Article in Wall Street Journal--Shout out to Vision Quest

[Dave Cloud]

Sports Movies That Continue to Inspire

From ‘Field of Dreams’ to ‘Vision Quest,’ the films of my youth can teach valuable lessons about beauty and the transcendent.

 

By Mike Kerrigan

April 16, 2023 4:13 pm ET

 

Matthew Modine in ‘Vision Quest.’PHOTO: WARNER BROS.

When I text with friends who, like me, came of age in the 1980s, it isn’t long before someone refers to a sports movie from his youth. With a buddy facing long odds in a job interview, I shared the tryouts sequence from “Rudy.” When I thought he was overthinking preparation, I sent him the wilderness training montage from “Rocky IV.”

I’ve written “Wanna have a catch?” from the end of “Field of Dreams” to remind one friend of the importance of seeking forgiveness. On the power of granting it, the town-hall vote of confidence in Norman Dale, the high-school basketball coach with a checkered past in “Hoosiers,” is my go-to bounce-pass.

 

Recently I received such a text from my friend Greg. We’d been debating the nature of beauty. My head, filled with Thomas Aquinas, C.S. Lewis and John Keats, knew pure beauty is objective reality: an attribute first of the thing observed before any secondary perception of it. Knowing in your head and feeling in your bones, though, are two different things.

The scene Greg shared was from “Vision Quest.” Protagonist Louden Swain, an 18-year old wrestler, can’t understand why Elmo, a much older night cook at the hotel where they both work, is missing a shift and much-needed wages, to watch Louden wrestle Brian Shute, his nemesis.

 

Louden asks Elmo why. Elmo explains by describing his reaction to something he saw on television: Brazilian soccer sensation Pelé scoring—and then celebrating over—an acrobatic, bicycle-kick goal. Though watching alone in his shabby apartment, ignorant of soccer and hardly a crier, Elmo admits that the vision moved him to weep.

Elmo’s tears show the arresting effect beauty has on the ordinary person. The gruff cook is overtaken by Pelé’s preternatural talent and joyful heart. Mere proximity to it draws Elmo from the cramped confines of his subjective self to a higher plane where the sublime is appreciated, simply for existing.

Nourishing not his stomach but his spirit, objective beauty compels the hash slinger to forgo wages and watch Louden wrestle. Beauty restores man’s capacity for wonder, which remakes a tired world anew. Its power derives from its source, which is both outside the subjective self and the created world.

Greg’s clip reminded me how the sports movies we adored in childhood not only can transcend. They can be signposts to transcendentals themselves, of which earthly beauty is but a foretaste. Those movies really were the best.

Mr. Kerrigan is an attorney in Charlotte, N.C.

[Ahawkeye]

Good thing for Elmo that Louden won! Then he'd really be pissed to lose the wages and Louden got his butt kicked, then what? Lol! I think about wrestling a lot, wins losses what could have been if I would have put more work into it.... the list goes on and on but the most important lesson I learned from wrestling was that no matter how hard things are in life (in general) they can't hold a candle to the work and sacrifice it takes to wrestle.