Champions (2023)
As part of a plea bargain, disgraced basketball coach Marcus Marakovich (Woody Harrelson) has been court ordered to serve 90 days as the coach for a not-very-good local basketball team. The idea of a coach inheriting a team of under performing athletes and turning them into winners is not new (see: A League of Their Own, Major League, The Replacements, Glory Road, Gridlock Gang, The Bad News Bears, Cool Runnings, Hoosiers, The Mighty Ducks, Remember the Titans…) If Champions brings anything original to the table, it’s that in this case, the athletes are mentally challenged.
The theme of Champions is revealed early in a bit of tough love assistant coach Marakovich’s receives from his coworker Coach Phil Perretti (Ernie Hudson), who informs Marakovich he’s not bad at coaching — he’s bad at relationships. And while the members of the “Friends” basketball team could certainly use some pointers on the court (one of the players insists on shooting backward granny shots; in six seasons, he’s never even hit the backboard), what the players really need is a mentor and a friend. It’s obvious that Marakovich has what it takes to improve his players’ skills on the court, but what they really need is a little help succeeding off the court, too.
The movie dips its toe into the stories of the individual basketball players (all of whom are played by actors with real mental challenges) but only inasmuch as their struggles overlap with the coach’s goal of turning the misfits into a winning team. One member of the team works for an abusive manager at a local restaurant, but it only becomes a problem when the manager won’t let him off to attend practice. The best player on the team has a personal reason for refusing to play for Marakovich, but resolving this issue seems less about helping someone with mental challenges and more about helping the team win. The de facto leader of team Friends is Johnny, a young man with Down Syndrome who is struggling to move out of his mother’s home and is too afraid of water to take a shower. Johnny gets more story time than most of his teammates, but his attractive sister is dating the coach. None of this is particularly detrimental to the film’s plot, but to be sure this is a movie primarily about the redemption and growth of a coach and not as much about the players. In the end it’s not the players who learn that winning means doing their best — they already know this — it’s the coach that needs to learn this lesson.
Costarring with Woody Harrelson and Ernie Hudson are Kairlin Olson as Alex as the coach’s love interest (and Johnny’s sister), Cheech Marin as Julio, manager of the local rec center, and Mat Cook as Sonny, Harrelson’s former assistant who mostly serves the story as someone who can give Harrelson a break from coaching so that he can do other things. Among the team’s players are Madison Tevlin, Kevin Iannucci, and Joshua Felder. I didn’t recognize any of the players from other films and most of them only have this film listed on their IMDB page, but a few of them are return actors and no doubt we’ll be seeing some of them again.
If you’ve seen the trailer you’ve seen the film, but that doesn’t make the 90 minutes any less of a feel good film.