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This movie is the best "football" film ever made. Along with "The Natural" - baseball, and "One-on-One" - basketball, these are an outstanding trilogy of the three best pictures representing our primary American sports, and all have interesting multi-dimensional stories as well. Pete Gent was a maverick in his NFL career, but it would seem his alter-ego, Phil (Nick Nolte), while possessing this same nature, is significantly more accomplished in his pro career (even if on the coach's "secondary list" in the film). Gent played six years, 48 games, with only 68 overall receptions and four touchdowns. These numbers and his yardage (his average per catch was pretty good) would comprise a good single season's stats. The primary "athletes" in the film - played by Nolte, Davis, Matuszak and Svenson are realistic, interesting, tough and bawdy. Matuzsak's distinguished career was as a defensive end, and Svenson also possesses more of the physical characteristics of a defensive lineman. The fact, though, that they played offensive linemen in the film was obviously a necessity to the drama - both off- and on-field, where all four prime leads had to be on-screen simultaneously. As I mentioned in commenting on "One-on-One," where the great G. D. Spradlin was the basketball coach - coupled with this film, he wins the award of the "all-time horse's ass coach" hands-down. Durning was hilarious as the vacuous assistant coach. Anyone familiar with Gent and Tom Landry can see that Spradlin's coach Strothers is modeled - at least in part - from the latter. Although similar in appearance, and more "professorial" than most coaches, and probably often a bit distant -- Landry did not seem to possess the extremely negative traits displayed by Strothers. In the film, with the level of talent Nolte's "Phil" possessed, it is unlikely he'd have been as neglected by the coach as depicted, even in view of Strothers' compulsive devotion to his computerized statistics, and distaste for Nolte's persona. I suspect that this relationship has similarities to Gent's with Landry, but, again, Gent in real life was not as productive or talented as Nolte on film. Steve Forrest was excellent as the smarmy, wealthy team owner, and Dabney Coleman as his even smarmier, completely unctuous younger brother. {Has anybody, EVER, in the history of the motion picture industry (t.v., too), done "smarmy" or "unctuous" as well as Dabney???} This one's a "10" for both sport and drama.
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