Emilio Estevez did not grow up playing hockey on frozen lakes and ponds. This we know. Sure he lived in Manhattan when he was six, but he moved to Malibu. Still, I lived not all that far from Malibu myself and knew kids who played hockey on a rink, so maybe he could skate. Certainly his dad could afford the equipment. Honestly, though, a lot of this movie doesn’t rely on the specifics of hockey. It’s a kids’ sports movie, and that’s one of those genres that has very specific rules regardless of anything to do with the particulars.
The particulars here. Estevez is Gordon Bombay. As a child, he played for the Hawks. Technically he did not lose the championship; he failed to break a tie, and the team lost in overtime. But his whole life, he’s thought of himself as losing the game. Now, as an adult, he’s a lawyer. He’s internalized the lessons he learned on the rink many years ago and is a go-for-the-throat, take-no-prisoners sort. One night, he is celebrating a win and is busted on a DUI. His boss, Gerald Ducksworth (Josef Sommer), arranges community service for him and orders him to coach a peewee hockey team, the first time Gordon has been on the ice since that childhood failure.
The team is your standards group of Kids’ Sports Movie multiethnic misfits. A few black kids. A kid named Goldberg (Shaun Weiss) who is actually of South Asian descent. A few white kids. Jussie Smollet in his film debut. They’re working class—one parent explicitly misses overtime to watch his kids play. The kid Gordon clearly identifies with (Joshua Jackson) has a single mother who’s a waitress (Heidi Kling). They’re up against the Rich Kid Team. And then it turns out that one of the kids on the Rich Kid Team is districted to be on the Ducks instead.
It’s worth noting that Gordon is sent to coach the Ducks in part so he’ll learn the value of fair play. But the techniques he’s learned are from Coach Reilly (Lane Smith), with whom Mr. Ducksworth eventually sides, are not about fair play. They’re about winning. Reilly scolds Gordon about how he’d taught him to skate, taught him to score, et cetera. But Gordon is explicitly a child who’d been grieving; his father died the same year as that failed playoff. And when he walked away from hockey, it seems he lost his connection with Reilly. And Reilly let him go. He taught Gordon to win at all costs, then he’s upset when Gordon follows the rules in part so he can win.
The eventual fates of some of the kids, when they grew up, is wild. Most notable, probably, is Smollett, but also the big tough kid, Fulton Reed (Elden Henson), would go on to play Foggy Nelson on the assorted Netflix Marvel shows. Weiss has served time for robbery and drug offenses. Jackson did 128 episodes of Dawson’s Creek and delivered the famous Simpsons line about not eating anything that casts a shadow. As is typical in a movie of this sort, most of the kids didn’t do anything really notable afterward, but the ones who did are really out there.
I have no particular interest in having my kids play organized sports, and one of the reasons I’m not fond of the idea is that many of the adults involved forget that these are kids playing a game. It’s not just that Reilly refers to his team as “ladies” when he’s upset—naturally, Tammy (Jane Plank) the figure skater is the only girl we see playing, and she’s a Duck. It’s that he tells the kids that they won’t make the team the next year if they lose. He tells them that there’s no point in playing if they don’t win. He convinces them that friendships don’t matter. These are children, and I don’t think that’s a healthy attitude in adults.
Do the Ducks win? Oh, that’s another thing built into the DNA of this movie. Just as Gordon’s relationship with Casey, Charlie’s mom, will have no surprises. I’m pretty sure I saw this movie in the theatre lo, these many years ago. Nothing about the movie would’ve surprised me then, and nothing surprises me about it rewatching it nearly thirty years later. I’m a little surprised to learn that anyone considered Charlie Sheen for the Gordon Bombay role, though it makes a lot more sense when you find out that this used to be a much darker story, before the script got to the draft they actually filmed.
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