Let's call the whole thing off
This article is more than 16 years oldFrom Monroe and DiMaggio to Streisand and Agassi, the love affair between Hollywood and sport has never quite blossomed into a successful marriage. Is it just a clash of egos between stars from two different worlds? Or, asks celebrated film critic Joe Queenan, is there a deeper reason for these doomed mismatches?During their mercifully brief public liaison, Barbra Streisand turned up at one of Andre Agassi's US Open Matches and likened her Iranian-American beau and cultural protégé to a 'Zen master'. This came as a surprise to everyone, including most Zen masters. Agassi had often been compared to Jimmy Connors (ferocious return of serve) and Rod Laver (won all four grand-slam titles), but this was the first time anyone had compared the pigeon-toed heart-throb to a Zen master. Shortly afterwards, Agassi ditched the Eastern aura for a starter marriage with former child star Brooke Shields, before graduating to a longer-lasting relationship with a leggy German tennis marvel called Steffi Graf. The flirtation between Hollywood and sport was, as usual, a passing fancy; sooner or later one of these folks was bound to come to their senses.
Most Hollywood marriages end in divorce, with the survivors often wondering whatever possessed them to hook up with such a jerk/twerp/scumbag/cheapskate/psycho. Athletes and movie stars are drawn to one another until the moment they realise that everything they have in common - fame, money, self-absorption, an all-consuming paranoia about their short shelf lives - are precisely the elements that tear marriages apart. Joe DiMaggio - baseball's biggest star while Americans were fighting on Iwo Jima - broke up with Marilyn Monroe just nine months after their wedding, in part because DiMaggio didn't like all the attention his wife got. Despite playing the most glamorous position in American sports - centre fielder for the New York Yankees - DiMaggio, retired at the time of the wedding, hated being in the spotlight and failed to understand that his bride didn't. On their honeymoon in Japan, the pair were wildly greeted by 100,000 US soldiers. 'I've never heard so many people cheer,' said Monroe. 'I have,' DiMaggio replied.
Other liaisons ended with similar results. Elizabeth Taylor and Janet Leigh were two of the many starlets escorted around by baseball's Ralph Kiner in the late Forties before he wised up and married a tennis player called Nancy Chaffee. Halle Berry's acting career started to take off just about the time baseball player David Justice's Major League career started to end, and that was the end of that. Mike Tyson's marriage to actress Robin Givens ended, after allegations of domestic violence, with a Valentine's Day divorce. Even Sheryl Crow's relationship with Lance Armstrong did not last.
Sometimes, the entire Hollywood industry falls in love with a famous player. This has happened with several sportsmen - Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan are just two of those with their own stars on the Walk of Fame - but none, perhaps, is as loved as Muhammad Ali. His self-generated star power was so great that Hollywood acolytes flocked to him; in his 1971 fight against Joe Frazier, aka 'The Fight of the Century', Burt Lancaster was the match commentator and Frank Sinatra was the fight photographer. He was never a great actor, but he didn't need to be (he was generally playing himself in biopics) and even now, at the age of 65, he is revered by Hollywood's finest as a star far greater than their own - witness the standing ovation he receives when he turns up to the Oscars.
Even as we speak, Hollywood is engaging in one of its ill-advised dalliances. This, too, will end badly. When David Beckham arrived in Los Angeles, a city that cares so little about sports that it does not even have an NFL team, the luxury boxes were filled with Tom Cruise, Jennifer Love-Hewitt, and assorted stars of Desperate Housewives. Now, ferried from one grim American town to the next, he will make crisp but futile passes to second-tier players who cannot put the ball in the net; and as it becomes apparent that Beckham neither is nor ever was the best footballer in the world, and that 32-year-olds with dodgy ankles lack the enduring appeal of a DiMaggio or a Jordan, Hollywood will surreptitiously re-evaluate its affection and the stars will slip away.
