Soul of the Game (1996) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Yet another fine specialty film from HBO. Score it a strong ground-rule double, nearly a homer.

This one is the flip side of Bingo Long's Traveling All-Stars. Bingo presented the humorous side of the era in which the Negro baseball leagues ended and black ballplayers were recruited for the majors. It was a comedy, and it was a fictionalization.  Soul of the Game, on the other hand,  is a serious, but not humorless, historical drama covering the exact same era.

The three main characters were Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Jackie Robinson. Robinson was the black man who broke baseball's color barrier in 1947. Paige and Gibson were the two greatest players in the history of black baseball, and also certainly two of the greatest players of all-time.

Paige, I have written about many times. We'll never know how good he really was, because he was a major-league rookie at age ... well, he was somewhere between 42 and 60 then, and he was still tossing a few innings 17 years later! In 1948 he was the rookie of the year, went 6-1 with a terrific ERA, and helped Cleveland to a rare non-Yankee pennant (after that year, the New York Yankees won 14 times in the next 16 years). A great showman as well as a great pitcher, he was also possibly the greatest box-office draw in the history of baseball, exceeding Valenzuela or Ichiro or McGwire, maybe even challenging Babe Ruth himself. And he was just as good in the locker room with the reporters as he was on the field. His combination of clowning, gentle refinement, melancholy philosophy, witty interviews, and downright dominating talent made him one of the most interesting sportsmen of the century.

Most people thought that either Paige or Gibson would be the player to break the color barrier, but the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers felt that Paige was too old and Gibson's recent behavior too erratic (Gibson died of a brain tumor before Robinson appeared in his first major league game.) This film shows the story through the eyes of the three ballplayers and Branch Rickey (the Dodgers' owner).

It's a must-watch if you are a baseball fan. Even if you know the story, it is fun to see it come to life. Edward Herrmann is uncanny as Branch Rickey, and Delroy Lindo is downright supernatural as Satchel Paige, in a performance that challenges even Downey's portrayal of Chaplin for the best performance in a recent celebrity biopic. After a while, I forgot it was an actor, and watched Satch in action.

The film also includes one of the most simple and effective scenes I've ever seen, amazing for a made-for-cable sports movie. Paige, Mrs Paige and Robinson stop at a roadside station to buy some fruit, and Mrs. Paige has a friendly conversation with a little white girl who doesn't seem to notice that they are black. Mrs. Paige, in turn shows the girl great kindness, and shows her a better way to wear her hair. Everything seems blissful until Mrs. Paige asks to use the bathroom and the little girl says "oh, sorry, my daddy doesn't allow niggers inside". What makes the scene so effective is that the little girl doesn't seem to have any hatred, animosity or prejudice, and doesn't seem to realize how her words will hurt them. She's just a sweet child dutifully reciting her daddy's rule so matter-of-factly that it's obvious she's never been aware that there could be another way to look at it.

The film is assembled with a very smooth and watchable narrative. Kudos to the director.