His team will lose early and win late, fall behind and catch up. They are carried off on the shoulders of a cheering mob - just the way we'd all like to end our workday. Somebody wins, and somebody loses, and that's it. I watch all kinds of sports, but as a sport, not as a morality tale. I don't think Shaq O'Neal is a better human being than the players he jumps over.
Most people lose.
That doesn't make them any less human. And it's precisely that humanness that the new sports movies, with their pat victories and their egregious ethnic stereotypes, are incapable of exploring. Morality is the ostensible subject of Blue Chips, from a script Shelton wrote in 1980. But the film avoids the hard truth that even traditional values in big-time college sports are a shuck. The Nolte character, like any college coach, is the overseer of slave labor.