Forty years ago, a beer-guzzling pool cleaner played by Walter Matthau as Coach Buttermaker led a rag-tag bunch of oddballs – including Tatum O’Neal as Amanda Whurlitzer and Jackie Earle Haley as bad-boy Kelly Leak - to within one run of the North Valley League title and into our hearts.

Forty years ago, a beer-guzzling, pool cleaner played by Walter Matthau as Coach Buttermaker led a rag-tag bunch of oddballs – including Tatum O’Neal as Amanda Whurlitzer and Jackie Earle Haley as bad-boy Kelly Leak - to within one run of the North Valley League title and into our hearts.

BY SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2016 The year America celebrated its bicentennial, Bears right-hander Amanda Whurlitzer had her curveball breaking two and a half feet; the team’s slugger, Kelly Leak, was batting .841; foul-mouthed shortstop Tanner Boyle led the North Valley League in base runners tripped and inciting bench-clearing brawls; and Morris Buttermaker, the irascible but lovable beer- and Jim Beam-swilling Bears manager, guided his band of Little League misfits to the title game against —- who else? —- the Yankees. Gerald Ford was the incumbent president, Derek Jeter had not yet turned 2 (in age), and the real-life Bronx Bombers were a day away from embarking on their World Series run -- that ended with a Big Red Machine thumping -- when "The Bad News Bears" movie hit theaters across the country, April 7, 1976. There were numerous Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning movies released that same year -- "All the President's Men," "Network" and "Rocky", the latter winning Best Picture and a film still enjoying a shelf life to this day, thanks to its six sequels. But the Stanley Jaffe-produced, Michael Ritchie-directed film about the Little League culture in California cemented its place alongside other sports movie classics with what Jaffe calls "a terrific script," a forever cast led by Walter Matthau (Buttermaker) and Tatum O'Neal (Whurlitzer), and a director (Ritchie) who mostly maintained the sanity on set while guiding an ensemble cast made up of mostly children. But maybe the biggest reason why the movie remains as timeless in 2016 as it did 40 years ago is because, in actor Erin Blunt's (who played Bears right fielder Ahmad Abdul Rahim) words, "It was honest." "I wasn't sure if it was the 30th (anniversary) or the 40th. It's the 40th right?" says Tatum O'Neal, the Oscar-winning actress who caused a million teenage and pre-teen crushes when she played Whurlitzer. "It can't be right." Paramount Pictures/Getty Images Yes, it's right, Amanda. Forty years have elapsed since a washed-up minor league pitcher-turned-pool cleaner named Morris Buttermaker first pulls his convertible Cadillac (no trunk cover) into the parking lot of a Little League baseball diamond early in the morning in the movie's opening scene, pops open a can of Budweiser, pours some Jim Beam bourbon into the beer for good measure, smokes a cheap stogie (courtesy of a light from Kelly Leak), and agrees to manage the lowly Bears in the ultra competitive North Valley League, at the urging of a city councilman and much to the disgust of Roy Turner (Vic Morrow), the Yankees manager, and the league organizer, Cleveland (Joyce Van Patten). What unfolds on the screen from there is a journey equal parts hilarious and profane, irreverent and shocking, heart-tugging and authentic -- a film that never feels dated, even if Amanda Whurlitzer is seen wearing bell bottom jeans on the mound during a practice. The movie blows the lid on the prototypical Little League parents and their children, and delves into such diverse issues as bullying, racism, sexism, birth control, even the dangers of overusing an ace pitcher's arm, all the while shifting seamlessly between comedy-- the Bears' team sponsor is Chico's Bail Bonds -- and drama. To peel back the layers behind the making of one of the great sports films, the Daily News talked with many of the "Bears" actors, as well as producer Stanley Jaffe, the film executive behind such classics as "Kramer vs. Kramer" and "Fatal Attraction." "I love the movie. I loved working with Walter. I loved working with all the kids," says O'Neal. "Great actors. Funny as hell. A tremendously wonderful film, and I was really honored to be a part of it. Still am."



