A little bit of context before I get into this week’s post. Not because you need the context to understand this week’s movie. The context is so that the big thing I’m taking from the movie will make sense. Last year and this year, I made some movie watching goals for myself. I chose a specific style or subject to watch fifty-two new-to-me movies from. This year I’m watching fifty-two new-to-me animated movies and fifty-two new-to-me Canadian movies. Last year, I went through female directors, international, and sports movies.
Now, not that this is too relevant to the post, but it will give a little more insight. I made a few rules when it came to some of these goals. With the female directors, I never doubled up on the director. With the international movies, each one came from a different country. I could watch more than one from a country, but it wouldn’t count as one of the fifty-two. Sports got a little more complicated. A lot of sports movies involve what I consider the big five sports: baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, and football. I could watch five from each of those five sports through the year. The other twenty-seven movies had to be from outside the big five, and I tried to go with a different sport for each of those weeks. It was a system that worked fairly well.
It is with my experience of watching that abundance of sports movies, as well as any other sports movies I’ve seen over the years, that I will be bringing some knowledge to this week’s post. You see, this week, I’ll be checking out another sports movie. It’s not a big five sports movie. It’s not even a tertiary big sport. This is a movie about BMX riding. This is a post about Rad. Sort of.
Rad came out in 1986. It was directed by Hal Needham, the guy behind the Smokey and the Bandit movies. Cru (Bill Allen) was a high school kid in a small town. It was a town where everyone knew everyone and nothing exciting ever really happened. That was the case, at least, until Helltrack came to town. Helltrack was a BMX race featuring many of the top performers in the sport. It was sponsored by 7-Eleven, so you knew it was a big deal. Cru wanted to get into the competition because he wanted to make a name for himself in BMX. The only problem was that he had to fight his way in because the sponsors didn’t want him to upstage their stars.
Through watching so many sports movies, I’ve noticed a few common storylines. One of them is the underdog team of rag-tag players who persevere and prove their worth. That’s where you get things like The Mighty Ducks, The Bad News Bears, and Major League. There’s a story where a kid ends up involved in major league sports. Little Big League and Rookie of the Year fit in there. Animals in sports became a big thing in the late 1990s with movies like Ed, Air Bud, and MVP: Most Valuable Primate taking up that mantle, though there had been earlier movies like Gus in 1976.
Where does Rad fit into all this? There are various sports movies about amateur athletes fighting for their big break. They want to become professionals in their sport of choice, so they force their way into a professional competition that will get people to take notice. There are a bunch of movies that fit into this story style, but I’m going to highlight three of them. Rad is the obvious first movie. It inspired this week’s post. The other two movies are movies that I watched for the first time last year, 2003’s Grind and 2005’s The Greatest Game Ever Played.
Let’s start with Rad. Before the movie introduced the Helltrack in a major way, it introduced Cru and his two best friends, Luke (Jamie Clarke) and Becky (Marta Kober). They were delivering newspapers around the small town on their BMX bikes. It showed that each of the three were capable riders, though Cru was clearly the best of them. He was the one who managed to do tricks like riding a dumpster over a fence without falling off his bike, as Luke did when he jumped a hedge and landed on a car. It was at the end of the delivery scene that Helltrack was introduced. Cru rode under a fence. When the fence came back down, there was an advertisement for Helltrack on it.
Cru wanted to participate in Helltrack. All the best BMX performers were there. Rad only focused on a handful of them. Bart Taylor (Bart Conner), Rex Reynolds (Chad Hayes), and Rod Reynolds represented Mongoose, a company run by the devious Duke Best (Jack Weston). The other BMX performer who was highlighted was Christian Hollings (Lori Loughlin), who had shown up for publicity, but not to participate in Helltrack. Cru hit it off with Christian after they had a BMX stunt-off at Cru’s high school prom. She would push Cru to participate when his mother wanted him to focus on school, instead. But this was Cru’s big break. If he could compete against Bart, Rex, and Rod in Helltrack, he could earn his spot among them as a star of the sport.
There were some obstacles that Cru had to jump over, of course. There always are with this type of movie. First, he had to get noticed. The prom did that well enough. It got the local BMXers on the radar of the big competition. A qualifying round was set up. That was obstacle number two. Cru passed that one by earning enough points to get himself a spot in the Helltrack competition. Then two more obstacles were thrown in his way. He needed a sponsor, so he set his own up. There was no way he was going to work for a major sponsor when they wanted to run the show. He set up his own sponsor company, Rad Racing. The other obstacle from the sponsor side of things was that the sponsor had to be worth $50,000. There was a lot of clawing and scratching his way into the competition that Cru had to do. He had to fight for his spot in Helltrack. Then he had to try and win.
It was the classic story in sports movies of making the jump from amateur to professional. Some movies do that early on so they can focus on a rivalry between the new star of the sport and the established star of the sport. Other movies, like Rad, make the journey the jump from that amateur status to becoming the new star. Rad did that by making the focus the Helltrack competition. Sure, there were rivals in there. There were Bart and the Reynolds twins. But the movie’s focus was on Cru starting a career in BMX competitions. It was about him making the leap from riding his bike around town to riding his bike in major events. It was a story about the first step into fame, not about the fame itself.
