USC’s Steve Sarkisian: How Not to Go Hollywood

Fans of the University of Southern California Trojans are still reeling from the sudden dismissal of head football coach Steve Sarkisian. Sarkisian, a former member of the USC coaching staff, had moved on to head the football program at the University of Washington, where his team scored some dramatic wins over longtime rivals. He was lured back to USC in 2014, and had hopes of another stellar season this year. Then it became all too clear that the coach was fighting a drinking problem. A divorce that was announced in April probably contributed, but there were rumblings about alcoholic lapses back in his Seattle days. At USC this fall, Sarkisian missed practices and behaved bizarrely at a major booster event;  several players admitted to smelling liquor on his breath. A brief leave of absence hardly solved matters, and his USC contract was terminated on October 12, 2015, with the football season barely underway.

This is not the way things happen at the movies. On-screen football coaches tend to be paragons of virtue. The movie that most sticks in my mind in this regard is an oldie, 1940’s Knute Rockne, All American. Today the movie is best remembered for Ronald Reagan’s portrayal of a real-life Notre Dame halfback, George Gipp, who – before dying young of a streptococcal throat infection -- makes an inspirational speech urging his teammates to “win one for the Gipper.” But the movie’s true star is Pat O’Brien, who plays the title character, a Notre Dame chemistry instructor who transforms the game of football with his inventiveness and his leadership skills. He invents the forward past, and inspires his Fighting Irish teams (composed of good men and true) to glory before dying at the age of 43, in 1931. Ironically, he was en route to serve as a technical advisor for a feature film called The Spirit of Notre Dame when his plane went down in a Kansas field.

Pat O’Brien’s Knute Rockne is a totally good guy (as in real life he apparently was). A much more recent true football story also boasts a good-guy hero. I’m talking about Remember the Titans, released in 2000, but chronicling a memorable series of events from 1971. The place was Alexandria, Virginia, then in the throes of desegregation. African-American Herman Boone (Denzel Washington) is hired to replace a legendary white coach at the head of a newly integrated high school team. Predictably, there are clashes between black and white members of the squad, complicated by the fact that the original coach has reluctantly agreed to serve as Washington’s assistant. But, happily, everyone learns to work together,  despite the bad behavior of biased officials, for the greater glory of T.C. Williams High School, 

USC has enjoyed a great deal of football glory, but the Steve Sarkisian era will not be on its highlights reel. Despite the real-life drama involved, a movie about a football coach with a drinking problem will probably not be on a studio’s roster anytime soon. This is especially true because USC has long had a cozy relationship with Hollywood. Its fabulous film school buildings are financed by some of the industry’s finest (Lucas, Spielberg, Ron Howard), and I doubt they’d smile on a story that cast university personnel in a negative light. I’ve discovered there WAS  at least one Hollywood movie that focused on a football coach from hell. But College Coach, starring Dick Powell as a conniver who’ll do anything to win games, was made all the way back in 1933.  I don’t see it being updated anytime soon.

  

Pigskin and Celluloid (Football on Film)

Well, football season is here again. But what with the Ray Rice scandal, bad behavior by other gridiron stars, and the rising anxiety about brain damage among athletes of all ages, football no longer seems like an all-American sport (in the positive sense, at least). How times have changed! My personal memory banks are full of movies in which football is presented as the great American pastime.

If you go back far enough into the annals of Hollywood, you’ll find Knut Rockne, All American. This thoroughly wholesome film was released in 1940, at a time when America had not yet entered World War II. While fighting raged in Europe and Asia, Americans turned inward, clinging to their isolation from the rest of the globe’s problems. Many cheered for this mostly true story of a Norwegian immigrant who grew up to be Notre Dame’s legendary football coach. As played by Pat O’Brien, Rockne was both an innovator and an inspirational figure. The film’s most famous sequence involves a outstanding freshman halfback, George Gipp, who leads the Fighting Irish to victory before succumbing to a fatal infection. As Gipp lays dying in a campus hospital, he urges his teammates to win one in his memory. "Rock,” he says to his coach (who later uses his words to motivate his squad), “sometime when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they've got and win just one for the Gipper.'”

Needless to say, George Gipp was played by the young Ronald Reagan. And when Reagan entered political life, “Win one for the Gipper” became his mantra. The film itself won no prizes -- for the Gipper or anyone else -- but in 1997 it was selected for preservation via the National Film Registry, overseen by the Library of Congress, in recognition of its cultural and historic significance.    

 I haven’t, of course, watched every movie made about football, though there’s warm spot in my heart for 1968’s Paper Lion. In this charming and funny flick, the always appealing Alan Alda plays writer George Plimpton who, for the sake of a Sports Illustrated byline, poses as a rookie quarterback for the Detroit Lions. There’s nothing like seeing (and empathizing with) someone who’s totally out of his league. Believe me, the audience feels every hit, every sack. Ouch!

More recently, two movies have depicted high school football as a laboratory for the solving of social problems. In 2010 The Blind Side won Sandra Bullock an Oscar. Of course she doesn’t put on the helmet and shoulder pads herself. As real-life heroine Leigh Anne Tuohy, Bullock is a genuine steel magnolia, a blonde Southern belle who welcomes into her comfortable life a homeless and troubled black kid with football talent to burn. After the usual trials and tribulations, of course he does her proud, going on to be the first-round draft pick of the Baltimore Ravens.

Equally inspirational is 2000’s Remember the Titans, another true story about high school athletes who make good. In this one, the always stalwart Denzel Washington is an African-American who in 1971 is named coach of a newly integrated Virginia team. Tensions between black and white players naturally mount, but Coach Boone finds ways for everyone to get along. I watched this film to catch the performance of Ryan Hurst, a star actor at Santa Monica High School who plays (very well) a showboating white kid. In a much smaller role, someone named Ryan Gosling is there too. How refreshing it is to see football players as good guys!