20 fantastic films about less popular sports

Now, when it comes to dodgeball as a competitive sport, it is mostly played in gym class. Or, more than likely, gym classes prior to 2010. However, there are competitive dodgeball leagues, usually of the “beer league” variety. When it comes to the silly Ben Stiller flick, though, the stakes are high for two gyms competing in a proper dodgeball game.

When cheerleaders are, you know, leading cheers, that’s not a sport. When they are competing in cheerleader competitions, though, it definitely is. It’s a judgment-based sport like figure skating or gymnastics, but it’s a sport. “Bring It On,” thus, is a classic turn-of-the-millennium sports comedy, one that spawned a cheap cash-in franchise of unremarkable sequels. That speaks to the quality of the first one.

You may not remember “Men with Brooms” unless you’re from the Great White North. It got an American release, but it’s a Canadian film. That’s probably not surprising given that it’s about curling. In terms of all its Canadian-ness, Leslie Nielsen has a supporting role in this silly comedy, and the band The Tragically Hip makes a cameo.

Granted, a lot of Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus” is about the end of apartheid in South Africa. Morgan Freeman plays Nelson Mandela, who got an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. However, “Invictus” tackles the state of South Africa through the prism of the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Matt Damon plays Francois Pienaar, captain of South Africa’s national rugby team, and Damon also got an Oscar nomination.

To a large degree, “Breaking Away” is a coming-of-age dramedy about life in a college town. One of the kids in this strong slice-of-life film, though, is obsessed with competitive cycling. The action, set in Bloomington, Indiana, culminates with the Little 500, an actual cycling race held in the city.

“Chariots of Fire” is a period piece about two runners in the 1924 Summer Olympics that won Best Picture over “Raiders of the Lost Ark” among others. Man, people really loved that score, huh? We considered including it here, but “running” is just so ubiquitous as a sporting endeavor. People do really care about the 100-yard dash every Olympics, and the act of running is just so fundamental to so many sports. So, we decided to give it a shout-out because with “The Boys in the Boat,” director George Clooney tried to capture some of that “Chariots of Fire” magic. It’s a period piece about a rowing team trying to qualify for the 1936 Summer Olympics. In terms of quality, well, we did spend a lot of this entry on an entirely different movie, which probably tells you something.

Bowling, like golf, is a sport many people have played. Unlike golf, bowling doesn’t have much of a cultural impact. It doesn’t get the TV coverage of a major PGA tournament, or even a mid-tier PGA tournament. “Kingpin” doesn’t exactly take bowling seriously. It’s a Farrelly Brothers comedy from the ‘90s, after all. Mostly, the movie works whenever Bill Murray is in it, because he’s having a ton of fun.

Is pool a sport, or a game of skill? Well, they have shown billiards on ESPN, and if it allows us to get “The Hustler” on this list, we’ll count it. Additionally, we get to mention the sequel “The Color of Money,” which was directed by Martin Scorsese, stars Tom Cruise, and won Paul Newman an Oscar. That being said, “The Hustler” is a better movie. It was the first time Newman played “Fast Eddie” Felson, one of four acting nominations for this movie. Of course, George C. Scott refused his nomination because no actor has ever hated the Academy more than Scott.

“The Cutting Edge” is a classic “opposites-attract romcom,” but this movie presupposes that you are opposites if you do different ice-based sports. Kate is a figure skater from a wealthy family. Doug is a down-on-his-luck hockey player who suffered a career-ending injury. Doug is cajoled into being Kate’s figure skating partner, and somehow they overcome all the obstacles to find love (plausible) and compete for a gold at the 1992 Winter Olympics (less plausible).

By 2007, if Will Ferrell and Jon Heder were starring together in a comedy, you knew it had a ceiling on it. “Blades of Glory” is dumb, but it is pretty entertaining. Playing almost like a riff on “The Cutting Edge,” Ferrell and Heder play two rival figure skaters who, when banned from singles competition, exploit a loophole to compete together as a pair.

Fresh off the success of “The Big Bang Theory,” wrote herself a starring vehicle in a small, low-budget indie comedy. “The Bronze” stars Rauch, who is of the smaller size, as a former gymnast who peaked with an Olympic bronze. Since then, her life has fallen apart, but she reluctantly mentors her former coach’s prized student after the coach’s death. It’s your classic anti-hero redemption story, but in the world of gymnastics.

