SORTING OUT A SHORT LIFE IN SPORTS

Irwin Shaw’s early short story “The Eighty-Yard Run” has been for many of us the perfect summing-up of those American lives in which everything after the Big Game--wives, children, jobs, travel, everything--is a letdown, anticlimactic.

Shaw’s man, a not very successful traveling salesman for Ivy League suits, revisits the campus where he once made an 80-yard run. Watching football practice, he relives the moment, but also the untidy disappointments of his life since. In Shaw’s tough revelation, memory and the retellings have even made the moment more than it ever was. The man is a lot of men you know.

Ron Shelton, who played five years of professional baseball in the Baltimore Orioles farm system before he turned screen writer, has written a new movie, “The Best of Times,” which looks very amusingly indeed at the other side of the coin toss: the man who can’t live down his failure in the Big Game.

In “The Best of Times,” warmly reviewed by Michael Wilmington in Calendar last week, Robin Williams can’t forget, and no one will let him forget, that he dropped the last-second pass that would have let Taft (Calif.) High defeat its traditional rival, Bakersfield.

Shelton grew up in Santa Barbara and played ball at Santa Barbara High and Westmont College before turning pro. (His teammates on the ’71 Rochester Red Wings included Don Baylor and Bobby Grich.)

When his father told him about an alumni football game between Santa Barbara and San Marcos high schools, organized as a charity fund-raiser for athletics programs cut by Prop. 13, Shelton seized on it with a writer’s thirst for a good, nourishing premise. (The game drew a crowd of 10,000, and among the alumni who wanted to play was Sam Cunningham of the New England Patriots; he was barred on account of being in shape.)

Shelton’s father and grandfather had lived in Taft, and for Shelton, growing up, the town had an almost legendary feeling (“tumbleweeds and oil derricks,” he says). It was once called Moron, and had endured an invasion by mice (consumed by sea gulls). It seemed a perfect setting.

The movie’s notion is the second chance, the possibility of the really delayed replay in which Williams gets another shot at catching the fateful pass, presuming his old teammate Kurt Russell can get the arm in shape. (Russell now runs a body shop; Williams works in his father-in-law’s bank.)

Shelton has slyly-written fun attacking the tyranny of Monday-night football, with rebellious wives, fraternal organizations and the snarling fervor of alumni boosters. But the persistence of the sports past is Shelton’s principal theme no less than Shaw’s; it’s just seen from the sunny side of the street.

Shelton, who played second base, quit the game in 1972 at the age of 24. “I had a good contract with a very good organization. But I was still in the minors, lifetime batting average .265. Where but in sports can you be a has-been at 24? I didn’t see a future.”

He did a variety of jobs to support a wife and two children, went to graduate school and came to Los Angeles as a painter and sculptor. He made a short film about one of his pieces and it was accepted by Filmex. “There I was, with a captive audience of 1,500 people, all for a little film I’d made for $2,000. I was hooked.”

He began writing in 1979 and has sold six scripts. Two have been produced thus far. The first to be filmed, which was also his first collaboration with the English director Roger Spottiswoode, who did “The Best of Times,” was “Under Fire,” the remarkable drama about journalists amid the Nicaraguan revolution, with Nick Nolte, Gene Hackman and Joanna Cassidy.

“ ‘The Best of Times’ is as lighthearted as I get or am likely to get,” Shelton says. His next project with Spottiswoode, in negotiations now, is what he calls a tough, dark comedy, “The Button,” about nuclear warfare.

It derives from a retired general’s remark that the real danger is that the strategists in both superpowers have lost all sense of the intimacy of violence. The Swiftian solution: a system in which you have to kill a living human being to get at the button which, when pushed, will kill 200 million human beings. “Dr. Strangelove” is, of course, the role model for the comedy of horror, and “The Button” sounds darkly funny, however hollow the laughter may be.

What Shelton wants to do eventually, defying the conventional wisdom that baseball films don’t make money, is a movie about minor league ball: the endless bus rides, the primitive ball parks, the intense competition among men determined to make the majors, the isolation from all other considerations except hitting, fielding and throwing, and the poverty.

“When I was playing,” he says, “the meal allowance in triple-A ball was $7.50 a day, the salary $500 a month. In class-A ball the allowance was $3. You ate a lot of 19-cent hamburgers and had a lot of meals in bus stations. Even so, at the end of every month you ended up owing the batboy. The batboy always had money.”

One of his first (unsold) scripts was about baseball, called “A Player to Be Named Later” (a wonderful title). He’d like to rewrite it, now that he has a deeper perspective on both baseball and the movies. (He worked as a second-unit director on both “Under Fire” and “The Best of Times,” a useful and uncommon way for the writer to stay close to a project from start to finish.)

What he brings back most sharply from the baseball days becomes the core of “The Best of Times.”

“Oh, you remember the home runs,” Shelton says. “In some parks they would get you a free meal. But what you can’t forget are the times you left the winning run on third.”