Stanley Jaffe was a high-ranking Paramount executive -- he later ran the studio -- when he says Charles Bluhdorn, the head of Gulf & Western (Paramount's then parent company), came to Jaffe with a script called, "The Bad News Bears," and wanted Jaffe to produce it. "When I read it, I loved it, though we changed the whole last half of the picture from the script that I was presented with," says Jaffe, 75. "I brought Michael Ritchie in after talking to a number of people, and we agreed that the last third wasn't up to the first part of the picture." Jaffe says that he had loved Ritchie's earlier directorial efforts, "Downhill Racer" and "Smile", and that the two men immediately clicked when they worked together on "The Bad News Bears." Jaffe says the script, written by Bill Lancaster, the son of Oscar-winning actor Burt Lancaster, originally focused on the character Kelly Leak (played by Jackie Earle Haley) and Leak's troubles with the law around Los Angeles. "It had nothing to do with the Bad News Bears. When we started working with Billy (Lancaster), he was great about accepting that and making the changes that ultimately resulted in the movie," says Jaffe. "I never talked to Billy about (the script) being autobiographical. I'm sure there were aspects of it that were, because that's how writers, especially writing about kids, draw from the best material there is -- themselves." Paramount was in the midst of a string of hits in the early 1970s -- "Love Story", "The Godfather" and "The Godfather: Part II", "Serpico", "Chinatown" -- but before "The Bad News Bears" began shooting in 1975, Jaffe says he and Ritchie needed to cast some big names because "the studio felt we needed help with this."

"This was not a big picture," says Jaffe. "It wasn't the biggest thing on their agenda. They were shooting "King Kong" and other pieces like that. But we were this little picture that could at the end." Jaffe says Matthau was actually the third choice in mind to play Buttermaker, behind the late tough-guy actor Steve McQueen and Hollywood heartthrob Warren Beatty. "I knew Steve because he was then with Ali (MacGraw)," says Jaffe. "I brought him the project and he said, 'I can't do it.' He was going to make "An Enemy of the People". Our second choice was Warren, who for the most part said, 'Yes.' He later came to me and said, 'There's a picture I want to direct.' It turned out to be "Reds" and he departed the campus as they say." O'Neal, 52, says now that neither McQueen nor Beatty would have fit the bill, in her opinion. "I doubt (McQueen) would have done it. Not so funny, old Steve," says O'Neal with a laugh. Matthau was already a veteran of film when he came aboard -- he won an Oscar for the 1967 film, "The Fortune Cookie" -- and Jaffe says he immediately "took to the kids," a group that included Matthau's real-life son, Charlie, who has a cameo and utters one of the funniest lines in the film. "I had my little part through pure nepotism," jokes Charlie Matthau, who still lives in Hollywood, and is a director and producer. "I did two movies with Walter, and he was singularly one of the best people I ever met," says Jaffe. "He's a curmudgeon but he's got a heart as big as this world. He was like the Pied Piper. The kids took to him and it was wonderful for the movie." Bettmann/CORBIS Casting the role of Amanda Whurlitzer, a character that Jaffe says was always part of the script, required a little more work. Jaffe and Ritchie wanted a name with clout, but also a female actress who could throw some heat and the occasional curve. O'Neal wasn't exactly an early version of Mo'ne Davis, and Jaffe and Ritchie had to get creative for some parts of the film after she was cast. A boy stunt double was hired to do some of O'Neal's pitching scenes, which were shot from behind and with the stunt double wearing a wig. "Finding a girl who could play baseball is not always something that's easy. Kristy McNichol, who was a young actress at the time, actually could throw the ball like a guy. She was really good and a wonderful actress," says Jaffe. "Walter and Tatum, of course, brought a lot of big-name value. (McNichol and O'Neal would later star together in "Little Darlings"). "We had to see if (Tatum) could throw a ball. She showed up at the bottom of Coldwater (Canyon), next to the fire station at the time," Jaffe continues. "There was a field. We made her pitch for us. She wasn't very good, but she tried. We decided we could get around it." O'Neal says she remembers going to the field to pitch, but that she had no idea it was for an audition. Peter Bogdanovich, the director of the 1973 film "Paper Moon" -- in which Tatum O'Neal starred with her father, Ryan, and for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar -- was part of the group pushing for Tatum to get the part of Whurlitzer. "I remember that they took me out to a field. There was a script and my agent (Sue Mengers) wanted me to do it. But I didn't have to do any lines or anything. I just had to pitch. Then I did a lot of pitching after that, once I got the part. I pitched for three months," says O'Neal. "Being able to play it and look like you play it well is very different than being obsessed with the game itself or being a baseball fan. What I do is just try to make you believe that I know how to do it well." Beyond Matthau and O'Neal, Vic Morrow and Joyce Van Patten (younger sister to the late actor Dick Van Patten) were film and TV veterans, and child actors Jackie Earle Haley and Brandon Cruz had acting experience prior to "Bears," including Cruz's star turn in the late '60s family-friendly TV series, "The Courtship of Eddie's Father." But the bulk of the Bears' roster was just starting out, and Van Patten thinks part of the genius of the film comes from Ritchie being able to coax great performances out of relative unknowns. "They were sweet kids, little troublemakers sometimes, but sweet," says Van Patten, 82, who has worked with everyone from Dean Martin to Elvis Presley to Adam Sandler. "Michael Ritchie, who I think is the hero of the movie, really just made a one-of-a-kind movie."

