3/5 easy on ourselves...
  by k3... (vt...)
a lesson well learnt not to be so hard on people and animals etc i also read the book an also comparring to florence nightingale as a biography or non fiction seems well and bill rusels book good to well structured as if building a building etc ....an some of billy jean kings an hills of home ....

4/5 fear strikes out
  by Srenam (Danville, Indiana, USA)
I saw this on tv when I was a boy. It gave me a better understanding of where I was headed as a player.

4/5 The Classic Tale Of Pushy Parents
  by Craig Connell (Lockport, NY USA)
I still remember seeing this as a Little League-age kid in the theater as our family was vacationing in Florida.

When I saw it again, some 40 years later, parts of the film were still very familiar, a testimony to how powerful some of these scenes were. I never forgot them.

This was a based-on-a-true-life account of major league baseball player Jimmy Piersall, a very talented player who suffered a nervous breakdown. The enormous pressure to succeed that was driven into him by his never-satisfied father was pictured as the cause which made him snap.

Anthony Perkins, who plays Piersall, and Karl Madlen, who portrays his dad, are both excellent, riveting characters. Some say this was Malden's best performance ever. Perkins was no slouch, either. This is the classic sports story of an overzealous parent living his or her dreams through their child.

The baseball segment of this film ended about halfway through. From that point, after Perkins breaks down at the park, climbing the backstop fence in a horrifying scene, the film actually gets even more interesting with everyone in the film contributing although the cast, after Perkins and Malden, is a pretty much an unknown-name one.

The only unrealistic part of the film, typical of sports films until the 1980s, was seeing an actor play a ballplayer when he "throws like a girl," as the old expression went. The younger actor playing Piersall as a kid was no better than Perkins in this regard. Neither had a clue how to a throw a ball. It looks corny nowadays.

Oh, well. That wasn't the focus of the story, anyway. As powerful as this film was, it apparently didn't have much of an effect as pushy parents in sports still exist and probably always will, taking the fun out of sports for a number of kids.

It's still a memorable film and worth your time today, especially if you have never seen it.


4/5 Demons on the Diamond
  by Mr. Richard D. Coreno (Berea, Ohio USA)
This is not supposed to happen in professional sports, with our heroes who wear the uniforms of our home team....right?

Director Robert Mulligan tackles what remains a delicate issue, mental illness - bipolar disorder - of an athlete, in this 1957 release based on the nervous breakdown of Boston Red Sox player Jimmy Piersall and his struggle to get back to the major leagues while confronting his personal demons.

Anthony Perkins portrays Piersall and Karl Malden turns in an outstanding performance as his father (John Piersall), who is driven to get his son into the majors and has such tunnel-vision that he does not see the price being paid through his demanding ways.

Though Jimmy Piersall reportedly was highly critical of the movie, Perkins does an excellent job in delving into the serious issues of the star power at a young age - Piersall signed a pro contract at the age of 18 and saw action with the Red Sox two years later - the stigma of mental illness in pro sports and the ramifications of a dysfunctional family when a child is driven to succeed for all the wrong reasons.

The batter's box in life can be daunting, especially when every pitch seems to be coming wild, high and tight. To hit the demons out of that ballpark makes this movie - that happens to have a baseball motif - even more special.

5/5 Chiling and revealing.
  by L. K Reyes (Warrenton, Virginia)
Anthony Perkins does an incredible job of portraying someone with bi-polar disorder. If I were in charge of the Academy Awards I would have given him the oscar for this role. His acting was phenomenal. The movie is very serious. It is well done and they treat the subject matter of Jimmy Pearsal's illness very delicately. It is an excellent movie, however, not one for a happy-go-lucky evening. It is more for a serious evening. The only flaw I saw in the movie is that they never portrayed the more entertaining side of Jimmy Pearsal. l had the opportunity to meet him in person at the old-timey Birmingham Baron baseball game and I can say that the movie only portrayed the ailing side of his personality and not his entertaining side. Nonetheless, it is an incredible movie.