We’re three days out from Super Bowl Sunday, and that gives me an excuse to zag a bit today and celebrate a football movie that was described in 1999 as “a film loaded with cynicism and choking on overbearing imagery that nevertheless winds up buying into many of the myths surrounding the sport.”
Yes, I’d like to add 27 years later, and that’s good.
Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday was seen as over the top and sensational when it arrived in 1999, but it’s very sentimental, too. That combination makes for an interesting cultural document nearly 30 years later. I wanted to write about it first and foremost because I’ve always loved this movie, but also because what it does well has only become more distinct alongside mainstream entertainment today.
Full of late-90s ephemera (the soundtrack features Godsmack, Moby, and Missy Elliot), broad sports cliches, salacious imagery, and sincerity that’s never preachy, it’s not a coincidence that this excellent treatment of the modern NFL landed a few years before the internet and social media would drench an entire generation in irony, politics and didactic art. That’s part of the time capsule, too. What follows, then, is an appreciation both for what Any Given Sunday is, and what it isn’t.
The Look and Feel of Pro Football
For anyone who hasn’t seen this movie in 20 years, the story opens with the Miami Sharks in the second quarter, at home against the Minnesota Americans (the NFL refused to license anything for this movie). In the very first scene, Miami’s star quarterback Jack “Cap” Rooney (Dennis Quaid) gets crunched between an unblocked linebacker and a blitzing safety, grimacing in pain on the ground until a sideline full of cameras and cheers from the crowd convince him to gamely hobble off the field. The next play, the backup quarterback, Tyler Cherubini, gets hit from behind, he gets injured, too, and his fumble is returned for a touchdown. On the ensuing possession, then, in goes 26 year-old, third-string quarterback Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx), a “mystery man” according to the play-by-play announcer. Beamen, memorably, vomits on the field before taking a snap.
All of this is great, standard sports movie stuff, and after Beamen calls audibles that don’t exist and struggles to get his bearings throughout his first series, the Sharks stagger into halftime down by three. Cut to the locker room, where an offensive lineman is demanding vicodin and cyclobenzaprine amid cramping, team doctors are arguing over the injury to Rooney, and assistant coach Montezuma Monroe (Jim Brown) is standing in front of a chalkboard and screaming at his defense: “We got the third string quarterback that ain’t gonna produce s***! And when I’m talking about the defense, goddamnit, you’re dumb enough, we made it simple enough! We made this s*** real f***ing simple.”
The chaos eventually gives way to a speech from legendary, Pantheon Cup-winning head coach Tony D’Amato (Al Pacino), which culminates with this:
TONY D’AMATO: We’re only down by three. We can win this one.
[locker room murmurs]
D’AMATO (screaming): We got three losses in a row!
D’AMATO (lowers his voice): I’m sick and tired of this. Are you? Because if you’re not, raise you’re hand. [D’AMATO raises his hand]. If you’re gonna act like a loser, raise your hand! If you’re gonna act like p***y, raise your hand!”
[Camera pans to the back of the locker room, star running back JULIAN WASHINGTON slowly standing on a chair to raise his hand]
D’AMATO: What the hell are you doing, J?
WASHINGTON: I didn’t want you to be the only p***y with his hand raised, Coach. So I figured I’d help you out.
[whole locker room erupts in laughter]
Successive generations have come to revere Pacino’s “Inches” speech at the end of this movie, and I’m certainly not here to argue; it’s one of the best sports movie scenes of all time. Still, as someone who’s spent a decent amount of time in and around pro sports, the moment above rings truer to what any of these worlds actually look and sound like. Because sure pro sports are full of egos and testosterone and occassionally dramatic speeches, but there’s also quite a bit of comedy that punctures all that tension on a regular basis. Guys being dudes, giving each other grief, etc. It’s wonderful.
There are a dozen more moments that capture that particular aspect of how the now-mind-blowingly successful NFL sausage gets made, like when linebacker Luther “Shark” Lavay (Lawrence Taylor) convinces Beamen to bring flowers to a meeting with his coach (who’s baffled by the gesture), or when Lavay confronts an offensive lineman about turning off postgame celebratory rap music to play hard rock. “Hell no!” Lavay says, “Not this Nazi rock shit again.” And the lineman responds: “Metallica ruuuuuuuules! Hetfield is God. We live to serve him.”
Nailing the emotional beats of pro athlete interactions is just one, minor charm of the the movie. In broader strokes, I was surprised by how well the football scenes hold up. This enjoyable reporting from Mike Freeman at the New York Times describes the painstaking steps Stone took to make the games realistic, including signing a cast full of extras from the Arena Football League, as well as then-active NFL players like Irving Fryar, Ricky Watters, and Terrell Owens. Stone held an 8-week training camp for the cast, and there was live hitting throughout the production. After filming a half-dozen takes of Watters colliding with a nearly-40 year-old Taylor on a fourth-and-one, LT was left dazed and lying on the field, with filming paused for nearly half-an-hour.
