Okay, this ended up much longer than I intended, so let me get the punchline out up front. I’m writing a sports movie, a story I’ve optioned from the author of a fascinating book about a small club in the sixth tier of English football. If you want details, you’ll have to read the rest.

But until I heard the voice, I’d never done a crazy thing in my whole life.

Kevin Costner as Ray Kinsiella,
Field of Dreams

I love sports.

Those who know me well know what a passion I have for the human drive to move a ball from point A to point B.

Being a middle-American kid in the 70’s, it started with baseball, of course. I was a pee-wee and little league catcher. I was good behind the plate, a decent hitter, and slower than molasses on the basepath. Hit a triple to the fence, but never a dinger. I also discovered football, though I never played other than street football.

Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, into two Daly City families who had been there for several generations, I was surrounded by Giants this, Niners that. The entire family bleeds Orange and Black, Red and Gold. But ever the contrarian, I fell in love with the working class teams across the bay, the Oakland A’s and the Oakland Raiders.

My late father told the story of his discovery of my defection. He took my brother and me to Sears when I was maybe five going on six, and my brother three, or scraping his way to it. We lived in San Jose at the time, at the crux of the bay, the Peninsula (Sunnyvale to San Francisco) to the West, and the East Bay (Milpitas to Oakland.) He walked us to the sporting goods aisle, where, on the end-cap, two child-size mannequins were bedecked in full-on American football uniforms, helmet, pads, and all. One was a 49er uniform, red shirt and gold helmet. The other was an Oakland Raiders uniform, black shirt, silver helmet, with an AWESOME piratey looking eyepatch dude and a pair of crossed swords. My dad gestured to the 49er uniform and said, “Guess what! Mom and I are getting you one of these!”

I pointed to the Raider uniform and said, “I want THAT one!”

The color drained from his face as he said, “But we’re 49er fans!”

I stuck my chin out and said, “I like the RAIDERS!”

My dad took a deep breath and said “Alright, son.”

Somewhere on a DVD I have the 8MM movies from that afternoon of my brother and I running in circles and falling down with those uniforms on.

For the next two decades plus, those were the only real team sports for me. I didn’t care much for basketball. Hockey was for Canadians.

And soccer? In the western Nevada town I did a lot of my growing up in (getting there from San Jose is its own long story) only “girls and homosexuals” played soccer. We didn’t use the word “homosexual.” Soccer was also something we had to do for one week in Phys Ed before moving onto whatever else they had to keep nerds like me moving. The only other time we thought about it was when our eighth grade health teacher, Mr. Hodsdon, brought it up, touting it as requiring more comprehensive fitness than any of our American sports, especially baseball. Mr. Hodsdon was sort of the weirdo teacher back then, which of course means he was awesome in hindsight. I’m not sure what else he taught besides health. The yearbook from that year, 1980-81, just says “Social Problems” under his name and picture.

Fast forward this social problem a decade or two. I got married, had a few kids, three, to be exact, bought a house, and got satellite for the first time.

There are SO MANY sports channels. I can watch ANYTHING.

Rugby – New Zealand All Blacks and South Africa Springboks. International badminton – Korea vs. Japan. Women’s College softball – UCLA vs. somebody else. Curling – Canada vs. some Scandanavian team. Women’s College Field Hockey – I have no idea who.

But two sports stood out to me. Australian Rules Football and…

Football. Real World Football that the whole world plays. That sport that we thought was for “sissies.”

I’ll write about AFL some other time. It’s a barn-burner of a sport. I chanced on it first, IIRC, and it was in perusing those channels on a Saturday or Sunday morning that I ran across the first “soccer” match (I’ll be calling it football from here on out) I ever watched. Newcastle United vs. Blackburn Rovers at St. James’ park. I didn’t know any of those names yet. All I knew is there was a team in cool black and white stripes (I’m a sucker for black) and the other guys, and there were tens of thousands of people in the stands SINGING. During the match! It was another level of passion we just don’t see over here. And the game itself – this was not the aimless kicking around of a round boring ball into a giant net we did for a week as kids. It was ballet and controlled chaos. And boy did they really like that zippy, stocky number 9 fella. I had no concept of formation, tactics, position, or anything. I was just captivated by the energy, and I couldn’t get enough.

