"That's My Boy" is a movie after my own heart. I'm a huge college football fan and the principal issue of the plot has everything to do with college football and student athletes.
The main character is Thomas Jefferson Scott (Richard Cromwell). He was a fine young man from the small city of Athens who wanted to go to college to become a doctor. When he got accepted to Thorpe University he found college life tough for no other reason than the cost. He was from meager means and college life was straining his pitiful budget.
He got a financial break when the varsity football coach, Coach Daisy Adams (Douglass Dumbrille), discovered him. Tom would be well taken care of so long as he could score touchdowns. They gave him the nickname of Snakehips Scott, which I found very unflattering. Snakehips is the nickname of a belly dancer, not a football player! In fact, there should never be any mention of the word "hips" in a football player's name.
I digress.
The real point of the movie, that Tom pointed out, was that College sports has been cashing in on young athletes since the turn of the century. Tom was determined to not go down that road. In fact, he delivered a poignant monologue when he was speaking to a Thorpe University booster (or something like that) named Al Williams (Leon Ames).
He said:
"A very fortunate thing happened to me last night Al. I had a look at myself five years from now. I was walking with a limp and working in an accounting office for $40 a week. Curly Decker (an ex-football player), that's what he earns--forty bucks a week and yet he made $6000 in New York during his summer vacation.
"Listen Al. I came here to be a doctor and I'm being sidetracked into something else. I'm being made to play football because I'm a big draw at the box office. I'm worth a million dollars a year to Thorpe, you told me that a thousand times. Alright, I'm worth a million dollars. Pay me some of it...
"College is just a big business, football's a racket. When they cheer you on the field and sing songs on the campus that's a lot of sentimental hooey. You taught me that.
"I'm being paid right now, that oil furnace job, and $6000 for doing nothing all summer. That's being paid, so it isn't that you object to professionalism is it?
"Look (as he opens a door to an accounting room). $350,000, all cash, and I'm responsible for it. Those are your own words.
"Here's my argument Al. You're taking away my chance to be a doctor. You're ruining my chance to do anything when I get outta here. It's worse to have been an ex-football star than to have been nothing at all and I wanna be paid for it. I'm worth a half-million dollars a year. Alright, pay me $250,000 for the next two years."
Tom's words reached right out of the screen and grabbed me by the collar. They were so true, so spot on, I couldn't believe that they'd been delivered over ninety years ago. Today many kids in college have NIL (Name Image Likeness) deals so that they get a piece of the billions-dollar pie that the NCAA and colleges make off of them. It was a long time coming. At least ninety years.
As much as I loved this movie for the actual plot, dialog, and situation Tom found himself in, I didn't even think Richard Cromwell was all that great. He was average, more or less, as an actor. I think he was helped tremendously by the script.
His being a football star affected his popularity, his academic trajectory, and his love life. He wanted to marry Dorothy Rogers (Dorothy Jordan), but her father disapproved. Her father, Steve Rogers (not to be confused with Captain America), played by Robert Warwick, was a steel magnate who knew that ex-football players were nothing once they left college and the spotlight. Tom wanted to disprove him while making sure that he wasn't going to be used up and thrown away by Thorpe U. He went through a real trial and I couldn't help but wonder whose biopic I was watching.
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