“We have a copy of it on DVD. I just love the story about how the
small-town basketball team went and won a state title. The whole story
is just really exciting to me, especially to a person who grew up just
loving basketball. It was a fun story to me and a fun movie to watch,
and I still enjoy it to this day.”
He added that his favorite part of the movie comes down to its
climactic finale.
“The very end of the movie where Jimmy Chitwood hits the gamewinning jump shot in the state championship game,” he said. “The
whole movie culminates on that one exciting piece — the Hickory
team is the state champions. It’s kind of a cool way to bring the whole
movie together.”
Mors said there’s a great message to the movie as well.
“Anyone, with hard work and effort, can become a champion,” he
said.
Prior to his tenure in Yankton, Mors also coached basketball,
including eight years as an assistant girls basketball coach at Huron
High School and five years as the Freeman High School girls basketball
coach.
He said during this time, he had a chance to introduce a new
generation of fans to the movie.
“In 2009 when the Freeman girls had qualified to the state
basketball tournament for the first time, I showed that movie to them,”
he said. “A lot of girls, at that time, had never seen it. They enjoyed it,
too, so it’s kind of a fun, inspirational story for them to watch, too.”
Glory Road
While Ryan Mors has taken to “Hoosiers,” his son Matthew has a
different favorite.
“My favorite sports movie is “Glory Road” because of all of the stuff
that they went through and how hard it was for them,” Matthew said.
The 2006 movie is based around the 19651966 Texas Western (now the University
of Texas-El Paso) Miners and their road to
the 1966 NCAA Tournament. The team
was especially notable because it boasted
an all-black starting five — the first team
to do so in a title game. Though a smaller
tournament at the time, the Miners
defeated opponents such as Kansas and
Adolph Rupp’s Kentucky Wildcats to earn
the school’s lone basketball title.
The movie itself stars Josh Lucas, Derek
Luke, and Jon Voight.
“I saw it when I was pretty little,”
Matthew said. “It’s about this basketball
team — the Texas Western Miners —who
Matthew Mors
is facing a lot of prejudice and adversity. No
one expected them to make it to the Final Four or the championship
game, and they just kept winning and proving everybody wrong.”
Matthew has a little championship experience of his own.
As a freshman with the Yankton Bucks — though he’s played for the
team since seventh grade —Mors was an integral part of this year’s
Class AA championship team.
And he says that this year’s championship can be partially traced
back to “Glory Road.”
“We watched this movie at our house a couple times when we were
really young,” he said. “It did (inspire me).”
“You’re Killin’ Me, Smalls”
Baseball may not enjoy the broad popularity it once had, but that
didn’t stop a generation of kids from foraging a connection to the
game — and learning the plethora of nicknames the legendary Babe
Ruth accumulated during his illustrious career — through 1993’s “The
Sandlot.”
One of those kids was Press & Dakotan assistant sports editor
Jeremy Hoeck.
The movie, starring Tom Guiry, Mike Vitar, Karen Allen, Denis
Leary and James Earl Jones, is set in Southern California in 1962 and
follows the story of Scotty Smalls — a baseball novice — who joins a
group of neighborhood kids and their sandlot team.
Hoeck said that, growing up, he could relate to the sandlot
experience.
“I, like many young boys growing up, gathered with my childhood
friends every day during the summer to play baseball at a sandlot next
to a school across the street from my house,” Hoeck said. “The small
group of us — all of us lived within 3-4 blocks of the school — would
call each other the night before and set a plan in motion to meet at the
sandlot the next day. And we would play baseball all day; mostly by
ourselves, but occasionally with other neighborhood kids who would
join in. Our greatest times came when we had enough for two full
teams, so we could play an actual game — much like the scenes in ‘The
Sandlot’ when they were able to play that game against the organized
team.”
As the movie progresses, Smalls is made aware of a vicious dog
referred to as “The Beast” who lives over the sandlot fence. When balls
go over the fence, they go there to die.
Hoeck said they had their own set of natural elements to worry
about.
“Although we didn’t have a giant dog in the neighboring yard to
worry about, weather was something we continually battled,” he said.
“I can remember days during those summers when it would rain all
day, and we would call each other (the days of landline phones!) to
figure out what to do next — did we want to try to play through the
rain? Or should we meet and do something else? It didn’t matter the
temperature — either, we would be out there playing. We could be
in jeans and jackets on those chillier summer days, or in shorts and
T-shirts on those scorching hot days, it didn’t matter; we wanted to
play baseball. We would do anything to play the game we loved.”
But the boys in the movie would then be confronted with a much
bigger problem. At one point when the boys are faced with the
prospect of no longer having a ball to use, Smalls comes through with
a ball his stepfather was displaying — signed by none other than Babe
Ruth. The ball makes it over the fence and it’s up to the boys to get it
back before Smalls’ stepfather returns.
Hoeck said he could similarly relate to having to scrounge for a new
ball.
“There’s a particular scene in that movie that still makes me laugh to
this day,” he said. “When they lost their one ball and had to track down
enough soda bottles to buy a new baseball. That’s a scene my friends
and I could relate to; there were many days when our small collection
of baseballs would be dwindled down to one, and the loss of that final
ball meant we had to find a way to track down a new one. We would
scatter to our respective homes and scour our rooms for a baseball, just
as in the movie — the desperation and panic on those character’s faces
was something my friends and I shared, as well. The feeling that you
would do just about anything to keep playing was one we were very
familiar with.” n
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