THE ACTING MVP’S

Herbert L. Klein
Aug 23, 2017 · 19 min read

Another list article. Thinking about the shitshows in Washington and around the world and the stupid bomb thrower in the Oval Office just makes your hair hurt. I’d rather compile mindless, brain-candy, comfort food, ultimately meaningless, trivial lists. Much more fun.

So here is my list of the top ten American actors who at one time or another, played athletes or sports heroes. Biographies and fiction both count. It doesn’t matter if the movie was about a team or individual sport, just so long as sports is central to the theme. Quality and quantity both count, so if you made a bunch of so-so, good or excellent sports movies, you get quality points. If you are among the elite athlete-actors, you get heavy point credit, even if you made only one or two sports themed movies. Athletic ability gets the most points, acting ability comes second, movie quality third and movie quantity fourth.

Carl Weathers, a former pro football player, looked great moving around the ring in Rocky, but sorry Apollo, only stars make this list, no supporting players.

I am a sucker for horse racing movies. They always have an inspirational underdog theme. I thought Seabiscuit got jobbed for the Oscar in 2003. I am guessing that the 10 horses who portrayed the great undersized thoroughbred who inspired the nation during the Depression all had lousy agents. The same goes for the actor-horses in the various versions of National Velvet, Phar Lap, Bite the Bullet (an underrated 70’s western with Gene Hackman) and Hidalgo.

Also, no martial arts movies. Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee are as good as any actor-athlete on this list, and watching Chan and Lee is like watching Nureyev or Baryshnikov. But there are just too many great martial artist actors, and frankly, comparing them to team sport athletes, golfers or tennis players is like comparing nunchucks to baseball bats.

Also, eliminated, games of skill that don’t require physical prowess. No chess movies and no movies about pool and billiards. Sorry to Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, good and great movies as they were, The Hustler and The Color of Money don’t make this cut, although Newman does get consideration for Somebody Up There Likes Me and his portrayal of Rocky Graziano.

Let’s get down to it. The 10 greatest actor-athletes.

№10 — Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes

Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes co-starred in White Men Can’t Jump, so they earned this spot as team.

Harrelson’s Billy Hoyle is a former Iowa Hawkeyes player who makes a living hustling on the playground courts of Los Angeles. Part of the reason he is so successful: the black players he hustles think they can roll over him because he is white.

Billy beats Sidney Dean, played by Snipes, twice, once in a half-court game and a second time in a one-on-one shootout.

Billy is being chased by mobsters. His girlfriend, Gloria, played by Rosie Perez, is a voracious reader and sponge of obscure facts, and she desperately wants to be on Jeopardy. Sidney yearns to move his family out of their tough L.A. neighborhood, so he talks Billy into a partnership hustle. But Sidney double-crosses Billy and throws the game, costing Billy $1,700.

Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes in White Men Can’t Jump

Gloria is livid with Billy so they go visit Sidney to ask for a break. Gloria and Sidney’s wife Rhonda force the boys to team up for a major outdoor two-on-two tournament with a prize of $5,000.

Gloria wins $14,100 on Jeopardy, and the boys win the tournament against two L.A. playground legends when Billy slams home a dunk on an ally-oop pass from Sidney, proving that white men can really jump in Ron Shelton’s hilarious 1992 comedy.

Shelton, a former minor league second basemen, knows the sporting life from the inside and he proved it by writing and directing both Bull Durham and White Men Can’t Jump. The authenticity extends to casting actors who can play. Both Harrelson and Snipes know how to handle a ball, showing off by crossing over, going behind the back and between the legs and with no-look passes. Harrelson is the better player, and Shelton had to lower the hoop a bit so Snipes could actually dunk.

I don’t know how far these guys in their primes would have gone in the elite two-on-two or three-on-three tournaments, but they definitely would not have embarrassed themselves.

