. . . Annie Savoy's opening monologue

DIRECTOR Ron Shelton played minor league baseball for years before retiring from the sport when he realised he'd never reach the majors and heading for Hollywood.

This hands-on knowledge and love of the sport shines through in Bull Durham.

Essentially this is a romantic comedy and a sports film rolled into one, but Shelton neatly sidesteps the cliches and conventions of both genres. Kevin Costner stars as veteran Crash Davis, who is drafted to play with the Durham Bulls to help mature and refine pitcher Calvin 'Nuke' LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), who is being groomed for the majors but described as having "a milliondollar arm and a five-cent head".

Local baseball enthusiast and groupie Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) has a tendency to take promising players under her wing and into her bed and she chooses Nuke for the season ahead, despite her obvious chemistry with Crash.

Nuke is thereafter exposed to the wildly differing methods of his new mentors . . . where Crash uses drunken brawling and insults, Annie uses bondage and poetry . . .

but it's clear that they also have lots of issues of their own to resolve, mainly their attraction to each other.

The film essentially traces the battle between experience and youth, and how the psychology of sport is entwined with the psychology of life. Where sports are often clumsily utilised in movies, Shelton uses the natural lulls in the game of baseball to drop in brilliant dialogue and add to his characters. But don't be expecting any bottom-of-the-ninth bases-loaded crescendos here, as befitting a man whose baseball career was jarringly similar to Crash's, Shelton makes sure reality has a strong hold on this film, and it's all the better for it.

Trivia

In their confrontation outside the bar Crash tells Nuke, "I hear you couldn't hit water if you fell out of a f**king boat."

The quote came from Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, who said this in 1984 in reference to San Diego Padres' Kurt Bevacqua.

There really was a baseball player in the minor leagues named Crash Davis, so director Ron Shelton had to seek him out to get permission to use his name.

When asked, the real Crash simply asked "Do I get the girl in the end?"

Shelton told him he did and Davis signed off his permission.

In the scene where the batboy says, "Get a hit, Crash", Kevin Costner adlibbed the response of "Shut up." Since the child actor didn't know this response was coming, he started crying.

In the late 1960s, Shelton played minor league baseball in the Texas League. The night before a game in Amarillo, Shelton, some teammates and Amarillo players were out partying and decided to go to the stadium and turn on the sprinkler system, thereby flooding the field and ensuring a "rainout". The scene is replicated in the film.