consumed, or altogether ignored. I was one of the boys going along for that insidious ride.

Another entity excluded and victimized by the American dream shows up in the film not as a commentary on that dream, it seems, but as a cobbled-together script complication to break up the scenes of happy jubilation and to introduce some narrative doubt into the proceedings. But a commentary does arise nonetheless, the scene’s intended implication of doubt—that the Bears are not very good and are going to get creamed—becoming a more general doubt about America’s general trajectory.

On its way to Houston, the team comes upon a group of Native American kids.

“Do you play baseball?” one of them asks.

Ronzonni acts as the spokesman for the group. He treats the question condescendingly, mentioning that the team has a game in “the Dome.”

“We play baseball, too,” the Native American kid adds, thumping his fist into his glove.

The locals proceed to give the Bears an ass-whupping in their rock-glutted desert field. The scene does a couple of things. First, it reveals that the Bears have been fooling themselves all along. They are not a good team, and Ronzonni is at the heart of their fraudulence. This almost causes a brawl between teams (Kelly averts it—he is cool enough to speak to the other team; after all, he has sartorial nods to native culture on his person), and then it causes dissension and hopelessness among the Bears.

It is a textbook bit of screenplay complication. But it also happens, perhaps accidentally, to work as a comment on the Bears’ American journey. This is something I understood even as a kid. When I walked out of The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, I felt exultant, but I couldn’t help thinking of the Indian team that had kicked the Bears’ ass in the desert. The Bears may have won the game in the Dome, but they couldn’t truthfully call themselves champions. They were far less capable as a team than the Native American kids still stranded in their impoverished digs in the desert.

It was, inadvertently or not, an acknowledgment of the fraudulence of the American dream of unbridled freedom out on the road. Such unbridled freedom comes at the cost of somebody else’s freedom, and the exultation over leaving home for the road is built on a sense of ownership or destiny that has been denied to the conquered. White consciousness had for most of its existence ignored and denied that their sweeping quest for home and freedom paved over the rights of people who preceded them in any given place. It denied that there was a valid consciousness outside of white consciousness, discounting indigenous peoples as godless savages who needed either to be saved or, should they deny that bit of Christian kindness, swept off the face of the earth.

This began to change by the 1970s, at least a little. The change could be marked, as with all shifts in American culture, by the treatment of American Indians in movies. Where previously they had been shown as a savage enemy to be faced down by the upright white man, most notably epitomized by John Wayne, in the late 1960s and 1970s counterculture ideas sifted into cinema enough to begin showing alternative shadings to the American myth of how the West was won. Films such as The Wild Bunch showed that the winning had been done in a much more savage and morally ambiguous fashion than had been previously acknowledged, and other films such as Little Big Man showed that the supposed savages were as human, if not more so, than their eventual conquerors.

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training was certainly not interested in making any political points, but the beating the team takes at the hands of the Native American team adds some sense that the American dream is more complex than the unbridled freedom of a vehicle sailing down the highway. There are people left behind, stranded in poverty. The only car in this scene is a burnt-out husk on the fringe of the field, a piece of wreckage that the Native American kids are able to navigate around to such an extent that Ogilvie mutters, “I guess that’s what they mean by a home field advantage.” This is their home, and because they are not involved in the phony fantasy that is the American road myth, they are authentic, more real than the fantasy-figment Bears.

America was waking up to itself in the 1970s. It was not a pretty sight. The year the Bears sequel came out, arguably the most significant event in popular culture was the airing of the immensely popular miniseries Roots. We were a nation built on slavery, a nation built on genocide. More immediately, we were the nation of Watergate and a lost war in Vietnam.

Within three years, voters would decide they’d had enough of this ugly reckoning. Ronald Reagan would wipe everything away by declaring that it was morning in America. Enough losing! It was time to win one for the Gipper.

But in 1977, there was enough of this kind of reckoning in the air for it to slip into a stock bit of screenplay complication. The Bears flew along the highway of the American Dream until they ran into some authentic inhabitants of the land. The meeting left them deflated, defeated, feeling like frauds, wracked with doubt, but a little bit closer to being real.

Kelly on Foot

The meeting with the Indians more or less signaled the end of The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training as a road movie, with the exception of one last moment of wonder and awe: the sun-kissed early morning sighting of their destination, the Astrodome. Arrival is the death of all road movies, of course, but the Bears sequel is a hybrid film, or perhaps a collection of recycled parts that don’t hang together. But for me they do hang together because of the presence of Kelly, who by virtue of his charismatic persona embodies the implications and intimations of the road in all that he does. He embodies the road, and when the team arrives in Houston, ending their road trip, he begins to carry the movie on his shoulders even more.

Kelly knows his way around, wherever he is. When the rest of the Bears are stranded in the hotel, under police scrutiny for their inexplicably unchaperoned presence hundreds of miles from home, Kelly sets off to make good on a police officer’s demand that he find the team’s coach. (Kelly has told the police officer that the coach “isn’t here,” rather than the whole truth.)

How does Kelly know how to get from the hotel where the Bears are staying to the factory where his father is getting off work? It is not explained, but it doesn’t have to be. Kelly knows his way around, no matter where he is.

As Carmen Ronzonni replaced Amanda, Mike Leak replaces Buttermaker. It is a replacement that on first glance adds credence to the commonly held belief that the sequel is the inferior movie. Walter Matthau is a film icon, a beloved performer with an Academy Award to his name. The man playing Mike Leak is a step down from that, surely, William Devane being one of those guys who shows up mostly in TV movies. But he does a good job in his role. And his casting and characterization add some shadings to the film’s inadvertent status as a time capsule of the American mind in a kind of exhausted, directionless crisis.