№9 — Hilary Swank

Million Dollar Baby is a profoundly sad story of faith and redemption, and how love overcomes the cold orthodoxy of faith. The movie swept four of the six major Oscars in 2005, including a Best Actress win for Hilary Swank, the first actor to win an Academy Award for a boxing movie. Million Dollar Baby was only the second boxing film to win an Oscar, after Rocky in 1976.

As 32-year-old Maggie Fitzgerald, a waitress from a white trash family, she pushes through Frankie Dunn’s reluctance to train her because she’s a girl. Dunn, played by Clint Eastwood, is one of the top trainers in the business, but his fighters always seem to abandon him before they win belts. The reason: he let one of fighters go one too many fights and he lost an eye. So Frankie plays the game very conservatively, never challenging his young men with tougher opponents.

Hilary Swank and Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby

Until Maggie comes along. In her he sees a toughness that makes him unafraid to push. He also sees in her the daughter who’s deserted him. Frankie becomes the father Maggie’s lost.

Swank was a Junior Olympic swimmer in her teens and her athleticism is obvious. She handles the speed bag adroitly, her footwork is graceful and she packs a convincing punch.

As does the movie. In a scene reminiscent of Jimmy Cagney’s opponent in City for Conquest rubbing resin in eyes and stealing the championship, Maggie gets blindsided by a dirty opponent’s haymaker. She gets KO’d and falls on a corner stool, breaking her neck and setting up Frankie’s struggle between his Catholic faith and his love for Maggie when she asks him to end her life.

Swank gets a fraction of a sports movie bonus point for being in The Next Karate Kid, a pale retread sort-of sequel to The Karate Kid.

№8 — Geena Davis

Geena Davis earns this spot for her performance as Dottie Hinson, catcher for the Rockford Peaches and the best player in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League during World War II in Penny Marshall’s 1992 comedy, A League of Their Own. The best talent in the Major Leagues is off to war, so candy bar magnate Walter Harvey, hilariously played by Garry Marshall, starts up the league so fans in small cities have some baseball to watch.

Geena Davis and Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own. Hanks’ character, Jimmy Dugan, is a washed-up former star loosely based on the great Chicago Cub slugger Hack Wilson, who hit a National League record 56 home runs in 1930 and drank himself out of the Big Leagues a few years later.

Davis plays Hinson, loosely based on Lavonne “Pepper” Paire-Davis, who had a 10-year career in the AAGPBL and was one of its best players. Marshall made Davis try out for the part, a simple test in Marshall’s backyard to see if Davis looked convincing throwing and catching a ball. All of the actresses ultimately cast had to prove they could handle themselves on the diamond. Davis was only the fourth choice for the role. Debra Winger backed out. Brooke Shield was ultimately passed over. Jennifer Jason Leigh turned the role down.

Davis is an excellent athlete. She qualified for the Olympic Trial semi-finals in 1999 and had a shot at making the U.S. archery team that competed in the 2000 Summer Games in Australia. She had only taken up the sport a few years prior to that.

So in the movie, when Davis throws a frozen rope to second to nab a would-be base stealer, drives a ball over the left field fence, or races back to the stands to corral a foul pop, there were no stand-ins. The only time a stand-in pinch hit for her was during the famous scene where, as a publicity stunt, she catches a foul pop while performing a split. Davis did the split, but couldn’t pop up after the catch.

No matter. Davis looked like a big league catcher in one of the best baseball movies ever made. No crying in baseball.

№7 — James Cagney

Jimmy Cagney was Hollywood royalty. He made 70 movies, gangster films, musicals, comedies, dramas and a handful of less than distinguished westerns (the kid from the streets of New York just didn’t translate all that well to the open range). He starred in dozens of gangster films, a few of them classics, but won his only Oscar for playing George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, another New York character. As near as I can see, Cagney only made one sports movie.

City for Conquest may be the schmaltziest movie of all time. Made in 1940 while the nation was still reeling from the Depression, City for Conquest is a classic rise-and-fall story complete with heartbreak, melodrama, good guys, bad guys, success, failure, mobsters and love, all played out on the streets of New York.

