The following notes on Slap Shot were written by Will Quade, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. A 35mm print of Slap Shot will screen at 7 p.m. on Saturday, January 25, the eve of Paul Newman’s centennial. The screening takes place at 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free.
By Will Quade
There is a conspicuous lack of glamor in the sports film classic Slap Shot. Despite the prestige of its Academy Award-winning director George Roy Hill and megastar Paul Newman as central protagonist Reggie Dunlop, the film’s opening scenes betray its gritty, but cutting, comedic tone. Sleepy-eyed Canadian goalie Denis Lemieux (Yvon Barrette) is forced to sit backstage awkwardly with foolishly toupeéd local sports television personality Jim Carr (Andrew Duncan) to promote the next game for the town’s hockey team. Next, at the sparsely attended match, Reggie speaks with the opposing team captain who openly admits to being skunk-drunk before the middling crowd hurls obscenities at their hometown players. All begrudgingly stand for the national anthem while the credits roll over a limp American flag.
Hill’s film is one of many sports films from the 1970s to highlight modern sports violence and satirize the bloodlust of fans, promoters, and players alike all while alluding to this being “about America” in some way. Norman Jewison’s Rollerball (1975) makes violence a central, gravely serious theme while Robert Aldrich’s The Longest Yard (1975) plays it mainly for laughs (until the hits are too much to take). Slap Shot is different, however, in its focus on athletes on the teddy-fringes of legitimate success rather than professional stars or criminals.
Taking place in the fictional town of Charlestown, Pennsylvania, the Charlestown Chiefs are a rinky-dink minor-league hockey club with many players having to take other jobs to make ends meet. Reggie is completely shocked when it is revealed that the town steel mill will be closing, losing over 10,000 jobs in the process. However, he is able to funnel the demoralization of the town into his team by instilling a culture of “gooning,” wherein his players are incentivized to start fights with opposing teams to increase popularity and, in effect, wins. After enlisting a trio of goonish brothers to fill up the roster, the team’s success starts to get out of hand and Reggie finds himself as something of a union representative for his squad in a desperate attempt to save the team from being sold off by their secluded, callous owner, Anita McCambridge (Kathryn Walker).
Newman’s star persona makes Reggie the unimpeachable leader of his ragtag group and, until the end of his life, he cited it as one of his most cherished roles. A hockey player in his youth, his skating and movement on the ice is more than passable, but it is his blistering foul language – words that didn’t even come out of the mouth of Cool Hand Luke (1967) – that is even more impressive to behold. He later told Time Magazine that he could never quite shake off the cursing after never having a particularly notable potty-mouth before shooting. His third film with Hill after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973), Slap Shot is a much different role for Newman with none of the period sweetness nor an angelic Robert Redford to soften the film’s violence and satiric cynicism.
But the film wasn’t Newman’s or Hill’s brainchild. Rather it was screenwriter Nancy Dowd who was inspired by her brother Ned’s career as a minor-league hockey player and wrote the script after months of research. Slap Shot’s kind of realism was important not only to her, but for the entire era of sports films and culture. A new emphasis on realism and authenticity made for a slew of tell-all sports memoirs detailing the violence of football such as Dave Meggysey’s Out of Their League (1971). Meanwhile football films such as Paper Lion (1968), Number One (1969), Semi-Tough (1977), and Black Sunday (1977) all utilized the facilities of NFL Films to create “real” football sequences that would match a live contest’s intensity.
Slap Shot, for all its satirizing, was based firmly on the real experiences of players and managers in minor-league hockey. Nancy Dowd based Dunlop on real-life player/coach John Brophy while the film’s climactic, notorious goon Ogie Oglethorpe (played by Ned Dowd) was based on the legendary Bill “Goldie” Goldthorpe, who amassed 25 fighting infractions in one half of one season in 1973. Screenwriter Dowd diligently captures the dialogue of the players to include their relentless cursing and limited vocabulary. Attuned to the rapid deindustrialization occurring in the Midwest which had only accelerated over three different presidential administrations, she also distills how the violence of the game is only as brutal as the conditions for its working-class protagonists outside the arena. Her ear for realistic dialogue and character made her something of a star script doctor after the film’s release. She won an Academy Award the next year for co-writing Hal Ashby’s Vietnam weepie Coming Home, served as the first (and longest tenured) screenwriter on another sports satire, Ted Kotcheff’s North Dallas Forty (1979), and wrote anchoring drafts of Redford’s Ordinary People (1980).
Despite (or because of) its commitment to authenticity, Slap Shot was controversial and merely “just successful” upon its release. Newman’s prickly character and the film’s highly regional drama may have contributed to it being a non-blockbuster, while its ambiguous perspective on violence in sport, and America, made reviews particularly divisive. However, the film has become a cult classic and, almost fifty years later, this authentic depiction of hockey culture has created scores of new fans, whether you’ve played the sport or not. Its coarse language and bloody set-pieces still puncture – Newman’s iconic send-off to Anita regarding her son before the climactic game feels especially abrasive in 2025. Still, his anger is righteous and so is Dowd’s. At the end of the day, what damage can bad manners and cheating in sport really cause compared to the thousands of jobs being stripped away from workers and their families?