So went my teammates and the crowd of parents as I finally made a basket during the last regular-season game of my team’s season. Like a lot of 12-year-old boys, I wanted to “be like Mike,” but my athletic skills didn’t quite measure up to my lofty ambitions. I rode the bench for most of the season in my community basketball league, but the all-stars that populated my team made sure to wallop our opponents right after we’d clinched the championship spot, so, my coach thought, What’s there to lose by putting Craig in?
I reminisced about this moment during the opening shots of He Got Game, that Spike Lee movie about a basketball star. As I watched clips of kids of all racial, economic, and geographic backgrounds playing, I remembered a discussion Alexandra Sullivan, my high school American History teacher, facilitated about economic backgrounds and sport. It boiled down to this: hockey is a rich kid’s sport; you need all kinds of equipment for it. With basketball, all you need is a ball and a hoop.
He Got Game exists on several levels: 1) a love letter to basketball; 2) a tale of reunification between an estranged father and son; 3) a commentary on sports as a business; and 4) my personal favorite – pro-single movie.
Denzel Washington, a regular in Lee’s flicks, starts as Jake Shuttlesworth, a man in prison for the manslaughter of his wife (he loved her and treated well, but he accidentally killed her in an argument with his son, Jesus). He learns that the governor is willing to reduce his sentence if he can get Jesus, one of the best high school basketball players in the country, to sign with the governor’s alma mater, Big State.
The main thread of the story involves his reconnecting with Jesus, and the pro-single part comes in two threads:
1)Jesus has a girlfriend, Lala, who’s been pushing him to meet with a sports agent through a friend of the family; some of the NBA teams are looking at him. Jesus wants to go to college and get an education, “the right path” (which I happen to agree with). We see that Lala’s been cheating on him with this “family friend.” But it goes both ways: Jesus hooks up with a couple of “students” at a visit to a school (these students are prostitutes whom the school hired to entice him). They have a deep conversation near a Coney Island beach during which she reveals she’s staying with him because, well, she wants to be with a rich NBA star and be taken care of. We can empathize with her; when living in a ghetto, one will do what they need to in order to get out. But they break up right then and there. 2)During Jake’s “work release program,” he stays at a cheap motel, where next door lives a prostitute, Dakota, who’s regularly beaten by her boyfriend/pimp. They get to know each other, and Jake pays for a “session,” but we can tell there’s genuine feeling. They don’t somehow fall in love and run off together, but rather, in the film’s conclusion, we see her riding a bus into a rural landscape (I’m guessing she’s gone back to one of the Dakotas, where she’s from).
While the two relationship aspects are pro-single, the movie takes relationships seriously, most notably between father and son. And I sense that Jesus is the type that probably will marry and raise children, but he’s not going to settle for someone who only wants him for his money, as I imagine many professional athletes do. For now, he’s chosen to delay that gratification. In this sense, he got game.