Hoop Dreams & a recurring nightmare
What a documentary from 1994 tells us about 2022.
Near the end of Hoop Dreams, the 1994 award-winning documentary about William Gates Jr. and Arthur Agee, two elite Black high school basketball players, Gates says, “When somebody says, ‘When you get to the NBA, don’t forget about me,’ I should say to them, ‘Well if I don’t make it, you don’t forget about me.’” Hoop Dreams followed Gates and Agee through four years of high school and became a smash hit, one whose commercial and critical acclaim ensured Gates and Agee won’t be forgotten. The film was celebrated in its day for bringing voice and screen time to poor Black families. 28 years later its significance has not only endured, it’s even more meaningful, because with the passage of time much of what was impactful in 1994 resonates today in entirely new ways.
When Hoop Dreams was released, its final chapter was still unwritten. The documentary followed Gates and Agee through four years of high school in their quest is to make it to the NBA and make enough money to rescue their families from systemic poverty. In the early 1990s, an aspiring novelist or guitarist or actress, regardless of age, could test their talent in the pursuit of a publishing contract or a record deal or a choice role; if someone offered one, they were free to take it. An aspiring basketball player had – still has – no such freedom. They had to go to college, usually for four years, more than enough time for a whole lot of people to get their hands into the player’s pockets..
Gates is invited to attend an elite basketball camp the summer after his junior year, one where born-white-in-America Dick Vitale regales a room full of Gates and Agees with talk of the United States as a merit-based paradise. The camp is essentially a convention center for the nation’s top college coaches, millionaires milling about, eyeballing young Black men for the best return on investment in an unpaid work force, like the slaveowners of yesteryear. It’s one thing to understand that intellectually, quite another to see it smiling at you blissfully unashamed, as when pro scout Bob Gibbons tells the camera: “[Recruiting has] already become a meat market, but I try to do my job and serve professional meat.”
How much has changed when nearly three decades later, the ethos persists, only with better PR? Only two years ago author Michael Sokolove’s The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino addressed corruption in men’s college basketball thusly: “People are buying and selling players. It’s a human trafficking market.” Today Gates, an AAU coach whose sons all play, sees what he calls a “controlled corruption” in college basketball and football that doesn’t exist in baseball, golf or tennis.
“The two sports that are heavily dominated by African-Americans, it seems like there is always an issue when it comes to money,” he said. College athletes are finally able to earn money from their own image or likeness, though as is often the case with sports and money, the profits produced by a large group are disproportionately slanted toward a small elite. NBA prospects are eligible for the draft once their 19th birthday occurs during that calendear year. College football players must serve for three years before they’re eligible for the NFL.
Meanwhile, Venus Williams played in her first professional tournament at 14. Tiger Woods was 20 when he played in his first via a sponsor’s exemption. This year NBA rookie Joshua Primo entered the league at 18, the same age Agee was when he started college and a year younger than Gates. If Gates were a phenom in 2022 and not 1994, he could have declared for the draft instead of going to college. He may have ended up playing in the developmental G-League, where he would have earned between $35,000 and $125,000 a year instead of the zero he made at Marquette. His coach at Marquette, Kevin O’Neill, earned millions over decades while the players who did all the sweating and running and scoring went unpaid.
St. Joseph’s, an elite private school in the Chicago suburbs, initially recruits both Gates and Agee. Gates, the more touted prospect, has his entire tuition covered as a personal favor by the president of Encyclopedia Britannica, who has a history and connections at the school. Later Gates gets a summer job at Britannica; a few years later so does his brother Curtis. All that benevolence existed while Gates was still a top prospect.
Agee did not show the same upside at 14, so once his family fell $1500 behind on his tuition St. Joseph’s left him in the lurch. His family had to find him a new school during the middle of the year. When he was a senior preparing to graduate from John Marshall, his inner-city public high school, he discovered he may not eligible because St. Joseph’s refused to release his transcript with the debt outstanding. It is gruesome seeing Agee’s parents meeting with the St. Joseph’s director of finance, who says he’s “here to help” while a family with no income has their son’s future mortgaged against a $1500 debt.
Hoop Dreams also accomplished something rare to this day in showcasing white people in power being open and honest with their prejudices. St. Joseph’s head coach Gene Pingatore berates his team of teenagers after one practice, at one point telling his mostly Black squad “You people just refuse to work.” The next day in practice, Gates re-injured a knee he’d already had trouble with, tearing a ligament and beginning an injury history thath would help short-circuit his career. At Gates’ summer camp, a smug Indiana coach Bobby Knight says with utter self-absorption, “There aren’t many kids at any level, including the NBA, that really understand what basketball is really all about.” A parasite presuming its host can’t live without it is an existential level of delusion.