I started watching regularly, and I’m the sort that needs a club to support. Having no idea how such allegiances are established in England, I asked an online friend of mine, a Leeds supporter from Cornwall who lives in Oz and who helped me learn about both football and AFL in those early days. How do I pick a team to support?

His answer?

You just pick one, then you never ever ever fucking change.

Oh, except Manchester United. You can’t pick them. Ever.

So I told him I was taking a shine to this Newcastle team. He warned me that I was in for season after season of heartbreak. Exciting going forward, defense for shit. They’ll win a lot of games and lose a lot of games. You won’t win anything, but it will never be boring. Over two decades on and, boy, has he ever been right.

Now, you’ll notice I’ve titled this article “Sports and Film.” Let’s get to the film part, then I’ll get to why I’m writing this.

I love sports movies. As long as they’re middling or better, I’m in. I love the underdog winner (Rudy) and the underdog loser (Rocky.) I love recovering from tragedy (We are Marshall) and persisting through adversity (Friday Night Lights.) I love the heartwarming (Cool Runnings) and the tear-jerker (Angels in the Outfield.) And I do love the funny (Major League.) Even when they’re really contrived (Goal) I still find it easy to buy in and enjoy it. The roar of the crowd gets me every time.

But, of course, my favorite sports movies aren’t about the sport. In a way, none of the decent or better ones are, right? They’re about people finding themselves, discovering their inner strength, or finding something they lost.

Like Searching for Bobby Fischer, one of my all-time faves. I know it’s chess, but in its structure and spirit it is 100% a sports movie. On the surface, it’s about child chess prodigy who suffers a crisis of confidence, but digs deep to win the championship at the end. But what it is really about is a young boy learning to take ownership of his own heart and ambition and his father learning to let go of his vicarious ambition and free his son to find his own way.

Or Field of Dreams, which seems to be about redeeming Shoeless Joe’s legacy with one last game, but is really about Ray getting one more chance to make peace with his father.

Or my very favorite, Moneyball. Never mind that it’s about the Oakland A’s (though that doesn’t hurt.) It seems to be an underdog story about Billy Beane bucking the system, being smarter than his competitors, and making a winner out of misfits. But what it’s really about is finding the win in the journey, and not in winning a ring. They do go out of their way to make sure we get that with the unexpected home run metaphor. But for me, the real message hits home when we watch Billy drive through Oakland at the very end, perhaps on the verge of leaving for the Red Sox, and we hear his daughter singing from the CD in his dash, “You’re a loser dad, you’re such a loser dad, just enjoy the show.” You won. You were right.

Hold that thought.

Because we’re going back to my discovery of real football for a moment.

Early on (several years before I had to watch it happen to Newcastle) I learned about relegation and promotion. This fascinated the daylights out of me. Americans are so used to the worst teams no longer caring about doing well at the end of the season. Sometimes we suspect they sandbag their results to ensure they come in last to get the best player in next year’s pro draft. But coming last in England means you get KICKED OUT of the league and are sent back down to the league below it. Imagine the Chicago Cubs having a terrible year and having to go play in Single A ball somewhere against other clubs’ farm teams! Some football clubs that have been at the pinnacle of the league have fallen all the way out of the league (the first 4 levels) and into the conference and below. From the sixth tier and below the clubs don’t make enough money for full time players. Those players have day jobs, then practice a couple times a week to be ready for the weekend match. A relegation that sticks – meaning they don’t go right back up – can absolutely murder a club financially, especially if player contracts aren’t structured correctly, as happened recently to Sunderland (obligatory boo-hiss), where they were stuck in the third tier paying a perpetually injured player 70,000 pound a week. A. Week.