Corey Sipkin/New York Daily News From l. to r., actors Erin Blunt, David Pollock, Charlie Matthau (son of Walter)

Most of the kid actors had to audition for the "Bears" roles -- casting calls were held in several cities around the country -- except for the Los Angeles-born Erin Blunt, whose path to the Ahmad role came about quite by accident. "We went to pick up my sister one day in Hollywood, and I was running around in the hallway, waiting for her to get done. This lady came up to me – in the '70s, you know, a little black kid doing bad things in the hallway at a prestigious modeling school, and an older white lady comes to you and says, 'Where's your mom?' – I thought I was in trouble," says Blunt, 52, who is now a DJ living in L.A. "The lady just liked my face, and she wanted me to do an audition for a commercial. My mother said, 'He's a little quiet, but we'll go do it.' I got the lead part in the commercial and the rest is history." When Blunt's mother raced him to the set of Paramount one day, Blunt says he was less than thrilled to learn there were auditions for a baseball flick. "I'm like, 'Aw, man,' because at that time, I hated baseball. My mom says, 'Just go for the experience.' On the way there, she says, 'We need to buy you a baseball uniform?' I said, 'No.' We get to Paramount. There's about 20 million and one kids, all wearing baseball uniforms," says Blunt. "Here comes this kid with jeans and a T-shirt, a hat on backwards, sitting in a corner. I stood out obviously because Michael Ritchie came up to me and said, 'What's your name?' I said, 'Erin.' He said, 'You act like you don't want to be here.' I said, 'I don't. I hate baseball.' He said, 'Good. I'm the director, and you just got the part.'" Cruz, despite his success on "Eddie's Father" (where he starred with Bill Bixby of "The Incredible Hulk" fame), says his young ego was on display when his agent sent him to audition for Ritchie. "I'd never really auditioned for anything since I was 6-years-old. My ego said, 'Don't you know who I am?' Michael Ritchie said, 'Yeah, I know who you are, but I want to see if you're right for this.' He actually gave me the part of Joey (Turner) based upon what I was looking and acting like at the time," says Cruz, who originally auditioned for one of the Bears players, but ended up getting the role of the bullying, smart-aleck Yankee pitcher Joey Turner, the son of Vic Morrow's character. Of all the kid actors cast, almost none had much baseball experience, except for David Stambaugh, who grew up in New Jersey after his father got transferred by AT&T to the New York area from Dallas. Stambaugh, now a minister with Green's Farms Church in Connecticut, says after he auditioned for the part at a New York casting call, he put his baseball skills on display.

Courtesy David Stambaugh David Stambaugh with original scoreboard, and on set as Toby Whitewood (r.)

