Sport Drama Genre HistoryBY MEGAN PILBERY

History Since the beginnings of the motion picture industry in the United States,

professional sports have been a frequent subject for the movies. Contemporary blockbusters such as Angels in the Outfield (1994), Space Jam

(1996), and Jerry Maguire (1996), collaboration with professional sports has helped sell the movies. Because they frequently draw upon real contests and athletes, sports films have often claimed historical status.

Sports films frequently represent this progressive view of history in melodramatic terms. Literary critic Peter Brook says that melodrama is a common fictional mode of addressing disturbing social issues that are otherwise repressed. In an essay on television movies, Laurie Schulze qualifies Brook’s assertion by noting that “If melodrama involves itself with the excessive, its function consists, many critics have argued, in invoking desires or anxieties only to put them back into the box again.”

History of Boxing Films Ever since the beginning, Hollywood has had a fixation with boxing, returning to it

over and over again, favoring it over far more universally popular sports such as basketball, football and American football. It’s been a long relationship that has been mutually beneficial. Boxing movies have always proved very popular with audiences, especially in the thirties and fifties, and the sport was one of the first to take advantage of new technology that made contests recordable. A bout between Jack Cushing and Mike Leonard, two not particularly notable fighters, was the first to be filmed in 1894 and the thirty-something seconds of footage can still be viewed on YouTube.

Fast-forward 121 years and with a boxing renaissance led by Floyd Mayweather (on the back of his record breaking bout with Manny Pacquiao), the all-action Saul Alvarez and destroyer of mere mortals Gennady Golovkin, Hollywood has a renewed interest in the pugilistic arts. Four boxing movies are set to hit cinemas in the next year. Southpaw, written by Sons of Anarchy mastermind Kurt Sutter and starring a buff Jake Gyllenhaal arrives next month and Rocky spin-off Creed is going to be out in time for Christmas; meanwhile highly anticipated biopics of Roberto Duran and Vinny Pazienza are a little further off.

Boxing movies with their tales of underdogs rising to the top against all odds have always struck a nerve with audiences and that’s something Hollywood has always looked to tap into. Rocky, making hundreds of millions, receiving critical acclaim and spurning several sequels, various video games and a spin-off is the greatest example of that. The universal appeal of seeing an ordinary man in exceptional circumstances fight against all odds, and the sheer human drama of a sport where who’s winning can change in a single second, is why Hollywood keeps revisiting boxing to show the triumphs and defeats of being human.