Losing Life's Game

Curtis Gates is getting sentimental. The "athlete of the decade" at his inner-city high school, he once dreamed of becoming a professional basketball player. Some 10 years later he is an overweight wage-laborer in a bleak Chicago factory. Sometimes, he confesses to the camera, his eyes well up and he wonders whether he isn't an abject failure in life.

He wonders and we wonder. The scene is from Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert's brilliant documentary "Hoop Dreams," a lyrical meditation on basketball, ambition and the depravity of inner-city life. Gates is one of the film's truth-tellers. He is aware--if only at moments--of the terrible burden of potential and its cruel habit of leaving behind a trail of unfulfilled dreams and unrealized promise.

Now Gates spends the better part of his time dreaming that his brother William will make good where he could not. The "dreams" of this film's title do not belong to the player alone. They are the heavy hopes of family and community that the would-be star shoulders every time he takes to the court.

What is profoundly disturbing about "Hoop Dreams" is not that its two protagonists will probably fall short of NBA stardom. Rather, it is the particular kind of failure--intractable, cyclical and tragic--that makes the film pathetic.

"Hoop Dreams" is a tragedy of bad advice. Bad advice begins with bad fathers, or more aptly, absent fathers. Both Arthur Age and William Gates, the two young players whose high school careers this film traces, grow up in single-parent homes. This fact becomes central to the narrative of their lives as time and time again they are manipulated by would-be fathers--be they coaches, recruiters, or corporations.

By the end of the documentary, both Gates and Agee are fathers. There is no indication that they have come to terms with the problems of their childhood and will choose to make things different in their own homes. On the contrary, it is easy to see how the sons will become the fathers in the next generation's hoop dreams. The tragic cycle of inner-city life will be repeated once again.

This film's documentary format begs a certain ethical issue. How can the three film-makers shoot a scene of the Agee family living in the dark, a consequence of their not being able to pay the monthly electric bill? Did the camera operators feel no moral imperative to dig into their own pockets and keep the lights on in the Agee home?

True, these questions are not peculiar to this film or this format. Still the audience is left to wonder. Are the film-maker just the latest group of authority figures to appropriate the talent of Gates and Agee for their own purposes, only to discard them when they are through?

And what of us, the viewing public? Are not the dreams of Gates and Agee our dreams in some fundamental sense? Don't we need them to succeed and become the next "Magic" or Jordan, demigods we all can worship? To watch this three-hour documentary is to be implicated in the vices it depicts.

"Hoop Dreams" is the story of viscious "hopes" of cultural pathology and unrequited "dreams" of evanescent fame. There are moments of extraordinary grace along the way, some intimations of hope and the occasional tremendous jam. But these moments are fleeting. As long as these cycles keep on spinning and these misguided dreams are dreamt, there can be little hope for William Gates and Arthur Agee--of, for that matter, any of us.

Samuel J. Rascoff's column appears alternate Fridays.