The Longest Yard and Appreciating Sports

    The Longest Yard tells the story Paul Crewe (Burt Reynolds) and his prison football team. Paul used to be a professional quaterback, but threw a football game and has not played for several years. After getting thrown in prison for domestic abuse, among other things, Paul gets coerced into creating a prison football team so that the semi-pro guard team can have a tune-up game before their season. He sets about recruiting a team to play with, although he is skeptical of their ability to take on the guards. As the movie continues, he builds trust with key members of the community and eventually finds enough talent to create a solid team. At halftime of the big game, the score is close enough to warrant worry from the warden. He tells Crewe that this was not supposed to be a close game and demands he throw it, blackmailing him by threatening to frame him for murder. Crewe plays terribly and takes himself out, the guards by this time just abusing the prisoners. After a talk with Pop, who assures Crewe his life sentence he got for punching a guard was worth the punch, Crewe goes back in and leads the team to victory.

            The story in The Longest Yard is easily relatable to Reid’s article “Sport’s, Education, and the Meaning of Victory”. The important aspect of the movie does not revolve around winning the game, although that is a large part. Instead, the real story centers on Crewe’s growth in the prison community and the relationships he builds. This gets symbolized in the end when he goes back into the game and stops throwing it, breaking from his earlier character. Making the football team in the prison has built his character. But even while the movie does show the community and character-building aspects of sport, Paul Crewe was a professional quaterback before and at the beginning of the movie has very few positive characteristics. While is funny and likeable, he also clearly acts spoiled and hits his girlfriend. 

But as Reid points out, sometimes sports get too overemphasized. For instance, one of the inmates says to Crewe that they prisoners do not dislike him for any crime he may have commited but the fact that he threw a game was “un-American”. This points out a disturbing trend in society to forgive athletes for some grevious societal offenses, turning a blind eye. People like Ben Roethlingsberger and Kobe Bryant get charged with rape and sports media quickly glosses over these charges. Coaches are charged to win and the character-building side of sports gets put as a lesser priority. Paying fans, after all, care more about wins than they do how much the team builds character. Youth sports function differently than this, but with professional sports to look up to they occasionaly fall into this trap. 

             This moves the discussion to why we do and follow sports idols. Does it have more purpose than just building character? In “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Sport”, David Schwartz looks at how we view sports. According to Mill would sports be a higher or lower pleasure? I think that sport can be considered an art form, as Schwartz suggests. In fact, the more you know about a sport the more you can appreciate a creative or beautiful play, just like the more you know about chess the more you can appreciate a clever move or the more you know about painting the more you feel about a classic piece of art. For instance, I can not appreciate baseball very well for I only played a little of it and did not grow up watching it. You can see this in “Federer as a Religious Experience”. David Foster Wallace knows the ins and outs of tennis and can appreciate the play of Federer on a much deeper level than I ever could. His explanation even makes me appreciate not only the play of Federer, but the complexity of the sport even more. On the other hand, years of experience playing soccer and basketball helps me watch it with more understanding. I see an incisive pass from Messi or Lebron to cut through the defense I know the skills and complications involved in such a play. It is simultaneously appreciating the intelligence and athletic ability of the player, for a beautiful play requires many things, just as a piece of music does.   

             This is perhaps why sports movies are so popular. They show most of the positive aspects of sports, the amazing plays, the community and character building. We appreciate determination and grit as much as we do skill and ability, showing that we have not completely thrown the positive aspects of sports away just yet.