The World's Greatest Athlete is a 1973 American feature film released by the Walt Disney Company. It starred John Amos, Roscoe Lee Browne, Tim Conway, Dayle Haddon, and Jan-Michael Vincent. It is one of the few wide-release Hollywood sports films to look at the world of track and field, as the World's Greatest Athlete, Nanu, played by Vincent, competes in the decathlon.
As the movie begins, college athletic coach Sam Archer (Amos) and his assista...
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The World's Greatest Athlete is a 1973 American feature film released by the Walt Disney Company. It starred John Amos, Roscoe Lee Browne, Tim Conway, Dayle Haddon, and Jan-Michael Vincent. It is one of the few wide-release Hollywood sports films to look at the world of track and field, as the World's Greatest Athlete, Nanu, played by Vincent, competes in the decathlon.
As the movie begins, college athletic coach Sam Archer (Amos) and his assistant Milo Jackson (Conway) are trapped in classic establishing-shot roles: they are the coaches at Merrivale College, and their teams invariably lose. A series of plot coincidences sends the pair to Africa, where they catch sight of the Tarzan-like Nanu, who can outrun a cheetah in full bound.
Seeing this, the coaching staff quickly whip out their recruitment pen and papers, but soon fall (literally) into the clutches of Nanu's mentor, spiritual leader Gazenga (Browne). Nanu, it develops, is an orphan and an innocent child of the bush. Gazenga...
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