What an exciting weekend to be a DePauw Tiger. For the first time in eight years, the Monon Bell is back in the 765.
After a thrilling football game Saturday, it is only fair that in this week’s column, I talk about a sports movie. This week’s film is, in my opinion, the most sensitive of all sports movies. It is the story of a ragtag group of Pee Wee hockey players on their quest for a gold medal at the Junior Goodwill Games. This week we will be talking about Sam Weisman’s 1994 film “D2: The Mighty Ducks”.
After a knee injury ends his minor league hockey career, Coach Gordon Bombay (Emilio Estevez) returns to Minnesota only to become head coach of Team USA’s hockey team for the Junior Goodwill Games. The most of the O.G. ducks are back, like Charlie Conway (Joshua Jackson), Fulton Reed (Elden Henson), and Goldberg (Shaun Weiss), and are joined by new members who help U.S.A. win the gold. The conflict of the story comes when Coach Bombay loses sight of having fun, and he instead solely focuses on trying to win.
The villains of the movie are the team members from Iceland, team U.S.A’s main competitor. Iceland is set up to be the antithesis of the Ducks, which are solely seen as an uniform mob. The face of the mob is Wolf “The Dentist” Stansson (Carsten Norgaard) who also is the foil to Bombay. Stansson played in the National Hockey League, whereas Bombay did not. Stansson only cares about winning, but Bombay and the Ducks try to fly together.
The funniest part about team Iceland has to be the ambiguity of their heritage. They all have different accents; however, the majority of them sound Russian or German, not Nordic. You can chalk up this to Hollywood still using the stereotype of Eastern Europe as the bad guy from the Cold War days. I half expected a player from team Iceland to go full Ivan Drago and say, “I will crush you” before the final game started.
The Ducks are obviously the heroes of the film, and represent the classic ragtag, underdog way of winning the big game. Their team is smaller and slower than Iceland, but they make up for this by playing with heart and a genuine love for the game.
The Ducks also show that the best way to practice. If you need to get really good, really quick, all you need is an inspirational montage of three drills interspersed with general fun team antics.
This training style coupled with an inspirational speech at an intermission break is the winning strategy for an underdog sports movie. I can only hope that Coach Lynch rallied the Tigers with a similarly passionate speech as Gordon Bombay’s “Ducks Fly Together.”
I actually think that there are a fair amount of similarities between DePauw and the Ducks. I mean the bar that’s right on campus is called “The Duck.” In minor seriousness, much like Gordon Bombay’s return to Minnesota, Coach Lynch made a triumphant return to DePauw in 2013. When fighting for the Bell, DePauw needed to make a comeback with time running down just like the Ducks, and they did.
Congratulations to the men’s football team and to DePauw in general, it’s been too long, but the bell is back. Until Hollywood turns our 123rd Monon game into a movie, I guess I am stuck comparing DePauw’s victory to The Mighty Ducks.
Go DePauw, and until next time, take care of yourself and each other. I’m Jeff at the Movies.