I began to research and learn about these lower leagues. I learned that these smaller clubs in the lower tiers are just as much the fabric of English football as the top tier clubs on the telly. They are closer to the people and the community, and are part of the community fabric and identity, moreso than even the big clubs, I would submit. I played some Football Manager and subscribed to magazines like 442 and When Saturday Comes to learn more about the game and about these leagues and the teams in them. I started shopping on Amazon UK to find books not available in the US. I was buying the Supporter’s Guides to Non-League Football Grounds and the Sky Sports Football Yearbooks. Around 2007 or 08, while browsing for more, a book called “Floodlit Dreams” popped up in the recommendations sidebar. Written by sports journalist Ian Ridley, who I believe was writing for the Observer at the time, it recounted his nearly 2 year journey to take over his boyhood football club, Weymouth FC, then (and now) in the sixth tier of English Football. That was the sort of inside look I was aching for – what really went on at these smaller clubs, beyond the glittering lights of the Premier League.

The book is a captivating ride throughout. There’s a line he writes in his prologue that sets the stage so well:

It may only have been Weymouth but I quickly learned that running a non-league football concern differs only from running, say, Manchester United, in the number of noughts on the balance sheet.

There may be a lot less money at stake, but people will always be people.

I came away from that reading, even then, thinking, Jesus, there’s a movie in there somewhere.

Time passed. Newcastle was relegated right around the time I discovered that book. I watched football, with all its ups and downs. My writing focus was in different areas, especially writing for the stage. My job kept me from doing as much as I wanted to. Or did it? Perhaps I just hid from my fear of failure in my job. Anyway, getting a reading for one of my plays and some good feedback on a screenplay kept me at least in the hunt in my own mind. During those years, I read the book two more times, even noodling some notes down for myself should I ever have the opportunity to cross paths with Mr. Ridley.

Fast forward to the present and recent past – maybe the last year or so. I’m on the downhill side of 50. I’m starting to feel my age as my body does things to make me listen to the ticking clock of my mortality. I have sort of an internal confab, realizing that if I don’t step up and do some of these things I desperately want to do, I will lie on my deathbed sometime in a future that is closer than I hope (even if it’s 40 years away) and slide into the ether with nothing to show for my writing but regret.

So what do I really want to do? I want to write a movie. Several of them, but there is one in particular I’m dying to write. Floodlit Dreams. I pull the book out and read it again. And while I have seen plenty of sports movies, this time it’s after 2011 and I’ve seen Moneyball, and I’m thinking THAT is the kind of movie this is. That is the tone that speaks to me, the sort of story Ian has told, that follows what happens, and how he changes the club’s fortunes for a time, before other people… become the other people they are(!) But most importantly, it finds the thread of what it MEANS to him and his family.

So I set aside my usual insecurities and simply messaged the man himself. I told him what I was up to and why. He was gregarious and receptive, and simply very kind. I finished up a pitch deck I’d been working on that mapped out how I saw the movie being structured. He sent me his thoughts that really helped clarify where Act III and the ending should land. I restructured the outline as we exchanged a few more emails. Once we were both satisfied, we came to an agreement on an option, giving me the green light to get this written and hopefully sold.

It’s really hard to express how encouraging he has been, and how excited I am. It’s my own sports movie – not the one I’m writing, the one I’m in. The aging aspirant who feels he has one last chance to achieve the big win. Perhaps it will be my Searching for Bobby Fischer and the movie will get made. Perhaps it will be Moneyball, where maybe it doesn’t get made, but it gets sold and opens the door for more later (for me and for Mr. Ridley!) Perhaps it will be Cool Runnings, where I’ll do my best, and find my meaning in reaching the finish line while we laugh a lot along the way.

However it ends, I’m looking forward to the journey. Thank you, Ian, for making this possible, and allowing me the opportunity to tell part of your story.