"At the point I met Tim, I think I realized how difficult the task really was," Rush said. "But I saw Tim was going to bring this incredible energy."
Chambers' movie, The Mighty Macs, is about Rush and her 1971-72 underdog Immaculata team that won the first women's national basketball championship.
It stars Carla Gugino, David Boreanaz, Ellen Burstyn, and Marley Shelton and is scheduled to open in more than 1,000 theaters on Oct. 21. First comes a world premiere Friday at the Kimmel Center.
The making of The Mighty Macs and seeing it through to a national distribution could be a Rocky story in itself. Chambers, a Cardinal O'Hara High School graduate and former Ivy League football player of the year at Penn, wrote the screenplay, found the money to make it, directed it, found more money to get the word out, and finally saw a national distributor sign on four years after the movie was filmed in 2007.
Rush said the movie exceeded her expectations. Tears streamed down her face, she said, as she watched filming of a pivotal early scene, as Immaculata's campus turned out late one night, many students in pajamas, to cheer on Immaculata's team - not after a big win but a crushing loss.
"It was so real," Rush said. "The uniforms, the nuns, the enthusiasm. . . . So vivid."
Chambers said he kept the words "Equality of dreams" taped to the side of his computer as he wrote the screenplay.
"All the good sports films are about something else," Chambers said, recalling how Rush told her husband, "I want to get a job. I don't want to start a family."
