Screenwriter Tim Kelleher sat down at the Hollywood headquarters of what was then—in the mid-1990s—TriStar Pictures. A group of studio suits were there, serving up a half-baked pitch for an underdog sports tale. “They wanted to do a movie with Billy Crystal and the NBA,” Kelleher says.
Pondering plotlines, Kelleher remembered a commercial he had seen featuring the famed fishmongers from Seattle’s Pike Place Market as they flung whole salmon from 50 feet away and landed them smack atop the weighing scale. “So I was like, What if the guy worked at a fish place, and he could hit a full-court basketball shot because he was so good at throwing fish?” Kelleher says. “But that just didn’t seem logistically possible. Defenders would be right on him.”
Not long after, Kelleher was getting lunch with his mentor, writer-producer Greg Fields, when talk turned to the subject of his TriStar sit-down—specifically, how Kelleher was struggling to find a more practical professional sporting specialty for his average-Joe lead character. “I was telling him about the story,” Kelleher says. “And he goes, ‘How about a field goal kicker?’”