"Eventually we went out to Central Park, and we're hitting the ball around with Michael Ritchie. If I remember correctly, I was one of the only guys that played Little League. I was actually playing during the time of auditions. One of the callbacks I couldn't go on because my team was in the playoffs," says Stambaugh, who plays Toby Whitewood, the son of the city councilman who pays Buttermaker to manage the Bears. "I like to tell myself, (Ritchie and Jaffe) were probably like, 'We've got to have this guy. He's the real deal.'" Pollock, who is right-handed, says the Rudi Stein character was originally called "Lefty Stein" in the script. "I pointed out during our first rehearsal that not only was I not left-handed, I was a pretty bad pitcher with my right hand," jokes Pollock. "Walter came up with the idea of naming the character "Rudi" and it stuck." Shooting began in 1975 after a baseball field was built on a park site in Chatsworth, California, in the Valley. Jaffe says a USC baseball coach was brought in to help teach the actors the baseball fundamentals. "He worked with Tatum. All we needed her to do was throw like three pitches that looked real, and then you could always find a way to use them again," says Jaffe. The actors in the movie all agree on at least two elements of the shoot -- working with Walter Matthau was a dream. And filming in Chatsworth might as well have been on the sun's surface. "Hot as hell," says Blunt. "What I remember mostly was that I was hot all the time, and that I hated the baseball outfit," says O'Neal. "With my tummy sticking out, and those high-waisted, funny (pants) – I just thought, 'Are you kidding me?' It was 100-degrees every day. But I got to work with Walter. How great was that? Amazing." Corey Sipkin/New York Daily News O'Neal was fresh off her Oscar win in "Paper Moon," but she says that unlike the close bond she had with Bogdanovich, she found her "Bears" role much more challenging. "I remember that working with Peter Bogdanovich was like magic, because he basically tells you everything to do. So being on my own and having a director just say, 'Ok, do it,' was very hard for me," says O'Neal. "I had funnier lines, lines about my boobs, or 'I'm going to be getting a bra soon.' Geez Louise. I remember that being hard to say. I did like doing the pitching stuff. (Ritchie and I) didn't have the same rapport. I don't think he disliked me. Then it came down to Walter telling me, 'C'mon kid, you can do this. Just read the lines like you are.' I was glad that it came out as well as it did because I remember being a little bit like, 'God, I'm really out on my own here.'" O'Neal has had a complicated relationship with her father, Ryan, over the years, and she says during the filming of "The Bad News Bears," her dad was on set only a few times, and that he was helping manage her career. "I don't remember what he was doing while I was doing ('The Bad News Bears'). Was it 'Barry Lyndon'? But I remember that we made a bet once – which movie was going to make more money, 'The Bad News Bears' or 'Barry Lyndon,' and I won," says O'Neal. "I think I got a 'Smart ass.'" Jackie Earle Haley, an L.A. native who now lives in San Antonio, calls Matthau "a real sweetheart," and someone who knew how to have fun on the set. "There were actually some times where he'd pop a can of Olympia beer open, like mid-day, and if I was sitting next to him, he'd go, 'Here, you want a sip?'" says Haley, who was 14 when the movie was filmed. "Just like at the end of the movie. It was hilarious." Yes, plenty of scenes feature Matthau guzzling an array of cheap beer -- Miller High Life, Schlitz, Mickey's and Budweiser are some of his mainstays. In one scene, Buttermaker is driving his convertible with all the Bears players stuffed into the front and back seats (and with not a seatbelt in sight), waxing about when he struck out Ted Williams in the minors. Engelberg (Gary Lee Cavagnaro), the rotund catcher, pulls a Jim Beam bottle out of the glove compartment. "You're not supposed to have open liquor in the car. It's against the law," says Engelberg. "So is murder Engelberg. Now put that back before you get me into real trouble," says Buttermaker. But Brandon Cruz says there was liberal distribution of coldies on the set for the crew. That was a perk of the job, and Cruz wasn't afraid to partake, especially if it helped him shed the squeaky-clean image of the Eddie character from "The Courtship of Eddie's Father." Hey, it was the '70s. "We were a rather crude bunch of kids unleashed on the baseball park. This was 1975 when we filmed it. A different time. They had trashcans full of ice and Heineken for the crew, because it was really hot. I guess that was the incentive of the crew to hang in there, deal with a bunch of crazy kids," says Cruz, another L.A. native who still lives there. "I can't really speak for other people, but I helped myself to the crew's freebies on a daily basis. I was between seventh and eighth grade that summer. I was 13, already off and running, smoking pot, drinking. I was into surfing and skateboarding. There were extras – people my age and older that lived around the park where we filmed – that liked to hang out with us. One older girl had pot on the set. We were happy to go across the street to her house. Nobody knew where we were half the time. We just kind of ran wild. Some of us. Some of them were really good kids. And some of us were doing our thing. It was fun." That kind of rebel nature and irreverence embodied the language and tone of the script, but despite a heavy dose of racial epithets and profanity, none of the actors today say that they or their parents were overly shocked when they first read the screenplay. Not even when the character Tanner Boyle (Chris Barnes) delivers his famous screed after the team's first practice is an unmitigated disaster. "If we keep playing like this we'll be the laughingstock of the league," says Bears pitcher/outfielder Rudi Stein. "Well what do you expect? All we got on this team is a bunch of Jews, Sp--s, n-----s, pansies and a booger-eating moron," says Tanner. The "moron" refers to perennial Bears benchwarmer Timmy Lupus (Quinn Smith). Tanner later adds a sarcastic "and now a girl?" to the sentence when Whurlitzer joins the team. "To tell you the truth, to us kids, it was just true to life," says Haley, 54. "I'm sure everyone was giggling, 'Oh look, we get to cuss in front of everybody.' At the same time, zero shock. This is exactly what it's like at school. I'm sure it's that and worse now."