At the time the film came out, Devane was most recognizable to viewers for his portrayal of President Kennedy in a popular miniseries, The Missiles of October (1974), and the echo of JFK in his face and the premonition of Reagan in the references to the Gipper reinforce the sense of the movie as a snapshot of a rudderless, in-between time in America.

Mike Leak, first shown walking out of a factory and later shown wearing an army jacket, is a working-class white man and possibly also a Vietnam vet. He is the state of American maledom at that time, including most especially his status as an absent father.

Mike passes Kelly with a glance but no sense of recognition. He does not know his son. Kelly then approaches him as he balances kid-like on a curb, waiting for his ride. The kid is in the know; the adult is still innocent. It is a touching moment.

“Michael,” Kelly says. “Hey, Michael Leak.”

This is the first moment that suggests who this man is to Kelly. Finally, Mike recognizes his son, says his name. They talk a little, Kelly trying to remain cool and aloof. He needs this man on a couple of levels, one of them huge, but he emphasizes the smaller one: he needs him to pose for a short while, no big deal, as the team’s coach.

“How long’s this gonna take?” Mike asks.

But once he enters the movie he is in all the way, though he knows enough to let the team come to him, rather than imposing himself in the manner of the team’s earlier coach.

His entrance into the action signals the end of the dream for real. Upon his arrival at the hotel, a tow truck can be seen in the background, briefly, towing away the van. It is a quick moment, barely noticeable. I want to pause there before I go any further. The van has left the scene, has left the movie, has left the world. There are other things to get to in the movie, but the beautiful dream of freedom and movement across the land is truly dead. The boys are now boys again, dependent on the coach and his big American convertible to get from place to place.

The Bears first agree that they don’t need anyone, but after a disastrous unsupervised practice they come to him and ask for his help. They acknowledge they need him, with one exception: Kelly.

Kelly does not like depending on anyone.

But he has no way of getting around anymore on his own. He has reached the end of the road. His motorcycle is back in California, and the van has been towed away. After a shouting match with his father over Kelly’s refusal to put out his cigarette, he appears to quit the team, and he stalks away from the field. Without wheels, his only option is to run, which he does, at full tilt, tears streaming down his face. Kelly needs to move. An aerial shot captures him from above, running down a road away from a baseball field, running as fast as he can and nowhere.

Ogilvie on Borrowed Time

Kelly is not the only Bear going through changes. Between the first and second movie, Ogilvie, played by Alfred Lutter, was hit by the puberty freight train. He shot up in height and his face changed, becoming more angular. This change works in the film, as Ogilvie is seen on a few occasions acting as the most mature member of the group. He’s the one who enables Kelly’s plan to have the groundskeeper pose as the coach by realizing that all they have to do is tell their parents the “truth” (that he’s been “around the Little League field for years”). He is voted team treasurer, the guy they most trust to handle the money. He is the one who gets the team a room at a motel. Once the team is in Houston, he sets off on a scouting mission on his own, gathering useful (albeit demoralizing) data, and then during the game he brings it up at an opportune time, serving as a de facto assistant coach.

His lack of athletic ability continues to be the standard of lameness. When Tanner gets spiked early in the game in the Astrodome, the coach jokes that he’s going to have to bring Ogilvie in to replace Tanner. He gets an at-bat during the game, which mainly proves that the ethic established in the first film—that everyone gets a chance—is still in effect (he does not reach base).

But all these contributions to the story, which in sum place Ogilvie in a fourth-place tie with Engelberg (behind Kelly, Tanner, and Carmen) in terms of the individual team members’ importance to the story, don’t add up to Ogilvie’s legacy, which is greater than his onscreen moments would suggest. He is (or should be)—no way around it—a pop culture god. This is partially due to his role in the first movie, which established and even made okay the role of a flat-out four-eyed nerd on a baseball team. Every four-eyed nerd who also loved baseball (this one included) rejoiced when he discovered Ogilvie. Ogilvie’s love of and reliance upon statistics further endeared him to those who saw themselves in him. Some kids play baseball and just love to play. Other kids—often the same kids who grow up still clinging tightly to their childhood love of the game—love to read about the game and all its dizzying endless columns of numbers.

Ogilvie not only gave hope and reassurance to all us statspouting bespectacled ectomorphs, he also presaged two developments in the culture. The first was baseball-related. Not long after Ogilvie’s love of stats hit the screens, a baseball nut named Bill James began creating Ogilvie-esque (in terms of their thoroughness, innovation, and love of the game) analytical reports that relied on but did not begin and end with statistics. This began a revolution in the game from the outside in, with Ogilvies all over the country beginning to follow James’s lead and eventually even becoming decision makers in the front offices of major league teams.

And in Ogilvie there is the first note of the coming revolution of the nerd, the takeover led by Bill Gates and other computer-savvy innovators. The actor who portrayed Ogilvie, Alfred Lutter, himself dropped out of acting to follow this path, and is currently the CEO of a Silicon Valley technology company.

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training was Lutter’s last film. Besides the two Bears movies, he had been in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, a seminal early 1970s movie that expanded the road movie genre by placing a single mother at the wheel. Lutter played the smart-aleck son, and in doing so offered an indelible portrait of childhood in the 1970s: the child as passenger in a fluid, changing world; the child as the necessarily precocious miniature adult, exposed to things that children from earlier eras were not; the child who in some ways has to serve as the parent to the discombobulated, disoriented, directionless parent; the child who dons as children never had before the bracing and protective armor of sarcasm. For his work in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and in the Bears road-going sequel, Alfred Lutter deserves a place in the pantheon of road narrative icons, the unlikeliest member of that pantheon, a bespectacled, thoughtful, wisecracking, inward young dweeb in the passenger seat, growing up as the world flies by the car window. I see him there now, next to Dean Moriarty and Peter Fonda’s Captain America and Ken Kesey and Thelma and Louise. Alfred Lutter: I see him cresting puberty, twisting into something new and unknown, clutching a road map and his charts and pushing his glasses up his nose with his fingers as he squints out at the road ahead and tries to determine something concrete and knowable.

