Estevez’s life, career have imitated Ducks art

As the most recognizable figure in the Mighty Ducks series, Emilio Estevez was under plenty of pressure to guide a cast of unknowns toward a memorable movie. With that said, his prior work and his own life made him the ideal fit to play Gordon Bombay, the coach who would inspire the underdog Ducks to succeed time and again.

Before accepting the role of Bombay, Estevez gained fame in coming-of-age classics like 1985’s The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire. While these films focus on high schoolers and college graduates, respectively, they entailed portraying young adults struggling to fit in and discover their identity in relationship to their peers.

In The Breakfast Club, Estevez portrays state champion wrestler Andrew Clark, who initially appears to have his life together. But over time, he clearly struggles with individuality and owning the person he wants to be rather than who his father would like him to be.

St. Elmo’s Fire continues that narrative in Estevez’s repertoire with the role of Kirby Keger, a law student and waiter grappling with relationship issues.

By the time he was chosen to portray Bombay in 1992, Estevez had the necessary insight into what it meant to be an adult mentor to a group of adolescents struggling with the same problems his past characters conveyed. Simultaneously, in his real life, Estevez knew what it meant to be a father figure to this group of ragtag athletes. His real-life son Taylor Estevez was eight at the time The Mighty Ducks premiered.

You can say that Estevez knew what it would take to motivate the Ducks to work together. But any viewer of that first Mighty Ducks movie would know it did not start that way.

Before becoming the coach of the District 5 program, so underprivileged it had no nickname, Estevez’s character wants nothing to do with hockey. After getting caught for a DUI, Bombay is sentenced to community service and his first encounter with the Ducks is one of the most memorable moments in The Mighty Ducks trilogy.

When he first meets them, his limo drives onto the ice and he declares, “I hate hockey and I don’t like kids.”

Over the course of the screenplay, Bombay slowly evolves into a willing coach who teaches the Ducks with many unorthodox methods. Everything from passing eggs instead of pucks to tying his goaltender up while the team runs a rapid-fire shooting drill to throwing footballs in the pregame warm-up.

Surprisingly, these methods work. And although tensions flare between the Ducks and Bombay in his relationship with longtime coach Jack Reilly of the Hawks in the first movie and his attraction to living the life of a celebrity in D2, he finds a way to keep recruiting new players and teaching them what it means to become a team that can win together.

By the time the trilogy concludes, Estevez’s character undergoes a dramatic transformation back into a lawyer. This happens for a few reasons, including the fact that Estevez did not want his legacy defined by the Mighty Ducks movies and only appeared in the D3 shooting schedule for one week.

However, his role as an attorney in the final movie proves vital. He steps in and saves the team from forfeiting their scholarships to Eden Hall. He is later influential in getting the high school to change its nickname from the Warriors to the Ducks.

In some ways, Estevez’s role in the trilogy, but especially in D3, foreshadows his future career, as he exchanged his coach’s whistle and skates for a director’s chair.

Two of Estevez’s most notable movies under his direction were Bobby (2006) and The Way (2010). The former fictionalized the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 with a star-studded cast featuring Nick Cannon, Anthony Hopkins, Ashton Kutcher, Elijah Wood and Estevez himself.

In The Way, Estevez’s father, Martin Sheen, follows a Catholic pilgrimage route as he mourns the death of his son, coincidentally portrayed by Estevez, and meets others experiencing trials in their own lives along the way.

While Estevez has acted since the ’90s when the Mighty Ducks trilogy was popular, he has clearly since chosen to be someone who helps create a movie rather than working in front of a camera and having players go through unconventional on-ice drills.

Although he appeared briefly in a 2008 Two and a Half Men episode with his real-life brother Charlie Sheen, you can say that Estevez’s life mirrored his art. He grew up in the ’80s coming-of-age tales before mentoring the Ducks on the ice in the ’90s. Since the turn of the century, he has embodied a similar player-to-coach transformation, working to inspire actors behind the camera.

In the end, while Estevez’s last role in Hollywood came in 2010, he may be most recognized for his role in helping the Ducks discover what it takes to be a team that flies together.