Jimmy Cagney in City For Conquest, flanked by Frank McHugh, Donald Crisp, George Tobias and an unknown supporting actor.

Cagney plays Danny Kenny, a nice guy truck driver who reluctantly enters the ring to earn enough money to put his brother through school to become a classical music composer. Ann Sheridan plays Danny’s girlfriend, Peggy, who abandons him for the vaudeville circuit because she dreams of being a famous dancer.

Peggy rises to top billings at the biggest venues, only to be betrayed by her partner (a snaky Anthony Quinn in an early role) and slip back to the bottom and out of show business. Danny fights his way up to become the number one lightweight contender. In the title bout, Danny is pounding his opponent when the champ’s trainer rubs resin on his gloves. The champ makes sure to hold Danny and push the resin into Danny’s eyes. Blinded, Danny loses the fight.

His eyesight permanently gone, Danny decides he does not want to be an isolated blind man, and the best way to avoid that is to run a newsstand on the busiest corner in Manhattan. So Danny Kenny becomes a blind “newsie”.

The film ends with Danny listening on the radio to his brother conduct his inaugural concert at Carnegie Hall. He hears his brother tell the crowd of swells that he owes everything to Danny who represents the best of New York. Danny sees the shadow of a person and, as it draws near, he vaguely makes out that it is Peggy approaching his newsstand. They have a tearful reunion and as the music rises, he tells her he always knew she would pass by, because “You’re always my ‘goil’.”

Cagney did some boxing as a youth. As a dancer, he looked like a boxer and as a boxer, he looked like a dancer. He was light on his feet but he could also brawl, throwing quick, wild punches. Cagney had a stand-in for those long shots — he was one of the studio’s most valuable properties — but he did most of his own stunt work in the ring.

With one possible exception among great actors who portrayed boxers, Robert Ryan, Cagney might have been the best.

№6 — Katherine Hepburn

Pat Pemberton is a brilliant athlete who knows she can compete with the best, but she breaks down and falls apart at every competition when her overbearing boyfriend, a stuffy university professor, breaks into her line of vision. He wants her to stop competing and settle down to a boring life in academia. Pat knows she is capable of more but just can’t get past her mental block. So she engages Mike Conovan, a shady sports promoter right out of a Damon Runyon short story. And of course she ditches the dominating boyfriend and falls in love with her agent.

Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon wrote Pat and Mike to showcase the athletic abilities of their close friend Katherine Hepburn and to give Spencer Tracy a chance to have some fun by playing a “dese-dems-and-dose” guy in a sharkskin suit. Pat and Mike would be the sixth of nine films the couple made together and probably the frothiest concoction of the bunch.

And gimmicky. Featured in the film are a constellation of the best female golfers and tennis players in the world. Pat competes against Babe Didrikson Zaharias on the links and Alice Marble on the tennis courts. Don Budge makes an appearance, as does Gussie Moran (tennis), Betty Hicks (golf), Helen Dettweiler (golf) and Beverly Hanson (golf).

Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Pat and Mike

The movie marked the first screen appearance of Chuck Connors, The Rifleman, one of only 12 athletes to play both major league baseball and in the NBA. Connors was still on a minor league roster when he was cast in a small supporting role. In one of the early script drafts, Pat Pemberton beats the Babe in a golf tournament, but Didrickson, whose drive to win was second to none, refused to appear in the movie unless the script was revised. “The Babe never loses”, Didrikson bragged.

Hepburn started playing golf at age 5 during summers spent at the family retreat at Fenwick in Old Saybrook, in her native Connecticut. Home-schooled as a teenager, she took daily lessons. “It looked as though I were going to develop into a pretty good player,” she wrote in her memoir. “I could hit it a mile. And I was quite accurate with my irons. The only thing I just was lousy at was putting.”