Erin Blunt says he was never offended by the liberal use of the "n" word in the movie, and that his mother told him at the time to look at the situation like "you have a job. You're playing a part." "One thing my mother didn't know about me, as a kid, I loved Richard Pryor. I used to sneak an 8-track that I found with Pryor, and used to play it when my mother was at work," says Blunt. "So I heard a lot of stuff. I was just shocked that my mother was going to allow me to use that language. I wasn't offended, because I knew it was a job. It wasn't like I was walking down the street and Chris (Barnes) called me a n-----. It was a different deal. Plus, they paid me for it." The Bears' season starts off in humiliating fashion, a 26-0 drubbing by Joey Turner and the Yankees that mercifully ends when Buttermaker forfeits the game. The Bears players stomp off the field, dejected, while Ahmad Abdul Rahim seeks refuge in a tree, sans every piece of clothing but his underwear. Buttermaker scales the tree for a managerial chat. "There's nothing easy about those fly balls Ahmad. They were tough chances. The sun was in your eyes," says Buttermaker. "Don't give me any of your honky bull--- Buttermaker," says Abdul Rahim. "Let's not bring race into this, Ahmad. We got enough problems as it is," says Buttermaker. The Bears team nearly quits on their skipper -- Tanner takes on the entire seventh grade after being taunted at school -- before Buttermaker successfully recruits Whurlitzer (on a second try) to pitch for the team. The cost for Buttermaker? Paying for Amanda's ballet lessons and "imported jeans." "Who do you think you are, Catfish Hunter?" Buttermaker asks Amanda as they're negotiating a contract. "Who's he?" she replies. With an ace aboard, and the team's fortunes starting to change, Buttermaker finds his slugger during a practice. Kelly Leak, the athletically-gifted local delinquent who chain smokes, rides a Harley-Davidson and hangs out at the field because "there's nice ass," rifles the ball back to Buttermaker from beyond left field foul territory. The only problem? Leak doesn't want to play for the Bears. "Oh, you call what you got a team? The baseball you guys play is for fa----s and old farts," Leak tells Amanda. She makes a bet for his services -- she has to beat him in air hockey -- only to lose and uphold her end of the agreement: going as his date to a Rolling Stones concert. "Boy you to take the cake, first you blow the game, then you get roped into a date with an ex-con," says Buttermaker. Off the set, Haley says he and O'Neal were good friends, and that he spent a couple afternoons at the O'Neal beachfront casa, where Tatum lived with her dad, Ryan, a notorious hothead. "I remember bits and fragments. I remember it was morning. She and I were sitting on the beach, right under the house. I'm 14 and she's 12," says Haley, laughing. "Who knows what we're talking about, but I look up and her dad is just staring right at us. Totally eavesdropping. And I think it was talk like, 'You know when I get a car we should hang and go out. In a couple years I'll be 16…' Later on, we're out having fun, throwing the Frisbee back and forth, with Ryan and Tatum. I end up on Ryan's side. Ryan kind of playfully wrestles with me a little bit, and kind of whispers in my ear: 'You touch my daughter, I'll break both your f---g legs.' To this day, I never really took that as he was really going to break my legs. I was 14. But it was a little like, 'Whoa.'" Haley says one of the other cool perks about the role was having to attend motorcycle school to learn to ride the Harley, complete with instruction from CHiP officers. When the Bears are on the cusp of sealing a spot in the championship game, Buttermaker takes no chances in the game prior, demanding Leak field every fly ball possible. "Hey Tanner, does he go to the bathroom for you too?" an A's player (Charlie Matthau) says to Tanner after Leak catches a pop fly the shortstop is perfectly positioned to snag. The title game brings out some of the movie's richest scenes, including a tender moment between Amanda and Buttermaker (whom she routinely refers to as "Boilermaker") the night before the Bears play the Yankees, when she tries to rekindle the romance between her mother and Buttermaker (who have dated in the past), while icing her pitching arm in a cooler of beer. Once the game gets underway, the full spectrum of Little League culture is laid bare -- with Buttermaker and Roy Turner leading the