This Sporting Life: What Happens When Sports Heroes Act Up?

This Sporting Life:
What Happens When Sports Heroes Act Up?

Eric Cantona and Ken Loach. These are not names you would immediately put together. One is a multi-millionaire (surely?) ex footballer, revered by millons of fans; and French. The other is a proud socialist from middle-England (Nuneaton), who has rejected the big money offers; his films are admired but by a relatively small number of committed film buffs. What's more, Ken Loach is a dedicated supporter of Bath FC. I'm guessing there isn't much room in his heart for a club like Man Utd.

Yet Cantona is very much the star attraction in Loach's latest film, Looking For Eric, a crowd-pleaser about an unhappy postman (played by Steve Evets) who confides his woes to a pin-up of his favourite footballer, and is surprised when Cantona appears before him to offer sage Gallic aphorisms and get his life back on track.

Course Loach's passion for footie has come into his films before: most memorably in that famous sequence in Kes when Brian Glover's sports teacher demonstrates his prowess by dribbling through a team of ten year olds and scoring, providing his own running “Match of the Day” commentary as he does so.

And though he doesn't usually work with stars, Loach has cast a footballer in a leading role before… admittedly Martin Compton of Sweet Sixteen wasn't exactly on Eric Cantana's level, but he was on the books at Greenock Morton FC at the time. (Compston also appeared in Loach's episode of the footie-themed three-parter, Tickets… like Sweet Sixteen and Tickets, Looking for Eric is written by Paul Laverty.)

As for Ooh-Ah Cantona, he's one of those rare sports stars to have made a credible transfer to the silver screen having appeared in a dozen movies in France and the UK. His range includes comedies (Le Bonheur est dans la Pre), costume dramas (Elizabeth) and thrillers (Le Deuxieme Souffle). I don't think he needs to start polishing up his Oscar acceptance speech just yet, but Cantona has enough charisma to sustain a steady side-line in the movie biz.

What other sports stars have made that leap? In the UK it's a short list, especially if we discount those gimmicky sports movies like Goal II, for example, where various footballers play themselves on screen, mostly without any acting to speak of. Bobby Moore and sundry long-haired Bobby Robson-era Ipswich players rubbed shoulders with such greats as Pele, Ossie Ardiles, Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine in John Huston's comic book WWII adventure yarn, Escape to Victory, but this was a one-off lark, nothing more.

Internationally, it's a different picture. In the US, anyway, quite a few sportsmen (all men, that I can think of) have successfully exploited their celebrity in Hollywood and enjoyed a second career in the movies. So here's our list of the top 10 over-achievers in the field… By the way, sportscasters are inadmissible, which keeps Ronald Reagan out of contention. Ditto circus acrobats (Burt Lancaster) and actors turned sportsmen (Paul Newman, Mickey Rourke). Those exceptions duly noted: Game on!

