Far From Neutral Notions - Philippine politics, culture and stuff

I‘m a sucker for sports movies, particularly of the basketball variety. I rank He Got Game, Any Given Sunday, Rocky, For the Love of the Game, Field of Dreams, Tin Cup - yes, I’m a Kevin Costner fan too - as some of my most favorite films of all time. So I took a chance with Samuel L. Jackson’s Coach Carter. I wasn’t disappointed.

The movie was inspired by a true story about controversial high school basketball coach Ken Carter, who received both high praise and staunch criticism when he made national news in 1999 for benching his entire undefeated basketball team for poor academic performance. Coach Carter was himself a player for that same high school in the 70’s and was one of the school’s most accomplished athletes. But while he’s made a good life for himself since, some of his friends and former teammates weren’t so lucky - they never got out of the hood, ending up dead or in prison. So when he gets offered a job to coach his former high school’s basketball team, he jumps at the chance, vowing to make a difference with the kids. He wants the players to see beyond hoop dreams and see a future with endless options and possibilities, and he knows that education is key.

There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

While the theme is a bit cliche by now - after all, who hasn’t seen black/latino kids from the ghetto trying to earn salvation through sports? - it is refreshing in that the focus wasn’t one athlete or even Coach Carter himself. Rather, the movie tackled they ‘whys’ of it. Why do so many young men see sports as their only hope? There’s a scene in the movie where the principal tries to convince Coach Carter to lift the lockout, saying that “… these basketball games may well be the high point of their lives…”, to which Coach Carter replies: “And don’t you think that’s the problem?”

That may have been a problem for the movie, though, since there were a lot of aspects of the character’s lives that were left hanging or felt rushed. But it does raise some interesting, and relevant points. Here in the Philippines, it’s boxing (pro basketball is still largely a rich kid’s sport), and wile I’m a fan of the sport, it’s sad when it becomes nothing more than a meal ticket.

The movie goes a bit deeper than that, though. Timo Cruz (played by Rick Gonzalez) practically lives just to play basketball; it’s his one source of pride, so when he gets kicked out for insubordination, he does everything he can just to make it back on the team. Coach Carter, in an effort to motivate Cruz to work harder both on and off the court, repeatedly asked Timo: “what is your greatest fear?” Cruz would just shrug, but in the end, quoted Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love:

(Note: I think he was actually quoting Nelson Mendela, who in his 1994 inagural speech, quoted Ms. Williamson.)

All in all, a good guy movie with a lot of depth, just not enough time to explore every story. The acting was good, and the basketball games felt real enough. It doesn’t even begin to approach the cinematographic coolness of Any Given Sunday, but that was Oliver Stone. It’s definitely better than He Got Game, and is very similar to Rocky in that it’s not just an ‘against-all-odds’ thing, it’s also human, humane drama.

B-

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