It's Friday afternoon here in San Francisco meaning the weekend is upon us. A deal may or may not happen this weekend but I sure can't tell you for certain what will happen and neither can most anybody else. Accordingly, I think it's better for our collective sanity to go out on a non-lockout note. If you feel the need to discuss the lockout we've got plenty of threads for that.

Instead I thought we'd just go out on a fun or at least moderately entertaining note. I'll go with a simple theme, but people can take this thread in other directions, just not the lockout. Favorite sports movie.

For me, I have several movies I really enjoy including Caddyshack, Field of Dreams, Any Given Sunday, Happy Gilmore, The Program, the Rocky movies (minus #5 of course), The Replacements (guilty pleasure that's fitting right about now). That's not a complete list but just the first group that popped into my head. However, if I had to pick my single favorite it would probably be Major League. It may have less meaning than something like Field of Dreams, but for pure entertainment factor it's the movie I can watch over and over again and it never gets old.

Just for the heck of it I thought I'd post some trailers of these movies after the jump. Enjoy.

Continue reading this post »

It's Friday afternoon (or evening if you're just showing up) and we're heading into the July 4th holiday weekend so I thought an open thread to take us into the weekend was the way to go. "Camp Alex" finished up earlier today and there is no subsequent minicamp planned until there is further word on the labor negotiations. The two sides met late into Thursday night and again Friday morning but have no broken up for the holiday weekend. They'll be meeting back up on Tuesday, which means there likely won't be any significant updates this weekend. Maybe some leaked information here or there but not much else.

As it is July 4th weekend, that also means the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest is back for its 96th appearance. The contest is of significance in the Bay Area because the four-time defending champion, Joey "Jaws" Chestnut" is a native of Vallejo and currently resides in San Jose. He'll be looking to earn his fifth straight Mustard Belt at Coney Island on Monday. Five belts would equal the 49ers five championships (don't ya love that tie-in?). Of course, winning those belts five straight times is pretty impressive.

If you're willing to consider competitive eating an athletic endeavor (easy for some, a stretch for others) you could argue Joey Chestnut is the greatest athlete in Bay Area sports history. He's a heavy favorite to win his fifth straight belt and owns numerous world records in the world of competitive eating. He holds the record for most hot dogs, matzoh balls, Krystal burgers, chicken wings, asparagus, steak and pork ribs. If that doesn't make him a Real American hero I don't what does!

After the jump, check out video from the 2010 contest where Joey consumed 54 hot dogs to emerge victorious.

Every 4th of July we see a record number of hot dogs eaten across the country. How many folks go for the traditional holiday BBQ and fireworks? Any other plans for the holiday weekend? Apologies in advance to our English users on this "Scoreboard!" holiday.

Continue reading this post »

Hopefully everybody made it through the week and is ready to enjoy what should be an entertaining weekend of sports. The A's and Giants kick off the second half of their annual Bay Bridge Series over in Oakland. The US Open continues on as Rory McIlroy looks to make history after a record-breaking first two days. And for college baseball fans, the 2011 College World Series gets underway on Saturday.

This year's College World Series features a pretty cool story from the Bay Area as Cal's baseball team will be taking part. Cal is the lowest seeded team in the eight-team field and faces an uphill battle to win it all. However, the fact that they've even gotten this far is pretty impressive given where they were leading up to this season.

The state of California faces a brutal economic crisis that has led to serious belt-tightening. Budget cuts are the norm at this point, and state universities are feeling the crunch. At one point Cal had voted to eliminate its baseball program in an attempt to satisfy the budget cuts. Supporters for the team rallied and came up with $9 million in donations to keep the program afloat for the foreseeable future. Over at SB Nation Bay Area, one of our contributors who writes for California Golden Blogs put together an awesome feature detailing the past year for Cal from being on the verge of budgetary elimination to now being in the College World Series.

It's not exactly a traditional Cinderella story, but it's a Cinderella story nonetheless. Given that, i'm curious what are some of your favorite Cinderella, underdog stories? Try and get a little creative as everybody knows about teams like the 1980 US Olympic ice hockey team. Any others that people might not remember nearly as much?

Last year during the off season I wrote a series of posts called Friday Night Fun. Basically the idea was to review sports entertainment, whether it was movies, books, documentaries or anything else. I quite enjoyed writing them, and more particularly I enjoyed reading/watching whatever it was that I wrote about that week. 

You can find the full list of articles here. 

Movies I reviewed last year:

Brian's Song
Hoosiers
Invictus
Remember the Titans
Rudy

We also talked about the best (and worst) Kevin Costner movies, and I looked at the Top 25 Sports Movies 

The books I reviewed:

The Genius (a biography of Bill Walsh's days with the 49ers)
That First Season (a historical look at Vince Lombardi's first season with the Green Bay Packers)
Blinded by the Light (part biography off Michael Oher, part examination of the rise in importance of the left tackle)

This year I'm going to start out with reviewing ESPN's great 30 for 30 series of documentaries. To quote Bill Simmons (the executive producer of the project):

It started out as a one-paragraph e-mail in 2007. And only because I love documentaries. The goal of a well-written piece and a well-done documentary is fundamentally the same: you pick a story that hasn't been fully explored yet, you throw yourself into it and you make it sing.

I know how to write; I don't know how to make documentaries. But I know what makes for a good story. And in 2007, I wanted to see ESPN create more stories. So I sent my bosses a short pitch that hinged on three ideas rolled into one:

Continue reading this post »

In 1971 ABC premiered a made-for-tv movie named Brian's Song. The movie is based partly on Gale Sayer's auto-biography I Am Third. At it's heart it's a people story (the best sports movies always are). The movie deals with the issue of race relations in Chicago, friendship between competitors and teammates, and the rise of Gale Sayers as a legendary running back.  

Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo came to the NFL via different paths. Sayers was the 4th overall selection in the 1965 draft and was also a first round pick in the AFL. Piccolo was an undrafted free agent who walked onto the Chicago Bears to try out at running back. 

In 1965 Sayers rushed for 1374 yards and 22 TDs. He had 2,272 all-purpose yards. That same year Piccolo was on the practice squad. In 1966 Piccolo was moved to the active roster as a special teams guy, and in 1967 he was the backup to Sayers. Eventually he would be moved to full-back. 

In 1967 George Halas made huge strides in the campaign for civil rights. At that time in the NFL black and white players didn't room together. The un-written rule was that you had to have an even number of black players so that no white player would be forced to integrate. Halas changed that. With the friendship of Piccolo and Sayers he saw an opportunity to make a statement and he acted on it, assigning the two of them as roommates. 

The would become close friends, as well as great competitors for each other. When Sayers blew out his knee in 1968 (playing against the 49ers) it should've been a career ending injury, but it was Piccolo who pushed Sayers into rehab. When Sayers was presented with the George Halas award for courage in 1969 he dedicated it to Brian Piccolo

"He has the heart of a giant and that rare form of courage that allows him to kid himself and his opponent -- cancer," Sayers told the audience. "He has the mental attitude that makes me proud to have a friend who spells out the word 'courage' 24 hours a day of his life. . . . I love Brian Piccolo, and I'd like all of you to love him, too. Tonight, when you hit your knees, please ask God to love him."

Continue reading this post »

Miracle of miracles, tonight's Friday Night Fun post is going to have actual 49er related information in it. This past week I just finished reading The Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football and Created an NFL Dynasty. I picked it up thinking that it was going to be an X's and O's type book about the offensive and defensive systems that Walsh ran. It wasn't. It's actually a history of the 49ers from 1979 to 1989, and a brief history of Bill Walsh before he joined the team. 

In that regard I'm somewhat disappointed. I was hoping for a more detailed look at the X's and O's. That's mostly my fault for thinking the book was something it's not, but it's also the fault of the author for naming the book the way he did. 

Here are some tidbits from the book:

• When Walsh was in high school he always wanted to be a QB. He was left-handed and moved around a ton so he didn't get many chances. This might explain his affinity for QBs, especially a certain prominent left-handed QB
• He was also a pretty good boxer, even winning some bouts against pro boxers. He briefly considered that as a career before realizing the folly of his ways.
• When he was an assistant with Paul Brown he was pursued by several organizations looking for a head coach but Brown refused permission for them to interview. When Walsh accepted the job at Stanford Brown blacklisted Walsh.
• During the 1989 1987 strike there were about a dozen 49ers who wanted to cross the picket lines before the bye week. Walsh actually talked the players into staying on strike for another week. Not so much that he agreed with the goals of the NFLPA but that he didn't want the unity of the team to be hurt. He went so far as to pay the players to stay on strike for another week
• Because Walsh paid some players and not others it actually had the opposite affect of what he'd intended. To make up for it Eddie DeBartolo offered to pay everybody on the team a bonus if they won their first playoff game. The league fined Eddie $50,000 for this and the players chipped in to pay the fine for him. 
• When the DeBartolo's were considering buying the 49ers Al Davis was acting as the go-between. When Eddie Sr showed showed up with Eddie Jr to buy the team Davis told them that the price had gone up by $500,000. Eddie Sr balked at that, declaring that he didn't do business that way. Eddie Jr convinced him that it was worth the extra 500k.

Whatever we might think of Costner's acting skills (on par with Arnold Schwarznegger and Keanu Reeves), there's no denying his love for sports. That love of sports has led him to star in five sports themed movies, four of which are among the best sports movies of all time. The last one was pretty bad (though I did get lucky with the girl I took to see it so maybe it wasn't all for nothing) and I can't recommend it to anybody. In order of release his sports movies are:

American Flyers (1985)

Bull Durham (1988)

Field of Dreams (1989)

Tin Cup (1996)

For Love of the Game (1999)

Between them his sports movies have won four Oscars and one Razzie. His best sports movies are those that are less about the sport and more about the people. Follow me below the fold as I explain more. 

Continue reading this post »

Hoosiers remains one of my all time favorite sports movies, ranking just below Rudy (which was written by the same guys who did Hoosiers) and Remember the Titans for me. It was a risk making the movie.

Recalls Gene Hackman:

No basketball movie had ever made it commercially, and we're going to make a high school basketball movie?" I thought "We should have our heads examined."

They needn't have worried. Hoosiers is very nearly the perfect sports movie. Yeah it's your typical David vs Goliath but it never feels cliched (though that whole romance thing with Gene Hackman was just weird), but best of all it's based on real events (the best sports movies are). 

Of course like most movies based on actual events it's only loosely based on real events. 

The movie follows the fortunes of Hickory High School (only 64 boys) as they compete for the Indiana state basketball trophy at a time when every high school, regardless of size, competed in the same class. 

I have three favorite scenes from the movie. The first is when Hackman deliberately gets himself thrown out of the game so that Hopper can come in and finish coaching. The second is when the team arrives in the big city and they measure the court to show that a basketball court is still a basketball court, even if it's in a big city, and the third is the montage of the town loading up in their cars to follow the team around.

Sadly, the first two never happened. 

Join me after the jump as we separate more fact from fiction. 

Continue reading this post »