I Coulda Been a Contender: Difference between revisions

 

== [[Comics]] ==

{{quote| '''Batman''': [["The Reason You Suck" Speech|You don't understand]]. [[Honor Before Reason|We don't do what we do for]] ''[[Honor Before Reason|fame]]''. [[Hannibal Lecture|How much were you paid to throw away your]] ''[[Hannibal Lecture|morals]]''?}}

 

* ''[[On the Waterfront]]'' ([[Trope Namer]])

* The majority of sports films, it seems. Heck, even some only tangentially related to sports (e.g., ''Two for the Money'', and of course the aforementioned ''Waterfront''). If the coach seems bitter, it's probably because He Coulda been a Contender.

* In ''[[Napoleon Dynamite]]'' Uncle Rico is this character played for laughs. He firmly believes that if his high-school coach had just let him carry a football during a crucial game back in 1982, that he'd be a Hall of Fame NFL star today. Most of his activity in the movie is spent passive-aggressively abusing his nephews and earning enough money for a time machine to transport himself back to his old high school glory days.

** Doubly subverted when it's revealed towards the end of the film that he was a benchwarmer and was never actually in the game.

* Subverted in the movie ''[[Unbreakable]]'', where Bruce Willis's character faked a serious injury after a car accident as an excuse to get out of a promising future football career so he could have a normal life with his fiancée, and then forgot he faked it through the normal process of memory reevaluation and editing, leading to his dissatisfaction with his "lost chance" at greatness in the movie's present-time.

* ''Ladybugs'': Rodney Dangerfield sucks up to the boss to get a soccer coach job, claiming the only reason he didn't get to the pros was because of injury.

* Used directly in the film ''[[Muppet Treasure Island]]''. As the pirates sing (without regret) about the different possible paths they could have taken in life, one of them comments "I coulda been a contender!"

* In the film ''Friday Night Lights'', the ex-star of the central football team's obsessing over his regrets turn him into a violent alcoholic. The current team members are painfully aware that a similar fate awaits them after the glory of the sport has long since faded.

{{quote| '''Charles Foster Kane:''' You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a really great man. <br />

'''Thatcher:''' Don't you think you are? <br />

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

* The [[Quincy Jones]] series ''In The House'' had [[LL Cool J]] play a football star who gets taken out by a knee injury, and starts a gym. His leg eventually heals, and he gets back in the game. Guess what happens?

* The prevalence of this in sports films is parodied in ''That Mitchell and Webb Look'', with a film about cricket; the coach is bitter because he used to play cricket for a team that reached the [[Did Not Do the Research|"final of the Ashes", shyeah]], but he never found fame, because he bowled a wide.

{{quote| You bowled a wide in the Ashes final? How can you live with yourself?}}

* In ''[[Spaced]]'', Marsha tells Daisy about how she could have been an Olympic sprinter had she not been knocked over by her first husband to be and introduced to alcohol. She still shows interest in it, though, on one occasion persuading Daisy to join her on a run.

 

== [[Music]] ==

* In the mid-90s, people thought that [[wikipedia:The Dayton Family|the Dayton Family]] was going to be the next big [[Gangsta Rap]] group. However, they were derailed by legal troubles and never made it out of their underground fanbase in Flint, Michigan.

* R&B singer [[wikipedia:Miss Jones|Miss Jones]] had a lot of buzz in the mid-90s after her guest appearance on Nas' ''Sugar Hill''. Especially since she was a singer's singer. However, a lot of set backs (as well as a reportedly [[Small Name, Big Ego|bad attitude]]) derailed her music career. She went into DJing after that, hosting the morning show on the [[New York City]] rap station Hot 97, before controversy got her kicked off of that station (look up "Hot 97 tsunami song" for a particularly noteworthy sample of her antics). She's now a DJ for a [[Useful Notes/Philadelphia|Philadelphia]] radio station.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* The title character in the [[Sierra]] game ''[[The Adventures of Willy Beamish]]'' uses this line in one of the game's many [[It's a Wonderful Failure]] screens.

* While he doesn't seem bitter about it, [[Left 4 Dead]] 2's Coach used to be a potential star football player in his youth - before a knee injury meant he had to be content with being a high school coach.

 

== [[Visual Novels]] ==

* Mitsuki Hayase in ''[[Rumbling Hearts]]''. At the beginning of the story, she's already a bonafide Olympic-grade swimmer. Then, [[Wham! Episode|her best friend Haruka got hit in a car accident, all because she chatted with her other friend, Haruka's would-be boyfriend, Takayuki, way too long on his way to date Haruka]]. At that point, she became unable to swim further, eventually quits and ends up as a [[Salaryman|salary woman]]. Over time, when she passes on a swimming pool, she's always reminded with this fact. [[It Got Worse|And things just go downhill from that point on]].

** The anime version at the end also had a shot on her looking at the newspaper, and saw Haruka's sister Akane, also Mitsuki's 'protege/successor', eventually making it to the Olympic championship, which makes [[Bittersweet Ending|the ending really bittersweet]], even if Takayuki returned his love to her and promises to restart anew together.