Over the Top (1987) and My Tiers of Sports in Sports Movies

I had three movie watching goals in 2020. I wanted to watch fifty-two movies directed by women. I wanted to travel the globe through movies, watching movies from at least fifty-two different countries. The third goal, and the one that was most connected to a script I wanted to write, was sports movies. I was going to watch one new-to-me sports movie per week for the entirety of the year. Completing those three goals was a daunting task, but thanks to a few lockdowns, it was easier than I expected.

Watching that many sports movies gave me a new perspective on the genre. Yes, I’m calling it a genre. It might not be the right word to categorize sports movies because they can fall into many genres. There are sports dramas, sports comedies, future sports science fiction movies, and even sports horror flicks. From this point forward, though, I’m going to refer to sports movies as a genre because it’s the easiest way to lump them all together. As for my new perspective, it was that there were different tiers of sports that got covered in movies. Typically, the tiers fell into the popularity of the respective sports.

Take the big five for example. This would be the top tier of sports movies, at least in the western hemisphere. There are four major sports in North America. They are baseball, basketball, hockey, and football. Most sports movies in the United States focus on American football or baseball. Basketball gets good focus as well, though not as much as the other two. Hockey gets some representation. When you toss Canada in there, the representation of hockey rises exponentially. We love our hockey in Canada. The fifth sport is soccer/football, which is the most popular sport worldwide. It might not have the biggest representation in Hollywood, but the UK certainly makes up for that.

Now, these tiers aren’t going to be a representation of the quality of the sports movies. I’m not saying that the best sports movies are the top tier of sports movies. What I want to separate the tiers by are the abundance per sport. The top five sports are the most popular sports. They are the sports that people know most about. It is much easier for a filmmaker to write a story about those sports because they have more familiarity with them. It is easier for the audience to connect with the story because they may have connected with other, similar, real sports stories. Hell, many of the movies are based on real sports stories, meaning that people already know the stories going into the movies.

When you think about sports movies, what are some of the ones that immediately come to mind? I’m sure you thought of a few baseball movies like Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, The Natural, Major League, or The Rookie. If you went to football, there were probably movies like Brian’s Song, Remember the Titans, Friday Night Lights, and Any Given Sunday. Basketball? Hoosiers, Coach Carter, Air Bud, and Space Jam have you covered. There are hockey movies like Goon, Slap Shot, The Mighty Ducks, and Mystery Alaska. For the soccer lovers, there are Bend It Like Beckham, The Damned United, Early Man, and Shaolin Soccer.

The big five sports take up a large amount of the sports movie landscape. It’s tough to even begin discussing them because there are just so many sports movies in that tier. That’s why they are a separate tier, the top tier. When it comes to abundance, that is. That’s how I’m leveling these tiers. I’m going from the most abundant to the least abundant. That brings us to tier two.

The second tier of sports movies are the movies about well-known sports that aren’t the big five. Some of them might still be sports with a large fan base. Most of them are still sports with a large fan base. If they weren’t, they’d be bumped down to the third tier. That’s for another section of this post, coming up later. First, I want to dig a little deeper into the second tier of sports movies. There might be just as many movies as the first tier, but they aren’t so densely packed. There are more sports being represented.

One of the bigger sports in the second tier of sports movies is racing. Specifically, racing cars. Sports like NASCAR and Formula 1 get big representation in movies. I remember going to Sam’s Club in the United States as a child. They had a demo of a Bose surround sound setup. When you pressed the test button, a scene from Days of Thunder, a movie about NASCAR racing, would come on. The sound of the engine and squealing tires, with the musical score behind it… That’s how they would show the power of surround sound. Days of Thunder is only one of the NASCAR movies, with Talladega Nights being another. Formula 1 has movies like Driven, Rush, and Ford v. Ferrari bringing the sport to the big screen.

Board sports also get some representation in the second tier. There are quite a few board sports movies, whether the sport be skateboarding, snowboarding, or surfing. The wheels get the big screen treatment in movies like Grind, Skate Kitchen, and Nic and Tristan Go Mega Dega. The latter flick put real child skaters Nic and Tristan Puehse in the starring roles. Stars of the sport in a movie involving the sport. Using their names. The movie was probably just thrown together to capitalize on their popularity. Snowboarding has been featured in movies like Out Cold, Johnny Tsunami, and Cloud 9. Then there are surfing flicks like Chasing Mavericks, Soul Surfer, and Surf’s Up.

