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'''''Bull Durham''''' is a 1988 Sports/Romance comedy by Ron Shelton, and starring [[Kevin Costner]], [[Susan Sarandon]], and [[Tim Robbins]].
It's the Carolina Leagues and the last-place Durham Bulls are working out a rookie pitcher Ebby LaLoosh (Robbins). LaLoosh has a "million-dollar arm and a five-cent head," so the ownership sends down "Crash" Davis (Costner), an aging catcher who'd been working his whole adult life to make the Majors, [[The Mentor|to teach and guide the new kid]]. Angry he's been ''sent down'' instead of up, Crash almost refuses to take the assignment to help the new "[[New Meat|Meat]]".
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Mixing into the conflict is Annie Savoy (Sarandon), long-time resident of Durham and a long-time fan of baseball. A sports groupie, she takes it upon herself to latch onto a promising new talent every year and train him on the mysteries of baseball, sex and life (the coaches don't mind: every rookie she beds has a great season). She spies both LaLoosh and Crash and invites them to compete for her affections: Crash, every bit her spiritual and intellectual equal, notes he's too old to "try out" for anything and leaves her with LaLoosh by default, whom Annie quickly beds and nicknames "Nuke".
Now with Crash and Annie teaching him - sometimes in conflict, but more often than not in concert - Nuke goes through the trials and errors of a pitcher: knowing when NOT to shake off a catcher's sign, the value of a rain-out, how bondage and poetry improve sex, how to hold a ball like an egg, how NOT to think when pitching, how to have actual fun during a game, and which way a garter belt ought to be worn ("Rose goes in front, big guy."). But while all that's going on, Crash and Annie get to realizing that the two of them might be perfect for each other, [[Love Triangle|except that she's with Nuke]]...
Critical reception for ''Bull Durham'' was mostly positive when it came out and was a moderate success, but in the 20-plus years since its release the film has been re-assessed as a full-out classic among sports film: critics, sports columnists, and baseball fans argue it may be the best baseball movie ever.
* [[All Men Are Perverts]]
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* [[All Women Are Lustful]]: Annie and Millie, although Annie tempers hers with roleplay.
* [[The Art of Bra Removal|The Art of Gartered Stocking Removal]]: Nuke has as much trouble with Annie's garters as most men do in the standard version of the trope.
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* [[Big Game]]: Subverted. In a baseball season even in the minors, there's no one big game outside of the playoffs, and the movie ends well before the season does.
* [[Bittersweet Ending]]: The movie [[What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic|ends on a rain-out]] and Annie returns to her home to find Crash having played his last game, hitting his record-setting home run for another team. Crash reveals he's quitting as a player, while Annie reveals that she's quitting too (just boys, not her love of baseball). {{spoiler|Crash then reveals he might get a coaching job in California, suggesting that managing is his ticket to The Show.}}
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* [[Book Ends]]: "La Vie En Rose" plays while Annie has Nuke tied up in bed and reads poetry to him towards the beginning of the film, and it plays when she says goodbye to him towards the end
* [[Brick Joke]]: At one point, Crash teaches Nuke all the cliches he's going to have to tell reporters when he gets to the majors ("We gotta play it one day at a time"). At the end, when Nuke is in the majors, and speaking to a reporter, he's using them all.
* [[The Cameo]]:
* [[Captain Obvious]]
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'''Annie''': Yes. I do.
* [[Catch Phrase]]: To this day, minor league pitchers want to "announce my presence with authority!"
* [[Centipede's Dilemma]]: One of the best examples of this. Nuke has ''no'' control when he thinks about what he's doing. He can't even hit Crash in the chest from five feet away when he thinks about what he's doing. Once he learns how to focus on something else, his control greatly improves.
* [[Chained to
* [[Cluster F-Bomb]]: Half the dialog is spiked with profanity. If you ever watch ''Bull Durham'' on a basic cable channel, you're missing probably thirty percent of the movie.
** There's also the [[Precision F-Strike]] for when the F-word helps make a point:
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** There's apparently one word {{spoiler|"cocksucker"}} you're never supposed to say to an umpire.
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'''Annie''' (sighs): How romantic.