Another grotesquerie is equating sports to war, thereby imbuing coaches with an authority and significance they neither possess nor deserve. DePaul coach Joey Meyer, addressing what he looked for in a prospect, asks in all seriousness, “You going to war, would you want him behind you covering your flank?” Meyer grew up the son of Hall of Fame DePaul coach Ray Meyer, from whom he inherited the position; hearing him talk about war regarding kids who’ve grown up seeing guns and violence every day.would be laughable if it didn’t so perfectly reflect the privilege of whites to assume their imagined experiences as more meaningful than a Black person’s lived reality.
Reading Roger Ebert’s review of the film offers an insight into the dangers of white American narratives regarding racism. Even when they seem intended as positive or supportive, the truth is these narratives never go so far as to actually acknowledge the capitalist necessity of inequality. Ebert wrote:
“A film like "Hoop Dreams" is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and make us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself…Arthur's mother asks the filmmakers, "Do you ever ask yourself how I get by on $268 a month and keep this house and feed these children? Do you ever ask yourself that question?" Yes, frankly, we do. But another question is how she finds such determination and hope that by the end of the film, miraculously, she has completed her education as a nursing assistant.”
“Yes, frankly, we do” is where most white perspectives fear to tread. Ebert, instead of following up by acknowledging centuries of designed inequality, instead marvels at the “determination and hope” of the oppressed. “Aren’t they plucky?” is an opiate that narcotizes the haves to the struggle of the have-nots. Another, one the film helps make clear, is the insistence by modern American racism that the past is a place where things were different and worse, the present is better, and anyone suggesting otherwise is too woke to function. Just like with Ebert, the white gaze is misdirected, but not by accident or misfortune.
Systemic racism isn’t strictly the prerogative of active racists. It is the lifeblood of American capitalism, a system that has never and will never change because it’s working according to plan. Kids like Gates and Agee are just the cost of doing business, the same as Dominican teenagers who dream of making it to MLB or poor Brazilian kids being scouted at 8 years old by scouts from the most powerful clubs on the planet. Anytime someone goes boom, someone else – usually many, many more someone elses – gotta bust.
Curtis Gates, William’s older brother, was one of the many. Once named player of the decade after his career as a Chicago hoops star, he never made it to the NBA; his mother says it’s because he wouldn’t listen to his coaches. Yet Curtis, who was shot to death the day before 9/11, obviously internalized the lessons his coaches tried to give him. Big brother often takes the perspective of an old-school coach when critiquing William’s play.
Juxtaposition is one of Hoop Dreams’ favored tactics: the film’s opening sequence juxtaposes Michael Jordan slam-dunking at the 1988 All-Star Game in Chicago with children playing in fire hydrant water in the summer. Later there’s a street-level shot from a street in Agee’s neighborhood while the Sears Tower stands in the distance. There is always the reminder that no matter how close opportunity may appear, it often may as well be out of sight, being out of reach. But we knew that before 1994. What does it matter now?
Hoop Dreams remains powerful because the passage of time has made its truths starker rather than faded. The way so much can appear to change in basketball without meaningful, justice-centered reform actually occurring is no different from the way racism is dealt with by the system that deals it out in the first place: there’s a lot of noise and paddling, but the boat doesn’t really move much. The film makes it easy to identify people like Pingatore and the St. Joseph’s administration promoting oppression as the status quo. But the villains of 30 years ago aren’t the boogeymen of today, and the film’s enduring power lays in how it exposes the design flaws of well-meaning white liberals, who are as culpable in the cementation of those flaws as the easy targets.
The temptation with Hoop Dreams is to see it as an affirmative answer to the question “Has anything changed?” The truth is the question that truly matters is not only often left unanswered, but unasked: “What needs to change now?” The truth is William Gates and Arthur Agee and thousands and thousands of people like them and their families live in the American margins. A margin is an arbitrary marker that gives order to a page. Black people living and dying – often dying much younger than white people, and more often from violence – with less than they deserve their whole lives is so endemic to American life many don’t ever notice or question it. Instead of the margin, it may as well be the whole notebook.
Hoop Dreams matters as a historic documenting of a specific time and place. It continues to resonate as a living document. 28 years is not as far off as many would hope or have us believe. The dreams the film illustrates, both on the surface and far and wide beneath it, remain as true today as they were in 1619 and 1748 and 1860 and 1968 and 1994 and 2022. The nightmare that inspires the dreams and the film changes some details, but recurs. By seeing and accepting how far we haven’t come, maybe we can finally make progress moving toward real, restorative justice.