A Hero for All Seasons: Pride of the Yankees, Brian’s Song, and the Athlete as Christ-Figure

Abstract

This study examines Pride of the Yankees and Brian’s Song, two biographical sports films tracing the stories of baseball legend Lou Gehrig and 1960s back up NFL running back Brian Piccolo. The paper argues that the two films are fundamentally the same narrative, a Christ-figure story in which the too young death of the sports hero rhetorically resolves a social tension of the time. As portrayed in the films, Gehrig’s death offers a vision of American soldiers as transcendent heroes created on baseball diamonds while Piccolo’s story presents a vision of America as transcending the pollution of racism that has perpetually clouded its social order. Each film creates a rhetoric of transcendence from a dramatistic reconstruction of the basic data of the athlete’s life.