Exploring Gene Hackman's greatness through the prism of his sports movie roles

The general public knows Hackman through his incredible acting work, work that netted him five Oscar nominations. He won Best Actor for "The French Connection" and Best Supporting Actor for "Unforgiven." 

However, a pair of divergent sports movies provide a unique opportunity to reflect upon Hackman as an actor and display his underrated greatness. 

In both 1986's "Hoosiers" and 2000's "The Replacements," Hackman plays a freshly-minted head coach. They are similar roles, but also fundamentally different performances, speaking to Hackman's grasp of nuance.

There are many who consider "Hoosiers" a pantheon sports movie, and Norman Dale one of the best film coaches in history. The film centers on Hickory High's basketball team, a small-town school that is guided by Dale to the championship game in the big city of Indianapolis. Classic underdog stuff. 

Dale is the sort of stern, fatherly coaching archetype, and Hackman certainly could exude intimidation. He is also able to bring dimensionality. Moments of warmth feel earned. The "underdog story" of it all is thunderingly obvious from the very start, but Hackman never feels like he's "playing underdog." Frankly, he's above the material, as is Dennis Hopper, but they pull the movie up to their level.

"The Replacements" is not nuanced. It's a sports comedy about ragtag underdogs that deserves to live as the kind of movie that plays at 4 p.m. on a Thursday on TBS. This is not an insult! Weirdly, our heroes are scabs, as the movie is about a fictitious football league that hires replacement players during a strike. Most of the football players have a single joke to their premise, aside from Keanu Reeves as Shane Falco, the former All-American quarterback. 

And yet, there's Hackman as head coach Jimmy McGinty, giving Tom Landry vibes even though the movie is set in the year 2000. It's all tough love and prickliness. Hackman was hired to do what could be considered "the Hackman thing," but such a notion undercuts his breadth of skill. 

He was close to retirement at this point, with "Welcome to Mooseport," a 2004 film, his last acting effort. If he was phoning it in, then he may very well be the best actor to ever live because it doesn't feel that way. Jimmy McGinty is not as famous as Norman Dale, but in this role Hackman provided a level of gravitas that allowed all the silliness (and there is some truly sweaty silliness to be found in "The Replacements") to be palatable.

Gene Hackman could have played 100 Norman Dales and Jimmy McGintys. He could have fallen out of bed and given a B-minus performance in a C-plus sports movie. To the extent one can understand a stranger through anecdotes, interviews, and their work, that doesn't seem like something he would have accepted from himself. He was the kind of hard worker that both those ficticious coaches would have admired.