Bull Durham

Bull Durham is a 1988 American movie about love and baseball. It is based upon the minor league experiences of writer/director Ron Shelton. Bull Durham stars Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. It depicts the players and fans of the Durham Bulls, a minor league baseball team in Durham, North Carolina. Also featured are Robert Wuhl and Max Patkin, the "Clown Prince of Baseball."

Summary

Costner stars as 'Crash' Davis (the name based on an actual baseball player), a veteran of countless years in the minor leagues unwillingly sent down to single-A Bulls for a specific purpose: to educate a hotshot rookie pitcher 'Nuke' LaLoosh (Robbins, playing a character loosely based on Steve Dalkowski) about being a major-league talent, and to get Nuke to control his haphazard pitching. Thrown into the mix is Annie (Sarandon, the character named from the 'baseball Annie' groupies), a life-long spiritual seeker who latched onto the 'Church of Baseball' and has, every year, taken on a prospect with the Bulls to be a lover/student. Annie flirts with Crash and Nuke but Crash walks out, noting he's too much a veteran to 'try out' for anything, although before leaving he and Annie share some sparks of mutual interest.

Related Topics:
Steve Dalkowski - Baseball Annie - Church

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Annie and Crash then work, in their own way, and with a lot of animosity from Crash, to shape Nuke into a big-league pitcher: Annie by playing mild bondage games, reading poetry to Nuke, and getting the rookie to think in alternative ways; Crash by forcing Nuke to learn 'not to think', by letting the catcher make the pitching calls (memorably at two points telling the batters what pitch was coming after Nuke had shaken off Crash's calls), and lecturing to Nuke about the major leagues with both the pressure in facing big league hitters that can hit Nuke's 'heat' (fastballs) and the pleasure of enjoying life in 'The Show' that Crash briefly lived for "the twenty-one best days of my life" and has tried desperately for years to get back to. Meanwhile, as Nuke matures the relationship between Annie and Crash grows, until it becomes obvious that the two of them are right for each other, except for the fact that Annie's with Nuke now...

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