Lady Athletes: A Filmic Celebration

I’m a little bit of a sucker when it comes to stories about girls who play sports. Just to give you an example, at the end of the film Higher Learning, when SPOILER ALERT (although, it came out in 1995, so do I really need to?) Michael Rappaport the neo-nazi in the clock tower takes aim with his sniper rifle and shoots Tyra Banks the track star, I bawled like a crazy person. At the end of the credits, when I was still shaking our row of chairs with my sobs, my mom was very concerned because she thought we were on the same page about the movie being crap, and why was I so sad about it?

I was partly sad because Omar Epps and Tyra Banks loved each other, dammit, and now their love would never be. But mostly I was sad because Tyra was a promising young athlete who had worked very hard to get to college and now she would never go the Olympics and set world track records. She would have to be a model instead. So sad.

But seriously, I think it’s because in movies where the lady lead is an athlete, she is necessarily shown coming up against brutal physical and emotional barricades and doggedly bursting through them. She is allowed to be tough in a way that women rarely are in movies but often are in real life. Watching lady athletes in movies inspires me to be just as tough as they are (even if I’m just being tough about jogging for 20 minutes instead of sitting on my couch). Here is a list of movies about ladies doing sports that are much better than Higher Learning and made me cry even harder.