IN 2018, TOM CRUISE finally joined Instagram, and fans sure felt the need for speed: He picked up 550,000 followers in less than an hour. Now he’s up to 6.5 million followers, and they’re greeted by the actor’s self-assessment of his own career in his bio. He could have gone with “Three-time Oscar nominee,” or “Sold $10 billion worth of movie tickets.”
But instead, he picked: “Actor, producer, running in movies since 1981.”
It’s a winking, self-aware nod to this much-memed chapter of his Hollywood career. He always gets the rogue bad guy with the rogue nuclear codes from the rogue country, and he does it in a sprint. By one running blog’s count, he’s run in 44 of his 52 movies, and that includes two running scenes in his newest movie, “Top Gun: Maverick,” which opens this week nationwide. A quick reminder: Tom Cruise is 59 years old, the same age as Wilford Brimley when he was chasing Mitch McDeere in “The Firm.”
But that raises the question… Is Tom Cruise actually a good runner? We convened an elite panel of Olympians, film critics and former coaches and set out on a mission to analyze Cruise’s running — and might have stumbled onto a never-before-told origin story of his first theatrical running moment.
The evolution
The official start of Tom Cruise, the running actor, was in 1981 when he ran in his first movie, “Endless Love.”
But perhaps the most formative run of Tom Cruise’s life came in 1980, during his senior year at Glen Ridge High School in New Jersey. His old wrestling coach, Angelo Corbo, says Cruise — then going by his legal name, Thomas Cruise Mapother IV — was a decent 122-pounder.
But Cruise came in one day on crutches right before the 1980 wrestling postseason and said he’d slipped coming down the steps at his house. Since he was done with wrestling, Cruise wondered if it’d be OK to go out for his first play, “Guys and Dolls.” Corbo said yes.
A few weeks later, though, Cruise came to Corbo and asked if he could come along to the state…
Source : espn
