'Bull Durham' director Ron Shelton was 'always getting banned' coaching Little League, argued like Earl Weaver

Ron Shelton has endured for decades in Hollywood but lasted only a few years as a Little League coach.

“I’d go out and argue like Earl Weaver and you’re not supposed to do that,” says Shelton, the creator of such sports cinematic classics as “Bull Durham,” “Tin Cup” and “White Men Can’t Jump.”

“I was always getting banned, and I was getting on the parents for spoiling their kids. 'Why isn’t my kid pitching?’ ’Cause he’s terrible! That’s why!’”

Shelton, whose son is now 15, recalls a moment when a player on his team asked, “Am I getting better?”

“‘No,” was his answer.

“The parents came up to me the next day and said, ‘You really said my kid wasn’t getting better?’” Shelton tells USA TODAY Sports. “I said, ‘Yes, I told him the truth.’ They said, ‘Well, thank you for telling him the truth. We don’t know how.’ It was like, ‘Well, you got a problem.’ ”

Shelton compares his coaching style to that of Morris Buttermaker, the crotchety coach played by Walter Matthau in “The Bad News Bears.” Shelton doesn’t necessarily like happy endings. The movies he writes and directs are built around character development and cut deeper than victory and defeat.

“I just don’t like sports movies where somebody hits a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth to win,” he says.

In “Bull Durham,” Kevin Costner plays Crash Davis, an aging catcher who has been to the major leagues but is sent down to Class A ball to mentor a young, reckless and supremely talented pitcher, Nuke LaLoosh (played by Tim Robbins). The movie is a romantic comedy, as Davis and LaLoosh vie for the attention of Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), but is modeled on a Western.

“I loved Westerns growing up, in this sense: Crash is a gunslinger; he goes from town to town wherever he’s hired, doing highly skilled and highly professional work for very little recognition, except for whatever they’re paying him,” Shelton says.

“And, like the classic Western gunslinger, he has no past, he has no background. Now, his entire past is 21 days in the major leagues but you don’t know where he grew up. Did he go to college? Did he go to J.C.? Did he sign out of high school? Who were his parents? Was his dad a working-class guy? There’s not one thing. But with Nuke, his dad’s there taking pictures of him and going to Annie’s house with him. So you can fill in the backgrounds of these characters, and in Crash’s case, he’s kind of mysterious.”

Since the COVID-19 pandemic has paralyzed the country, and people are home watching movies but not live sports, Shelton has found himself doing a lot of interviews about “Bull Durham.” He shared some of his other favorite sports movies with USA TODAY:

“The Hustler” (1961): “The pool-shooting movie with Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason and George C. Scott. Three powerhouses. It’s Minnesota Fats and Fast Eddie, pool hustlers. It’s the greatest movie about competition and gambling and the human psyche. It’s a black and white movie. It’s not anything your kid couldn’t watch, but your kid would be bored because it’s about grown-up issues of mortality and risk and reward. But it’s really, really well done.”

“This Sporting Life” (1963): “Directed by Lindsay Anderson, starring Richard Harris as a kind of rugby player, also kind of a drinking, brawling blue-collar guy.”

“The Bad News Bears” (1976): “Having coached Little League, I think the original is pretty good. I coached my kid for 2 or 3 years and I kept getting kicked out of the game for swearing ... So I ended up being a lot like Matthau, I’m afraid. I had to retire from coaching Little League but I’ve always liked that movie.”

"Sugar" (2008): “A Latin player in the minor leagues, bouncing around, the whole cultural, social adjustment.”

Shelton was asked if he had seen “The Perfect Game,” the 2010 film detailing the rise of an underdog team from Monterrey, Mexico, to the 1957 Little League World Series.

“I haven’t seen that one, though I was in Mexico, in Monterrey a number of years ago, because I want to do a Latin baseball movie I’ve been trying to get off the ground for a while,” Shelton says. “And I was with the owner behind home plate of the Monterrey team. And I asked him, with a translator, I said, ‘Wait a minute! Monterrey. This is where, in 1957, you had the famous team with that pitcher who pitched lefty and righty, Angel Macias.’

“And he goes, ‘Yes, do you want to meet him?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ And he screams, ‘Angel! Angel! Angel!’ And Angel, who was in his ‘60s or 70s comes over, and he’s a god there. And he runs the baseball academy outside of town, which is the place where prospects from Mexico, if they’re chosen, get to go there for a summer and train at the highest level. So, it was really kind of neat to see the resonance of all of that a half a century later.”