Cheat to Win: The Underdog Scoundrels of 'Diggstown'

With the death last week of Louis Gossett Jr.'s, now's a good time to remember one of the less-celebrated gems in his seven-decade career.

Louis Gossett Jr. died last week at age 87. The obituaries led, naturally, with his role as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in 1982’s An Officer and a Gentleman, for which he became the first Black winner of a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but his filmography runs deep, along with his early stage work on Broadway and his appearances on television, from an Emmy-winning turn on Roots to his performance as Will Reeves, the first masked vigilante, in the 2019 reimagining of Watchmen. All told, Gossett was in the business for seven decades, and gave many acclaimed performances in many beloved films. But only one of those films was something I recommended dozens of times to a certain type of dude wandering into my video store in Georgia in the mid-‘90s, looking for a brisk entertainment on a Friday night. It was a recommendation with a 100% success rate: the 1992 sports comedy Diggstown. 

Released to middling reviews and anemic returns, Diggstown seemed to gain momentum on video and television as an unpretentious pugilistic entertainment like The Sting, a twisty affair with ace con men working to scheme each other out of a fortune. But that “momentum” could be strictly anecdotal on my part, a cult limited to a small handful of appreciators in Athens who half-watched it while dubbing $5 pornography rentals on their second VCR. Yet it’s pleasant to think about the film as a scrappy comeback for everyone involved, including its director Michael Ritchie, who’d been in a steep decline since his ‘70s heyday, and character actors like Gossett, who’d had hits in the mid-‘80s with Enemy Mine and Iron Eagle, but had squandered the years afterwards on Iron Eagle sequels and dogs like The Principal and The Punisher. It’s the type of film that encourages rooting interests.