In The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, his stooped elongation signals that the whole team is on borrowed time, that—like the kids in “Miri,” the episode of Star Trek in which Kirk and crew beam down to a planet with no adults, just kids who turn into monsters and die as soon as they hit puberty—the Bears will all soon go into queasy bloom and disappear. This is Ogilvie’s last trip with the team, something that we know in retrospect but that kids watching in 1977 also knew subconsciously since they lived in the world in which kids who sprouted up like Ogilvie suddenly stopped doing the things they used to do—they disappeared from their former world, the world of the kid, and moved on to something else more complicated and less fun.

Ogilvie is still holding tight to the kid world, or to his version of it, which was always more grown-up than the versions of all his other teammates besides Kelly and perhaps Amanda (even Carmen, despite his boasting aura of worldliness, seems in his inept, imitative ways much more of a kid than Ogilvie). There is no angst on his part, no desire to go broodingly off on his own as Kelly does and as Carmen does, too, at one point. He is totally focused on the team, as consistently focused as anyone with the possible exception of Tanner (and he may even have Tanner beat given Tanner’s frequent detours into tantrum rage). He wears a jacket that only a kid would wear—it is emblazoned with the names of major league baseball teams. He wears a baseball cap.

There is one brief moment in which his focus on the team seems to waver. It’s when the Bears reach the practice field and a couple of local girls come up to a chain link fence and talk to the Bears across the top of it for a moment before walking away. One seems to fixate on Ogilvie momentarily, possibly because he is the tallest and therefore the most mature of the players, and as they are walking away Ogilvie moves toward them as if pulled by a magnet, stopping only when impeded by the fence. Earlier, like the other guys, he had fought to get his hands on one of the Playboys Carmen had stolen (he failed and can be seen collapsing in slight disappointment onto the bed and soothing his disappointment by chomping into some sort of mass-produced yellow snack cake), but this later moment seems a little different. He is the only team member who seems to be drawn in the unmistakably zombie-like fashion of a young teenager toward the girls.

A later scene gets us back to the old Ogilvie and raises questions about the first scene and about the logic or lack thereof of the fictional world of the Bears sequel. Ogilvie meets up with the two pretty girls and gets them to talk about the opposition, taking copious scouting notes as they talk. Once this scouting mission is over, there is some flirting, which Ogilvie seems oblivious to, and then Ogilvie walks away and the single most inexplicable moment of the often reality-stretching movie occurs: one of the girls says to the other girl, using a singsong voice and clearly referencing Ogilvie, “Oooh, I’m in looove.”

Ogilvie? Ogilvie? Did I mention these girls were pretty? Maybe they think the elongated Ogilvie is an “older man.” He’s not hideous or anything, and he’s undoubtedly a refreshing change from the local breed of boy, which as we find out is a particularly obnoxious strain of dumbass tobacco-chawing meathead. Ogilvie is a stranger from far away who was instrumental in the caper that brought the team to Houston, the greatest joyride in the history of time.

So okay, maybe it’s not so inexplicable. But the Ogilvie that all of us four-eyed nerds looked up to was an Ogilvie very much like us, and none of us ever had the feeling that pretty girls were saying to one another that they were in love with us. It’s a jarring note in the proceedings. Ogilvie is not quite like us anymore. Ogilvie, though he seems only intermittently interested in such things, will soon be moving on.

This is it, then. Fuck the idea of another game in Japan, which turns out to be beneath consideration anyway. If this is Ogilvie’s last game, this is the last game. The sequel started with the feeling of continuation, facing down the “we can’t go on” with “we’ll go on.” Now, as the movie enters its third and final act, and as the boys enter their teens before our eyes, it’s back to “we can’t go on.” Everything ends. What do you do about that? How do you go into that pimply night?

3

Let Them Play

Dear Looper,

I don’t want any of this anymore. Send it all to the cruddy moon. I junked almost everything else after my old man croaked but here is one last thing. I saved it. Sometimes I think it should go back to Ronzonni because he is the one who swiped it and gave it to me saying you kept fighting little man you deserve it and I said blow it out your ass but I took it because I wanted to remember but what is the use. I never knew who Jutze was anyway. Ask Ogilvie if you ever see him. But I guess he was an Astro. His shirt still just about blinds me all those colors. Easier just to look at nothing so I don’t want it anymore. But I hope you can use it Big Looper. When I first held it in my hands it seemed like that day would never end.

Your pal,
Tanner Boyle

The Blue Bicycle

“How’s your mom?”

This is a question that became familiar to many kids in the 1970s. As the divorce rate climbed exponentially, more and more children found themselves functioning as the emotional telegraph wire between separated adults who had once believed their separate lives would be merged into one life forever.

I know I got this question. I never knew how to answer it, because I sensed that there was more to the question than the mere three syllables. I always answered “fine” because she was always the same to me. She was Mom. Same as she was last summer when you asked. But I knew this wasn’t an answer to the hidden parts of the question:

How did we get to this point?

How am I here and she there?

Is she happy or sad or somewhere in between?

Is there any place left in her world for me?

How am I?

These may have been some of the hidden meanings of the question, I don’t know. Really, the hidden part was wordless, was part of all the things we can’t say. The question, in fact, wasn’t even a question, but a statement of fact: we are no longer together.

But the statement did have a question mark at the end of it. Similarly, the society-wide trend toward marital disintegration and familial atomization was laid at the feet of the children to solve. It was a statement. It happened. But there was a question mark at the end of it, an uncertainty that it was the right thing to be happening, and the question mark was aimed squarely at the children.