In the movie, Pat gets so angry at a nosy busybody trying to give her advice that she pushes her into a chair, grabs a driver and proceeds to whack nine drives into the distance, rapidly moving from tee to tee. The camera cuts away after the first three drives into a close up of Hepburn hitting the ball, and moves back for the ninth and last shot. Because five of the drives are close-ups, it’s not clear whether all them were straight. No matter, Hepburn’s form is terrific and she appears to hit the ball squarely. She moves around the tennis court with equal grace.

Hepburn didn’t tap dance like Astaire, but her style was great. Watch her drive those golf balls.

https://goo.gl/oZePoS

№5 — Fred Astaire

Astaire learned to play golf as a boy during a 1914 vacation in Delaware Water Gap, Pa. “I was so crazy about golf I couldn’t sleep nights,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “I had a terrific desire to be a golf pro.”

In his 1938 movie “Carefree”, Astaire does an extraordinary job hitting golf balls while tap dancing, a routine he devised on the first tee at Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles, where he played to a 10-handicap and once made an ace.

The choreography is built around a warm-up wiggle and the swing and the inside joke is the connection between the golf swing and the jazz swing.

Astaire chips the first few shots using a wedge off a hard surface before a supporting player flips him what looks to be either a Brassie, Spoon or Baffie, what they used to call a two wood, three wood and four wood. The sequence is astounding. While Astaire tap dances to an Irving Berlin tune called “Since They Turned ‘Loch Lomand’ Into Swing”, Astaire machine guns at least half a dozen balls, first with the wedge and then the wood. The sequence took a couple of weeks to shoot.

Fred Astaire in Carefree

It should be noted that each shot appears to be straight, including the pitches Astaire picked cleanly off the hard surface.

Ginger Rogers was also an avid golfer, although she didn’t get to show off like Astaire.

Watch Fred’s swing.

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№4 — Sylvester Stallone

When Rocky won the 1977 Best Picture Oscar, there was a lot of speculation that under Stallone’s sweet, sensitive everyman underdog was an actor with the chops to be the next Brando. Within two years, the release of F.I.S.T. and Paradise Alley quickly dispelled that notion. Nevertheless, over the next 40 years, Stallone has proven himself to be a durable, popular star who, lacking the talent of Sir Laurence, Sir John, Sir Alec or even Kevin Costner, knows what the public wants and gives it to them over and over.

Sylvester Stallone as Rocky

Stallone’s sports movie output outstrips everyone’s. Rocky and three of its numeric sequels, along with Rocky Balboa and Creed, were all good-to- excellent films. You can toss out Rocky II and Rocky IV — Rocky II followed the same plot as Rocky, except he wins the title, and Rocky IV was a flag-waving embarrassment that has Rocky bringing about world peace. Something tells me the Rock wouldn’t be as successful with Putin as he was with Gorbachev. However, Rocky III and to a lesser extent, Rocky V were pretty good movies, III because the character has to figure out how to beat a bigger, stronger slugger who fights the same way he does and V because a now-retired Rocky learns that his son is more important than a disloyal protege.

Rocky Balboa displays the character in middle age coming to grips with grief and loneliness and showing that age may diminish your body, but not your courage and heart. Rocky takes Floyd Mayweather’s Mason “The Line” Dixon (a really ridiculous name) to school when Rocky shows him that the old guy can go the distance in a three-round exhibition.

And in Creed, Stallone showed that he could act by playing Rocky in winter, channeling his late mentor Mickey (Burgess Meredith), training Apollo Creed’s illegitimate son Adonis Jordan (Michael B. Jordan) in the ring and giving him in life lessons. Stallone was nominated for a Supporting Oscar this past year and might have won in another year if not for Mark Rylance’s brilliant performance in Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies.

Stallone made three other sports movies that ranged from bad to mediocre, Grudge Match (with Robert DeNiro), Escape to Victory, a World War II Allies vs. German’s prisoner of war drama that has Stallone surrounded by some of the top footballers in the world (Pele) while hogging the film’s most dramatic moment with a block at goal, and Over the Top, a poor 1990 movie about a father trying to re-connect with his son while competing for an arm wrestling championship.