Hollywood is smitten by Beckham today because Beckham is believed to be one of those stars whose fame transcends his sport. But Hollywood has also fallen for him because the once-dominant Los Angeles Lakers basketball team stinks and front-running Hollywood, forever requiring a sure thing to bet on, mistakenly thinks it has located that sure thing in Beckham. Unfortunately for the Englishman, he is not much of a scorer in a country that hates low-scoring sports. This is the main reason soccer has so little mass-market appeal in a nation that already has too many teams, too many leagues, and too many ageing metrosexuals.
Throughout its history, Hollywood has made many, many attempts to capitalise on athletes' fame and transform them into movie stars. Those who do succeed tend to do so through typecasting: the glamorous ice skater Sonja Henie, an Olympic gold medallist in 1928, 1932 and 1936, made several well received films just before the Second World War, usually playing a glamorous ice skater. She became one of the best-paid actresses of her time.
But elsewhere, the terrain is littered with athletes' corpses: long-forgotten football players, punch-drunk boxers, flabby gymnasts, paunchy wrestlers. Swimmer Mark Spitz, who walked off with seven medals at the 1972 summer Olympics, never got his career off the ground; despite talk that he might be hired to play James Bond, Spitz on camera turned out to be a pure stiff and that was the end of that career. OJ Simpson, one of the greatest American football players ever, failed as a dramatic actor (The Cassandra Crossing, The Towering Inferno), but had more success as a buffoonish cop in the Naked Gun comedies. After that ... Well, anyone seeking a perfect example of why sports and Hollywood don't mix need look no further than OJ.
The industry has had even less success with other American football players. Quarterbacks are among the most high-profile sportsmen in the US, but determined efforts to transfer their fame into another field, and turn players such as Roman Gabriel (in the Sixties) and Joe Namath (in the Seventies) into actors, resulted in some of the worst films ever made (The Undefeated, C.C. & Company
What is most interesting about these many failures is the way Hollywood abruptly switches gears once things start to go south. When Hollywood loves someone, it really, really loves him. But once Hollywood gets tired of the new kid on the block, it incinerates the glossies, trash-cans the phone numbers and pretends that it never heard of anyone called Mark Spitz. The public quickly follows suit.
The motion-picture industry's fascination with athletes may derive from a deep, subconscious desire to figure out how sports are played. Hollywood, teeming with vertically truncated, athletically challenged dweebs, loves to make movies about sports, which usually involve tall, graceful men. (One theory as to why so many athletes have bombed in the movies is because they are too tall, though not being able to act and having cauliflower noses may also have something to do with it.)
Generally speaking, Hollywood does a pretty bad job when it makes sports movies, frequently introducing action and situations that could not exist in a real game. The Rocky films merely sublimate the racist fantasies of fantastic racists: 'Wouldn't it be great to live in a parallel universe where white fighters can actually fight?' The Natural, the 1984 baseball film starring Robert Redford and nominated for four Oscars, massacred Bernard Malamud's classic novel. Matt Damon's swing in The Legend of Bagger Vance was hilarious. And the soccer interlude in Escape to Victory will be a source of amusement to Brits for generations to come. On a technical note, Any Given Sunday, the 1999 American football blockbuster featuring Al Pacino, Cameron Diaz and Dennis Quaid, doesn't even get the scoring right: the scoreboard keeps putting up seven points after a touchdown, but back where I come from, a touchdown is worth only six points. Let us not even speak of Wimbledon
And while there are notable exceptions - the uplifting Chariots of Fire, the heartwarming Field of Dreams, the wry Tin Cup - sports films are generally atrocious. These movies possess but one virtue: they provide a social safety valve, in that they almost always end up with the underdog winning - The Mighty Ducks, Cinderella Man - whereas in real life the winners are invariably the New York Yankees or Manchester United. Sports films thus serve the highly useful social function of allowing fans everywhere to experience the vicarious thrill of victory by watching the feisty but outgunned David topple the wicked Goliath. Unfortunately, in real life Goliath always wins because he has more money.
Hollywood loves to attach itself to a championship-calibre player or team, but has a hard time not being part of the action. Consider the example of the New York Knicks basketball team. So long as a night at Madison Square Garden was still a hot ticket, the stars would be out in force at their games: Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, the usual suspects. But after a slump in the team's performances a few years ago, the stars stopped coming.
