Screenwriter Tim Kelleher sat down at the Hollywood headquarters of what was then—in the mid-1990s—TriStar Pictures. A group of studio suits were there, serving up a half-baked pitch for an underdog sports tale. “They wanted to do a movie with Billy Crystal and the NBA,” Kelleher says.
Pondering plotlines, Kelleher remembered a commercial he had seen featuring the famed fishmongers from Seattle’s Pike Place Market as they flung whole salmon from 50 feet away and landed them smack atop the weighing scale. “So I was like, ?” Kelleher says. “But that just didn’t seem logistically possible. Defenders would be right on him.”
Not long after, Kelleher was getting lunch with his mentor, writer-producer Greg Fields, when talk turned to the subject of his TriStar sit-down—specifically, how Kelleher was struggling to find a more practical professional sporting specialty for his average-Joe lead character. “I was telling him about the story,” Kelleher says. “And he goes, ‘How about a field goal kicker?’”
Debuting to a national television audience on Feb. 15, 1998, the result of this conversation largely landed as a cinematic footnote at the end of a decade-long golden age of kids’ sports movies: and trilogy, to name a few. But stood apart in two notable—if contrasting—ways. First, it had easily the shortest run time, at a crisp 78 minutes. And, second, it boasted what a review described as “one of the longest titles in TV movie history,” a ridiculous, rambling eight words, 18 syllables and 55 letters (yet, exhaustingly, no hyphens or commas).
The script is no less silly, centering on a schlubby Philadelphia sanitation worker named Barney Gorman, played by a still-in-his-prime Tony Danza, who develops near-superhuman strength in his right leg from repeatedly kicking a sticky hydraulic lever on his garbage truck. He subsequently signs a contract with the Eagles after a front-office executive (Julie Stewart), while scouting potential stadium sites for the team’s new owner, serendipitously sees him booting some empty water jugs at the dump. “It’s a public relations goldmine,” the executive eagerly declares. “The field-goal-kicking garbage man!”
The gamble pays off in the movie as Gorman, taking his kicks straight on while donning a calf-high workman’s boot, wins over his initially skeptical teammates and coaches; earns a sponsorship with a trash bag manufacturer; and appears on (cover line: “The Eagle Has Landed.”) A humbling fall from grace ensues when Gorman gets cut by the Eagles after blowing two critical field goals in a loss to the Giants, gets thrown out of the house by his wife (Jessica Tuck) after a photo of another woman planting a surprise kiss on his lips at a bar appears on A1 of the local paper and gets chased away from his favorite diner by a mob of effigy-burning Eagles fans. But, in the end, Gorman finds both personal and professional redemption, begging his way back onto the roster for the regular-season finale, delivering a dramatic halftime speech and, pressed into replacement duty after accidentally concussing the team’s usual starting kicker with a celebratory headbutt, scooping up a botched snap and scoring the game-winning touchdown before retiring from football for good.
In real life, was far from a ratings bonanza then. It barely even seems to resonate now; even the dozen-plus cast and crew members contacted for this story universally expressed surprise when responding to interview requests. As veteran actor Barclay Hope, who played the concussed starting kicker, put it: “What ever possessed you to do an article on … what is it? How does it go?”
Shovel past the breathless, Chris Berman–esque title, though, and a number of hidden production gems are revealed, from actual broadcasters (including Berman and Dan Dierdorf) making on-screen cameos as themselves, to a still-current NFL owner and a then-future NFL kicker playing critical behind-the-scenes roles, to dozens more professional players appearing in a lineup of (given the budget) surprisingly realistic live-action football scenes.
And so, with real kicker Jake Elliott and his real Eagles teammates set to face the Chiefs in Super Bowl LVII on Sunday, three days before the 25th anniversary of the movie’s original airing, there’s no better time to revisit , with an oral history as unnecessarily long as its title.
