Fifty years after The Bad News Bears opened on April 7, 1976, nine of the boys who played for Coach Morris Buttermaker sat down together on a panel at The Hollywood Show in Burbank last month. They were schoolkids when Walter Matthau showed up for work as a beer-sipping pool cleaner who took a Little League coaching job for the paycheck. They are in their 60s now, and the man they wanted to talk about was still him.
What they said, as reported by Remind Magazine this week, paints a very different picture of the grumpy face on the movie poster. One former Bear credited Matthau with teaching them “what it meant to be a good person.” Another said something about him that seemed meant for one particular person sitting in the audience that day.
What Did the Kids Make of Their Beer-Swigging Coach?
On screen, Buttermaker was a mess. He drank on the job and cussed at his players, and when the big game was over he handed out cans of beer to the whole team. Paramount paid Matthau $750,000 plus a slice of the rentals to play him, according to the film’s production history.
The kids mostly took it in stride. David Stambaugh, who played Toby Whitewood and later became a minister, told The Hollywood Interview that Matthau’s biggest worry after that famous final game was practical. “His only concern is that we hide the beer because the local news is there,” he recalled.
The wild stuff on set wasn’t all Matthau’s, either. Jackie Earle Haley, who played Kelly Leak, the cigarette-smoking delinquent who joins the team, tore around the San Fernando Valley on a mini Harley-Davidson. “Jackie Earle Haley riding a motorcycle down the middle of Devonshire Boulevard? Fine,” Stambaugh said. Haley remembered Matthau as “super-sweet, super-nice” when he spoke with The A.V. Club in 2012, and said Matthau handed the cast silver Tiffany keychains when filming wrapped.
How Did a Child Oscar Winner Fit In With the Boys?
Tatum O’Neal arrived as the biggest name on the roster after Matthau. She had won the Academy Award for Paper Moon on April 2, 1974, at 10, which made her the youngest person ever to win a competitive Oscar. Paramount signed her to play pitcher Amanda Whurlitzer for $350,000 plus a share of the profits.
The boys noticed. “It was clear that she was Tatum O’Neal and we weren’t,” Stambaugh said, though he added that he got along with her very well. Brandon Cruz, who played the son of Vic Morrow’s bullying Yankees coach, told a Long Island SABR screening this summer that her Oscar gave her “weight and power” on the set, according to Kiner’s Korner. He also admitted that “everybody had a crush on her.”
O’Neal saw her scenes with Matthau through her own family. “You see the camaraderie that Walter and I had in the same way really that me and my father did at the time,” she told Bob Costas on MLB Network in 2013, a telling comparison from a woman whose relationship with her father, Ryan O’Neal, was famously rocky. She also described a hospital visit she never forgot. When she was about 15 and recovering from a car accident, Matthau came lumbering down the hall. “Kid, I just had to come in and see that you were all right,” he told her. O’Neal turned 63 on November 5, and she was at The Hollywood Show in October, though she didn’t join the panel.
What Was Matthau Really Like When the Cameras Stopped?
That hospital visit turns out to be typical of him. Brett Marx, who played Jimmy Feldman, told the Burbank crowd about the dugout spelling bees. “Walter was the treasurer of the set,” Marx said. “He would have spelling bees in the dugout to keep us in line and pay out the money for those who got it right. I made a couple bucks off.” Then he got serious. “He was the sweetest, gentlest, most professional, giving actor on the set.”
Chris Barnes, who played the foul-mouthed Tanner Boyle, remembered a grown man who treated a dugout full of kids like an audience worth working for. “He taught us vaudeville routines and told jokes and took us to lunch,” Barnes said. Stambaugh described one of those lunches in a 2010 interview. It was the day Jack Lemmon came to visit and the two old friends took the whole team to a barbecue place.
David Pollock, who played the nervous Rudi Stein, had a harder time with Matthau’s sense of humor. He kept breaking up during the scene where Rudi gets hit by a pitch for a second time, because every time he looked up, Matthau “would burst out laughing.” Matthau then gave him a piece of comedy advice that Pollock says he still doesn’t understand: “David, don’t ever put whipped cream on top of a whipped cream.” Pollock called it “prophetic.”
Why Did the Bears Save Their Best Words for Last?
Matthau died on July 1, 2000, at 79, and Vic Morrow was killed in 1982 at 53 in the helicopter accident on Twilight Zone: The Movie. Many of the boys who played the Bears are still here, though. Stambaugh, Pollock, Marx, Barnes, Cruz, Scott Firestone, Gary Lee Cavagnaro, Erin Blunt and Jaime Escobedo all came to Burbank. Haley, now 65, is still working, and in July Deadline reported that he had joined the cast of They Follow.
Their stories had something in common. The friendship didn’t end at the wrap party. Firestone said Matthau “stayed in touch with us over the years and always answered a phone call or wrote back a note.” Cavagnaro, who played catcher Mike Engelberg, said the cards kept coming. “Every year I got Christmas cards,” he said. “I think we had a special place because we were all Charlie’s age, and we had a special place in his heart.”
Charlie is Charles Matthau, Walter’s son, born in December 1962 and now a director. He was sitting in the audience in Burbank, and Barnes said he hoped the cast’s memories would be, in a way, “a love letter” to him. Barnes summed up all that warmth in one line. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a father love a son like this guy.”
