Where Have All the Heroes Gone?

Abstract

This article argues that Jerry Maguire, For Love of the Game, and Any Given Sunday seek to explain the sporting life to American society. More specifically, an analysis of a transcendental, redemptive quest by central characters in these melodramatic films can be understood as offering reassuring cultural therapy for the omnipresent, materialismravaging, professional sports while reinforcing traditional visions of morality, gender, and middle-class ethics. The most ambiguous of the texts, Any Given Sunday, provides viewers with a choice between accepting such therapy or concluding that transcendence is fleeting cover for deeper material problems of sports celebrity. In drawing primarily from the field of rhetorical studies to analyze the therapeutic implications of the films, the authors explore the parameters of this perspective, apply it to the films, and finally, reflect on the value and meaning of the conclusions.