Another big second-tier sport is golf. It’s probably because everyone and their cousin has played a round at some point in their life. Golf is a sport, but it’s also a pastime. Golf is a business meeting location. It’s a boys’ day festivity. Tin Cup, Happy Gilmore, The Greatest Game Ever Played, and Caddyshack have each shown that golf has its place on the big screen. People like to play golf to relax. They like to watch golf movies to relax even more.

Other sports that I would toss into the second tier of sports movies include boxing, wrestling, martial arts, volleyball, figure skating, rugby, bowling, competitive dance, cheerleading, chess, and pretty much any of the other sports that get televised on a regular basis. Oh, and horse-based sports. Things like horse racing, which have numerous movies including Seabiscuit, Secretariat, and Racing Stripes. Aside from one horse-based sports movie which I will be tossing into the third-tier because it’s a specific horse sport that fits into that tier perfectly.

Speaking of which, let’s get to that third tier. The third tier includes the oddball sports. They could be a sport that you recognize, but it’s just not typically represented in movies. Or it could be a sport where you either think “Oh, they made a movie about that?” or “Oh, that’s a sport?” These are the sports where it would be shocking to find maybe three movies total where they are the focus. There’s one, or else they wouldn’t even make the tier. There might be two. But three? There’s no way these sports have three movies dedicated to them.

The most famous of the third-tier sports movies might be Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. How many movies about dodgeball can you think of? I don’t mean high school movies where kids play dodgeball in gym class. I mean movies where the story revolves around dodgeball. The story of Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story is that the members of a gym compete in a dodgeball tournament. It’s similar to Balls of Fury being the ping-pong movie. The movies don’t just involve the sport. The sport is the movie.

Over the Top is a 1987 movie that was built around arm wrestling. Sure, there was another story that might have been more important, but it was told through an arm wrestling tournament. Lincoln Hawk (Sylvester Stallone) was a truck driver who drove a rusty old truck. He showed up at military school to pick up Michael Cutler (David Mendenhall), the son he hadn’t seen in years. Michael’s mother, Christina (Susan Blakely), was dying in the hospital and her last wish was for Lincoln to drive Michael to see her. The father and son bonded over arm wrestling, all while Michael’s grandfather, Jason Cutler (Robert Loggia), did everything in his power to keep Lincoln out of Michael’s life.

It might seem like Over the Top was a movie about a father and son bonding. It very much was. But it was bonding through a similar way as Real Steel, where they bonded over sport. Instead of robot boxing, however, they bonded through arm wrestling. Lincoln taught his son that beating people was about mental fortitude. It wasn’t always about strength. If you believed you could win, there was a good chance that you could. He pitted Michael against a bigger kid in an arm wrestling match at some roadside diner with an arcade in it. Michael beat the kid in a two-out-of-three match.

That didn’t completely bond the father and son. Michael still felt like Lincoln abandoned him at a young age, which was kind of true. Over the Top never got into the actual reason that Lincoln left his family. He just kept saying that he had reasons and it was a mistake. Like any good romantic comedy, the two separated as things went into the third act. They would come back together at, you guessed it, an arm wrestling tournament where Lincoln won a new truck. Father and son could travel the country together in their brand new transport truck.

If you think arm wrestling is the most minor sport to be covered in movies, it’s not. Sure, it’s probably a smaller sport than lawn bowling, which was the subject of Blackball. It might be on par with paintball, which was featured in Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story. I would say that it’s a much bigger sport than competitive grocery bagging, though. There’s no way that competitive grocery bagging has a huge following and a bunch of movies. It has maybe two movies, National Lampoon’s Bag Boy and Ready, Set, Bag!. Then there’s the sport of horse diving. You know, that one that I said doesn’t fall into the second tier because it’s so obscure. Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken was about horse diving during the great depression. Sports like these are the epitome of the third tier.

Now it’s time to get onto the fourth and final tier of sports movies. We talked about the big five and the abundance of movies surrounding those sports. I got into the second tier where the sports weren’t quite on the same popularity level, but still had a bunch of movies about them. The third tier got into the lesser sports and competitions, and the few movies that they had depicting them as a competitive force. Now I’m going to cover the movies featuring fictional sports. Yeah, the fourth tier is the made up competitions.

Before I get into these movies, let me specify that for the movies to fit into this tier, since these are sports movies, the sports have to be a big part of them. The Harry Potter flicks featured quidditch, a made up sport (did you know we can’t fly on brooms?), but they weren’t centred around the sports. The movies weren’t about the sport. That could also be said for Solarbabies. There was a futuristic, fictional sport in there. But the movie didn’t revolve around that sport. It was simply something featured at the beginning. It went on to be more of a roller blading movie, if it was to be considered a sports movie at all.

