How I Fell In Love With. . .Kevin Costner

by: Emily

I apologize if reading the title triggered your gag reflex. I know that a lot of people, especially those too young to remember the late eighties, only know Kevin Costner as the creepy old guy from Rumor Has It, or the star of the inexplicable and seemingly interminable Waterworld and Postman marathons on TBS. But despite these rather embarrassing associations, I have to confess that once, a long time ago, I was madly in love with Kevin Costner.

Before I tell you how Kevin captured my heart, I think you need to know something important about me. Here it is: I love baseball. I don't mean that I kit myself out in a cleavage bearing tee-shirt and troll the local sports bar while a ball game happens to flicker behind me on a flatscreen. No, I mean I LOVE baseball. I love the grass and the ball park, the popcorn and warm beer. I love the sweet smack a wooden bat makes when it connects with a fastball over the plate. I love the players, their spitting, and crotch grabbing, and general manliness. I love ground balls and great sweeping flies to right. I. Love. Baseball. Every summer my boyfriend springs for the MLB Extra Innings cable package as a gift to me, though he knows full well that it means many evenings spent listening to me groan, scream, and cheer as my beloved Red Sox battle the Stankees--um, I mean Yankees. (Note: my boyfriend rocks.) I am a certified baseball junkie. And this is how I found Kevin Costner.

I was twelve when Bull Durham came out. It was 1988, and like many other things I discovered that year (lipstick, Cosmo, my father's wallet) an unbreakable bond was formed. I was young, impressionable and, like many girls of that age, my love life consisted mostly of imagining how I'd nurture a gloomy, misunderstood loner out of his funk with my loveliness and formidable--yet soft and sweet--girly powers. The broken, brooding, quietly intelligent Crash Davis, therefore, was my dream man. He played ball and cared about his teammates. He sparred with Susan Sarandon's Annie like an everyman-poet. He taught the brick-brained "Nuke" LaLoosh to trust his talent. In short, he was lovely. Oh, and did I mention smoking hot?

Field of Dreams came out the next year. It was an ode to baseball, dreams, and, well, corn. Ray Kinsella was heartbreakingly damaged, a beautifully drawn character who followed his heart instead of his better judgment and ended up creating a portal by which Shoeless Joe Jackson could play ball again. Are you kidding me? I cried like a baby, and Kevin was my hero.

Of course, now I realize that I was really in love with Ron Shelton and W.P. Kinsella, the writers of those two amazing films. At the time, though, it was Kevin who drew me in and held me there, and he held me right into the nineties playing that paragon of misunderstood loners, Robin Hood. But I suppose, like so many other infatuations of my early teen years (perms, tracksuits, blue mascara) it was not meant to last.

It was The Bodyguard that began Kevin's sharp decline in my estimation. Waterworld was its death knell, and The Postman its epitaph. But it wasn't just the movies. In the mid-nineties, I became as interested in the film industry as film watching. I discovered that Kevin Costner had developed a not uncommon acting affliction known as GES, Ginormous Ego Syndrome. GES is characterized by an innate ability to choose good roles and then destroy them by rewriting your own dialogue and/or directing yourself. I found out that Kevin's downward spiral was his own doing, and precipitated by a very un-sexy hunger for fame and self-aggrandizement. Kevin broke my heart.

I suppose it's possible that I really only like Kevin in a baseball uniform (or tights), because I had a brief flash of hope when he made For Love of the Game in 1999, a not too terrible movie about an aging pitcher's personal struggles and a perfect game. Or perhaps it's that as Kevin grew older I found myself falling for fantasy boys my own age. It's tough to know for sure. All I do know for certain is that I don't love Kevin Costner anymore. But if he's in another baseball movie I'll be the first in line.