"Hoop Dreams" versus March Madness

March Madness and NCAA tournament blitz begins. Talk shows spend endless hours debating seeds and bubble teams. Yet the hype and hoopla hide another reality behind the minority basketball players who drive the NCAA teams.

Hoop Dreams is a superb 1994 documentary that follows five years in the lives of two black American adolescents pursuing their dreams of making the NBA. Every college fan should be required to see this film, one of the greatest sports documentaries.

Stories about kids overcoming poverty and adversity will leaven tournament mythology.  Yet poverty is not about edifying stories, it hurts and drains and starts children off at incredible disadvantages. Hoop Dreams evokes a clear-eyed moral urgency to that world of poverty and despair that spawns the brilliant young athletes seeking to escape their world. One of the athletes William Gates says, “basketball is my way out.”

The documentary highlights the broken and resilient families who nurture, ride and exploit those dreams. The poverty and want peek out and glare at us despite the smiles and energy of the young men. We, the privileged fans, benefit from the excellence fostered by hoop dreams. We should never forget the reality behind their lives.  Nor should we forget what our colleges owe in education and support to these young athletes.

The probabilities of a young black teenager becoming a professional basketball player remain 1 in 65,000 orders of magnitude larger than being a lawyer or doctor. Yet thousands of families press young players to seek the lottery and glamor of basketball over studies. Hoop Dreams reveals the moral costs of the distorted path that lure many minority males to practice sports rather than academics.

William Gates and Arthur Agee are superb young basketball players busting with talent and infectious energy. No one who sees the film ever forgets their smiles and pure joy at playing. Gates especially epitomizes an elegant and explosive style. They dream of making the NBA. They dream of saving their families. Arthur talks about how the first thing he will do is buy his mother a house.

Basketball beckons as their way out. A black middleman brings them to the attention of St. Joseph’s a wealthy white suburban Catholic school. The school offers them partial scholarships. When raised tuition makes it unlikely Gates can continue a good “Samaritan” pays for his schooling. Both families scrape to send them to the school. 

The boys endure three hour round trip to arrive at the alien white world of St. Josephs. Both read at fifth grade levels and possess neither the clothes, language, study skills nor family support to succeed at a high performing suburban school.

This is not the fairy tale world of Blind Side. When Arthur does not develop as rapidly as hoped and his family cannot make the tuition increase, St. Joseph’s coach drops him from the team. The school then presents a tuition bill of 1800 dollars to a family that lives on welfare of 268 dollars a month.

The raw reality of poverty shoots through the film. The coiled violence, self-delusion and abuse of Arthur’s father poison his home. His father buys drugs behind the court where Arthur plays pickup ball. Drugs pervade the world, and Arthur’s best friend Shannon will succumb.

Yet despite it all, Arthur perseveres in basketball. His mother struggles to hold together the fragile household and give Arthur a center as well as a motive to escape. She achieves a nursing degree in one of the most powerful moments in the movie when she says in tears, "I didn't think I could do it. "And people told me I wasn't going to.”  

Arthur’s school gym and primitive playing conditions do not matter. He plays and practices. He endures his father’s abuse and his mother’s illness. The entire time he can never bring himself to take studies seriously and ends up unable to attend college because of his grades and ACT. Ultimately Mineral Area College in Missouri offers him a basketball scholarship to build up academics and get noticed. Like St. Joseph’s, the community college uses him. Of the seven black players in the college, six are basketball players who live in in a small cabin miles from the school.

The bleak isolated cabin highlights how Arthur must fight for his dream. The schools use him. He has to use them to play and escape. Ultimately he wins a scholarship to Arkansas State and has a successful college career. Neither he nor Gates will ever see the NBA. But he leaves with an intact and almost credible education that permits him to work with kids. Today he gets by and founded the  Arthur Agee Role Model Foundation that works with adolescents to support their dreams. He helped make a film called Hoop Realities that followed up the life he and Gates lived. 

