This post is part of a series of essay for paid subscribers on the films of 1998. “He Got Game” was released on May 1. I was 18 years old.
The opening montage of He Got Game is a film unto itself, five minutes of young American men and women—mostly men—just shooting hoops in slow motion. Set to the dramatic melody of Aaron Copland’s “John Henry,” it re-contextualizes basketball as a national sport. It was around 1998 that Spike Lee was trying to get his Jackie Robinson biopic made, and I wonder if he had been watching other baseball films around the time he pivoted to He Got Game. The loving shots of basketball courts, some of them in rural areas, make it feel as if the game sprung straight from the brown American soil. There’s no truth to it; Dr. James Naismith invented basketball so that students at his Springfield College would have something to do indoors during the long Massachusetts winter. On the other hand, baseball isn’t really a rural sport either. The first organized game happened in Hoboken. If baseball can have its myths, so can basketball.
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