Dudes Rock! The 70s Jock, North Dallas Forty, and a Crisis of Confidence
On idealism and fatalism in 70s sports flicks
This is part two of Dudes Rock!, an ongoing essay series attempting to understand bros at the movies. This week, an examination of the unreformed jock of the 1970s. This post (and the audio version) is exclusive to paid subscribers.
‘I love your legs. They got your feet on one end and your pussy on the other.’
— Jo Bob (Bo Svenson), North Dallas Forty
The decade of Burt Reynolds as the ur-athlete of his generation. The decade of The Bad News Bears and The Longest Yard. The decade where the bombshell movie star of her time, Raquel Welch, formed a celebrity power couple with mega-star New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath. It was a time of burly he-men and the Wide World of Sports. Famous jocks from George Best to the aforementioned ‘Broadway’ Joe Namath were party boys as well as athletes, with their fair share of codeine, benzedrine, and amyl nitrate to keep them going.
Of course, screen athletes predate the 1970s, and fall into all sorts of categories, but cinema’s sexual and social politics shifted enormously from the Nixon administration onward, and the sports movie served as a fascinating vessel for all the contradictions & difficulties of Being A Man in The World. If recent filmmakers have had a tendency to try and upbraid, revise, and even reform the image of the jock, it’s interesting to take a look at what image older films might have been transmitting in the first place. The rise in popularity of a particular kind of sports film in this period - i.e. of the spit-and-sawdust good times of rollickingly profane jocks and good ole boys - think Slap Shot (1977) - does not seem like an accident. If Rocky (1976) was a metaphor about a white, working-class American man proving there was some fight left in the old dog (pointedly, against a Black opponent), plenty of other sports films of the decade were also working to defeat the malaise of the age.