William Gates’ path is no less hard. He excels at basketball and acclimates to St. Josephs and earns a decent GPA. He plays with explosive elegance. Colleges court him with boxes of scholarship offers by sophomore year. His father tries to sneak back into his life after years of absence when the dad thinks he might have a future. His mother is haunted by the failure of his older brother Curtiss, a superb basketball player, who never developed the self-discipline and study habits to succeed at college. Curtis lurks in background out of shape, unemployed. He haunts William as a symbol of failure and spur.

His high school lionizes him, his coach relentlessly pushes him. But disaster strikes Gates. Like Boobie Miles in Friday Night Lights, he injures himself. During surgery his mother worries “I just want this one to make it.” Bearing the burden of his family’s dreams, like so many young athletes, William Gates comes back too soon and reinjures himself. Another surgery and rehab follows.

The injury causes coaches to back off scholarship, and Gates tries to prove his worth at the NIKE summer camp with the 100 best high school players in the country.

Spike Lee gets it right then an now. He  tells them at the camp, “no one here cares about you…you are young male and black…they want you to play for their team to make money…that’s what it is money.” An independent scout summarizes the world where Gates struggles to impress celebrity coaches like Bobby Knight and Rick Pitino as a “meat market.”

Gates barely qualified for college after taking the ACT five times and enters Marquette. He had an OK college career, lost heart, quit the team but came back and graduated. During high school he fathered a child and stayed with the mother and married her. Thinking of his dad, he states, “I will not leave her.” Now he works as a minister in his old area of Chicago. Basketball helped him escape but did not provide him or his family salvation. At a certain point in the movie, both Gates and Agee stop smiling.

Everything and nothing has changed. Today these wonderful players would be recruited, culled and groomed from the age 12. Select teams and shoe-financed programs would feed them, coach them and have them travelling and playing a 100 games a year. Posses surround young players who get scholarship offers at age 13. The best are NBA ready at 18. Coaches and recruiting begin early, scholarship offers arrive at age 13. The corruption of college recruiting is more hidden but enticements of money, jobs to family clog the system. Young athletes are surrounded by intermediaries, on-the-take AAU coaches or bags of money like leeches.

The players still fight to escape the brutal poverty. Basketball not education gives them the focus and cache to escape the drugs and violence. NCAA rules force them to take more core classes and actually get reasonable grades. Graduation rates for black basketball players at Division I schools are improving but remain awful. Hoop Dreams reminds us of why. It cuts through the glitter of March Madness and reminds us of the moral cost and our school's moral obligation to get them the education they often do not achieve.

PS:          William Gate’s brother Curtiss was shot do death in 2001. Arthur Agee’s father was murdered in 2004. For a fine complementary review see http://etheriel.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/hoop-dreams-the-struggle-and-the-triumph/

End of the Big East—Birth of an Old Fashioned Conference

Much like Argentina, no one should cry for the end of the Big East, and certainly no one should romanticize it. Villanova, Marquette, Georgetown, St. John's, Providence, Seton Hall and DePaul, all urban undergraduate focused non football schools, are leaving the conference. This spells the end of a long painful death spiral. (As usual Pete Thamel does a fine job examing the process) In 1980 the Big East was carved out as the first completely commercial conference. It was created solely to stake out a market, produce a brand across disparate schools and increase the probability of getting schools into the NCAA basketball tournament. Born in commerce, it dies in commerce. One side effect may be the creation of a new conference that actually resembles what conferences were once upon a time.

From 1980 to 2005 the Big East launched an unparalleled period of success and visibility for its schools in basketball. Traditional eastern powers like Villanova, Georgetown, Syracuse and Providence joined with newcomer powers like Connecticut and Pittsburgh to generate a depth of competition and market visibility. The Big East branded a distinct form of physical and tough basketball. Each year 6-8 teams got into the NCAA tournament, and their coaches spread the gospel of brutal Big East basketball across the land. The expansion of the NCAA tournament into a national liturgical event gained immense stature for its schools. Connecticut and Syracuse with their superstar coaches took home a series of titles

This basketball success could not withstand the pressures unleashed by the economic dominance of football over the last twenty years. College football and its vast popularity has reaped huge media money, and power conferences have reaped gigantic windfalls from conference contracts. These contracts at the five elite BCS conferences garner 15 to 19 million dollars a year for schools.

