Ask any sports enthusiast what the best sports movie of all time is, and they will give you a comprehensive list of their favorite sports movies and teary-eyed descriptions of their greatest moments. But what distinguishes a good sports movie from a bad one? Do the best ones have anything in common?

The underdog and redemption tales are the ones most frequently featured in films about sports. The human elements attached to sports stars, often admired by millions of people and occasionally viewed as untouchable, make these stories relatable to fans. With teams or athletes able to defy reason and vanquish all-conquering entities with the correct strategy or a lucky break, they also make for fascinating stories in the real world of sports. The fact that sports are unpredictable in real life has given the entertainment genre a sizable global audience. Sport is so popular because it allows real people to compete against one another in ability and grit, which can consistently produce amazing stories.

A sports movie must make you think the events may actually occur for it to be great. Sports arouse emotion, and that makes them a popular film subject. You are nearly always assured a wide range of emotions because the possibility of losing adds additional risk. If you depict that correctly, it would be great movie material. A film must have a certain level of realism and appear credible to successfully capture the emotional aspect of the sport. If not, a serious movie might veer toward parody.

Often, the sport is not the main focus. Boxing was never the only focus in the Rocky movies. Football was never the sole focus for Jerry Maguire. It was about something other than baseball in Field of Dreams. Rocky was a movie about an underdog trying to succeed. In Jerry Maguire, an overachiever learns what true success in life is. The theme of Field of Dreams was repentance and forgiveness. Only a tiny portion of each of the movies had actual boxing, football, or baseball sequences. Everything else about the sport served as a backdrop, a specific canvas on which the narrative and its characters were shown. The goal of the sports background is to use the ambiance and mythology of the sport as nothing more than the setting for a character-driven or message-driven drama.

Considering all of this, we will conclude this article by revealing our top three picks for the best sports movies of all time. We will also describe why these were chosen and what sets them apart.

Rocky

The first Rocky earned an Oscar for Best Picture for a reason: It’s a sympathetic drama about a broken-down boxer who gets one final, improbable chance to prove himself against the World Heavyweight Champion, portrayed by the excellent Carl Weathers, that’s unexpectedly lived-in and compassionate. There’s something so heroic about this human bruiser. The then-unknown Stallone, who also won an Oscar for the writing, must have appeared like such a revelation with those hang-dog eyes, that shrinking manner, even his habitually slurred speech.

Coach Carter

Soapy teen dramas One Tree Hill and Melrose Place inspired Coach Carter, an exciting, gripping drama ideal for its younger target audience. This is also Channing Tatum’s feature film debut, and the basketball scenes are appropriately showy. Worth watching merely for Samuel L. Jackson’s jaw-dropping performance.

Caddyshack 

A fantastic comedy that also happens to be about golf. One of those films that you have to watch again since there is no way you could have understood all the jokes the first time. Most likely because you were too busy laughing and the fact that they arrived so quickly. Bill Murray is Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield is great, and Chevy Chase is at the top of his game. The “it’s funny because it’s true” characteristic of caddies is also present in Caddyshack. Anyone who has ever transported clubs on a course attests to its accuracy.

Bottom Line

Sports foster a sense of community and a shared past. They express our desire to succeed and sympathy for those who suffer defeat. They can fill us with joy and sorrow, success and failure, and frequently all four in just a few minutes. In contrast, movies have the same power. They may be entertaining, genuinely instructional, or both in the finest cases. Creating a film gives you the freedom to shade and shape, envision, design, and find ways to lead the viewers where you want them to go. Similar structures, motifs, or patterns can be seen in movies and sports.