Another movie that followed a similar trajectory was Grind, a 2003 movie about skateboarding. Eric, Dustin, and Matt were three high school friends who wanted to take one last shot at making a career out of skating. They created their own skate team and set out to follow skate star Jimmy Wilson on tour so they could perform in front of him and get signed to a major deal. There was only one problem. They needed a driver. The friends teamed up with Sweet Lou, a slightly older guy from town who had a van, and hit the road. It was a road trip to get noticed.
Much like Rad, Grind was about taking the next step to move from amateur performer to professional. The skate team, Super Duper, was making a last-ditch effort to go professional. They were fighting for their chance to be professionals in the sport. There were multiple stops along the way where they showed off their talents. However, the movie was about getting that one moment to show their stuff. It was about getting to perform in front of Jimmy Wilson and get their foot in the door of professional skateboarding. Everything was leading to that one moment where they would start getting paid for their talents.
The obstacles weren’t as much in the rules of the competition in Grind. The obstacles were the basic obstacles of a road trip comedy. Super Duper had to get from one location to another to another as they tried to catch up with Jimmy Wilson’s national tour. They had to deal with strange people, car trouble, family reunions, and such things that were unrelated to skateboarding. The main obstacle in terms of performing for Jimmy Wilson was Jimmy’s security guy, who wouldn’t let the team perform for him. That and getting into a tournament at the end of the movie. They managed to overcome many of their obstacles in the end, though, and showed the world what they had.
The BMXing of Rad and skating of Grind are similar enough sports. Most of the time, they’re just stunts while riding. Jumping over things. Moving the device while in the air. Kickflips and such on a skateboard. Flips and handlebar spins on a BMX bike. It makes sense that some of the movies based on those sports would share similar stories. What if we move outside of wheels and go to a sport that uses a ball? There are a lot of sports with balls. The one that I want to focus on, though, is golf.
The Greatest Game Ever Played was released in 2005. It told the true story of Francis Ouimet, though some fictional liberties were taken to tell a more compelling story. Francis Ouimet was poor caddie at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. His real dream was to become a professional golfer, but the wealthy people involved in the sport weren’t as open to his participation. He was going to fight to get his spot among the wealthy stars of the sport.
In the early 1900s, when The Greatest Game Ever Played was set, golf was primarily a wealthy sport. Only the elite could play. Poorer people could work at the golf club as caddies, lawn care people, and other jobs that were beneath the elite. But they couldn’t compete with the elite in the game. They could only watch and dream of one day being wealthy enough to play the game for themselves. That would rarely happen, though. It’s still rare for people to change wealth classes.
Francis Ouimet did his best to fight that class system within golf. He wanted so much to play with the professionals that he wasn’t going to let money stop him. With the help of one of the members at The Country Club, Ouimet was entered in the U.S. Amateur for the U.S. Open that would be played at the same course he worked at. He showed his talents to the world but fell short of qualifying. He quit golf and joined the workforce. That wasn’t the end of his dream, though. He was approached by the president of the United States Golf Association to play in the open and possibly bring the title back to the United States. The rest of the movie was about the tournament, where Ouimet was able to prove himself on par with the best. He saw his dream come to fruition and took the opportunity to turn it into a career.
The Greatest Game Ever Played was a movie about Francis Ouimet proving that he could make the jump from amateur hopeful golfer to a professional at the same level as the wealthy. It was about going pro. He made a name for himself. He turned his love of golf into a career. It was a story that had been told many times before in sports flicks. It was a story told before in Grind and Rad. It was tried, it was tested, and it was true. It was a classic sports story about characters proving themselves as capable as the stars in the sport. That story could inspire other amateur athletes to take their shot, fight for their place in professional sports. It was an uplifting underdog story thread.
After watching a bunch of sports movies over the past year, as well as the sports movies I watched regularly anyway, I noticed different stories that would repeatedly be told. There were stories that were sure-fire ways to get audiences invested. Filmmakers knew that and continued to repeat those stories. Sure, they had different characters and sometimes different sports. But deep down, it was the same sports story being told time and time again. That’s not a bad thing, mind you. Originality is in how the story is told. The difference between a Hal Needham stunt movie, a road trip movie, and a biopic can make all the difference when it comes to telling the same basic story in a fresh way. That’s how movies work.
I’m going to finish this post off with a few notes:
- Ed (week 11) was brought up early in the post.
- Rad featured Ken Squier, who would go on to appear in Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (week 110).
- Finally, Jack Weston was in Ishtar (week 192) and Rad.
- Have you seen Rad? Have you seen Grind or The Greatest Game Ever Played? What did you think of them? Do you like the story of an amateur going professional or fighting to be recognized? Give me your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter.
- If there are any movies that you think would fit within Sunday “Bad” Movies, hit me up and let me know what they are. You can find me on Twitter or in the comments.
- You can head over to Instagram and check out Sunday “Bad” Movies if you want more bad movie fun.
- Next week’s movie will be a little more recent. It’s a movie that came out less than a decade ago. It’s not brand new, but it’s new enough to still be considered recent. It came out in 2014 and featured a few actors that you might recognize. The movie I’m writing about is Don Peyote and I’ll write a bunch more about it for next Sunday. Come on back to read it. I’ll be here. Have a good week!
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