'Hoop Dreams': A Look Back at 1994, Best Year Ever

In “Hoop Dreams,” documentary filmmaker Steve James and his team follow two talented high school basketball players, William Gates and Arthur Agee, both of whom have dreams of one day playing for the NBA. An audience award winner at The Sundance Film Festival, the film ended up on many Top Ten lists in 1994, and was Roger Ebert’s favorite film of the entire decade. It was oddly and controversially not nominated for best documentary that year, which led to a change in the selection of the nominees.

The movie remains great, a gripping sports documentary fraught with underdog heroics and powerful family drama. Many of the characters are straight out of a Syd Field book, and if these existed in a Hollywood narrative film, they would in some cases be absolute clichés. I think the three hour length allows us to get to know the characters so deeply that they move beyond the stereotypes they oddly seem cut from. There’s Curtis Gates, who, having failed at basketball, now drifts from job to job living his dreams through his brother William. There are Agee’s parents, his hardworking mother and his ne’er do well but likable father. Finally (for the purposes of brevity), there’s Coach Pingatore, seemingly only in it for himself, a hard ass whose claim to fame is coaching Isiah Thomas in high school. This fact is a carrot that Pingatore seems to dangle in front of Agee and Gates, as in, You could be the next Isiah Thomas, if you listen to me.

I love the film’s fly on the wall appeal. Steve James and his Oscar Nominated Editor, William Haugse, simply tell a story, without ever fully taking sides. Of course, Pingatore comes across as a bit of a jerk. Which is strange, because he’s a coach, and most coaches are so warm and fuzzy, y’know?

Pingatore recruits both Agee and Gates to attend prestigious St. Joseph’s, offering each a partial scholarship. When Gates immediately excels, a donor comes up with the rest of his tuition, but Agee is dropped and must enroll at Marshall, an inner-city school. Surprisingly, it’s Agee who leads his team deep into the playoffs, while Pingatore is forced to watch.

While I love the movie, I am at odds with leftist fans who come away from it saying things like this doozy from Joseph Cunneen in the National Catholic Reporter:

“When the movie is over, however, even jocks are apt to ask themselves: What kind of a society is it that can’t seem to provide black male children with alternative dreams, ones that can be pursued at better odds?”

Since when was it society’s obligation to provide dreams for children, black male or otherwise? As though, left to their own devices, black people can’t dream realistically – it makes no sense! I don’t profess to know Cunneen or his work, but this statement stinks of Great Society paternalism, the effects of which can be seen throughout the movie: absentee fathers, children born out of wedlock, and drug abuse are all on display in the film.

In an analysis of the film, social critic and English Professor Murray Sperber echoes the liberal sentiment that Arthur’s father Bo is a “victim of crack addiction.” Arthur’s father, Bo Agee, abandons the family at one point in the film. He shows back up, says hi to Arthur, and slinks off camera to score some crack. It’s a devastating moment, and as Arthur grows increasingly wary of his father, it’s difficult to think of Bo as the victim in all of this. When Bo resurfaces, clean and sober, and very religified, but Arthur still regards him with suspicion. The look of sad skepticism on Arthur’s face as his newly sober father leads the family in prayer is both depressing and cinematic.

It’s a testament to Steve James and his team that the film can produce such diverse insights. Some see Agee’s struggle and say, “Society needs to do more.” I see the same struggle and say, “Agee’s daddy needs to do less crack.” Roughly translated, I mean that the individual needs to do more to improve his or her own life and stop waiting for society or anyone else to help them out. My own viewpoint is reinforced in the film, when Arthur’s mom Sheila completes training to become a Nurse’s assistant, without much help from Bo. As she learns that she received the highest grade in the class, she sobs, “I didn’t think I could do it. And people told me I wasn’t gonna be anything.”