Before ‘Ted Lasso’, There Was a Similar 37 Year Old Kevin Costner Movie That Every Studio Rejected

Before Ted Lasso, Kevin Costner starred in a feel-good sports movie that every studio rejected.

Heart, grit, and emotional payoff still won.

Way before Ted Lasso charmed us with its underdog charm and fish-out-of-water feels, Kevin Costner had already played a similar game, but back in the ’80s.

Nearly 37 years ago, Costner starred in a sports flick that shared major Ted Lasso energy: heart, grit, and a whole lot of emotional payoff.

However, every studio flat-out rejected it.

And while it didn’t have a mustache-wearing football coach at its center, it proved that feel-good sports stories don’t need hype to score big.

Sometimes, they just need a heart.

Kevin Costner’s Bull Durham was the underdog classic Hollywood almost benched

Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins in Bull Durham | Credits: Orion Pictures.

Long before Ted Lasso gave us locker room therapy sessions, Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham was out here playing a very different kind of game, and studios didn’t want anything to do with it.

Released in 1988, Bull Durham is a baseball movie that couldn’t care less about winning.

The real competition was a love triangle between a washed-up catcher (Kevin Costner), a rising pitcher (Tim Robbins), and Susan Sarandon’s baseball muse-slash-guru, Annie Savoy.

Costner’s Crash Davis even steps aside romantically because, well, “the show” was never just on the field.

And yet, this shaggy, soulful, slow-burn classic almost never got made.

Shelton pitched it everywhere, but the studios passed twice.

Even with Costner attached, fresh off The Untouchables and ready to go, Bull Durham looked too weird.

It was too talky and baseball-y without the sports movie payoff.

Enter No Way Out.

Costner’s other 1987 film unexpectedly crushed it with a killer NYT review by Vincent Canby.

That single rave lit the fire.

Orion Pictures, sensing they had a star in Costner, rushed to greenlight Bull Durham within 24 hours.

What followed was magic.

Shelton had to hustle, but the result was pure movie alchemy.

Monologues like “dying quail” became legend.

The chemistry was off the charts.

It even set Costner on course for Dances with Wolves glory later on.

Today, you couldn’t sell a film like Bull Durham.

They’d try to stretch it into a quirky streaming series.

But in ‘88, a longshot script, a rising star, and one killer review came together for a sports film that played by its own damn rules and won anyway.

How vodka swings landed Kevin Costner in Bull Durham

Kevin Costner in Bull Durham | Credits: Orion Pictures

Kevin Costner took vodka shots and hit the cages to earn Bull Durham. Back before he was a box-office name, Costner wanted to prove he could play Crash Davis, not just act the part.

So, one afternoon, he and director Ron Shelton downed a couple of vodka shots, hit a batting cage behind a mini-golf course in Van Nuys, and started swinging. Shelton recalled (via The Ringer),

We put a bunch of quarters in the slot…People were walking by him all the time…They didn’t know who he was yet.

At the time, Bull Durham didn’t scream “Hollywood hit.”.

Shelton had the script, a creaky stadium in North Carolina, and a dream.

But Costner’s rising star, fresh off The Untouchables and No Way Out, got Orion Pictures to sign the cheque.

Watch Bull Durham now on The Roku Channel & Apple TV+.