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Home , Arthur Agee, Gene Pingatore, Isiah Thomas

: A Bildungsroman

David L. Vanderwerken

I n my film-driven unit on basketball. Hoop Dreams proved to be a rousing success. Over the three class sessions that it took to view the three-hour documentary, my students sat mesmerized by the interlocking stories, cover­ ing nearly a five-year period, of William Gates and . They could easily identify with these young men and their pursuit of the NBA variant of the American Dream, to pull oneself up by one's own Nikes to become the next or . The discussion generated by the film covered a number of topics. Many could see the shrewdness of Gene Siskel's insight that Hoop Dreams documents two American families - inner city African-American families, each with a powerful matriarch as head of the family, Emma Gates and Sheila Agee. Indeed, the two mothers are perhaps the real heroes of the film, doing the best they can with what they have, managing to shield their sons from the drug and gang vermin infesting their neighborhoods, surviving the idiocies of the welfare bureaucracy, keeping the light of hope alive in their homes whether the power is on or off. Perhaps the most moving scene in the film is the one in which Sheila Agee earns her nursing assistant's degree. Both women, so different in personality - the quiet strength of Mrs. Gates, the effervescence of Mrs. Agee - provide models of perseverance and responsibility for their sons unlike the husbands/fathers. The absent father of William, who surfaces only once in the film when the scent of money in the air arising from William's basketball success motivates him to make contact, and the hapless "Bo" Gates - in and out of Arthur's life - could serve as poster figures for what the Million Man March (occuring shortly before we took up Hoop Dreams) was all about. My students interpreted 32 Aethlon XIII:2 / Spring 1996

William's and Arthur's acceptance of their responsibilities as male parents as a positive and hopeful sign. Another family issue students noticed concerns overbearing male kin trying to live their lives through William and Arthur. William's older brother, Curtis, failed to achieve his hoop dream, so it's up to William to redeem him, as we see in scene after scene in which older brother coaches William on the playground court, justifying the hammering he dishes out to William as preparation for the kind of body contact he'll face in big time high school and . Similarly, "Bo" Gates takes credit for Arthur's basketball talent, allowing that if he hadn't been a drug addict, a criminal, a wifebeater and so on and so forth, he would have been NBA material himself. Sheila Gates takes a mordant, sidelong look at the camera while her husband delivers his monologue about helping Arthur fulfill his NBA dream, and of course directly vindicating his father. During negotiations with the Mineral Area Junior College coach, "Bo" does the heavy father routine, just as earlier we have seen Curtis Gates acting as surrogate father for William during the Marquette University coach's home visit. Of course, Arthur has seen "Bo" cruising for drugs at the same playground where Arthur is honing his skills, so his distrust of his father's attempting to look out for Arthur's interests is clearly written on Arthur's face. Earlier, Arthur's face has the same skeptical and quizzical look during the church service in which "Bo" testifies about his conversion. Both boys ultimately reject the "family messiah" role, of personifying the family "ticket" out of the projects, of having to be Atlas shouldering a basketball instead of the globe. These Atlases shrug. My students agreed that director Steve James accomplished a remarkable feat in Hoop Dreams in making the audience care about the Gates and Agee families in a deeply personal way, especially in the way the filmmakers display the deepest respect for the two mothers. These remarkable women served as reality instructors for the men blinded by America's hoop dream, to be . The African-American sociologist, Harry Edwards, has had the most to say about what he calls the "Great Sports Myth" in relation to young African- American men. If society culled America's ghettoes for potential concert pianists the way it seines for basketball players, Edwards has argued, then eventually the Van Clibum competition would be predominantly black, not the NBA. That some of my students still believe, even after the testimony of Hoop Dreams, that the ghetto playground is a magic carpet that will carry talented young men off to fame and fortune reveals the incredible seductive power of the myth. Yet most students will acknowledge that James, Marx, and Gilbert expose the system for what it is - corrupt, cruel, cynical, and exploitive. The talent scout, Earl, whom we meet early in the picture, combs the inner city playgrounds looking for potential recruits for Coach of St. Joseph's Preparatory School, for that special kid who may follow in the sneaker Vanderwerken/Hoop Dreams: A Basketball Bildungsroman 33