Are you okay with all this? Are we doing the right thing? Are we all going to be okay?

If The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training was the ultimate prepubescent fantasy, it was also a projection of the cultural trend in which the child became the parent and the parent the child. In the Bears sequel, all the parents, with the exception of Mike Leak, are shown to be oblivious and naive and easily swayed; the children, on the other hand, are the ones in the know, the schemers who are aware that the world has moral gray areas and that it’s okay in certain situations to lie and steal. The children are at the wheel.

This is reflective of the 1970s, in which parents everywhere drew on the cultural suggestions of the experimental 1960s and decided to “find themselves.” Children spent more time alone, fending for themselves. Children became friends to their parents, confidants, strong shoulders to cry on. Much of this came out of a rebellion on the parents’ part against the stern-jawed silences of their own parents. But it was also due to the sharp increase in the numbers of single parents. In a home without an adult partner to share the burden of keeping a family afloat, the single mother often relied on one or more of her kids to be that second parent, confiding in them and leaning on them. Meanwhile, the mostly absent second parent became something like a buddy, visiting once in a while or hosting a visit, the meetings strangely formal and date-like, the adult stripped of any parental authority, instead becoming someone to talk to “man to man.”

When Kelly Leak first tracks down his father in Houston, Mike asks Kelly, “How’s your mom?”

Kelly seems to understand what’s at stake with this question better than I ever did, not surprising given his sophistication and worldliness.

“She’s okay,” he says with a complicated flatness, giving nothing away but also managing to communicate the notion that her life is certainly no bowl of cherries. She’s on her own, fuckhead. She’s barely getting by. She’s making it up as she goes along. Also, in Kelly’s answer, somehow so much more revealing of knowledge on the subject than my confused and thin “fine,” there is the sense that Kelly has become her equal in the home, an adult charged with sharing the burden of a tough life.

The questioning along those lines goes no further. Unlike my dad, Mike Leak seems to harbor no desire to remain a part of Kelly’s mom’s life. He has moved on. The question really isn’t so much about the mom but about Kelly. It’s the question the children of the 1970s were charged with answering. The question that was a statement with a question mark at the end of it.

Kelly’s answer comes out later, during a blowup between the father and the son. It’s an answer that we all might have done well to consider.

No.

That was his answer. A refusal. Here it is in total:

On the day you left you gave me this little blue bicycle. I was five years old—this little punk kid. You gave me the bicycle thinking if I accepted it, I’d accept the deal. Well, you were wrong. I didn’t accept that bicycle. It’s eight years old, it’s untouched, and it’s still in my basement.

Most kids took the bicycle. They said yes to the bicycle, yes to the deal, yes to the absence of the father, yes to a dawning era of superficial, consumption-oriented individualism and societal atomization. What were the 1980s but a shiny blue bicycle proffered by an absent father figure, Reagan—absent both in terms of any depth of character behind his actor’s mask and in terms of any desire on his part to preside over a cohesive, egalitarian society, that dream of family that is the dream of democracy?

Jimmy Carter saw it all coming, poor fucker. From his Crisis of Confidence speech of July 15, 1979 (often referred to as the “malaise” speech):

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves.

Carter was trying to say no to the blue bicycle that would be waved around in front of the noses of voters the following year by his opponent, when voters would say yes and send the staggering incumbent packing.

Kelly Leak would have still been too young in 1980 to cast a vote in the presidential election, but you have to think he would have been able to see through the bullshit of the national offer of the blue bicycle. When something was really at stake, even if it was as hard to define as the concept of a whole, unbroken family, Kelly could feel it.

Is it a stretch to find, in retrospect, political commentary in the subtext of a slight, for-money, fast food cheeseburger of a sequel for kids? Sure, but my intention is to make the stretch sincerely, and, in making it, to aspire to the passion and tenacity of Tanner and the hunger of Engelberg and the focus and curiosity of Ogilvie and the swagger of Carmen and the wow, cool enthusiasm of the rest of the guys and most of all the toughness and sensitivity of Kelly Leak. All roads lead to Kelly Leak, and Kelly Leak leads to all roads.

Which makes his refusal of the blue bicycle all the more interesting. Kelly has based his identity upon that most American notion of all, freedom, on his vehicular mobility. But this defining facet of his persona seems to have its roots in the refusal of the blue bicycle. Picture a blue bicycle given to a five-year-old: I see plastic grips on the handles, tassels draping down from them; I see a seat that is not quite banana but a kind of junior banana, a cushiony plastic softness, deep blue with gold sparkles. I see training wheels. I see a five-year-old boy. I see childhood itself. I see that moment in movies when a kid first learns to ride a bike—the glee and shaky fear combining on his face, the glee prevailing, the echo of a father’s guiding hand still on the kid’s back as he begins to pedal away.

It’s the epicenter of childhood, this blue bicycle. It’s childhood itself. It’s a means of mobility, but mobility within a known world, a small world, a world presided over by parents. A safe world. Kelly understood on some level that this world was not his world anymore. He understood that childhood for him, if he clung to it, would be a lie. He said no to childhood. If he was going to have any kind of vehicular mobility, it would be a vehicular mobility appropriate to an adult. It would be a vehicular mobility that allowed for passage anywhere and that did not recognize any borders. It would be one that was fueled by the hole inside him that the blue bicycle was meant to fill. It would be one that would eventually bring him to Houston, face-to-face with the man who had left in his absence a blue bicycle.

Refusing Disconnection

I’ll never forgive you for this. That’s what one person recently told me after interpreting my occasional mentions of the Bad News Bears sequel as a recommendation to purchase and watch the DVD. A more common response to the news that I’m working on this book has been an incredulous, rhetorical “Why?” And then there was the reaction by a writer who once made a living as a film critic. He admitted to me that he’d liked The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training as a kid but then declared authoritatively that a viewing later in life revealed it to be “unwatchable.”

