Sports Stories that Would Make Good Sports Movies

This is one that Disney would love.

In 1905 the Dawson City Nuggets decided to challenge the Ottawa Silver Seven for the Stanley Cup. Problem is, they had to get from Dawson City in the Yukon to Ottawa.

It started with a month long trip dog sled from Dawson City to Skagway then a ship to Vancouver and then train to Ottawa. And this was all in the middle of winter.

Needless to say, it didn't have a happy ending. Dawson City was trounced by Ottawa and in the second game "One Eye" Frank McGee of Ottawa scored 14 goals.

 

I've only heard about this second-hand, but there was a basketball powerhouse in Tennessee (Nashville area, perhaps?) in the late '80s or early '90s that had at least a couple of top players who were Seventh-Day Adventists. So obviously the TSSAA championship game was scheduled for a Saturday night, making them ineligible to participate for religious reasons.

The story as it was related to me was that the team's 12th man ended up playing a key role in the title game and they won the state championship despite the absence of a few of their standouts.

Anyone remember this and if so, what was the name of the school?

 

I think the story by a beloved SportsJournalists.com columnist on the disabled woman who was a Dodger fans and would blog about their games would be a cool movie.

 

Anyone hear or know about the story of the Clay County high school basketball team in Kentucky? It was Richie Farmer's team. They were from mountains of Kentucky, the poorest county in the state, and fielded a team with no one over 6'1".

The team went on to dominate the state in basketball in the mid 1980s and won the state title in 1987 - beating, among other teams, several considerably more athletic, taller city teams from Louisville, including Allan Houston's team.

Story seems like a 1980s version of "Hoosiers".

Anyone know much about this story?

 

This is actually in the works, and so is a movie based on Smith's piece on the freedivers.

 

i pray that they don't change the ending to smith's basketball coach story

 

Donnie Moore.

 

I hear some autistic kid up in Rochester hit a couple of three-pointers last season.

I'm sure none of you have heard of it though. :

 

Thats coach of Lubbock, not Coach Lubbock, right?

 

I think they should make a decent movie about Babe Ruth instead of the two lousy movies they made about him.

 

That's actually one of my favourite hockey stories and one I have wanted to write for a long time, but really have no idea where to begin, also don't have the time to put the indepth research into it that one would need to properly write it. This one definitely gets my nod, however Idoubt it would capture Disney's eye because it is part of Canadian folk lore. But if it could be altered with the trip going from Alaska to say New York, to play a yet to be created team named the New York Rangers, we might just have soemthing.

 

Absolutely. As dramatic as it is to see the plucky underdog triumph against all odds, it can be equally dramatic to see the achievement of ultimate perfection.

Maybe have a subplot which would focus a little bit on Sham, the horse who battled Secretariat to the wire in record time in both the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness (Sham's Derby time was a record too, and still would be today), hung with him for the first quarter mile of the Belmont, and then dropped to dead last as Secretariat shifted into nuclear warp drive and disappeared into the distance.

Also good movies could be made about:

1) Bill Veeck, the only owner in sports history fans would actually pay money to see. Supposedly a movie about Veeck, with Bill Murray in the lead role, has been in development for a number of years, but it keeps getting shoved onto the back burner. God help us, I think Will Ferrell could actually be good in the role, since Murray is drifting into the category of being too old to play the younger Veeck.

2) The 1914 Miracle Braves.

3) Moses Fleetwood Walker, actually the first African-American to play Major League Baseball, in 1884, and the movement to ban black players from the majors thereafter. Walker was an interesting figure in his own right, an Oberlin College graduate who later advocated the repatriation of American blacks back to African homelands.

4) The 1950s Detroit Lions, a rollicking bunch of hard-drinking cowboys, led by Bobby Layne, who roared their way through the NFL, battling the Browns for league supremacy on the advent of the arrival of TV. If there was ever a guy more born to play a role than McConaghey for Bobby Layne, I can't imagine it. (They need to hurry up and shoot this movie soon, while Tiger Stadium is still standing.)

5) Great movies could be made about a number of outlaw sports leagues, from the Federal League in 1915, to the AFL in 1960-61, and the ABA in the late 60s/early 70s. The outlaw leagues always have plenty of wild-and-crazy "OMG WTF" stories, because they haven't developed the inflated sense of self-importance of the established leagues. Heck, even the story of the establishment of the American League in 1902-03 would make a pretty fun movie.

And yeah, somebody absolutely should make a good Ruth/Gehrig movie.