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Josh Wilker
The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training
Josh Wilker studied writing at Johnson State College
and Vermont College. He writes about his life through his
childhood baseball cards at http://cardboardgods.net and in
his book Cardboard Gods (2010). He lives with his wife in
Chicago.
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also available in this series:
They Live by Jonathan Lethem
Death Wish by Christopher Sorrentino
The Sting by Matthew Specktor
Lethal Weapon by Chris Ryan
Heathers by John Ross Bowie
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Deep Focus
The Bad News
Bears in Breaking
Training
Josh Wilker
Series Editor, Sean Howe
Soft Skull Press
an imprint of Counterpoint | berkeley
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Copyright © 2011 by Josh Wilker
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilker, Josh.
The bad news bears in breaking training / Josh Wilker; edited by
Sean Howe.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-59376-418-0
1. Bad news bears in breaking training (Motion picture) I. Howe, Sean.
II. Title.
PN1997.B1955W55 2011
791.43—dc22
2011005457
Cover design by Spacesick
Interior design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
Soft Skull Press
An Imprint of Counterpoint LLC
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.softskull.com
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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The Bad News Bears
in Breaking Training
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1
Stolen Vehicle
Dear Looper,
This will probably end up in a cruddy post office dumpster. No one
is ever where they were. I found it while clearing out some junk after
my old man croaked. A billion years ago I probably wanted to send
it to you from Houston but we came right back too fast. Recognize the
picture on the front? It is nothing now. They want to tear it down.
I remember when we first saw it from inside. We walked out onto
the field and wowed like a pack of stumbling drunks. The crowd the
giant scoreboard the dome roof way up high. It was the best thing
and I mean ever. You should have been there Looper and you were you
always will be. Thats all I wanted to say.
Your pal,
Tanner Boyle
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Flaws
Love has nothing to do with perfection. The world is ban-
daged together, a fractured thing at best. Light leaks out the
cracks. That’s how I try to see it.
So let me start with a brief, relatively inconsequential
moment in the latter stages of the 1977 sequel The Bad News
Bears in Breaking Training. A flaw. The central figure, an under-
appreciated and largely forgotten American icon named Kelly
Leak, troubled and rebellious star slugger of a Little League
baseball team, the Bears, is shown in full, from the side, reach-
ing to pull back the curtain in his hotel room. The next shot
shows Kelly’s arm and the view out the uncovered window.
The view is an enclosed stadium in Houston, Texas: the As-
trodome. The outside of the Astrodome has been shown once
before from another vantage point and will be shown once
more, later, from a third, just before the film moves inside
the stadium for its climactic final act. No matter the vantage
point, the view always looks the same: a large, impersonal,
symmetrical structure surrounded by pavement. In the earlier
shot, Kelly considered the Astrodome from behind the wheel
of a customized van. Later, he will gaze upon it from the park-
ing lot at dusk. The three viewings of the Astrodome seem,
considering Kelly’s pensive squint and the swelling orchestral
regalia in the soundtrack, to be meant as moments of reckon-
ing, as if Kelly is grappling with the sense that his destiny lies
within the looming symmetrical construction.
2 | josh wilker
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I never really understood the idea of destiny. Life seems
random to me, asymmetrical, entropic. It doesn’t add up. I
find myself drawn to ragged narratives, bumbling human sin-
cerity, the flawed. Which brings us back around, finally, to
this: in the brief scene in the hotel room, Kelly is shown in
full, from the side, pulling the drapes toward his body; then
in the next shot, which is aimed out the window at the As-
trodome, at the idea of destiny, Kelly’s arm is visible, and it is
pushing the drapes away from his body.
It’s a continuity mistake. The interior shot was taken in a
hotel in California while the view of the Astrodome was taken
in Houston. And so somewhere in between the two shots, the
tiny detail of whether Kelly was pulling the drapes toward
him or pushing them away was fumbled. It’s probably not
something you would consciously notice unless you watched
the movie repeatedly, as I have. But somewhere in your sub-
conscious an undercutting, discordant note would sound, a
little jagged flicker, a minute puncturing and subsequent in-
finitesimal deflation of an ideal. Symmetry, destiny: illusions.
This movie, which I loved at first sight as much as I’ve
ever loved any movie, is sprinkled with these subtly unset-
tling fuckups. It was cheaply and quickly made. Unimportant
objects appear and disappear unaccountably. East is west,
dusk is dawn. Shadows of camera equipment and boom mikes
flicker in and out of one scene and a muffled, disembodied
voice bleeds into another. The away team is the home team.
The home team is the away team. Rules are blurred, batting
orders jumbled. Upon close inspection, the movie begins
to resemble a dream in the mind of a sleeper on the edge of
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