But I’m not willing to let go of my childhood love for this supposedly unwatchable, unforgivable film. When people question my affection for the movie, I think about that first time watching it, when I cheered as loudly as I ever have for a movie, surrounded by a theater of boys yelling their heads off, too.

When it was over, we all spilled out of the theater, beaming and laughing. I spent the night at my friend’s house and went home the next day. The end of childhood was off in the distance, but not really that far. As that end came, and even after, far into my adult life, I circled back to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training from time to time, at first coating my return in that young adult’s protective armor, irony, but as I continued to come back I realized it was more than that: I wanted to keep playing.

In that, I’m like the boys in the sequel, who all want to keep playing. Even Kelly, who has in his life found most connections to be fraudulent blue bicycles to be refused, turns out to be the Bear who needs a true connection the most.

He’s shown signs of this need by his mere presence on the trip, but he isn’t pushed to make this need abundantly clear until late in the movie, after he’s sprinted away from the practice field, leaving his father and the team behind with the words “I don’t need you! I don’t need any of you!”

I ruminated earlier on Kelly’s fate, imagining that beyond Breaking Training he might end up among the kids in Over the Edge. This possibility seems the strongest when Kelly’s first moment back onscreen after he is shown leaving the team is in a pool hall, alone, smoking and playing. Where does he go from here? Why would he even go back with the Bears to California? Wouldn’t he just go out into the fatherless, juvenile delinquent America of Dean Moriarty that Jack Kerouac rhapsodized over in On the Road?

Kelly seems as if he may indeed venture out to find that same elusive, cosmic sense of connection that Kerouac and Cassady looked for as they crisscrossed the country. He seems as if he will build his journey on a refusal of disconnection, rather than merely on the refusal of a false connection that was represented by the blue bicycle.

His father’s arrival in the pool hall seems to begin to turn him around. By this time, Mike Leak’s legitimacy is already well established in the eyes of every baseball-playing boy in the audience. This legitimacy, though enhanced by William Devane’s confident yet understated performance, is largely due to his athletic prowess. While Walter Matthau in the first movie displayed little evidence of his supposedly athletic past, Devane shows as he leaps around the field during the Bears’ practice that he used to play some ball. He can field a grounder and make a throw and bat fungoes capably, and with a sincere love of the game. He’s for real.

His coaching carries this legitimacy further, most notably in the scene in which he fixes the team’s most crucial problem—Carmen Ronzonni’s ineptitude as a pitcher, which is based in his insecure total reliance on impersonations of star major league pitchers—by telling Carmen to “cut the bullshit” and “throw like Carmen Ronzonni.”

This legitimacy carries into the scene with Kelly in the poolroom. We don’t really know what kind of man he is, but we know he’s not full of shit about baseball, and that’s enough for us to think that he might have something worthwhile about him. He’s not just some adult blowhard mouthing platitudes without understanding. The understated nature of Devane’s performance helps, as he quietly comes across as someone who realizes that things are not okay, and that this time he’s not going to try to give Kelly a blue bicycle, metaphorical or otherwise. He leaves the decision of whether father and son should try to connect completely up to Kelly, asking his son if he would have come to see him if the team didn’t need someone to pose as a coach.

Kelly doesn’t answer, implying an answer in the negative and, more generally, that he’s clinging to his cool disconnection from everyone and everything.

Mike Leak doesn’t push it, instead asking Kelly to “think about that.” With that—and with the information also passed along to Kelly that “there’s a group of kids back at the hotel who can’t play without you”—Mike Leak exits, leaving the rest up to Kelly.

Kelly, of course, returns to the team, just in time to take the field for the game inside the Dome. The makers of the film were not trying to shatter any narrative boundaries. The good guys will band together and win.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the flaws and crass manipulations of plausibility and logic that have been a part of the movie throughout seem to crescendo at the film’s conclusion into a kind of fugue state. To me, for whom the movie is a mutation of my own skewed imagination, this frenzied seizure of mistakes as the Bears near victory is an unconscious commentary on the ridiculousness of victory in an era of general, expansive defeat. But I understand that for anyone already doubting the movie, the extended in-game action that comprises the finale would clinch an attitude of complete disdain.

The centerpiece for the whole flawed movie is the team’s batting order during the winning rally, the lineup now bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the one established earlier in the game. Any baseball-loving kid would understand, even as a flicker somewhere below the overriding, giddy pleasure and joy brought on by the action, that things had literally and figuratively gotten out of order. Jose, Carmen, Tanner, Ahmad, and Engelberg are all skipped over in the batting order at various times, suggesting that at-bats are awarded on some sort of merit basis. Kelly, naturally, is the beneficiary of this rampant flaunting of one of the more basic rules of the game, getting three at-bats, which is two more than everyone else on the team except Ahmad and Toby, who manage to get two each (for those scoring at home, Kelly smacks a double, a homer, and a single, collecting two RBI and two runs scored).

Fuck it, the filmmakers seemed to be saying. Who’ll know the difference? And even if they do, this ain’t prime rib at Tavern on the Green, it’s a cheeseburger.

And they were right and wrong both. We did know the difference, but we had connected to the movie by then and we damn sure weren’t going to disconnect over something like the fact that Carmen Ronzonni, who previously seemed to have been banned from batting, somehow materializes at a completely implausible spot in the order so as to be able to come up with the sacks full and the team down by three runs with two outs and everything on the line. We just wanted to chomp the goddamn cheeseburger.