A movie that was wholly dependant on a future sport was Rollerball. The original or the remake, it doesn’t matter. The original was a look at the negative side of corporations and capitalism, told through a future sport and one of its stars. The sport was an integral part of the story, as the corporations were trying to control what the sport star did both on and off the court. The remake wasn’t as smart in its critique of capitalism, instead becoming a movie sort of about the players disliking the excessive violence that was coming into the game. Either way, they each heavily involved a sport that doesn’t actually exist.

Death Race and its sequels fell into the same territiory. There was a future in which convicts were put into a race to try and earn their freedom. That seems pretty basic. The difference was that the convicts were supposed to try and kill each other, and they earned different weapons and power-ups through Mario Kart style checkpoints. Instead of the cubes in the air, they drove over lit panels in the ground. There’s not much more to it than that. There have been four movies in one series involving this version of the death race, a future sport that doesn’t exist in our reality.

Similar to that were Gamer and Beta Test, two movies where gamers took control of real people to play their games. Beta Test was not so much sport-like, so let’s toss that one out right now. It just needed to be mentioned because it had a gamer controlling a real person as their avatar. Gamer took that concept to the next level. It was e-sports by way of real people. One kid controlled a real convict in a Call of Duty kind of game. If the kid won a certain amount of games, the avatar was released from prison. It was like Death Race, except with a video game instead of racing. Still, a future where people could control other people as avatars.

Obviously, those aren’t the only tier four sports in movies. There have been a bunch of things like The Tournament, Hunger Games, and Battle Royale about a bunch of people being put into a tournament to kill each other. Real Steel had robot boxing. In a movie set more in the current world, BASEketball had a sport that was a cross between baseball and basketball. There are other movies that feature fictional sports, but there aren’t nearly as many where the fictional sport is an essential part of the story.

So those are the four tiers of sports movies. There are the big five sports that get the most movies made about them. There are the sports that get a lot of movies made about them, but not nearly as much as those big five. There are sports where very minimal movies get made, but it’s fun to see any movies about them. Then there are the fictional sports that still manage to capture a writer’s mind and become the focus of a story. Tier one, two, three, and four.

Throughout 2020, I watched a bunch of sports movies. I tried to limit my tier one watching or else the entire watching goal would be overrun by five sports. It led me to watching a bunch of stuff from tier two and tier three. Would I have seen Blackball or Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story had it not been for limiting tier one? Probably not. But I did limit it, and I did see those movies, and I’m happy about that. Maybe you’ll think about seeing some of the tier three or even tier four movies sometime. I hope I may have opened your eyes to something here.

Now let’s get some notes done:

• I mentioned a few movies that have been covered for Sunday “Bad” Movies before. Here are the posts for Nic and Tristan Go Mega Dega (week 272), Balls of Fury (week 349), Solarbabies (week 416), Death Race (week 9), Death Race 2 (week 9), Death Race: Inferno (week 9), Death Race: Beyond Anarchy (week 311), and Beta Test (week 397).
• Over the Top was directed by Menahem Golan, who also directed The Apple (week 196).
• Sam Scarber was in both Over the Top and Robot Wars (week 37).
• Susan Blakely played the dying mother in Over the Top. She was also in Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2 (week 70).
• The great Terry Funk has now been in two Sunday “Bad” Movies. He was in Road House (week 200) and Over the Top.
• Jimmy Keegan returned from Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (week 350) to be in Over the Top.
• Over the Top featured Christine Bridges from Soul Man (week 354).
• Magic Schwartz was in Over the Top. He could also be seen in Stone Cold (week 423).
• Dean Abston was in Over the Top and Too Young to Die? (week 441).
• Finally, Robert Loggia was the grandfather in Over the Top. He would go on to have a role in Independence Day: Resurgence (week 449).
• Have you seen Over the Top? What did you think? Do you think my tiers of sports movies are right? Do they make any sense at all? Let me know about it in the comments or get a hold of me on Twitter to chastise me.
• If you head over to Twitter, you can suggest a movie for me to watch for a future Sunday “Bad” Movies week. Or you can leave the suggestion in the comments. Either way works.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
• Next week, I’ll be watching another movie for Sunday “Bad” Movies. What is it? I’m going to check out a new sequel to a franchise I’ve been watching for a while. It’s a religious movie. If that doesn’t tip you off, I don’t know what will. I’m going to be checking out God’s Not Dead: We the People, the 2021 entry in the series of films from David A.R. White’s production company. I’ll see you in a week with my thoughts.