charge, trading profane jabs at each other, and Turner later channeling all his testosterone rage toward his son, Joey. Paramount Pictures/Getty Images Cruz, 53, says that during the filming, Vic Morrow didn't exactly hold back when he smacks Cruz for throwing a beanball at the Bears rotund catcher Engelberg. "Vic was not an easy person to like. He was not an easy person to deal with. It seems to me he didn't even want to be there. He was very – 'Let's get this done. Let me get out of here.' I guess he had his demons," says Cruz, who also works in the drug and alcohol recovery field after being sober for nearly 20 years. "I think he kind of had a bit of a smile when he got to slap me. I noticed when he walked up, he was about a foot closer than he had been. And I went, 'OK, this is going to get a little tense.' And he slapped me. He put everything he had into it. Whatever. I can't guess 40 years ago what was going through his mind. I just know that he was not a pleasure to work with." In a freak twist, both Morrow and Reid Rondell, the stuntman in "The Bad News Bears," were killed in separate helicopter accidents, on the set of a movie (Morrow) and TV show (Rondell). The Ahmad character lays down a perfect bunt in the last half inning of the title game after stepping to the plate and declaring, "This is for Allah, and it's going way out there sucka." Blunt says that to him, there was some deeper significance to that sequence. "When I said, 'This is for Allah,' there's a little young black guy, he's a radical, he's an irate kid, and it worked for the character I played," says Blunt. "It wasn't a bash on Islam. He needed to use that line to kind of drive in the point – he is a Muslim – so when (Ahmad) goes on those mad tirades, you can understand. That was my character, a headstrong little black kid. Just like Tanner – Chris (Barnes') part – I guess you would call him a bigot. He was Archie Bunker as a kid. You had to have this melting pot to make the movie, which people are still talking about today." After Ahmad's bunt puts two runners on base, the Bears then load the bases trailing 7-3, and Leak steps to the plate. Only the Yankees elect to intentionally walk him. Buttermaker signals his slugger to hit, and well, if the ominous crescendo of Bizet's "Carmen" score doesn't spell the end of the Bears as Leak rounds the bases, the home plate umpire's call as Leak slides home seals their fate. Jaffe says that he was in the minority when it came to how the film should end. Then-studio head Barry Diller and other Paramount executives wanted the Bears to win, as did actor Warren Beatty. A separate ending was even shot where the Bears were victorious. "I felt strongly, as did (Ritchie), that there was no way that (the Bears) were going to win. At the end, when we had the previews, Barry said, 'I want them to win it.' I said, 'It's not happening. Just not happening,'" says Jaffe. "It's not about winning. It's about trying. One person wins. But everybody can try and that's what this picture is to me – everybody trying." Only a manager like Buttermaker would celebrate a loss by handing out beers to his underage roster, but it's the perfect end to an imperfect team, complete with Tanner telling the Yankees to stick their apology and trophy where the sun don't shine (only in more colorful words). Jaffe says that three weeks after the release, he was at the famous (and long shuttered) Chasen's hotspot in L.A., when seated near him was the head of Warner, Frank Wells. "He yelled over, 'Stanley, you just defined what 'legs' means, in terms of box office.' The picture was a terrific success. It was a totally enjoyable experience," says Jaffe. David Pollock, who played Rudi Stein, says the actors did a lot of promotion for the film, and that the cast members even got to challenge the cast of "Annie" to a softball game in Central Park when the "Bears" cast was in New York. Courtesy David Pollock The film launched two sequels, although Haley jokes that he would rather not admit to being part of "The Bad News Bears Go To Japan." "I believe it is in several top 10 lists of worst movies ever made," says Haley. "So if you're wondering why there is no "The Bad News Bears IV"…" There was even a reboot "Bad News Bears" in 2005, but with apologies to Richard Linklater and his many other directorial successes, the 1976 original should have remained untouched. "Why try to make something better out of something great? It's already great," says O'Neal, who did not reprise