How fitting that the well-intentioned fraud, Ronzonni—and not, say, Kelly—delivers the winning blow. Fitting too that it is not a majestic shot of completely unambiguous glory over the fence but a droopy opposite field liner that gets kicked around repeatedly by the opposition, the feeling that things are shaking to pieces now fully infiltrating the action itself, and Ronzonni blusters and huffs and puffs around the bases by virtue of that most human of all things: mistakes.

It’s the kind of hit that every Little Leaguer in the audience saw a ton of in his or her mistake-filled games. If it was one of our teammates benefiting from the bumbling, we sure as hell didn’t cheer any less than we would if everything was gained without human error anywhere. In fact, dramatically speaking, there was nothing that built as well or as much in a game of baseball than an error-aided sprint around the bases. Each time it looked like things would come to a natural conclusion and the rally would die, it found new life somehow, by virtue of the kind of clumsiness that we all knew from inside out, and this time it was our turn to be immune to clumsiness and the other team’s turn to feel it. It was our turn to win. It was our turn to chomp into the cheap arbitrary cheeseburger of victory.

And so yes, when the home plate ump, after a dramatic pause, signaled that Carmen Ronzonni was safe, I cheered as loud as I ever have. We all did.

I still do, in my head. I keep coming back to my unwatchable, unforgivable movie to refuse disconnection and play, just like Kelly, whose dramatic arrival in the locker room of the Dome just before the start of the climactic game shows that he wants his connection to his team to survive. It’s a connection that is the essence of childhood; it’s also a model for the kind of societal connection that Jimmy Carter was pleading for in his Crisis of Confidence speech: let’s band together and play.

I keep coming back to refuse disconnection, and I keep coming back to refuse the end. And now we come to the climax of the movie. Not the ultimately negligible, if structurally necessary, moment when Carmen scores the winning run, but the part that actually precedes that false climax, the part that begins when all seems to be lost, when the team is told, right in the middle of an early inning, that the game is over. There are initial groans and protests about this, but they are all impotent, even Mike Leak giving up after arguing for a while with the ump. Everybody has given up and accepted the end, with one exception.

Tanner’s still out there, standing alone.

Refusing the End

When the depth of corruption in the highest levels of political leadership revealed itself in the early 1970s, the president at the center of the revelations, Richard Nixon, resigned, the first time a president had ever done so. He was on the verge of being impeached. Soon after his resignation, he was pardoned. The political system that had allowed the corruption to occur remained unchanged. It was a system driven by corporate interests and not by the will of the people, contrary to the nation’s dream of democracy.

The people’s will thus exposed as having little effect on political realities, dispirited voters began staying away from the polls at increasing rates. The game was over. Even before it seemed it should be, the game was done and lost. Everyone felt bad about it, and wronged, but just about everyone walked with shoulders slumping toward the dugout, so to speak.

You could see it everywhere. Films grew flaccid and numbing, losing their early 1970s edge. Popular music came to be dominated by the monotonous thumping of disco and the slick, bloated posturing of arena rock. Hairstyles regressed into ugly collisions of retreat and desperation. Megaphones once used to lead chants gathered dust.

“Where’s everybody going?” Tanner asks. “We’re not finished!”

Two men in suits advance toward him. They are not evil. They are not stand-ins for Nixon. They are, in a way, worse. They are functionaries, apologetic but assertive, pointing to their watches and invoking the god that rules the country, money. The game is a commercial-driven diversion between the commercial-driven diversions of the first and second games of a doubleheader. The important thing turns out to be the commercials. They, and what they sell, and the corporations that rake in the profits, rule. Everyone else has to get in line. I’m sorry, the men in suits explain, but that’s just the way it is. And they advance toward Tanner to remove the last dissenter from the field.

In 1977, the same year Tanner made his stand, the Grateful Dead performed a string of shows that many of their fans agree was the pinnacle of their achievement as a band. They had by then been written off by the wider culture, were already considered anachronistic holdovers from the questing, psychedelic hippie days. Many of those who had joined them in an earlier, more open and adventurous era had begun to slump toward the dugout, surrendering to the evidence that their time had passed.

We’re not finished, the Grateful Dead declared. This message would have had no potency had the band become a fossilized touring outfit aping recorded versions of their “hits” as they trudged from county fair to county fair. But the band, who had first performed under the name the Grateful Dead during the acid tests of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, saw their music as an eternal exploration, a way not only to pay lip service to the idea of the American dream of the road journey but to physically catapult themselves night after night down that road, into the unknown. That was the plan, anyway. There were some nights when this didn’t come together, and the band struggled through flagging connections to one another and to the music. But in 1977, while the rest of the world cleared the field and walked to the dugouts, the Grateful Dead hit a hot streak and staked out mile after mile of new territory. There was ecstasy in the music, and connection and collectivity, all the musicians on the same wavelength as much as they had ever been and ever would be again.

There are ways to take a stand and to refuse disconnection and refuse the end.

In 1977, another kind of music that dissented from the current trends—echoing the spirit of Tanner’s strident last stand more closely than the gently tenacious wow, cool enthusiasm and collectivism of the Dead—was beginning to spread beyond the borders of its first epicenters in New York and London. That year would be the last before, as Mike Watt wrote in a song about himself and his best friend Dennes Boon, “punk rock saved our lives.”

Watt and Boon, along with a third friend, drummer George Hurley, did not shuffle toward the dugout when they were supposed to but, as the Minutemen, explored the weird, wild roads of America that were still to be discovered, and they did so in a van, helping to trailblaze a national network of clubs and fans for the independent bands that followed, and they said yes to the possibility of the people grabbing the reins of power from anti-democratic, profit-driven corporate interests. Tanner, had he had a more nuanced understanding of the situation unfolding in the Dome—had he seen, in other words, that the Bears were being banished from the field before the end of the game because the commercial-driven schedule had to be adhered to above all else—might have screamed “fuck advertising” (like D. Boon in the Minutemen song “Shit from an Old Notebook”) at the men in suits as he dodged their deathly grasp.