Lloyd Dobler was wrong about kickboxing being the sport of the future, but around the same time he was making that point, “Kickboxer” was giving Jean-Claude Van Damme a starring vehicle. JCVD’s entire career was built on excuses for him to use his martial arts and fighting skills (and to not have to act much). We should, of course, also mention “Bloodsport,” which focuses on the niche sport of kumite.

Sure, when it comes to roller derby movies, “Whip It” is the one most people know. Well, you also could consider including “Rollerball,” but we digress. For the sake of fun and variety, though, we wanted to mention “Kansas City Bomber.” Raquel Welch stars as K.C. Carr, a single mom who moves to Portland to start a new life. There, she gets involved in roller derby, but in this film, it is more like Roller Games, which was the sports-entertainment-style roller derby league that you may have seen on ESPN Classic back in the day.

Skateboarding can be a means of conveyance, but it can also be a sport. Hey, it’s in the Olympics now, and let us not forget the X Games. “Lords of Dogtown” is something of a fictionalized companion piece to the acclaimed documentary “Dogtown and the Z-Boys.” Stacy Peralta, one of the Z-Boys, wrote this film, which is based on his own life. It chronicles when a group of skaters helped legitimize and sportify skateboarding, changing the face of it for the rest of time.

If you are looking for a film starring the late, great Robert Redford that perhaps you have not seen, give “Downhill Racer” a shot. None other than Roger Ebert called it, “the best movie ever made about sports,” though he then added, “without really being about sports at all.” Redford stars as the world's best American downhill skier, who traverses Europe with the U.S. team, but the reality of his situation is one of tedium, repetition, and tremendous pressure.

Some ski downhill, while some ski and jump. Also, some ski jump well, while others aren’t quite so good at it. “Eddie the Eagle” is one of those underdog sports stories that is about how triumphant it can be to even try. Michael Edwards was a real British athlete who, dreaming of being an Olympian, realized he could pursue ski jumping with little competition, given that Great Britain hadn’t competed in that event since 1928. It should be noted that Edwards was aiming for the 1988 Olympics. While Edwards is no ski jumping wunderkind, what made his story so winning, and why they bothered to make a movie, was that he managed to gut it out and make his dreams come true anyway.

Surfing is a sport. Martial arts are sports. So how about a movie that combines surfing and martial arts? And also combines all that with Rob Schneider, Tone Loc, and Leslie Nielsen as Colonel Chi, a warlord who has taken over the fictional East Asian island of Patusan. That’s all to say that “Surf Ninjas” is remarkably stupid but fun in all its badness and silliness. A classic ‘90s film of that vein.

Professional wrestling is sports-adjacent, sports entertainment as it is known, but there is also traditional wrestling, the kind they do at the Olympics. “Foxcatcher” is based on a bizarre, disturbing real-life story. Mark and Dave Schultz are brothers who have both won Olympic gold medals in wrestling. They are recruited by John du Pont, heir to the du Pont fortune, who seems eccentric at best, and unhinged at worst. Well, things culminated with murder, so “at worst” ended up winning out. Mark Ruffalo and Steve Carell were nominated for Oscars for “Foxcatcher.”

A fun real-life story was turned into a reasonably fun movie. Jamaica decided to try to put together a bobsled team, and that team ended up competing at the 1988 Winter Olympics. And they did terribly, but nobody cared because it was all a lot of fun. “Cool Runnings,” which stars John Candy as an Olympian who is tasked with teaching his Jamaican charges the finer points of bobsledding. All the points of bobsledding, in fact.

We’ll call it table tennis and not ping pong, since we’re talking about it as a sport. “Marty Supreme” is based, in part, on the life of Marty Reisman, an actual table tennis star in the 1950s and early 1960s. Josh Safdie, the Safdie that doesn’t act but apparently is the driving force behind the intensity of Safdie Brothers movies, took the hustling nature of the sport at the time to craft one of his “Am I having a panic attack or is it the movie?” offerings. Timothee Chalamet stars as Marty Mauser, and we shall see if he gets his Best Actor Oscar this time.