The 100 Greatest Sports Films of All-Time

Sports Films are those that have a sports setting (football or baseball stadium, arena, or the Olympics, etc.), competitive event (the 'big game,' 'fight,' or 'competition'), and/or athlete (boxer, racer, surfer, etc.) that are central and predominant in the story. Dramatic sports films or biographies have created memorable portraits of all-American sports heroes, individual athletes, or teams who are faced with tough odds in a championship match, race or large-scale sporting event, soul-searching or physical/psychological injuries, or romantic sub-plot distractions. Fictional sports films normally present a single sport (the most common being baseball, football, basketball, and boxing), and include the training and rise (and/or fall) of the underdog or champion in the world of sports.

Sports films may be fictional or non-fictional; and they are a hybrid sub-genre category, although they are often one of the following:

• biopics - i.e., Raging Bull (1980)
• dramas - i.e., The Hustler (1961)
• comedies - i.e., The Freshman (1925), Caddyshack (1980)
• documentaries - i.e., Olympia (1938), The Endless Summer (1966), Pumping Iron (1977), Baseball (1994), Hoop Dreams (1994), When We Were Kings (1996), Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001), Murderball (2005), Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story (2005), Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2005)
• fantasies - i.e., The Natural (1984), and Field of Dreams (1989)
• film noir - i.e., Body and Soul (1947), and The Set-Up (1949)
• melodramas - i.e., Brian's Song (1971)

Sports should play a predominant role in a 'true' sports film. The most popular sports themes in Hollywood films of the 20th-21st centuries appear to be auto-racing, American football, boxing, baseball, horse-racing and basketball in a plentiful selection of films. Track and field, golf, ice hockey, soccer and wrestling have also proven to be popular sports themes. See also AFI's 10 Top 10 - The Top 10 Sports Films.

Popular Real-Life Sports Characters:

A number of sports films have documented or portrayed real-life characters, such as the following:

• boxer James J. Corbett (Errol Flynn) in Gentleman Jim (1942)
• New York Yankees baseball player Lou Gehrig (Gary Cooper) in The Pride of the Yankees (1942)
• pro NY Yankees baseball player Babe Ruth (William Bendix) in fictionalized The Babe Ruth Story (1948)
• baseball player Jackie Robinson as Himself in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) - he was still an active ballplayer at the time (his career didn't end until 1955)
• middleweight champion Rocky Graziano (Paul Newman) in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956)
• major league baseball player Jimmy Piersall (Anthony Perkins) in Fear Strikes Out (1957)
• boxer Jack Johnson (James Earl Jones) in The Great White Hope (1970)
• boxer Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) in Raging Bull (1980)
• drag racer Shirley “Cha Cha” Muldowney (Bonnie Bedelia) in Heart Like a Wheel (1983)
• slugger Babe Ruth (John Goodman) in The Babe (1992)
• middle-weight boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (Denzel Washington) in The Hurricane (1999)
• boxer Muhammad Ali (Will Smith) in Ali (2001)
• Depression-Era heavyweight boxer James J. Braddock (Russell Crowe) in director Ron Howard's The Cinderella Man (2005)
• South Africa's improbable Rugby World Cup victory in 1995, in Invictus (2009), led by rugby captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), with Morgan Freeman portraying inspiring political leader Nelson Mandela

More About Sports Films:

• Greatest Sports Films - (in multiple sections, including short plot synopses)
• Examples of Greatest Sports Films - (in chronological order)