March 23, 2006
Hoop Dreams Come True: A Thought-Provoking Documentary Posted by Allen Barra at 07:30 AM EST Increasingly, it seems, documentaries, or at least sports documentaries, are not so much imitations of life as B-movies. Through The Fire (Walt Disney Video, $29.99) chronicles the meteoric rise of Sebastian Telfair, the most sensational Coney Island schoolyard legend ever. The film’s promotional tag line reads, “His family gave him the dream, the streets gave him the drive. The game gave him the chance.” And happily for ESPN, which just released the film on DVD, none of that is untrue. It just seems untrue while you’re watching. Directed by Jonathan Hock—who did Imax’s Michael Jordan to the Max and has done numerous shows for ESPN, most notably Streetball—Through The Fire is a documentary structured as a feature film. The central casting is perfect; Telfair couldn’t be more charming if he were played by a young Cuba Gooding, Jr. It’s hard to imagine that even Hollywood could come up with more of an underdog scenario than Telfair’s real life story. We’re scarcely settled in our seats before Sebastian, with Abraham Lincoln High School fresh from its third league title and a state championship, calls a press conference to announce his choice of a university, Louisville, coached by Rick Pitino. In a movie, side stories would then converge on our hero. His older brother, also something of a basketball legend, would fail to make the NBA draft, devastating the family. Then, as if to underline their desperate straits, a drug-related shooting in their building would emphasize how desperately Mrs. Telfair and her children needed to get out of the project. Darned if life doesn’t cooperate and provide precisely these circumstances. Sebastian opts for the NBA and a whopping $15 million Adidas deal. But this didn’t end his underdog status; it merely heightened it. When he announced he would be available for the draft, much of the New York press got hostile, questioning whether his size (slightly under six feet and about 170 pounds) and inexperience would allow him to succeed in the NBA. In truth, these questions have yet to be answered, and it will probably take a follow-up documentary to resolve them. Telfair is currently a mediocre role player for the Portland Trailblazers, averaging under ten points a game. “Right now,” he recently told an Associated Press writer, “I don’t know who I am. I’m definitely not Sebastian Telfair.” Such doubts are absent from Hock’s film, which is one long sustained cheer for the system that helped lift Sebastian and his family out of economic despair. As you might expect from a director who has worked so closely with ESPN (the network that broadcast the high school game that first brought Telfair before a national audience), the emphasis is on the game itself, and here Hock is on steady ground. All of the basketball, from the energetic schoolyard pickups to the high school games, is so lovingly recorded, and the grace and spirit of the young men so evident, that it exposes the over-edited basketball sequences in movies like Glory Road for the studio concoctions that they are. Sebastian himself is clean-cut, smiling, and buoyant, and he handles the media with a slickness that belies his years. No doubt he has picked up a lick of media savvy from watching his cousin, Stephon Marbury. Telfair seems like the very incarnation of what the game is supposed to be about, and Hock’s camera sticks to him so close that at times you’re almost expecting a referee to jump in and call a technical. One never questions for a moment that Sebastian deserves everything that he finally gets. Unfortunately we also don’t question the larger issues that surround the Telfair story. Leaving aside the issue as to whether Sebastian or his brother (who is now playing professional ball in Greece—not such a bad life after all) would have been better off going to college, it might have been appropriate for someone in the film to address the question of how many lives have been ruined for kids who chased the carrot at the end of the stick like Sebastian but never got to bite. A friend of mine who covered high school and college basketball for 30 years once estimated that it takes at least a thousand young boys, all of them competing furiously from grade school level on up, to create the forge that will produce a single great talent. How many of them, dropping out of school to pursue basketball, get burned before they get through the fire? Through The Fire is an exhilarating watch, but you have to wear blinders to walk away from it unconcerned with all the issues it pretends don’t exist.
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