Samuel L Jackson names his favourite sports movie
The sports movie is something most actors will find themselves drawn to eventually, and as one of the most prolific stars in the business who signs on for almost everything that comes their way purely because he loves to work, Samuel L Jackson has been in a few.
In keeping with his eclectic filmography, though, they couldn’t be more different than each other. Jackson might have notched up well over 100 credits during his career, but unless he’s required to reprise a role in one of his many franchises, he tries to avoid repeating himself whenever possible.
Perhaps the most famous sports drama in his back catalogue is 2005’s Coach Carter, the uplifting biopic that finds Jackson’s title character taking a hard-line stance to ensure his basketball team balances their success on the field with thriving in the classroom, an approach that ruffles feathers but is made with the future of his students at the forefront.
His first sports film The Great White Hype was a comedy, though, with Jackson’s Reverend Fred Sultan deciding that the best way to present a challenger for his champion client is to create a Caucasian from the ground up, leading him to enlist Peter Berg’s musician as the ideal candidate to serve as the necessary tomato can.
Rod Lurie’s Resurrecting the Champ starred the leading man as a former boxer presumed dead and discovered living on the streets, who rises to prominence when his fall from grace serves as the backdrop to a magazine article, only for the truth to prove even more astonishing than the fiction that transforms Jackson’s ‘Champ’ from homeless into a source of public fascination.
The regular collaborator of Quentin Tarantino has even dabbled in the animated realm by voicing a snail in 2013’s Turbo, where Ryan Reynolds’ garden snail dreams of becoming a racing driver. Those are some wildly different bases to be covered, but it still stands out as somewhat odd that Jackson has never appeared in a movie set in the world of golf when he’s one of Hollywood’s most famous practitioners of the sport.
After all, he’s admitted he has it written into his contracts that he’s allowed to play golf twice a week at any time of his choosing during production, but as of yet, nobody has come to him with an offer to play a major part in a production set on the fairways. Unsurprisingly, it’s a golf flick that he named to ESPN as his favourite-ever sports movie, albeit one that never saw the inside of a cinema.
Bobby Roth’s Dead Solid Perfect premiered exclusively on HBO in December 1988, where Randy Quaid leads the line as professional golfer Kenny Lee, who tries to put his personal issues to the side and stitch his life back together in time to hit the links and take part in the US Open. Not one of the most famous or greatest sports films ever made, but it’s at the top of Jackson’s personal pile.