The camera work during games is jittery, full of abrasive jump cuts set to fast-paced music. All this was done in service of approximating on-field speed and power that was “shocking” to Stone, and which rarely comes through on a traditional TV broadcast. I’m no cinematography expert, but to the extent Stone is trying to make football look like barely controlled chaos moving so quickly and violently that just standing on the field would give any normal person a panic attack, the effects work.
Off the field, Stone talked to owners, coaches, team physicians, and even the wives and girlfriends of players, all to understand what they care about, what the experience of pro football really looks like for various stakeholders, and what drives tension. As Freeman wrote in 1999, “The movie shows how, if two players in a locker room do not like each other, the players’ wives or girlfriends will dislike each other as well. Such a scenario has happened several times with recent Giants teams.”
So, on the back of all that research and realism, there’s also the matter of the reviewer’s complaint at the top, that this film is “loaded with cynicism.” On that one… I don’t know! Many of the storylines that were read as overly cynical or sensational in 1999 have come to look prescient and borderline mundane.
The movie features an insecure new owner, Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz), who’s meddling with the coaching staff and using the threat of relocation to Los Angeles to extort Miami for a new, publicly funded stadium. Elsewhere, Lavay is a linebacker who continues playing despite risks of brain damage. One team doctor (James Woods) is colluding with the ownership to shield the extent of Lavay’s risk, promising a sleight of hand with test results the team “won’t forget come contract time.” There’s a quarterback, Rooney, who’s too injured to keep playing but too famous to quit. There’s a running back, Washington (LL Cool J), who wants more carries to ensure he hits his contract incentives. There’s a hotshot offensive coordinator, Nick Crozier (Aaron Eckhart), who thinks the team should be playing faster, taking more risks, and has tensions with the more traditional D’Amato.
Versions of all those stories have happened in real life, and continue to! That’s the NFL. None of these characters were invented or even particularly embellished.
Then there’s Jamie Foxx’s Willie Beamen, the engine of the movie as the third-string QB whose athleticism sparks a turnaround in Miami and who quickly becomes a household name. He reacts to his newfound fame by disregarding playcalls from the coaching staff, publicly taking shots at D’Amato (“Coach Stone Age”), and losing the locker room by taking shots at the defense. Now, is this part embellished? Is it realistic that all of this would happen in the span of three weeks? Of course not. But Beamen’s trajectory from precocious upstart to jaded and truculent superstar is pretty familiar to anyone who’s followed pro sports for the last 30 years.
In his one-on-one meeting with D’Amato, after exchanging flowers and pretending to enjoy his coach’s gumbo, the young quarterback lashes out when told Rooney will start the team’s playoff game in Texas:
BEAMEN: I seen a long line of coaches just like you, all the way from college with that same old bull***t halftime speech.
D’AMATO: Bull***t?
BEAMEN: Yes, it’s bull***t. You know, you always bull***t, because it’s about the money. Raking in the TV contracts, fat cat boosters sitting the sky box, the coaches trying to up their salaries. And the whole time what you looking for? You looking for the next black stud to take you to the top ten. Get you in a bowl game. It’s the same way in the pros, except in the pros, the field hands get paid.
D’AMATO: Come on, don’t play that race card on me, kid. Twenty-five years I work with men of your color.
BEAMEN: Maybe it’s not racism. Maybe it’s place-ism. Brother has to know his place. Right, boss?
The reason the movie works, and is smarter than it gets credit for, is that Beamen’s perspective is not endorsed. Yes, he’s got legitimate grievances with D’Amato’s playcalling, and certainly with the coaches who played him out of position in college, or teams that didn’t draft him because of trumped up NCAA violations—two pitfalls for young, black athletes that were very real 25 years ago. But when he draws on those experiences and sneers to an interviewer that “football is a corporation,” the only character who agrees with him is peevish TV host who says, “Your smack is so fresh. It’s so on time. It’s so truthful.”
The actual truth is more complicated in Stone’s rendering: football is a business, but it can’t be purely transactional if you want to succeed. So Beamen’s interview ends, and the movie immediately jumps to Shark Lavay in a hot tub, hearing about his young quarterback taking shots at the defense, and then interrupting a team party by chain-sawing Beamen’s yellow Tahoe into two pieces (“In football there’s an offense and a defense, you can’t have one without the other.”). From there, Beamen starts the final game of the regular season, it’s a disaster, and he gets punched in the face in the shower.
Meanwhile, Beamen’s fake-deep musings are bookended a few scenes later by Coach Jim Brown at a bar, lamenting that in his day players used to sell liquor and wrestle in the offseason, while today’s players have year-round training regimens and bodies that crack like china. A drunk Al Pacino answers that point by blaming TV for corrupting the purity of the game he used to coach. “The first time they cut away to commercial,” he says, “that was the end of it.”
