The (excellent, IMO) movie Lucas has the main character fail to score the winning touchdown, which actually made it 10x better.
In*** Requiem for a Heavyweight***, Mountain Rivera (Anthony Quinn) lost his fight. Worse yet, he had too much heart to go down early, as his treacherous manager bet he would. Instead, he gamely hung in there, taking more and more punishment, and was knocked out late anyway.
I just thought of*** A League of Their Own.***
In the final of the women’s baseball league, the Rockford Peaches (the team we’ve been following the whole movie) lose in the championship game. Dottie (Geena Davis) MAY have let her sister’s team win because baseball was much more important to her sister than to herself.
I’ve stated this here before, but this one really angered me. Leave before the ending card. You’ll then realize you watched the wrong underdog movie:
The next year, the team WINS the State Title. This is more remarkable as they’re replacing all the stars on offense and defense from the previous year. Think of the 49ers winning it all the year after Montana, Rice, and Lott suddenly retired.
That, my friends, is a FAR more remarkable story.
That’s a huge pet peeve of mine.(that theory) There is no frigging way she let her sister win. She didn’t drive half way across the nation to come back and destroy the dreams of every single one of her teammates. If she wanted her sister to win, she wouldn’t have told the pitcher to throw her high fastballs. Dottie got obliterated at the plate and the ball came lose at the last second.
Good call on the movie though.
The high school football team lost the big game in All the Right Moves.
However, after the Tom Cruise/Lea Thompson love scene, most people have forgotten there even was a football game.
The Durham Bulls go nowhere in their season, and after Crash Davis is traded, nobody even notes that he breaks the minor league record for home runs.
But he does shack up with Susan Sarandon, so that’s a big Win.
There was a thread years ago debating just this. The sides seemed to be:
[ol]
[li]Eldest brothers/sisters believed the Geena Davis character dropped it on purpose.[/li]
[li]Folks with older siblings believed the little sister knocked it free.[/li][/ol]
That wasn’t fiction, though.
Right- the real Odessa Permian team lost to Dallas Carter high school that year.
Many of the best sports movies are based on real people or real stories, and I ignored those. Jake LaMotta lost fights in Raging Bull, as he did in real life, but that didn’t seem to fit the category.
I SUPPOSE that, since ***The Great White Hope ***is technically fiction, it may count, even though it’s essentially the biography of Jack Johnson. The fictional hero, Jack Jefferson, loses the title fight at the end… and it’s strongly implied that he took a dive.
It was fictionalized - the real team lost in the semi-finals to the team that won the championship game, only for that team to forfeit the title when it was discovered that they had ineligible players (I can’t remember if they were academically ineligible or lived outside of the school’s district). Unfortunately, the Texas high school sports bylaws say that they have to give the title to the other team in the final, despite the fact that the team in the movie actually came closest to beating the forfeiting team in the tournament.
Do you consider Remember the Titans nonfiction? It’s based on a real team, but in the movie, most of its wins are close, including the championship game, but in reality, except for one early-season game, all of its games were blowout wins, including the state championship.
Good one! After Chick Hicks caused The King to crash, McQueen basically throws the race to help The King cross the finsh line. It shows that McQueen isn’t so self-centered anymore.
On the Waterfront is not really a sports movie, but Marlon Brando does find himself in hard times because he threw a fight that ended his boxing career, instead of being a contendah.
In the last game of “The Pistol” Pete sinks the game winning shot at the last second. Just as he’s beginning to celebrate, the ref declares the ball left his hands after the buzzer and doesn’t count.
The finale of the first season of the TV season Blue Mountain State had the team coming up from their underdog status and making it to a bowl game against long odds. The last scene was the team on the bus pumped up with their success and heading to the game.
The first episode of the second season was set a few weeks later and revealed they had been annihilated at the game.
In Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, not only doesn’t Emmet win the talent show, his mom doesn’t either. They both lose to the RIVERBOTTOM NIGHTMARE BAND!
And if I recall from Tennyson’s poem, the light brigade doesn’t fare too well.
In A Soldier’s Story, the undefeated baseball team from the “negro” barracks throws their last game in protest to the incarceration and death of their star player.
In Tin Cup, Kevin Costner knocks 5 balls into the water on the 72nd hole of the U.S. Open to lose by 7.
And he narrowly lost in the sixth film, though surviving going toe-to-toe with the current world champion decades younger than you is nothing to be ashamed of.
Didn’t the inmates lose in The Longest Yard?
Cool Runnings