Sport and Cinema.com

On August 28, 1982, Cody Webster and a small group of schoolyard friends from Kirkland, Wash., sat anxiously in a dugout waiting to take the field for the championship game of the Little League World Series.

The Journey of the Youth Olympic Flame got under way today in Olympia, Greece, with the lighting of the flame at an official ceremony outside the famed Temple of Hera.

Baseball’s Midsummer Classic returns to Anaheim Tuesday for the third time since the All-Star Game began in 1933, but the event has changed quite a bit since the city first hosted the exhibition (in 1967 when the NL won in dramatic fashion on a Tony Perez home run in the 15th inning).

LW Alexander Ovechkin Capitals; C Sidney Crosby, Penguins;RW Jaromir Jagr, Penguins-Capitals-Ducks;D Nicklas Lidstrom, Red Wings;D Chris Pronger, Blues-Oilers-Ducks-Flyers;G Martin Brodeur, Devils

Where did the author stand? Primarily in centerfield. The former Phillie, Cubs and Ranger player, Doug Glanville presents a cornucopia of the everyday occurrences, rituals and pressures that operate hand-in-hand as a major league ballplayer.

Staging its first film festival and in such historic settings as Grauman’s Chinese and Egyptian Theaters along Hollywood Boulevard now through Sunday, Turner Classic Films, the American broadcast authority on classic cinema, is celebrating some of the best movies ever made.

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

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:

In one of his earliest starring roles, Robert Redford gives a memorable portrait of an inarticulate, self-absorbed, but gifted world class skier obsessed with being the best, no matter the cost.
Taking on the sport’s best downhillers on the circuits of Europe with dreams of Olympic glory, David Chappellet’s (Redford) selfish clashes with his U.S. national team coach (Gene Hackman) can be summed up when he tells him, “I ski fast and that’s all there is to it”.

This beautifully-packaged, digitally preserved celebration of the Fall Classic is a magnificent collection of all the drama and unforgettable moments of the World Series.

Encased in a hardcover book that includes a 58-page pictorial retrospective going back to the event’s origins in 1903, are 65 films on 20 DVDs representing nearly 50 hours of restored and newly digitized masters going back to 1943.