I can’t think of that anti-commercial epithet without hearing D. Boon’s full, joyful, defiant wail, his blistering lead guitar line backing them. He and the Dead’s de facto leader Jerry Garcia, both overweight lead guitarists in California bands, were not otherwise a lot alike. One had no interest in politics at all, or believed that the strongest political stance he could take was to chase down the joy he found in music (he may have been right—the Dead over the years fostered a staggeringly large community with decidedly humanistic values, which in itself is a victory over the atomizing and disempowering dictates of the corporate-driven system)—the other was stridently, overtly political, advocating not only dissent from the unjust system but the growth of local communities, namely “a punk band on every corner”; he wanted people everywhere to get into the van as he and his buddies had, in the sense of embarking on an adventure together, in pursuit of truth and real joy. Both men, Jerry Garcia and D. Boon, said no to the approaching men in dark suits by saying yes to their passionate love of being on the field, playing with their friends.

Tanner darts in and out of the grasp of the two men in dark suits. They are bureaucrats, cogs in the system. They have difficulty dealing with the feints and spins of a little boy who needs to keep playing. They don’t have that kind of flexibility or imagination.

As Tanner fights to keep the game alive, several members of the Houston Astros enter the Bears’ dugout. Their cameo might have been forgotten, and may have taken the film into the land of the forgotten with them, had they not been wearing the greatest uniforms ever devised—to my childhood eyes—for any purpose in the history of the world.

These brightly colored, rainbow-striped uniforms are mocked nowadays, in retrospect, and they may well have been mocked by adults back when they first appeared, but they were never disdained by the boys of that day. We loved them. On baseball cards and in the occasional glimpse on television, they burst into the rooms of our homes like a blow against the encroaching world of gray.

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training moves toward these uniforms like Dorothy toward the wizard. There is never a hint that these uniforms will be seen, but every boy watching the movie knows to associate the early mention of the Astrodome with the Astros, the wearers of these uniforms, so the dream of seeing the great rainbows larger than life up on the screen is embedded in the undertones of the road film; and when the Bears are in their greatest peril, facing the premature bureaucratic end of their game, when the Bears need an Oz-like miracle, these uniforms make a stunning, thrilling, magical appearance. Real major leaguers appear, clad in coats of many colors. An impossible situation is flooded with the vivid flickering of boundless possibilities.

When the Astros enter the dugout from the clubhouse, the Bears flock to them with wow, cool enthusiasm. The boys know their names, as I did from studying their vivid color photographs on my baseball cards, and so it is as if gods have come down to the world. It would, in fact—because of the role of the players in the turn the film is about to take—be a moment of deus ex machina (a literal one, given their godly status), had Tanner not been doing what he was doing, continually, and by doing it actually seeming to inspire one of the gods to voice his opinion from on high.

It is Bob Watson who speaks. He is the only Astro to get a speaking part, and once he looks out at Tanner and gets the gist of the situation, he flails his arm in a somewhat lame, jerky fashion, and says, “Hey, let the kids play.”

Mike Leak hears this. To this point he has been staring out at Tanner along with anyone else, frustrated that there seems to be no way to help his last holdout keep the idea of the game alive. But a god has spoken, and it dawns on Mike Leak that there might still be a way to take the word from a god to the people.

The crowd. It was a force for a little while, wasn’t it? Seemed that way anyway. My mom has told me about the magnetic images of the crowd that she saw on TV in the late 1960s—at civil rights rallies, at anti-war rallies. It seemed to have power, the crowd. People banding together to change the world.

In 1970, the concert movie Woodstock debuted, the crowd for the first time in cinematic history the hero of a film, and even more than that the seeming triumph of the peace and love movement. There seemed no limit to what the crowd could do.

Subsequent films of that decade showed a souring of this belief that the crowd could have a positive impact on American life. In two of the best movies of the decade, crowd scenes figure prominently in the climactic moments. In Taxi Driver, the crowd in a scene near the end of the movie seems merely to be a backdrop, but in being a backdrop the crowd stands in stark contrast to the focal point of the movie, Travis Bickle, a profoundly alienated and solitary man. The crowd has gathered for a political rally, and the underlying message as the camera follows the psychotic, newly mohawked Bickle’s attempt to position himself to assassinate the rally’s featured candidate is that the crowd is involved in meaningless activity. We have been atomized and split from one another, and slogans at rallies (is it “we are the people” or “we are the people”?) will not bind us together. Bickle’s plan to “do something big,” a plan that does not pan out during the crowd scene, is in a sense an attempt to reveal the lie that there is a “we” or a “people.”

A movie from the previous year, Robert Altman’s Nashville , offers an even more pointed consideration of the American crowd. The climactic scene occurs in a huge crowd and reaches its peak when a Bickle-esque character successfully assassinates the most highly valued person in the crowd, the headliner at the outdoor concert that is a political rally for a populist third-party presidential candidate. There is a moment of hysteria and terror, but after the assassination victim is carted from the stage, another performer takes the mike and starts singing a song that another group has made a hit in the fictional world of the film: “It don’t worry me, it don’t worry me. You might say that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me.”

It’s a catchy, insipid ditty. Gradually, a few voices in the crowd join in. Then more. Finally, everyone has surrendered and is singing. The camera pans the crowd, the last moment of the movie: Here we are. All of us. Not worried. Not free.

