The curtain for The Mighty Macs rises with Cathy Rush
(played by a surprisingly blonde Carla Gugino) driving her VW Bus
through the Pennsylvania countryside to interview for the
basketball coach position at the Catholic girls-only Immaculata
College. The radio gives us the latest bulletins. News flash:
Richard Nixon, running for reelection, won’t pull U.S. troops out
of Vietnam. Extra: feminists are demanding equal pay or some such.
We don’t hear the whole thing because Rush finds it tedious and
switches it off.
This tells moviegoers two things. First, we’ve time
traveled back to early 1970s. Second, and more important, no, it’s
not going to be that kind of a movie. It’s a story about struggle
and triumph whose principal actors are women, sure. But it isn’t a
story about feminism. Rush isn’t trying to shatter glass ceilings.
She wants to coach a winning women’s team before she settles down
to raise a family with her husband, the NBA ref Ed Rush (Bones’s
David Boreanaz).
It’s going to take a lot of doing. Immaculata is a small
college teetering on the financial precipice, as the dour but
decent Monsignor (Malachy McCourt) and assorted board members and
building surveyors constantly remind us. The school’s team,
nicknamed the Macs, has a record so underwhelming that Rush is the
only applicant for the job. The gym recently burned down, so those
home games are going to be tricky.
Rush recruits a team, led by star shooter Trish Sharkey
(Katie Hayek), but quickly sees she’s in over her head. Divine
intervention arrives when the coach notices one of the nuns knows
how to shoot hoops. Sister Sunday (played by a very Christina
Ricci-looking Marley Shelton) starts out as that old movie cliché,
the Pretty Young Nun who is Questioning Her Calling, but she
quickly establishes herself as the moral center of the
film.
Sunday gives encouragement and shot-blocking tips to the
team. She stands up to Rush when the coach goes all Bobby Knight on
the girls, insisting that they have a fundamental dignity as young
women that must be respected. As they get better, the sister
reminds Rush that victory on the court is not enough. The
motivation driving them to the net is every bit as important. And
at one make-or-break point this pious nun commits what Victor Hugo
would call “an act of sacrifice” and lies through her teeth to save
the day.
It won’t ruin the ending to say that the Macs achieve some
measure of success. The Mighty Macs is based on a true story. The
Immaculata team really were national champs of women’s college
basketball from 1972 to 1974 and this is very much the authorized
version. Several members of the school’s first championship team
appear as nuns in the film.
Two behind-the-scenes struggles make The Mighty
Macs more interesting than your run-of-the-treadmill sports
flick. One is the struggle over distribution. The movie was first
shown in 2009 at Indianapolis’s Heartland Film Festival but took
some time to land a national distributor. Disney was interested but
wanted to add a few mild swears to bump it from a G to a PG rating.
Writer-director Tim Chambers said heck no, so had to find a
different distributor.
The second struggle is over Katie Hayek, or perhaps we
should say, over Hayek’s health. The Lancaster, Pennsylvania-born
actress was perfect for the role of Sharkey. She both looked and
lived the role, having played guard for the University of Miami on
a full basketball scholarship. However, just as she was cast in the
part, she found out that she had Hodgkin’s lymphoma and would need
to undergo treatment stat.
Hayek told reporters she would have understood if the
director had recast a non-cancer stricken actress in her role. But
Chambers didn’t see it that way. He decided Hayek was indispensable
and found a way to make it work. Chambers bumped her shooting
schedule up. She wore a wig throughout to mask the effects of the
chemo.
Hayek’s best scene comes when the whole team is posing for
pictures. She is poor and without good clothes, so the photographer
tries to hide her away behind the other girls. She fights back
tears and retreats to a bathroom. Rather than talk her out
immediately, her teammates go ransack their own wardrobes to help
girl her up. The affection they display for her is obvious and —
we now know — heartfelt.
