A non-fan of sports tells you which sports movies are actually good.

I am not a sports fan. To clarify, I hate sports. Football has rules clearly written by a very drunk psychopath. Baseball is the most boring activity humans perform. Basketball is hard to follow and why can’t I just carry the ball, George? Why the heck should I bounce the dumb thing all the time? No one ever scores in soccer. Hockey is some weird Canadian shit. I don’t like sports. I like movies.   Knowing this, my friends who are sports fans often recommend sports movies to me. Mostly they suck. Examples:

Rudy is a very, very dumb movie with no stakes that anyone should care about.

Hoosiers is a dumb, weirdly racist, boring movie.

Moneyball is about math. Math isn’t a sport.

Field of Dreams is just boring.

Jerry macguire is about business, not sports. Plus the acting is ridiculous. Plus it’s boring.

So now I, a person who hates sports, will tell you (possibly a sports fan who likes Rudy, I don’t know) which sports movies are actually the best.

The Longest Yard – Not the dumb Adam Sandler remake, but the 1974 original starring Burt Reynold’s mustache.  This is really a prison movie, but it plays at being about football. It's gripping, exciting, and surprisingly well-acted.

M*A*S*H – Robert Altman’s Korean War comedy / drama turns into a football movie in the third act. This is the ideal against which ensemble pieces are judged, and deservedly so.

Hoop Dreams – The documentary that was famously robbed of an Oscar is really about Urban poverty and the dreams of the young. Hoop Dreams is a powerful work of art.

Eight Men Out- John Sayles’ true story of the Chicago Black Sox manages to be about a lot of things that aren’t baseball.

The Fighter – A film about addiction, poverty, love, redemption and bad teeth. It has some boxing in it too.

And that’s it. Those are the good sports movies. Think I’m wrong? Sound off in the comments.