False Hoops

By RICHARD CORLISS

Making it to the NBA: it's the worst dream a boy can have. Even if he's one of the 50,000 or so high school phenoms in a year, his chances are only one in 2,000 that he will play NBA basketball. And once there, the kid is more likely to be a bench jockey, a Harthorne Wingo, than an idol-of-millions type like the Detroit Pistons' Isiah Thomas.

But people will dream the implausible dream, especially if they are agile black boys in a neighborhood ravaged by crime, and their only other options are fast-food chef and drug runner. Hoop Dreams, the powerful new documentary by Steve James, Fred Marx and Peter Gilbert, follows two basketball players from the Chicago projects as they pursue their calling through full or partial scholarships to suburban St. Joseph High School, which is a three-hour round trip and social light years away from home.

It's a grueling life for William Gates and Arthur Agee; they can make poetry of a jump shot, but to them algebra looks like Chinese. At school they are hired guns, set apart by their race and their athletic gift. And when they get on the court, thrill and fear pump through their veins like high-grade heroin. In class you can get a B or a C; in basketball you get an A or an F -- win or lose, period -- and everyone's watching. These kids must perform under pressures that would break most adults. "It became more of a job," William says, "than a game to play."

Arthur soon slips that noose, but at a hefty price. When tuition is raised at St. Joseph, he transfers to local Marshall High, where he becomes a star player. But until his parents pay St. Joseph what they owe, the school refuses to release Arthur's records, thus threatening him with loss of a full school year. By then his dad has left home, done drugs and jail time; his mom has to hold things together in the dark (literally -- the electricity's been turned off). But she, the film's heroine, does it; then she gets the top grade in a nurse's-assistant course. At her graduation, all we see are tears of joy and rows of empty chairs.

William is the one marked for stardom, and the burden of anticipated glory weighs heavily on him. His brother Curtis, once a junior college star, is now a has-been in sports and an ain't-gonna-be in life; he wants his brother to make it for him, but William says, "I always felt that Curtis should not be living his dream through me." The St. Joe coach can't afford to bring William along slowly. In the '70s he had refused to play a gifted freshman -- Isiah Thomas -- and "it cost us the state championship." William's teachers, classmates and family all want him to make it -- their way. As he notes wanly, "It's like everybody I know is my coach."

By the end of his four-year high school tour, William is an old man with a damaged knee, a child to support and some rueful wisdom: "When somebody said, 'When you turn nba, don't forget about me' and all that stuff, I should've said to them, 'If I don't make it, well, don't you forget about me."'

You won't soon forget him. You may be bored by basketball, and maybe you don't much care about black kids. But Hoop Dreams isn't mainly about sport, or even about life and death in the inner city. It's about families hanging tough on nerve and prayer. It's about what passes for the American dream to people whose daily lives are closer to nightmares.

Oh yes, and it's about three hours long. But it moves like Isiah, fast and smooth, and it's over in a heartbreak.