Sport and Cinema.com

He has played a dying baseball player, a crazy fan and won an Oscar portraying boxer Jake LaMotta, now Robert DeNiro is set in the lead role as legendary NFL coach Vince Lombardi

Nee-How Ma from Beijing where your intrepid reporter has scaled the Great Wall, survived the worst sand storm in four years as well as meals of boiled seaweed, spiced jellyfish and pickled shark intestines (and that’s breakfast!) to relay a bit of sports history I witnessed here Sunday night.

One of baseball’s most charismatic and talented players of all-time is presented in a rich and engrossing new biography that goes well beyond the amazing statistics. Still the numbers reflect the ultimate “five-tool” player:

Oscar-winning actress Sandra Bullock leads a group of four football films as the leading-All-American winners at the box office. The star of “The Blind Side” who portrays NFL lineman Michael Oher’s adoptive mother, teams with the director of “The Rookie” John Lee Hancock to deliver a popular picture.

In a role that carries the ball forward in a picture based on a true story, Sandra Bullock’s performance as Leigh Anne Tuohy, a gutsy, self-confident, well-off Southern woman with hyper-protective instincts garnered her an Oscar as Best Actress at the 82nd Annual Academy Awards held Sunday.

Cable network FX will present a new dramatic series with a pugilistic backdrop.

“Lights Out” centers on an aging former heavyweight boxing champion (Holt McCallany as Patrick “Lights” Leary) who struggles to support his orthopedic surgeon wife and three daughters after his fighting days are over (don’t doctors make pretty good coin?).