So for quantity and not quality, Stallone makes it into the first division of this list. As an actor-boxer, he is just OK. Rocky is more convincing as a brawler-slugger, plowing straight ahead like Joe Frazier or Rocky Marciano, absorbing three blows for every punishing one he lands. When Rocky flummoxes Clubber Lang in Rocky III, he switches styles from a southpaw puncher to a dancing, righty boxer, landing jabs and softening up Lang before switching back and KO’ing Lang with a left-handed bomb. Unfortunately, it’s clear that Rocky misses Lang’s jaw by the proverbial mile.

Make no mistake, nobody will ever think that Stallone floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee on the screen. But he manages to do just enough to make us love Rocky anyway.

№3-Robert DeNiro

In Raging Bull, DeNiro turns in the single best performance of any actor on this list. Yes, the stories about how the movie was made have entered cinematic folklore. He gained 60 pounds to play the older Jake LaMotta and Martin Scorsese had to shut down production for a couple of months for DeNiro to make weight. The actors got pretty beat up because they didn’t pull their punches.

DeNiro won the Best Actor in 1981, although the movie lost out to Robert Redford and Ordinary People.

DeNiro trained for months to be able to imitate LaMotta’s brutal ring form. LaMotta, who was a consultant on the film, said that DeNiro was good enough to be ranked as middleweight.

Robert DeNiro as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull

DeNiro handled himself well behind the plate as doomed catcher Bruce Pearson in Bang the Drum Slowly. He even made one other inconsequential boxing movie, the aforementioned Grudge Match, a 2013 paycheck he made opposite Sylvester Stallone. The two play way-way-way-over-the-hill former champs who square off against one another for bragging rights and, yes, a paycheck.

№2 — Burt Lancaster

Lancaster was a titan of the American cinema, both as an actor and producer. In his 60-plus year career, he starred in only one sports biography, Jim Thorpe-All American, where he had to portray the greatest all-around male athlete in American history. Thorpe, voted the best American track and field star and the best football player of the first half of the 20th century, also had a journeyman career in the major leagues playing for John McGraw’s New York Giants. Lancaster, who was a gymnast and circus acrobat before injury cut short that career, played Thorpe with honesty and skill.

Burt Lancaster as Jim Thorpe

Lancaster would make two other films that put his athletic abilities on display. In The Swimmer, a John Cheever short story about a well-to-do suburbanite who travels across a well-heeled town by swimming his neighbors’ pools, Lancaster’s Ned Merrill discovers he is nothing but a heel in denial, but Lancaster gets to show off his stroke. In Trapeze, a hackneyed love triangle, Lancaster plays a crippled former circus star and gets to display his art on the trapeze.

Kirk Douglas, who gets some attention here for Champion, called Lancaster the best athlete he ever knew.

№1— Kevin Costner

Kevin Costner was probably the second best all-around athlete among top actors — after Lancaster — and he turned the sports movie into his specialty.

Kevin Costner in Bull Durham

In Bull Durham, Costner was convincing as a catcher and a hitter. In For the Love of the Game, he plays a great pitcher at the end of the line trying to cement his legacy by finishing a no-hitter while flashing back to a failing relationship. In Tin Cup, he plays a club pro at a backwater course washed up not because he’s can’t play, but because he always has to go for the pin and can’t lay up. Costner is not a golfer, but he perfected a graceful swing quickly enough before shooting began. And in Field of Dreams, he simply looked good playing catch after reuniting with his father in the cornfield.

For athletic ability, acting chops, the smarts to choose great sports properties and turning it into a speciality, Costner gets the top spot.

Very Honorable Mention — Robert Ryan

Ryan was a a champion boxer at Dartmouth. In The Set-Up, Ryan plays a boxer at the end of his career, whose manager takes bribes from mobsters to make sure Ryan’s character Bill Thompson takes a dive. Ryan stumbles around the ring, swinging wildly at his younger opponent but he doesn’t go down. He finds his courage, integrity and just enough strength to get in that one punch that sends his opponent to the canvass. I don’t think that Ryan ever got to show his stuff because he was playing an over-the-hill palooka. Had he gotten the chance to play a boxer in his prime, he probably would have made this list.