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

10. Carl Weathers
Weathers is known to movie fans as boxer Apollo Creed in the Rocky movies. In real life he was an American football player, a linebacker for the Oakland Raiders and the BC Lions. It was a relatively short career (18 pro games in total) and he switched to acting in 1974 at the age of 28. Outside of the ring, his best films are Predator (1987), Action Jackson (1988) and Happy Gilmore (1996). He played "Carl Weathers" in the short-lived Fox TV comedy Arrested Development.
9. Hulk Hogan
Is pro-wrestling a sport? Maybe not, but don't try telling Hulk Hogan that! Wrestling is a natural breeding ground for actors (see The Wrestler) and in the late 80s/early 90s the Hulkster outpaced rivals like Andre the Giant and Roddy Piper to corner the market in family-friendly muscle comedies like Suburban Commando and Mr Nanny. His range may have been negligible but with his Teutonic moustache and eye-rolling, chest-thumping style, his persona was irrepressible.
8. Mike Tyson
Several boxers have made movies, usually in cameo roles, and a few professional boxers have gone on to become working actors, including Frank Bruno, Gary Stretch, Tony Danza, Jack Palance (Shane and City Slickers), and Victor McLaglen, who once fought Jack Johnston and went on to become one of John Ford's "stock company", won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1935's The Informer and brawled memorably with John Wayne in The Quiet Man (1954). "Iron" Mike Tyson basically plays Mike Tyson, but his filmography is quite long and varied, including Play It to the Bone, Black And White, When Will I Be Loved, Driven, Rocky Balboa, and this week's hit comedy, The Hangover. But his best movie performance comes in the documentary Tyson, one of the hits of the Cannes film festival.
7. Shaquille O'Neal
The ex LA Lakers NBA star stands 7'1", a challenge for cameramen but hard to ignore. Shaq likes to moonlight as a policeman, but he's also recorded a couple of hiphop albums, and he's starred in half a dozen movies. The first of these, Blue Chips, is a very solid college basketball drama with Nick Nolte. It's been downhill ever since - in fact it's hard to think of an actor with a worse list of credits than this: Kazaam (1996); Steel (1997); Freddy Got Fingered (2001); Scary Movie 4 (2005). About the only thing he hasn't stooped to (yet) is an action movie with Jean Claude van Damme - unlike his NBA colleague Dennis Rodman (Double Team).
6. OJ Simpson
A Hall of Fame NFL linebacker for the Buffalo Bills and the San Francisco 49ers, the Juice was one of the most recognisable faces in America 20 years before he became one of the most infamous. He started acting off-season in the mid-1970s, in films like The Towering Inferno, Capricorn One and The Klansmen. His movie career was waning until the Zucker brothers cast him as the unfortunate Detective Nordberg in The Naked Gun.
5. Jim Brown
Fullback for the Cleveland Browns (1957-65) Brown is rated one of the greatest athletes in NFL history. Director James Toback (who made the Tyson documentary) wrote a book about him, and cast him in his cult movie Fingers (1978). By then he was already a veteran of some twenty movies, starting with the western Rio Conchos (1964) and including The Dirty Dozen (1967), Ice Station Zebra (1968), 100 Rifles (1969), and blaxploitation fare like Three The Hard Way (1974). After a decade in TV he made a movie comeback, still impressively tough as he entered his sixties in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988), Original Gangstas (1996), and Mars Attacks!(1996). Spike Lee cast him in He Got Game (1998) and Oliver Stone cast him as Montezuma Monroe in Any Given Sunday (1999).
4. Johnny Weissmuller
Born in Freidorf, in what is now Romania, Janos Weissmuller grew up in the US, and won five Olympic swimming medals in 1924 and 1929, breaking numerous records and going undefeated in Freestyle between 1921 and 1929. In 1932 he played Tarzan the Ape Man, a role perfectly suited to his abilities (according to MGM he was "the only man in Hollywood who can act without clothes"). The series stretched to a dozen titles before Weismuller downgraded to the equally long-running Jungle Jim.
3. The Rock (Dwayne Johnson)
A promising college football player until a back injury put him out of contention for the NFL, The Rock switched to wrestling, and was WWE World Champion seven times. His movie breakthrough came as the Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns (2001), so much so the character earned his own spin-off movie. Johnson went the tough guy route in Walking Tall (2004) but he's also been willing to take chances, playing a gay bodyguard in Be Cool (2005) and taking a double role in Richard Kelly's apocalyptic satire Southland Tales (2005). Like Hulk Hogan he's cultivated the family audience in Gridiron Gang, The Game Plan and Race to Witch Mountain. Can he establish himself as a bone fide movie star?
2. Vinnie Jones
The ex Wimbledon and Watford player manager doesn't owe his Hollywood career to his celebrity, but to his physique, his mug, and his desire. He was never a pretty footballer, but he made his presence felt - just ask Gazza - and that same attitude drives his acting. The former hod carrier doesn't coast and he asserts himself in the scene. Sure, he's typecast as a hard man, but within that niche Jones has revealed gradations of sadism, grim efficiency, and rough-and-ready humour. His deadpan "It's been emotional" was the perfect delivery to round off Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. He was pretty funny as Bullet Tooth Tony in Snatch and Mad Maynard in EuroTrip, and no disgrace following in Burt Reynolds' footsteps in Mean Machine (even if the movie itself was a joke). In X-Men: The Last Stand he was Juggaurnaut, a human battering ram whose speciality is head-butting his way through walls... It ain't subtle, but it's one sure way to bring the house down. Word has it he's got a major role in the forthcoming Smokin' Aces prequel. If it's a hit, who knows...?
1. Arnold Schwarzenegger
I know, bodybuilding is not an Olympic sport, and Arnie's alleged steroid use would be frowned upon today. But let's allow that he approached his chosen discipline with the dedication of the professional sportsman, and that the five time Mr Universe, seven-time Mr Olympia excelled at it. Further, when people like Hulk Hogan and The Rock eye Hollywood and weigh up their chances, you can be sure it's Schwarzenegger who represents the pinnacle of success for them. Arnie's movie accomplishments hardly need repeating, but he made his first appearance as Hercules in Hercules in New York (1970) and then played a mute hitman for Robert Altman in The Long Goodbye (1973). Stay Hungry and the documentary Pumping Iron made him a minor celebrity, but the title role in Conan The Barbarian (1982) opened up many more doors - and earned him The Terminator (1983), which in turn propelled him to the front rank of action stars. By the mid 90s he was earning $20 million a picture, cleverly expanding his base with comedies like Junior and Kindergarten Cop, and readying himself for the biggest transfer of all... into politics.