Live Life Team
This film is one of those that leave me depressed. This type of a film leaves me wondering how intelligent people can throw away success, money, fame and a great career just for a relatively small sum of cash.
This film is based on the Black Sox scandal of 1918 where members of the White Sox baseball team accepted bribes to deliberately lose the World Series. Of course, they may have lost anyway, but that is not the point. They accepted money from a group of people who had significant bets running on the game and didn’t want to chance letting anything go wrong.
They approached the key players and offered them what probably seemed like a fantastic sum of money for doing what really amounted to very little work: simply don’t play with the same skill as the team always gave to every game. They took the bribe and destroyed everything they had worked so hard to achieve up until that point.
Of course, like most scams, this one eventually came to light. When it did, not only had the involved players destroyed their reputations, their careers and their standing in a community that admired them, but the fans had also lost something precious. They were forced to face the fact that the players they had so adored were just as human as they were — subject to human greed and temptation just like everybody else.
By the end of the film I was left feeling depressed, not because I’m a fan of baseball — because I’m not — but more because I would have thought that back in that time players had a higher sense of morality than perhaps we see in professional sports today.
You don’t need to understand baseball to follow this movie. You just have to understand a bit about human nature and how disappointing it can sometimes be.