The next crowd scene of note in American cultural history, if the usual omission of The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training from that history is made, would occur in 1980. It would be, like the Bears sequel (a concurrence that helps make the case for The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training as the missing link in this chain), a moment in the sports world: the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. The crowd, so stripped of power from its peak in the 1960s, so dispersed, found a voice again, simplistic to the point of being moronic, but powerful, feeding on the human need of the individual to find itself in the crowd. It did so this time by chanting three syllables. The syllables were chanted by the crowd at the event and by everyone watching everywhere across the fractured nation.

I chanted it, and I cried as I did, and whenever I see the old clips of that moment and hear the chant I cry again.

The U.S. Olympic hockey team, a collection of college players, beating the hardened professionals from the Soviet Union in the Olympic semifinals and going on from there to win the gold medal. The greatest upset and the greatest triumph in American sports history, an echo of the upset that spawned the nation, the young colonies beating the redcoated army that was the greatest in the world. This is us, young and fresh-faced and sincere, innocent, heroic. This is me and you and all of us. Those boys didn’t have a chance in hell and yet here they are, winning. The 1970s, that decade of losing, has ended. Everyone everywhere found themselves chanting the syllables:

“U.S.A! U.S.A.!”

The three-syllable chant seems to me to be the most powerful bonding agent in crowds (I think because of its brevity, coupled with its ability to integrate with breathing: it has the fewest syllables of any chant that also naturally allows for a restorative in-breath after each voicing—try a three-syllable chant and then compare it to a breath-draining two-syllable chant such as “Reg-gie! Reg-gie!”), yet it seems not to have been a part of rallies in the 1960s, which featured more complicated singsongs (“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” and “Hell no, we won’t go!”). Years later, the three-syllable chant would fuel solidarity in crowds that seemed to hearken back to those of the 1960s and that helped elect the first black American president (“Yes we can! Yes we can!”).

I was powerfully drawn to something like it at the baseball games I went to as a kid: the chant “we need a hit,” with the unstressed “a” de-emphasized so that it became a three-syllable chant with a slight stutter. It’s as if the chant needed to be three syllables, as if that was some kind of a key to the most basic, simplest core of the crowd.

If that’s the case, the emergence of the “U.S.A.” chant in 1980 seems of a cloth with the so-called Reagan revolution. The sardonic message embedded in “It don’t worry me” was stripped clean and made strident. There was no more need to feel ashamed of anything. Now we could feel proud to be Americans again. No need to discuss whether we’re free or not. To do so would be un-American anyway, a suggestion that we might not be free. Enough questions anyway; questions are for losers. It was time for answers, and the answer to everything was as follows: U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

The missing link between the scathingly ironic commentary of Nashville and the uncomplicated, victorious chanting in the 1980 Olympics can be found in the climactic moments of The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, where the three-syllable chant was born.

Let them play. Let them play.

At face value, the chanting in the Bears sequel would seem to extend the notion forwarded in Nashville that the crowd is essentially impotent. There is nothing, it seems, at stake here, at least on a grander scale. No war is being stopped. No revolution is being waged. This is a kid’s movie, a slight, slapped-together attempt to tap the allowance money of America’s youth. How could anything of importance be happening here?

Let them play. Let them play.

This is what Mike Leak begins chanting, in a polished, shortened version of the words Bob Watson uttered in the dugout. He chants alone to the stands, pumping his fist. He is wearing the same jacket he’s worn through the movie, an army jacket, strongly suggestive at that time that he’d served in Vietnam. Here he is, back home from that war, pumping his fist, chanting, trying to bring the crowd alive.

Kelly is the first Bear to join him. Father and son, finally together. When the U.S. hockey team won gold three years later, with me chanting along at home, Jim Craig, the team’s goalie, took off his mask and in the pandemonium on the ice he began searching the crowd and saying something that you couldn’t hear but that you didn’t have to be a lip reader to understand. He was literally draped in an American flag as he repeated his question.

“Where’s my father? Where’s my father?”

I was watching this, and I began to cry. I didn’t see my father very often as a kid in the 1970s. I don’t see him much now. I talk to him on the phone. He tells me about the crumbling capitalist system. He tells me his dreams of a better world.

Let them play. Let them play.

The rest of the Bears pour out of the dugout as the chant begins to spread up into the stands. Tanner is still eluding the men in suits.

“Humanity has to strive to have all people have the chance to live a life of epiphanies,” my father told me a little while ago over the phone.

Let them play. Let them play.

Now the whole stadium is chanting. Yes, if you watch the movie closely, you will be able to see empty sections of the stadium here and there, the crowd itself a partial illusion. Yes, the winning rally that follows Tanner’s Last Stand is built on a ridiculous disqualification-meriting lineup. Yes, the whole movie is a lumpy collection of flaws, and it is far from clear that the Bears will achieve any sort of lasting triumph after the end of the game. But it glows. And it leads to all the roads. And when I was a kid I was with the crowd as they chanted. I was chanting, too. And when the authorities bowed to our will and let the Bears retake the field, I cheered with the crowd and with every other kid around me in the theater. And we all felt like we were running back onto that fake grass one more time, underneath the wow, cool lights of the Dome, given one more chance to play.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Sean Howe, Anne Horowitz, Laura Mazer, Denise Oswald, Lori Kranz, Denise Silva, Neuwirth Associates, Mitch Ansara of Spacesick, Kate McKean, Seven Footer, Michael Paul, the Earl Fibril Trio, Louis Wilker, Jenny Wilker, Tom Byrne, Ian Wilker, and Abby Theuring.

Thanks also to everyone who has joined the conversation at cardboardgods.net.

Copyright © 2011 by Josh Wilker

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

Copyright Conventions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilker, Josh.

The bad news bears in breaking training / Josh Wilker; edited by Sean Howe.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-593-76452-4

1. Bad news bears in breaking training (Motion picture) I. Howe, Sean.

II. Title.

PN1997.B1955W55 2011
791.43—dc22
2011005457

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