prints of Isiah. Today he's looking at Arthur Agee, who has the quickest first step Earl has seen in years. Arthur is fourteen. Is Earl a great humanitarian, an altruist, a patron out of an Alger novel offering a helping hand to a struggling lad, or simply a slave trader, pure and simple? While he sees himself as the former, he realizes that many fellow African-Americans view him as the latter. Arthur never pans out at St. Joe's and returns to his inner city school, Marshall High. During Arthur's senior season at Marshall, Earl makes a sentimental journey of sorts to watch Arthur play, to prove that he "cares" about his boys. In a nice juxtaposition, director James has Earl sitting a few seats away from the next round of meathunters, two scouts for a consortium of junior colleges in attendance to observe Arthur. Their marketing is more successful as they "sell" Arthur to the coach of something called Mineral Area College in outback Missouri. Since our class has scrutinized a number of fictional coaches during the semester, students are most interested in the characterizations of the two factual coaches in Hoop Dreams, Pingatore of St. Joe's and Luther Bedford of Marshall. The film portrays Pingatore as a jerk, in a word. With his abusive style, his obsession with winning, his treatment of William, his "they come and they go" attitude, Pingatore offers quite a contrast to the idealized Norman Dale in Hoosiers. St. Joe's has a veritable shrine to Isiah Thomas, to whom Pingatore continually compares William (or contrasts, more accurately). But William is "too nice," in Pingatore's evaluation, lacking that "killer instinct" Isiah had. At the team awards banquet, William does a voiceover cataloging his realizations about his hoop dream while Pingatore drones on at the podium extolling this season's MVP, a four-year starter, a claim Isiah himself could not make. At his exit interview, Pingatore tells William how he'll always be there for him. William clearly has his doubts, even saying he intends to major in communications so he'll know how to properly say no to St. Joseph fundraising efforts. The one time William did try to talk with his coach about a personal issue, how his girlfriend's family was on his case about not spending enough time with her and their child, Pingatore's advice is "write 'em off" since they're distracting him from basketball. So much for the surrogate father mentoring stance coaches claim to assume. Luther Bedford comes across as not only more humane, but considerably more realistic about his charges than Pingatore. Coach Bedford has no illusions about the system. While a white couple named Weir financially "adopt" William at St. Joe's, no angel is provided for Arthur. Bedford says this was a business decision; Agee just didn't mature as a player as quickly as Gates. If Arthur had, some "arrangement" would have been made to keep him at St. Joe's. Nor did Arthur acculturate enough, "whiten" enough, during his freshman year. Too much "playground," according to Pingatore, too much attitude. However, Arthur does develop under the stem but benevolent Bedford and it will be impoverished Marshall, not the wealthy suburban 34 Aethlon XIII:2 / Spring 1996 parochial school, that gets to go "downstate" to Champaign to play for the state championship. Although Marshall loses, ending up third in the tournament, director James offers a nice shot of Pingatore in the stands watching Arthur lead Marshall to a win in a semi-final round. The look on his face is easily interpreted - "My God, why didn't I have sense enough to keep that kid. Look at him!" The two coaches are also the first line in the network that forms the money- driven subculture of college recruiting. Pingatore sits in when the Marquette coach makes his home visit to the Gateses, and the junior college scouts introduce themselves to Bedford. Even local drug dealers buy into the system, offering money to Arthur to hit the local Foot Locker, sort of a pre-athletic scholarship by these Robin Hoods of the 'hood. The scenes shot at the Nike camp at Princeton reveal nothing more than a glorified livestock auction, a "meat market," to use the Marquette coach's term. Another metaphor might be car salesman. It must occur to some that this is a demeaning trade, having to depend for your livelihood on your ability to sell your school like a used Chevy to an adolescent. All the usual suspects - in bad blazers and ties - are present, from preaching one of his exhortative screeds to these 100 "special people" to Spike Lee, who tries to balance Vitale by telling the boys that they're essentially "revenue units," while John Thompson, , , Coach K, et al, circle like sharks. When William limps off having dinged his injured knee, the camera pans to several coaches making notes on their clipboards. Probably, "write 'em off." The next stage of the recruiting game is the storied campus visit. William's NCAA-sanctioned trip to Marquette is guaranteed to turn an eighteen-year- old's head. The coaching staff has contrived a radio play-by-play in which Gates sinks the winning three-pointer at the buzzer. The fleshpots of Milwau­ kee prove instructive. Now if he can only make that 18 on the ACT so that he can be a non-Prop. 48 athletic admission. He does, after five tries, scoring a 17.5, generously rounded upward to the qualifying 18. In contrast, Arthur's visit to Mineral Area College is not so dazzling. His living quarters, such as they are, would be a flimsy "basketball house" on the outskirts of campus, contiguous to nothing. Director James offers us a long shot of the isolated structure that calls to mind a slave cabin. After all, seven of the nine Africa- Americans enrolled at Mineral are in residence here. His academic interview shows Arthur mentioning that he'll major in business, perhaps pre-med, maybe architecture - or he'll just go have lunch. His trying to come up with answers that might satisfy the white folks provides one of the film's lighter moments. Of course, he'll be majoring in basketball, but a hypocritical system doesn't deal in such candor. After William has signed his letter of intent to Marquette, he cans all his college recruiting brochures in a dumpster, follow­ ing up by trashing the suitcase that stored them. The next Isiah wasn't at Marquette, where William quit the team, rejoined, Vanderwerken/Hoop Dreams: A Basketball Bildungsroman 35

