If there’s something that sports movies always get right, it's an inspirational quote or speech. Most of those stories are about an underdog athlete or team, and a great, inspiring, halftime speech by the coach before the big game, changes minds, and melts audiences’ hearts. And some of those speeches are so good, that they can be applied to anyone’s life outside of sports, as they’re usually about teamwork, effort, and doing things the right way to get the right results.
Some of these speeches were made by fake coaches, but delivered by great actors like Al Pacino or Gene Hackman, while others were made by real-life coaches like Herb Brooks, or Gary Gaines. All of them will give you chills, and get you in a mental space to get to work in whatever your line of work is, as they’re as inspiring as they come. Here are the all-time 10 most inspirational quotes from sports movies, ranked.
10 “Ducks fly together!” - D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994)
When Emilio Estevez decided to do a film about coaching ice hockey to kids, nobody would’ve thought that the film would get two sequels, a TV series 20 years later, and would convince Disney to buy an NHL team called the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. This quote is said in the second film, D2: The Mighty Ducks, when his Gordon Bombay has lost focus on the team now that he’s a famous coach, and without his guidance, the team has lost its way. This simple sentence makes the group and audience remember what they did in the first film, and that they’re only going to win if they play like a team.
9 “Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory lasts forever.” - The Replacements (2000)
Inspired by the 1987 NFL strike, The Replacements tells the story of a team of nobodies who get their big break as professional football players for the first and (probably) last time in one of the best underdog football movies out there. They’re in their last game together, and the team must score to go to the playoffs, so their could’ve-been-great quarterback, Shane Falco (Keanu Reeves), gives this cheesy speech to his teammates, reminding them that they’re just normal guys, but that today, they can be destined for glory if they’re able to score a touchdown. The quote is much funnier than most on the list, but that’s also what makes it great.
8 “Being perfect is not about the scoreboard.” - Friday Night Lights (2004)
“Being perfect is not about that scoreboard out there. It's not about winning. It's about you and your relationship with yourself, your family and your friends. Being perfect is about being able to look your friends in the eye and know that you didn't let them down because you told them the truth. And that truth is you did everything you could. There wasn't one more thing you could've done. Can you live in that moment as best you can, with clear eyes, and love in your heart, with joy in your heart? If you can do that gentleman - you're perfect!”
That’s the whole quote that coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) tells his team, making it one of the best half-time speeches ever written, and it's even better when he’s been telling them all season to be perfect, giving it a new meaning here. The Friday Night Lights TV series is so good, that some don’t remember that before the show, there was an equally great Friday Night Lightsmovie, where Thornton delivered this incredible speech. It’s even more impressive once you know that Thornton ad-libbed some parts of it.
7 “In this life, you don’t have to prove nothin’ to nobody but yourself.” - Rudy (1993)
Based on the real-life story of Notre Dame’s Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiner; Rudy is one of Sean Astin’s best performances in his whole career. This is the tale of a small kid who loves football and has been practicing with the Notre Dame team, but never gets to play, so he decides to quit the team, This is the answer his coach, Fortune (Charles S. Dutton), gives him; that changes the way Rudy thinks, making him work even harder and win the respect of the rest of the team. The whole quote is: “In this lifetime, you don’t have to prove nothin’ to nobody but yourself. And after what you’ve gone through, if you haven’t done that by now, it ain’t gonna never happen.”
6 “The inches we need are everywhere around us…” - Any Given Sunday (1999)
Coach Tony D’Amato’s (Al Pacino) full quote is: "You find out life's this game of inches, so is football. Because in either game - life or football - the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don't quite make it. One-half second too slow, too fast and you don't quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They're in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when add up all those inches, that's gonna make the fu*king difference between winning and losing! Between living and dying!"
Any Given Sunday is a film about what really goes on behind the scenes of a football team, and might have been much more prescient than it seemed back then, as it already talked about concussions, money, and fame, and that’s what makes it one of Oliver Stone’s best films. The movie is all about spectacle, but at the end of the day, what’s more important is fighting for what you believe in, something all of us have had to do at one moment or another, making it not just an inspiring quote for those playing ball, but also for the rest of us.
5 “If you put your effort and concentration into playing to your potential…” - Hoosiers (1986)
Hoosiers was one of the first inspirational sports movies, and that’s thanks to both Gene Hackman and Dennis Hopper’s performances, but also because of the script that shows the whole process the team goes through to get to the possibility of winning the game in the final shot.
It also helps writing inspirational speeches like this one, and having Hackman deliver it, showing the vulnerable and loving side of a character that has been tough with his players: “If you put your effort and concentration into playing to your potential, to be the best that you can be, I don't care what the scoreboard says at the end of the game, in my book we're gonna be winners.” proving that effort is always more important than results, as with one, the other will come eventually.
4 “People will come, Ray” - Field of Dreams (1989)
The whole quote in Field of Dreams, told by Terence Mann (James Earl Jones and his very distinguishable voice), is: “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.”
This quote, which still gives audiences chills, encapsulates the magic of baseball in America, and it’s so beautiful that the lead character, Ray (Kevin Costner), is inspired to build a stadium where the ghosts of baseball legends will go to play. It’s impossible to hear this quote and not want to put a baseball game on, as it’s the most beautiful way to distill why this game is so important to the country.
3 “Wax on, right hand. Wax off, left hand. Wax on, wax off.” - The Karate Kid (1984)
The Karate Kid is another underdog story, as Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) asks his neighbor, Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), to train him after he's been bullied by the members of Cobra Kai. The film hit the zeitgeist and had three sequels, a remake, and a sequel TV series that’s still going, and it makes perfect sense, as the movie had some great moments. The quote above gets much more meaning as the movie goes on, proving that hard work, repetition, and following your sensei's advice pay dividends in the future.
2 “You’re gonna eat lightnin’ and you’re gonna crap thunder” - Rocky (1976)
Rocky not only created a career for Sylvester Stallone, but also became a surprising franchise that is still going. This underdog story captured the minds and hearts of audiences all over the world, and even won three Oscars (Best Movie, Best Director, and Best Editing). As always in sports stories, the training montage is essential, and the quote from Mickey (Burgess Meredith), Rocky’s trainer, is a very graphic way of telling how the training for the big match is going to be electric.
Stallone told GQ how a fight between Chuck Wepner and Muhammad Ali inspired the film: “The guy didn’t even look like a fighter. He was terribly awkward and unskilled, and he looked like a heavy bag with eyeballs. It was really sad. Then, all of a sudden, something incredible happened. From nowhere, Wepner knocked down the immortal Ali.”
1 “Great moments… are born from great opportunity.” - Miracle (2004)
“Great moments… are born from great opportunity. And that’s what you have here, tonight, boys. That’s what you’ve earned here tonight. One game. If we played them ten times, they might win nine. But not this game, not tonight. Tonight, we skate with them. Tonight we stay with them, and we shut them down because we can! Tonight, We are the greatest hockey team in the world.” That’s the whole quote that makes Miracle one of the best movies about the Olympics, and the number one film on this list.
This speech is as inspirational as they come, and it’s perfectly delivered by Kurt Russell as coach Herb Brooks, selling how important this moment was for the hockey team, and underlining how they could beat the team everybody thought would win. The movie tells the real-life story of the USA ice hockey team that won the gold medal at the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics, beating the USSR in the process, something that looked impossible before the tournament as the USA team was formed by college athletes and people thought they wouldn’t even qualify in the group stage. The fact that they got to the finals, played against some of the best professional players in the world, and were able to beat them, made for an incredible story, one that didn’t need dramatic licenses, as the feat was already incredible.