Honorable Mentions

Denzel Washington (The Hurricane), Bernie Casey (Big Mo’), Ian Charleson and Ben Cross (Chariots of Fire), Parminder Nagra (Bend It Like Beckham), Russell Crowe (Cinderella Man), Mark Wahlberg (Invincible, The Fighter), Matt Damon (Invictus. The Legend of Bagger Vance), Robert Redford (The Natural), Dennis Quaid (The Rookie, Any Given Sunday), Tom Berenger (Major League), Errol Flynn (Gentleman Jim), Marlon Brando (On the Waterfront), Paul Bettany (Wimbledon), James Earl Jones (The Great White Hope), Chadwick Boseman (42), Stephen James (Race), Keanu Reeves (The Replacements), Jim Caviezel (Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius), Tom Selleck (Mr. Baseball), Will Smith (Ali).

Paul Newman (Somebody Up There Likes Me, Slapshot) barely makes this list. As Rocky Graziano, his performance is excellent. As a boxer, he looks like an actor pretending to box.

And Dwayne Johnson, a former football player and WWF wrestler who has grown into an enormously popular and likable actor. The only sports movie he’s made is the eminently forgettable Gridiron Gang. Johnson will eventually make more sports movies and hopefully good ones.

Ray Milland (It Happens Every Spring), James Caan (Brian’s Song), John Goodman (The Babe), John Garfield (Body and Soul), and Kirk Douglas (Champion) also do not make this list. All of these guys are terrific actors, but as athletes, they come up very short.

Goodman had to be the only actor in Hollywood who had to diet to play the Babe. Douglas’ and Garfield’s performances made Body and Soul and Champion iconic films, but they were less than convincing as boxers. Garfield looked like he was playing pitta-pat in the ring, and Douglas couldn’t handle a speed bag. Caan didn’t do any running in Brian’s Song, and Milland, in It Happens Every Spring, does just enough as a pitcher to avoid the list just below.

Dishonorable Mention —

William Bendix — The Babe Ruth Story was a miserable flop and, on top of that, Bendix was a non-athlete and clearly looked the part. The story goes that the director, Roy Del Ruth, spent an entire morning just to get a close-up shot of Bendix lifting a batting practice pitch in the air.

Gary Cooper — I loved Gary Cooper. He was one of the great actors of the history of film. Pride of the Yankees is a terrific four-hanky movie, and Cooper, playing Gehrig the man was great, but playing Gehrig the ballplayer, well, let’s just say he lacked coordination. And it pains me to say that because Gehrig is one of my heroes and Pride of the Yankees is one of my all time favorites. A righty, Cooper could not swing at all from the left side — Gehrig was a lefty — so they filmed him pulling the ball and in the editing room, flipped the negative so Cooper looked like he was left-handed.

Anthony Perkins — Fear Strikes Out. Perkins turned in a good performance showing Jimmy Piersall’s struggles with mental illness. But his fine work comes completely apart because he is just — I am looking for a kind word here — such an ungainly klutz in the outfield.

Jean-Claude Van Damme — He doesn’t count. A professional kick boxer turned journeyman actor, he plays kick boxers in formulaic thrillers. No one ever expected him to do Shakespeare, but Dwayne Johnson can act rings around him.

Jackie Robinson, Chuck Connors and Muhammed Ali also don’t count. Connors was never a star and only a serviceable actor, although he was great in The Rifleman. Robinson and Ali played themselves and that is about as much as you can say about their film careers.

NOTE: This article was edited on August 30, 2017 to add Marlon Brando to the Honorable Mentions.

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Herbert L. Klein

Written by

Retired corporate counsel to a major automaker, history buff, avid baseball fan and golfer, proud to have been a newspaperman many years ago.

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