Episode 38: Hoop Dreams
Justin:
If there’s something in this material world that I love more than movies, it’s basketball. I have lived and breathed the sport since I could literally live and breathe, thanks mostly to my dad putting a soft foam orange ball in my newborn hands. I love watching the game, talking about the game, analyzing the game, and of course, playing the game. So it was very, VERY easy for me to step into the shoes of Arthur Agee and William Gates and share in their dream of making it to the highest reaches of the professional basketball mountain.
And while it is simple to view the documentary in terms of the basketball success and failure that these young men face, the true brilliance of HOOP DREAMS and what makes it so impactful is how it also manages to highlight a number of societal issues that we still very much deal with today, some thirty years after the filmmakers started following around the Agee and Gates families. From Arthur remarking about how there’s no one that looks like him at St. Joseph’s and he’s not sure how to act with other races to him watching his father dealing with a drug addiction; from both young men losing family and friends to gang and gun violence to a middle-aged white coach yelling at a team of mostly young black men “you people just refuse to work.” Sometimes it’s subtle and sometimes it’s in your face. But I guess that’s what you get when you record every day life - you get a little bit of it all.
It is impossible not to run the gamut of emotions while watching the nearly three-hour documentary (three-and-a-half if you include the Criterion-sponsored follow-up doc on the young men from 2014). I laughed and I cried. I yelled out in celebration and in frustration. I was filled with elation, but also depression. As a life-long sports enthusiast, that all sounds about right, as fandom will do all of those things to you as well. But as gutting as watching your favorite team lose is (and believe me, I know a thing or two about that) it’s actually much more difficult to hear a high school guidance counselor bemoan “it doesn’t seem fair, but then that’s the system” in a defeated manner not too unlike that of a losing team watching the final seconds tick away in a championship game. HOOP DREAMS is masterful because of its ability to connect sports and life, transcending the two and revealing the ups and the downs, the good and the bad of this American life, and specifically for those so often used, abused, and disenfranchised.
