by L.A. Mood Comics and Games

By Dan Brown

You may not remember the ending to The Bad News Bears, released 50 years ago this month.  You might have faded, jumbled memories of the film about a group of rough-and-tumble kids playing baseball concluding with an on-field celebration in which 11-year-olds dump bottles of beer all over each other.

Maybe you’ve even convinced yourself the ending was a happy one, that it ends with an impromptu party on a dusty baseball diamond in Southern California because the scrappy misfits beat the odds to triumph over a squad of bullies and their bully coach.

You’d be wrong. 

The Bad News Bears ends with the lovable losers – losing.

And that’s the main reason it earned its place in movie history.

If Bad News Bears ended with a final-inning, come-from-behind victory, as so many baseball movies do, it likely wouldn’t be considered a masterwork, a classic of the genre.

Nor would it have spawned two sequel features, a network TV series and a 2005 remake.

If you don’t think I’m being straight with you, go back and watch it again with adult eyes.

It’s true the motley crew do slowly turn their losing season around, performing well enough to secure a spot in the last game of the summer for a chance at the youth-league title.

But, like the title character in Rocky (which came out a few months later in 1976), the Bears don’t have what it takes to win. They fall short. Like Rocky, they have to settle for a moral victory.

So The Bad News Bears is  a movie about losers made for losers – which is most of us, because life isn’t about winning big. It’s about doing your stoic best in the face of unfairness.

“Everybody on my team gets a chance to play,” Coach Buttermaker (Walter Matthau) snarls in the final inning of the climactic game. Not just the elite players. Not just the stars. All of us.

I’ve always thought there’s an even more instructive scene about the spirit in which Bad News Bears was made, earlier in the story.

It’s when Tanner Boyle (he’s the kid famous for his bigoted rant against pretty much every minority) gets a burrito at the same stand as Timmy Lupus, his fellow Bear.

The pathetic Lupus attracts the attention of two players from the rival Yankees, who steal the cap off his head, then put it back on him after they’ve filled it with ketchup and other condiments. Tanner sees all of this from another picnic table, and even though he considers Lupus a “booger-eating spaz” he rises to his weaker teammate’s defence. 

Tanner smashes his burrito into the one bully’s face to avenge Lupus’s honour. But that’s as far as he gets, because the bully – who is a much larger boy – then stuffs Tanner into a green plastic garbage can, ending the fight. 

On one level, it’s just a funny scene. On another, it’s an example of stoicism.

There’s no way Tanner was going to get the better of the bullies, but he fights on regardless. He knows he’s going to lose, he’s fully aware he doesn’t have the size to beat them, but when he sees injustice he presses on anyway. 

In this way, Tanner is an illustration of Ernest Hemingway’s dictum that, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” 

You may think of it as a dumb 1970s comedy about sports and kids and baseball and swearing and drinking, but the real message is simply, “Be stoic” We can all do that – just like the Bears – when the odds are stacked against us, no matter that we’re grinders rather than marquee players.

In common with other classic sports pictures, it’s a metaphor for this crazy thing we’re all trying to get through called life.

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group.