10. Cool Runnings

This is my favorite childhood Disney movie, edging The Sandlot which might be No. 11 or 12 at worst.

Cool Runnings is loosely — and I mean loosely — based on the Jamaican bobsled team from the 1988 Calgary Olympics. In the movie a group of three Jamaican sprinters who failed to qualify for the 100 meter dash in the Summer Olympics team up with a wacky pushcart driver to race a bobsled in the Winter Olympics. Their coach is a banished American bobsledder who weighed down the front of his bobsled with weight to make it go faster. This character is played by John Candy, making the movie that much funnier and better.

It’s an inspiring movie to me, even though most of it is untrue and over dramatized. I always tear up at the end when the Jamaicans carry their crashed bobsled over the finish line.

Any kid from the South who loved this movie at one point in time raced a wagon down a hill thinking one day he’d be a bobsledder. Hopefully they didn’t crash like I did.

9. Miracle

Why it took over 20 years for a movie studio to make a movie about the biggest upset triumph in American sports history is beyond me. However, once it was made, it was great.

Miracle is the story of the 1980 United States hockey team made up of amateurs who took down the mighty professional Russians in the Winter Olympics.

Led by coach Herb Brooks, who was played by Kurt Russell, the rag tag Americans went on to capture the gold medal in Lake Placid. The movie did the actual event justice, not an easy feat in my opinion.

Unfortunately the real life Brooks died in a train accident before the movie premiered. He missed a good one.

8. Hoosiers — This is the highest ranked basketball movie on my list. When it comes to basketball movies, this is the gold standard.

Hickory, Ind. is like Valdosta except it’s basketball crazy. The small town lives for its Hickory basketball.

Like most dramatic sports movie it has an element of redemption. Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) shows up after being fired from a previous job to turn around Hickory. He wards off intrusive fans and eventually wins over Jimmy Chitwood, the star who previously refused to play.

With Dale coaching and Chitwood banging down jumpers, Hickory takes off and make a magical run to the state championship game. The whole town caravans to the game (except for the drunken Shooter played by Dennis Hopper) to watch the underdogs win the title.

Hoosiers is a feel-good story, and the small town high school aspect gives it a certain charm.

7. The Legend of Bagger Vance — I’m a golfer so I had to pick one golf movie to go with. It was between Happy Gilmore, Caddyshack, Tin Cup and The Legend of Bagger Vance. While the first two are hilarious (especially in Caddyshack when the bishop gets struck down by lightning after the round of his life), the humor trumps the golf. Tin Cup just makes me mad because Kevin Costner bashed a bunch of balls in the water on the 72nd hole of the U.S. Open.

Bagger Vance is about a great golfer, Rannulph Junah (played by Matt Damon), who returns from World War I as a haunted veteran. He lost his woman and his golf game and only found solace in booze. His home city of Savannah (another reason I like the movie) is suffering, and Junah’s old girlfriend thinks a golf match between him, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen will boost the town.

Junah starts the three-round match in the tank, but rallies to come back and tie Jones and Hagen. In the end he calls a penalty on himself after his ball moved and it costs him the win. That’s the beauty of golf, it’s the only sport where you have to call a penalty on yourself.

6. Cinderella Man — For some reason this movie gets lost in the shuffle. Maybe it’s because there are too many boxing movies. Maybe because it’s set during the Great Depression, it wasn’t heavily promoted or its genre made it hard to draw a big audience.

That doesn’t take away from Cinderella Man being a great movie. I thought Russell Crowe was great as James Braddock, a washed up fighter returning to the ring to support his family during the Great Depression.

The only reason this movie isn’t higher on the list is because in some ways its similar to Rocky, which came first. But the fact that Cinderella Man is compelling as it is despite seemingly being done before speaks to its greatness.

5. Rudy — The kid just wouldn’t take no for an answer. You have to admire Rudy’s determination. Not even his own family believed he could one day play for the great Notre Dame.

My favorite scene is when Rudy is practicing for the scout team against the starters and the big left tackle pulls and brushes Rudy out of the way. Rudy gets up in his face and tells him to treat him like the upcoming opponent. Big mistake. The next play that giant tackle pulled and ran over Rudy like a freight train. Rudy got back up, though. You have to appreciate him for that.

Plus the movie is about college football, so how could you not like it?

4. Rocky — It’s a true American Classic. It was the first sports movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The only other sports-related movie that can claim that is Million Dollar Baby.

Rocky is the ultimate underdog story. Balboa was a guy everyone gave up on, except his fat, drunk friend, crusty old trainer Mick and his shy girlfriend. He pounded on dead animals in a meat freezer while Apollo Creed basked in the glory of being heavyweight champion.

By the time the giant fight scene at the end came, you could feel something special was going to happen. It was an epic fight, albeit completely unrealistic because neither fighter could withstand that kind of punishment. Nevertheless, it was great theater.

While Rocky IV may be more memorable in pop culture because of Ivan Drago, the original Rocky was a cinematic achievement not seen before by in the sports realm.

3. Friday Night Lights — This was an easy one. As a sports writer for the Valdosta Daily Times I feel like I live this movie every fall. High school football means everything to the people in Friday Night Lights, just like it means a lot to the people of South Georgia.

Right or wrong the players are glorified and the coaches are scrutinized. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Friday Night Lights shows everything that’s good and bad about high school football. Living in a high school town dubbed TitleTown USA, it’s hard not to relate.

2. Field of Dreams — Even though I made my Top 10 sports movies list, I’m not a huge fan of sports movies. The reason is because I don’t think they’re realistic. No one can take a running start and smash a golf ball 400 yards like Adam Sandler in Happy Gilmore. No one can take even one of the punches in Rocky without being knocked out cold.

That’s why Field of Dreams is one of my favorites. It’s technically a baseball movie, but there’s not much baseball in it. Field of Dreams is about a man on a journey to find out the meaning of his life and reunite with his father. Baseball is secondary.

Field of Dreams romanticizes baseball without showing the game being played. It’s genius. Ray Kinsella plows his field of corn to make his own baseball field. It’s every baseball fan’s dream. James Earl Jones eases his pain by rediscovering the game. His speech towards the end is mesmerizing:

“…The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh… people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.”

It’s too bad for baseball that Field of Dreams was made before the Steroid Era. I’d argue that if the movie debuted today it would bring back a lot of the fans who’ve become disenfranchised because it reminds us how great baseball can be.

1. Major League — I love this movie so much. Everything about it. It’s one of those movies I can watch from start to finish every time it comes on, even if I’ve seen it 1,000 times before.

What makes Major League so great is its memorable characters.  Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn, the fireballer who played in the California Penal league, Pedro Cerrano and his Voodoo, Jake Taylor and his bad knees, manager Lou Brown with his monotone voice, Willie Mayes Hayes who hits like Mayes and runs like Hayes and the unlikeable Roger Dorn, who won’t dive for a ball because it’ll screw up his face.

And of course Bob Uecker with his timeless lines. “Juuuuust a bit outside” and “The postgame show is brought to you by… (expletive), I can’t find it. To hell with it.”

A lot of the lines I love and remember I can’t repeat in this column.  The whole movie is quotable.

Major League is a classic sports movie. It’s about baseball, but it’s more so about the people. Everyone loves a good character, and this movie has them all.