Parents, beware! Of all the lovely, inclusive sports you could watch with your young, don't let them suffer cricket. To a young child, cricket is nothing but sleep and misery.

This I know. When I was a little girl, I was dragged to endless cricket matches in the country, where jocular men drank Pimm's and wore white trousers. Moored in the sea of childhood memory are summer odysseys, my damp cheek pressed against the car window—whining me, wishing my dad had provided a brother or sister before he and my mum split up, because then it wouldn't be so boring. Then, the house (whomever it belonged to)—always a Gothic Victorian spidery sort of house with a lawn that stretched down to a stream, with red setters lurching crazily toward me. There was the initial relief of being able to pee, and the vision of a table heaving with cucumber sandwiches, smoked salmon, and the ubiquitous quiche. My seven-year-old heart lurched with happiness when I saw the summer pudding with whipped cream, hoping it would fill me with sweet anesthetic to what was next: the white-clad men playing cricket, and my dad going with them.

"Goodbye, darling; see you in a bit; go and play now."

"But there's nothing to do! Please don't leave me."

He grabbed an unsuspecting older child. "What's your name?"

"Florence," she answered politely.

"See? You can play with Florence. She seems very nice."

And so Florence and I played. In the game, I was her pet dog. This lasted for hours until Florence climbed under an electric fence. She made contact with the wire and gave a shriek. Now I was the master, and I led Florence, weeping, to the adults.

"What were you doing?" my dad beseeched.

"Playing. Florence is very injured. Can we go home now? I want to watch Rocky again."

It was easy to love sports movies, but much more difficult to play sports. I was a sporting wretch. I wore large, unbecoming glasses, and my coordination (or lack of it) rendered gym teachers speechless with rage. I couldn't relate to sports as a spectator either, because I didn't understand the mechanics of any game. But in gym class, we watched a film (title long forgotten) about Nadia Comaneci, and I fizzed with determination. Maybe I too could be an elegant Balkan contortionist? Perhaps it was a talent that had been missed by everyone, lurking inside of me, longing to leap out, enveloped in a hot-pink leotard. No such luck. I threw myself off the gym bars like a sacrificial bat, arms outspread, and crashed to the ground with a cartoonish, gym-quieting crunch.

Recently, I found a shoe box of old rosettes celebrating my sporting mediocrity: Radnage Riding School, eighth place; Self-Defense, first for effort; Goal Shooter Netball, good team spirit. There they lay, the crumpled, primary-colored sum of all my athletic humiliations. The sporty boyfriend caught me stroking them nostalgically.

"Oh my God! You're Gaylord Focker."

"Go away!" I snapped. "You wouldn't understand. You would have bullied me. You're a horrible person."

"I would have loved you! I loved nerds. I would have stared at you in the library."

The tenuous connection I felt to sports was bridged by a passion for movies about it. I rooted for Redford as he "lived for a dream that wouldn't die" in The Natural, and later watched Will Smith float like a butterfly in Ali.

The boyfriend, that sporting creature, introduced me to further staples of American sports cinema. He watched me watching Rudy, biting my lip, white-knuckled, shouting out with relief as Rudy Ruettiger—the would-be footballer of endless HBO repeats—was ultimately rewarded on the hallowed ground of Notre Dame. Afterward, I was teary-eyed, exhilarated, even grateful. "Wait till you see Brian's Song," the boyfriend warned.

(Click here for scenes from Rudy.)

Given that I loathe running, abhor tennis, and am not bending it like Beckham in my spare hours, what better than those stadium-rocking, testosterone-pulsing movie moments to get the endorphins raging? In sporting classics, the hero always triumphs—either on the field or, in some cases, as he meets his maker.

Brian Piccolo, the Chicago Bears running back immortalized by James Caan in the original 1971 Brian's Song, is forever captured in celluloid as an exemplary guy. He coaches his more adept teammate, Hall of Famer Gale Sayers, through a leg injury with the same humor that eventually heralds him to his own heartbreaking destination. (Brian died of a rare form of cancer, embryonal cell carcinoma, at 26.) The movie's Vaseline-over-the-lens quality and corny soundtrack only heighten the melodrama.

On the sports-movie tree, the fruit is seasonal and abundant. Caddyshack is bliss on a summer night; Hoosiers is a rainy-Tuesday sort of film. Chariots of Fire warrants pairing with the unruly daffodils of spring; Friday Night Lights or Any Given Sunday, frowsy autumn evenings. Fight Club is anytime-on-the-sofa date material—if you're not too freaked out by Brad Pitt's physical perfection. Your girlfriend won't be.

In the tradition of team spirit, you both could commit to Debbie Does Dallas, a redemptive tale set in the world of competitive sports. And in this one—sigh of relief—it isn't just the jock who gets the girl. As they say back home, "It's certainly not cricket." No, it's not; nor is it Rocky. But we're grown-ups now, with the privilege of picking our own movies—and our own teams.

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