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VIGNETTES T No Bull DIRECTOR RON SHELTON CELEBRATES THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF BULL DURHAM BY LOOKING FOR HIS NEXT HOME RUN // BY Mike Cullity TWO MOVIE SCRIPTS, three television pitches, a Broadway musical, and a reality show are among the projects occupying Ron Shelton these days. Twenty-fve years after the release of Bull Durham, the baseball movie that put him on the Hollywood map, the director and screenwriter is still hunting for the next big hit. "You've got to have a lot of irons in the fre, because things fall apart," he says. Conceived from the ruins of his own major-league dreams, Shelton's Bull Durham screenplay earned him an Oscar nomination while the flm grossed more than $50 million in North America. The story of minor-league lifer "Crash" Davis, pitching phenom "Nuke" LaLoosh, and ballpark groupie Annie Savoy made Kevin Costner a star, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon a couple, and Shelton a hot commodity. The fctional tale of the real-life Durham Bulls came to life during a chilly North Carolina winter. "Every time [the actors] opened their mouths, breath would come out, and so you'd put ice in their mouths, because that would counteract it," Shelton recalls. Once the flm hit the screen, however, audiences warmed to its humor and romance. "I think people saw a little of themselves in the characters," the director adds. "Crash was a guy who loved something more than it loved him, his job, baseball. And I think there's a universal in that.…There are a lot of people who have the dream that isn't going to make it, and they've got to fgure out what their reckoning is." 22 Shelton was one of those people. A Whittier, California, native, he played second base in the Baltimore Orioles' minor-league system from 1967 through 1971. Although he advanced Tempus-Magazine.com . Summer 2013 A Diamond in the Rough R O N S H E LTO N DIRECTOR TIN CUP, 1996 COBB, 1994 WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP, 1992 BLAZE, 1989 BULL DURHAM, 1988 to Triple-A and played with future big leaguers Don Baylor and Bobby Grich, he retired during Major League Baseball's players' strike in April 1972, a decision he struggled to reconcile. "I couldn't even look at a game for ffteen years, because I felt like I'd just failed. When I decided to write Bull Durham, it was kind of a cathartic act, and I made peace with baseball." With subsequent box-offce winners White Men Can't Jump and Tin Cup, Shelton established himself as the dean of sports ficks. But he acknowledges that nothing quite compares to the rush he felt on the diamond. "Every play matters, and that keeps you living seriously connected to the moment. It's exhilarating in that regard. Once it's gone, it's hard to fnd the world to have that again. I think making movies is close." Married to actress Lolita Davidovich, the Los Angeles resident coaches his eight-year-old son in Little League and has another baseball movie in the works. "It's about a major-league pitcher who doesn't pay attention to his career, gets released, and ends up in the Latin American leagues trying to fnd himself," he says. In his directorial style, Costner once likened Shelton to pugnacious former big-league manager Lou Piniella. But at this point in his career, the sixty-sevenyear-old flmmaker considers himself the pitcher who won't give up the ball. "They're going to have to drag me off the mound," he says with a laugh. "And they may."