With two notable exceptions: Woody Allen and Spike Lee. Allen, who is a relatively impassive spectator, never makes much of a stir at Knicks games; he doesn't even seem to be enjoying himself. But Lee's obnoxious taunting of visiting players is legendary. The diminutive director - who once made a series of Nike ads with Michael Jordan, the man who forever obstructed the Knicks' road to the championship in the Nineties - was famous for abusing a notoriously volatile Indianapolis Pacers player named Reggie Miller whenever he came to town. Miller, a native of Los Angeles, once grew so exasperated at Lee's trash-talking that he exploded for 25 points in a single quarter, and blew the Knicks out of their own arena single-handed, all the while personally ridiculing Lee. The next day, the New York Daily News carried a full-page picture of Lee making a fool of himself, beneath the headline 'Thanks a Lot, Spike'.
A few years later, when I interviewed Lee about the incident, he still could not understand why fans had reacted so vociferously to his actions, suspecting a racial bias. Yet the explanation should have been clear: tall, athletic millionaires play basketball; short, unathletic millionaires make films. In the eyes of the average sports fan, maverick directors have no moral authority to engage with professional athletes; it makes them look ridiculous. It was as if Miller had turned up on a Spike Lee set and criticised his inability to bring his movies to a successful conclusion.
What Lee failed to appreciate is that Hollywood and sports will often overlap and, occasionally, collide, but in the end they have almost nothing in common. People in the movie industry simulate brilliance. Professional athletes are brilliant. Professional athletes are worshipped in part because they can do things with their bodies that ordinary people cannot do, and are willing to subject themselves to punishment that ordinary people could not endure. What's more, professional athletes are willing to risk life and limb, and to accept the fact that they will live shorter lives, because they have only one objective in mind: glory. Whereas people who simulate brilliance can keep simulating it until they are 80, athletes are usually washed up by the age of 35.
In the end, this is why Hollywood inevitably tires of the stars it once embraced. Athletes get old. Athletes get injured. Athletes twist their ankles, and one day the ankles stop healing. By contrast, celluloid heroes, as the Kinks' Ray Davies wrote, never feel any pain. And celluloid heroes never really die.
Together forever?
Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen
Brady, a quarterback for the New England Patriots, and actress Bridget Moynahan, of Coyote Ugly and I, Robot fame, were the perfect Hollywood pairing. Until Moynahan got pregnant last year, and Brady left her for supermodel Gisele (who previously dated surfer Kelly Slater). At which point they became the typical Hollywood pairing.
Laila Ali and Curtis Conway
The daughter of the world's most famous boxer, Ali (pictured with Conway) is herself a super-middleweight champion, still unbeaten after 24 fights, who made her first foray into TV as a contestant in America's version of Strictly Come Dancing earlier this year. Her July wedding to the former NFL wide receiver was LA's social event of the summer.
Landon Donovan and Bianca Kajlich
Posh who? David Beckham's LA Galaxy captain Donovan and Rules of Engagement star Kajlich are LA soccer's original first couple. They married last New Year's Eve and have so far resisted any Hollywood offers, preferring a quiet life in the suburbs with their three dogs.
Dario Franchitti and Ashley Judd
Scottish racing driver is rejected by Formula One, moves to America, woos prominent actress and clinches the IndyCar Series. Sounds like a film script, but it's Franchitti's life story. When not filming box-office-busting thrillers, his wife Judd (left, with her husband of six years) can be seen at the racetrack.
Kobe and Vanessa Bryant
The Lakers' Kobe met Vanessa, a dancer, while recording an album in 1999. Kobe's parents disapproved of the marriage, but the relationship has weathered a rape allegation made against Kobe in 2003 - it was dropped after he made a public apology to his accuser, and he also bought Vanessa a $4m ring - and the couple are worth a combined $50m a year.
Tony Parker and Eva Longoria
NBA star Parker married the Desperate Housewives actress in July. A fan of Parker's team, the San Antonio Spurs, Longoria recently admitted that the pair couldn't bear to spend more than two weeks apart.
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