* [[Deconstruction]]: Before this, sports movies had clean-cut heroes, outright villains, and every problem resolved by a [[Big Game]] that saves the day. This movie dumps ''all of that'' for serious character development and introspection, and that winning the game is unimportant compared to coming to terms with who you are. By playing by none of the rules, ''Bull Durham'' is considered one of the best sports movies '''ever'''.
* [[Did Not Do the Research]]: Averted, big time. Shelton was a long-time minor league player who knew from experience how life went in Carolina Leagues. Nearly everything in the movie (including the scene of the radio announcer faking a live broadcast from a studio as they couldn't afford the road trips) happened in the minors when the movie was made.
** The one thing Shelton didn't get right was {{spoiler|having Nuke get called up to the Major Leagues straight from playing with a Class-A organization like the Bulls. Even rookie players spend some time at AAA level for a few games before getting called up like that}}. It could be explained away as how {{spoiler|Nuke was leaving and never coming back}}.
* [[Fourth Date Marriage]]: Millie, Annie's friend and fellow groupie, has basically slept with half the Carolina League right up until she tries hooking up with the overtly religious Jimmy. After just one night, the two of them get engaged.
* [[Glory Days]]: Crash once spent 21 days in the major leagues (what he calls "The Show"
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** In a non-sports way, Annie. She keeps wanting to relive the magic of seducing and mentoring a hotshot ball player every year... but even she realizes she's getting too old for that now...
* [[Good People Have Good Sex]]
* [[Informed Ability]]: Let's just say that while Costner does a pretty good job playing a ballplayer, some of the others don't. Tim Robbins is a big tall guy who fit the physical profile, but his pitching motion is a pretty poor imitation of the real thing.
* [[Ironic Echo]]: When they first meet, Crash taunts a half-drunk Nuke into starting a fight outside a bar by challenging him to nail him with a fastball. Nuke smashes a door window instead and Crash punches him out. After Nuke gets called up to the majors, he finds Crash (who knows it means the end of his stay on the team) getting drunk and taunting Nuke with baseball stats. Trying to get into another fight, Crash smashes a nearby mirror, forcing Nuke to punch Crash out. Crash then [[Secret Test of Character|uses the moment]] to see if Nuke punched with his throwing hand (he didn't)... showing that [["Well Done, Son" Guy|Nuke has the instincts not to fuck up his career]] if he ever gets in a bar brawl.
* [[Manic Pixie Dream Girl]]: Annie. It's subverted a bit in that she does what she does because she enjoys it; she's not just a character-building device for the male characters.
* [[A Man Is Not a Virgin]]
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* [["Not Wearing Pants" Dream]]: Annie tries to get Nuke to focus his energies elsewhere by insisting he wears a woman's garter belt. He has a horrifying nightmare of being on the mound wearing ''just'' the garter belt (and a jock strap), and refuses to. When he finally relents, Crash is the one who spots him trying it on... and doesn't mock Nuke for wearing it. He even tells him "Rose goes in front, big guy."
** Oh, Crash mocked him, all right-- he was just snarky about it. Slapping him on the ass and saying, "That's ''really'' hot."
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* [[The Obi-Wan]]: Crash. The rookie players flock to his leadership and wisdom real quick, except for Nuke, who eventually comes around when Annie insists on him following Crash's advice... and it actually improves his game.
** Annie's insistence on Nuke following Crash's advice comes back to bite her on the ass when Nuke's re-channels his sexual energy into his pitching, which helps him go on a fantastic winning streak. Annie, [[Catch Phrase|being monogamous in the framework of the baseball season]], starts getting ''very'' sexually frustrated... even though [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|she's the one who suggested]] the re-channeling before the streak. But when Nuke admits to Crash that he's thinking about having sex with her just to get her out of his hair, Crash basically says, "Are you crazy? Never ''fuck'' with a winning streak." So Nuke stays out of Annie's bed, and when Nuke tells her why, [[Roaring Rampage of Revenge|she gets pissed off at Crash]].
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** "Don't ''fuck'' with a winning streak."
** Straight-arrow Christian Jimmy gets what counts, for ''him,'' as a precision F-strike when he sees the "special wedding cake" the boys get him:
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{{reflist}}
{{AFI's 100 Years 100 Laughs}}
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[[Category:Films of the 1980s]]
[[Category:Sports Stories]]
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