College football drives the profit. The Big East was never a football conference. Largely because no one else even looked plausible, the Big East snuck into the BCS championship pool as much as a sop to the mid major conferences as any football merit of the conference. Each year its BCS team got humiliated by real football powers in a random BCS bowl game. Heck, TCU quit the conference before it ever joined the conference.

A media consultant once told me, “aside from the tournament, basketball is filler for slots. It has bulk but not profits.”  The dominance of football and the migration of real money to the big five left the Big East vulnerable in two ways. First, it would never be a serious football conference. At random times Boston College, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, West Virginia or Cincinnati might emerge for a year a two with a great player or coach. But the coach would inevitably move on, and the player would graduate. When Boston College, Miami and especially Virginia Tech jumped to the ACC, this portended the end of any hope of football elite status. Second, all the Big East schools were hemorrhaging money with football, and the inability of the conference to ever gain elite football status doomed them to perpetual money losing.

This still-born football status coupled with huge monetary losses from football meant any half way decent football schools looked for other conferences that could gain them more money and status. It also meant that the basketball only schools found themselves mooted by the desperate and futile search for football credibility. This lead to increasingly desperate overtures to Boise State, San Diego State, Tulane or whomever could bring a shred of credibility to the conference.

In addition unlike the ACC or Big 10, the Big East never had any serious academic credibility. Schools such as Syracuse or Pittsburgh or Louisville would jump to the ACC which offered more money, stability and more academic stature. Each defection lead to more panicked search for lower quality football schools to fill the void. The Big East could no longer fulfill the requirements of a  successful modern conference.

The paradox here lies with the non-football schools. Most of them were city based religious colleges colleges. They all remained mission driven undergraduate institutions. None of them had huge endowments, but all had fierce and loyal alumni based in urban areas. Many had added strong professional schools and grown into universities, but their core identity remains mission driven undergraduate education. None of them had added football, and the very few who did like Boston College struggled with indifferences and periodic success.

These urban, mission driven religious undergraduate schools had great markets in big eastern cities and had strong traditional rivalries among New York, Providence, Boston, New Jersey or Philadelphia. Many of these rivalries echoed back fifty years when schools clustered in small boxes to play intense rivalries. They all shared plausible commitments to serious undergraduate education with a values based foundation. Sister schools like Xavier, St. Louis, Creighton lived in different conferences. They now loom along with an interesting and similar newcomer like Butler as possible new allies for a reconstituted conference who would share a scale and values dimension.

This basketball driven conference would not make huge amounts of money, granted. The new conference, however, would connect strong rivalries among strong markets with strong committed undergraduate focused universities and colleges. It would also lead to strong filled auditoriums. The conference would post strong strength of schedule and high RPI ratings for the tournament. Travel for the Olympic sports would be manageable. It would have a strong brand, solid recruiting base, good coaches and regularly get strong exposure at tournament time.

More interestingly the conference schools would not face the economic hemorrhaging of football. Football is a two-edge sword. The vast majority of football schools lose serous money, and the losses require internal subsidies. Even with the new mega conference contracts, schools continue to lose money as they must pay rising salaries, build up facilities and pay back internal subsidies to schools. Freeing themselves from the football schools permits these undergraduate focused universities to live within their means, still gain visibility through NCAA tournament runs and imbed themselves in their communities as they once did. It still gives alumni a focal point of identity.

The demise of the first purely commercial conference creates a paradox. Who knows, maybe a new conference might emerge that shares similar undergraduate based values, has relatively contiguous markets with traditional rivalries and does not lose huge amounts of money each year chasing the dream of football largesse. It would be a conference based upon affinity and proximity. Now wouldn’t that be a change?


Big East Exodus

School	Left	For
Miami	2004	ACC
Virginia Tech	2004	ACC
Boston College	2005	ACC
TCU †	2011	Big 12
West Virginia	2012	Big 12
Syracuse	2013	ACC
Pittsburgh	2013	ACC
Louisville	2014	ACC
Rutgers	2014	Big Ten
Notre Dame	2015	ACC
DePaul*	undetermined
Georgetown*	undetermined
Marquette*	undetermined
Providence*	undetermined
St. John's*	undetermined
Seton Hall*	undetermined
Villanova*	undetermined