Amazing Grace And Chuck

Year releasted: 1987

by Keith Phipps
August 15th, 2001

With the bombing of Hiroshima, humanity awoke to the possibility that its own technological progress might destroy it. If the brightest minds on the planet could produce such a terrible weapon of destruction, what kind of mind would it take to remove the threat? A religious leader? A politician of tremendous foresight? Or could it be, as Amazing Grace And Chuck suggests, an iron-willed Little Leaguer and a Boston Celtic? When 12-year-old Joshua Zuehlke, the son of fighter pilot William L. Petersen, takes a tour of a missile silo, he begins to take a negative view of nuclear annihilation. He decides to take matters into his own hands the only way he knows how: by refusing to pitch for the Little League team that depends on his awesome athletic prowess. A wire service picks up Zuehlke's story, which attracts the attention of star basketball player Amazing Grace Smith (Alex English), who decides to resign from his team in sympathy, much to the initial consternation of manager Jamie Lee Curtis. Leaving Boston, English sets up house in Zuehlke's barn, and the two begin chumming it up across the countryside as a nation looks on in bewilderment. But, before long, their idea gets paid forward through the ranks of professional athletics, devastating professional sports and flustering a shadowy businessman and President Gregory Peck, both of whom feel that the growing movement threatens their interests. "They want me to tell you that you're jeopardizing your country by not playing Little League baseball," Peck says of his advisors in a private meeting with Zuehlke. Bringing the concept of brinkmanship to his own brand of amateur-athletics-based passive resistance, Zuehlke refuses to give in to the bushy-browed commander-in-chief, but the ante is upped when other powers-that-be inveigle English onto a doomed jet. Launching an international silent protest, Zuehlke soon has children all across the globe refusing to speak. Moved, or perhaps creeped out, by the Village Of The Damned-esque scenario, Peck meets with the Soviet premier, who joins him in wholesale disarmament. With that matter taken care of, Zuehlke resumes his Little League career.