quit again, and is now through with his hoop dream. For Arthur, the dream is very much alive as he now pursues it in Winnipeg, Manitoba after two years at Mineral and two more at Arkansas State. He can't let go. Or it won't let go of him, one. As a story of the growth and development of young people, a Bildungsroman Hoop Dreams is an admirable achievement. As independent filmmakers, James, Marx, and Gilbert were willing to take five years, shoot untold feet of film, to capture the maturation process of William Gates and Arthur Agee. At eighteen, the "foul dust of reality," as Fitzgerald put it, has modified or frustrated the young men's dreams. The film ends with a crosscut sequence of the two high school commencements and family graduation parties. It has been, in one sense, a triumph over environment. Arthur is mugged and robbed just a few days before graduation. His friend Shannon is now serving time for dealing. And Arthur asserts his independence from father "Bo" in the highly symbolic one-on-one game between father and son. Here, there is no bonding a la baseball's fathers and sons playing catch motif. While the Agee women whoop and catcall, the macho posturing of "Bo" and Arthur threatens to erupt in outright violence. The sheer joy the boy took in competing when he was fourteen has become serious business at eighteen. The starry-eyed lad who met his hero Isiah is grimly determined to chase the phantom. William, however, has become a cynical young man. Two revealing lines suggest his state of mind: when he opens the Marquette admission letter, he wryly asks, "Any cash with this?" And he reflects on the fragility of sport glamor when he responds to his friends who tell him not to forget them when he's in the NBA, "If I don't make it, don't forget about me." As Sheila Agee prepares a dinner in honor of Arthu r's eighteenth birthday, she is proudly aware that even surviving to eighteen in the ghetto is in itself a milestone. She doesn't need to read in Time that murder is the number one cause of death among young African- American males. She lives it. A ghetto Bildungsroman, then, is nearly an oxymoron. Hoop Dreams is a powerful exception, a film that may well turn out to be the the best social history of our time. WORKS CITED Hoop Dreams. Dir. Steve James. Fine Line Features, 1994. With William Cates and Arthur Agee.