her role in the two sequels. O'Neal is still acting, lives in Los Angeles and dotes on her three grown children with ex-husband John McEnroe. Her daughter, Emily, is trying to follow her famous mom's lead into acting. "My mother was an actress. My father is an actor. My grandmother was an actress. My grandfather was a writer. My uncle is a writer," says O'Neal. "I don't know, man. Is there anything else for me? It's the only thing I love, and the only thing that I believe in. It's what I live for – great movies, great television. It's a passion." She adds that actor friends still inquire about "The Bad News Bears," including Jason Patric, who once made the mistake of asking her to wear her old uniform. "I've had people tell me, 'Do I have the costume, could I put it on?' Not dates or anything. Jason Patric once asked me, 'Can you put it on?' I was like, 'Really? Are you out of your freakin' mind?' Of course I don't have it," says O'Neal. "I'm sort of a very bad pitcher now, but who cares?" Haley bowed out of the business for a lengthy stretch only to return with acclaim, including an Oscar-nominated role in "Little Children." Most recently Haley was in "The Birth of a Nation," about Nat Turner. But Haley says he still gets recognized for his seminal role as Leak. On one occasion, he broke a male fan's heart with the reality of filming that role. "Ten years ago – there was this guy who was running a warehouse at this company that I was working for. I was VP of communications," says Haley. "He was also a pro arena football player for, I want to say the Arizona Rattlers. When he met me, he was like, 'Oh my God, dude, you're Kelly Leak. I've got to tell you, you're the whole reason why I got into sports. And I'm now playing professional football. I wanted to be Kelly Leak. How did you guys do that stuff?' "What I went on to say is, 'Here's how it kind of worked. Remember that ball that I caught in mid-air, and I told Tatum to throw the pitch a little faster? That was a rubber ball.'" "And then I said, 'Every time I would hit a home run, they basically would pitch to me and I'd swing, making it look real good, but I'd kind of doof it over to second base and it would land in the field. They'd turn the camera around and some big, huge guy would throw the ball over the fence.' And this guy was standing there looking at me going, 'Oh man, I'm crushed.'" "I'm no Kelly Leak, let's put it that way," Haley says laughing. Haley has a grown son and a teenage daughter.

Cruz, meanwhile, says he got out of Hollywood altogether not long after playing Joey Turner, turned off by the industry. He was in a punk band, but has since circled back to the movie industry, while also raising his two kids, and doing his work with recovering addicts. Pollock, also a father of two, is running for state senate in California (as Democrat), and is currently a city council member in Ventura County. Walter Matthau died in 2000, and Michael Ritchie passed a year later. Bill Lancaster, the screenwriter, died in 1997. Chris Barnes, who played Tanner, has shied away from any media interviews since starring in the two "Bears" movies. Jaffe is still a producer living in the New York area, and Van Patten is still acting and lives in Manhattan. While working on "Grown Ups" with Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade and Rob Schneider and Kevin James, she had an unexpected shout-out. "We were together for a long time, for three months, on location. When you work with those kinds of stars, they pretty much have a coterie of people around them. So you don't get to know them the way you get to know other people when you work with them. But at one point somebody told one of them that I had been in "The Bad News Bears." Just think about it, they were all kids when that came out. And they just piled around me with questions and wanting to know about it. It was so funny. So "The Bad News Bears" won me a little celebrity there," says Van Patten. It is a movie that someone like the late Philip Seymour Hoffman called his favorite, and one which resonates on many levels today, with all different generations. Pollock is hoping to organize a reunion with all the actors associated with the film, maybe even a pickup softball game as part of the agenda. But the task has been easier said than done. If the old roster reunites, that can mean only one thing: bad news for the opposing team. Buttermaker would approve.

CREDITS: Interactive Developer, Evie Liu; Photo research: Isabel Slepoy