KEVIN COSTNER knew McFarland, California, growing up.
“I was down the road, about 45 miles, in Visalia,” he says. “When I was in high school, my baseball team played those guys. I knew a little about that world. I had this little connection, and I was moved by the story and I wanted to help tell it.”
“This story,” in the new Disney sports drama McFarland, USA, is the true tale of how a dead-end town, surrounded by farm fields, whose population was migrant Hispanic laborers and their descendants, was transformed by its high-school cross country team. Kids, who worked with their families, mornings, nights and weekends, became the star long distance runners in a state where, as in much of America, cross country is a prep-school sport.
“The miraculous thing about this story was this town wasn’t growing anything but vegetables and this prison, where a lot of young men there ended up finding themselves locked up,” says Costner, who first heard about McFarland’s farm worker kids and their nine state titles in a Sports Illustrated article over a dozen years ago. “Prison was the endgame for a lot of these kids, because they couldn’t find meaningful work to get out and advance themselves. The idea of a high school and a prison co-existing the way they do, in a community this size, was a really interesting backdrop…that team gave this town a new identity.”
The sports lover, star of Bull Durham, Field of Dreams and Tin Cup, also saw the novelty in this familiar up-from-poverty sports drama.
“To win one championship is hard enough. To win nine, you’ve got to wonder, ‘What’s in the water down there?’” Costner plays Jim White, a physical education teacher who is a fish out of water in this alien, Hispanic world in 1987 McFarland. Though the script “takes a little license with the real Jim White” (think Hoosiers), he was a man who looked out at kids bent over tomato plants all day and saw stamina and stoicism.
“These kids on that team back in the ‘80s, they’d wake up at 4:30 in the morning to pick in the fields,” says Carlos Pratts, who plays Thomas, the star of McFarland’s team, a boy whose family needs his picking income to make ends meet. “They’d pick, go to school then come home, go to sleep and do it all over again. Add in the running, and you have to wonder if these kids were machines. They were our inspirations.”
The flat farm country around McFarland isn’t the best place to train for races in the nearby mountains and foothills. So, in the movie, Coach White has the kids run up and down canvas-covered mountains of almonds, picked by farm labor from the local trees.
“They really did that, and those mounds are still there, real people picked them and real kids ran up and down them to train,” says Hector Duran, who plays another runner on that first McFarland team. “Amazing. It’s about using the resources that you have.”
McFarland, USA is earning glowing reviews, with critics suggesting that, as formulaic as the story can seem, Costner’s “slyly enjoyable lead performance” (Variety) makes it work.
Costner’s name got the movie made, and one reason he decided to sign on was recognizing “the coaches, the teachers who stay. These kids won nine championships, and Jim White’s journey was to immerse himself in a community so thoroughly that this triumph could happen,” Costner says. “In the psychology of success, you do something, you master it, you move on and up. And out. Jim didn’t do that. He stayed.
“There was an important coach in my life who did the exact same thing…. There are teachers that just stay. It’s not just because it’s more comfortable. It’s because they have something to give this place and they see how important that is.
Roger Moore / Tribune News Service