They don’t sound wise, either—just old.
The Moral of This Story
Any Given Sunday was largely panned critically when it was released (Rotten Tomatoes score: 51%) and it’s full of shagginess and heavy-handed imagery (there are Roman chariots from Ben Hur interspersed at one point) that may not be for everyone. Without poring too much over contemporary reviews, I recall that people who loved the NFL thought the movie’s depiction of the league’s corruption was way over the top, while others, maybe more open to NFL skepticism, seemed disappointed it wasn’t more negative. As the New York Times wrote in 1999, “Although the story presents many opportunities for tragedy (some situations practically beg for it), ‘Any Given Sunday’ turns ludicrously upbeat…”
Regardless, what I found rewatching it recently was a surprisingly resonant great time. For one thing, I didn’t realize until writing this article how much I adore the names of everyone involved here. Willie Beamen as the young black quarterback, Montezuma Monroe (!!!) as the defensive coordinator, Nick Crozier as the whiz kid OC, Julian Washington as the running back, Luther “Shark” Lavay, Jack “Cap” Rooney, Dr. Harvey Mandrake, Tyler Cherubini… On and on and on. For character names alone, this is hands down the best sports movie of my lifetime.
Elsewhere, the football scenes are solid, the emotional beats land (“Don’t you drop me… I’m worth a million dollars”), and some of the best performances in the movie come from Jim Brown and Lawrence Taylor, two of the most legendary players in the history of the sport. And sure, the story is full of stock characters who don’t develop that much—another critic nitpick—but what I enjoy about the writing 27 years later is that there was no Twitter-brained self-consciousness about dealing in cliches or taboos; as a result, the broad characters in this movie are actually a more honest look at the virtues and blindspots of modern athletes than you’ll find in most of today’s media coverage.
The Hollywood Reporter complained in 1999 that “[t]here is no area of professional football in which Stone and fellow writers John Logan and Daniel Pyne do not see money-hungry, ego-gratifying misbehavior.” In other words, then, they had eyes. The NFL, for its part, complained that Stone’s script does not “accurately or positively portray our players, club owners or club personnel.” Stone, on the other hand, said, “This movie is a tribute to the players of the NFL, because they sacrifice everything to play this sport.”
To that end, the movie stops short of indicting an entire industry the way, say, Stone’s Wall Street did. The restraint shown in that regard lends a sneaky bit of depth to a movie in which Lawrenece Taylor saws a Tahoe in half and a lineman releases a baby alligator into the team showers (among other things). Indeed, a lesser version of this project could have been a polemic painting the NFL as a morally bankrupt universe, or maybe been framed as a simpler story around Beamen or D’Amato as a singular hero—the old coach trying to prevent the game from losing its soul to capitalism, or the young quarterback fighting conservative shackles and trying to usher in a more progressive style and get paid.
The moral of this story, though, is merely that both those perspectives exist in parallel, and each side has some valid points. That rings truer to how any of this works. Draymond Green doesn’t win titles without Steve Kerr, the inverse is equally true, and similar, barely functional dynamics exists in dozens of other locker rooms throughout pro sports. Everyone has worked a lifetime to get to these levels, is sacrificing a great deal to stay there, and has to trust people they can’t fully control as the most dramatic moments of their lives play out in real time.
The movie resolves its own version of that drama with an uplifting and fun note, apparently to the chagrin of that Times critic. And yes, it’s fair to see the health risks, ethical compromises and corporate incentives endemic to pro football and conclude this movie lets the league off easy. The media’s NFL conversations certainly went the other direction for much of the 2010s, back when everyone was writing their “Why I stopped watching football” essays.
What I love about Any Given Sunday, though, is that for all the prescient and unsparing portrayals of greed, sex, drugs, corrupt team doctors, craven owners, and concussion risks—many of the same issues that led to that NFL backlash—the movie itself never makes the mistake of judging the characters who choose to dedicate their lives to this enterprise. Instead, you can tell that Stone’s interviews with players and coaches made an impression. Football, it turns out, does in fact transform lives and provide meaning to a wide variety of people who are not merely rubes tricked into a lifetime in the meatgrinder. We see humanity and dignity in the linebacker who wants to hit his million dollar bonus regardless of the health risks, the coach who gave his life to the game even if it cost him his family, or the quarterback who became famous, became insufferable, and then re-centered himself.
It would have been easy to make an NFL movie that grabs at the low-hanging fruit, debunks much of the sport’s mythology, and adopts the scathing cynicism of some of Stone’s characters. Maybe that movie gets better reviews, but it probably struggles to resonate nearly 30 years later, because at a fundamental level its conclusions would be simplistic, incomplete and hollow.
Cynicism that’s presented as wisdom is often its own form of naïveté. Real intelligence, on the other hand, will recognize a chaotic world for exactly what it is and find reasons to love it anyway.
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