1998 in Review: "He Got Game"

I don't freestyle much, but I write 'em like such

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.

Dr. Naismith is name-checked early in He Got Game by a white prison warden (Ned Beatty), who sets in motion a needlessly convoluted plan for Jake Shuttlesworth (Denzel Washington) to be surreptitiously released from prison, where he’s serving a long sentence for the accidental murder of his wife, so that he can convince his son Jesus to sign a letter of intent to play at fictional Big State University, the governor’s alma mater. Jesus is the nation’s top high school basketball player, and it’s easy to believe such a scheme was considered by the governor. It’s hard to believe it was ever enacted, especially with the ludicrous twist that the state has to pretend Jake has escaped because they can’t ever let the media find out the truth. 

There’s a lot of stuff like this in He’s Got Game. A lot of stuff that shouldn’t be in He’s Got Game at all. It’s 134 minutes long, and it should only be about 115. They should have cut the romance between Jake and the abused sex worker in his apartment building. Her character—played by Milla Jovovich as if she missed out on the role of Mona Lisa Vito in My Cousin Vinny but nobody told her—is dreadfully written, spouting cliche after cliche (“He loves me, and he always apologizes!”) from the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold playbook. 

Somehow more grating is Jesus’s uncle (Bill Nunn), who raised him after Jake was imprisoned, and who we see encouraging him to illegally take money from agents and boosters, while his aunt looks on in horror. It’s not credible that this conversation would just happen to come up with one week before Jesus must declare his intentions, and the scene is filled with laughable exposition. “Martha, your mother, my sister,” his aunt said while picking up a photo of Jesus’s deceased mother, awkwardly ensuring the relationships between everyone in the room are crystal clear. There’s more stuff like this throughout the movie. When Jesus meets with an agent, the guy actually says, “I’m the best at what I do. I’m a sports agent.”

I don’t quite understand how this happened. In Spike Lee’s best movies, he displays a nuanced understanding of racial stereotypes. He exposes them and watches as they shrivel up in sunlight. There’s that montage in Do the Right Thing in which people of various races angrily repeat the stereotypes routinely used against them directly to the camera. There’s that great scene in which Mookie (Lee) and Vito (John Turturro) discuss Vito’s subtle prejudice, where he considers certain Black celebrities like Michael Jordan or Prince “more than Black.” There is no such nuance in He Got Game. Pretty much everyone is a stereotype, and none are critically examined. The agent is a sleaze. The uncle is greedy. Jesus’s girlfriend, Lala (Rosario Dawson), is a jezebel. It’s almost as if he put so much thought and care into the film’s central relationship that he had nothing left for the rest of them.

And ya know what? It might be worth it. The scenes between Denzel and Ray Allen, a real-life NBA All-Star on his first big acting job, are simply incredible. Jake has an impossible task in front of him; he must ingratiate himself back into Jesus’s life and, in just one week, so profoundly repair the damage so that, if Jesus decides to go to Big State, it will actually be the best decision for him and his father. That’s a lot of work to do in a week, but Denzel makes you believe it. Other actors might have tried to play coy, making the audience wonder if Jake really cared about his son or was just after his own liberation, but that kind of narrative ambiguity would have been far too much for the film to handle. Jake’s genuine fatherly love for Jesus is the film’s core. Without it, nothing else would work. Jake knows from anger and vengeance. He knows that this is an opportunity for Jesus to rid himself of, as he says in their final exchange, the hatred in his heart. He truly believes that their liberation is linked.

I wasn’t expecting to relate so hard to this one, but like almost every other film of 1998, I found He Got Game touching a raw nerve. Part of it is timing. I was 18 when I saw these movies. They helped me fall in love with film, but maybe the reason that happened is because I found these films that spoke so specifically to my heart. This is going to sound crazy, but I relate to Jesus. I’m not a baller from Coney Island—I tried out for the JV team freshman year of high school and didn’t make it—but I do have a biblical name that inspired comment from pretty much everyone I met; “Noah” was not a common name in the 1980s. I did have a father with rage and a violent temper, and he did serve jail time. He did show up to talk with me in public places because that was the only way he could get an audience with me. 

My dad never pushed me to athletic excellence, or kept me up late on the public courts of Coney Island, trying to break my will so that I could build up my strength and withstand the pressures of the NBA, but Lee stages those scenes in He Got Game with such verve that I feel like he did. As both an actor and a star, Denzel’s secret weapon is his willingness to be unlikeable. Sometimes he goes straight villain, like in Training Day. There’s nothing more hateful, however, than the bullying and abuse of a child, and he goes right there in He Got Game, particularly in the basketball scene just before he accidentally kills his wife after throwing her to the floor. He and Jesus are out on the courts. Jake is pushing him hard, literally. In between shots, he takes swigs off a bottle. There’s no justification for his behavior. It’s bullying, pure and simple, and almost certainly the result of unprocessed rage stemming from trauma in his own past, although we never find out. And yet this relentless coaching, abuse, or whatever you want to call it—some combination of the two—undoubtedly makes Jesus a better player and allows him to transcend his humble origins.

It’s smart of Lee to wait until the final third of the movie to show this scene because by then we have already accepted Jake as a reformed man. It’s also a little dishonest. A better film would have centered Jesus in his own narrative, opened with Jake’s heinous violence, and then followed Jesus’s path towards forgiveness. Instead, we mostly stay in Jake’s shoes, which is not really a bad place to be.  Washington gives one of the best performances of his career, capturing both the heroism and villainy of Jake in almost every line reading. He is a warm, fatherly presence with violent rage lurking just behind his eyes. Ray Allen, on the other hand, does solid work, especially when considering his total lack of acting experience, but he could not have been expected to carry the film and its point of view.

Ultimately, He Got Game has a few too many balls in the air, and Lee would have been wise to put one of them down. It’s a flawed film, and some of its virtues may have even faded with time. In 1998, the average viewer was far less educated about the pressures faced by young Black athletes. It was in 1995 that Kevin Garnett jumped straight from high school to the pros, creating a new normal for young players of his ilk .Kobe Bryant did it the next year. Jesus plans to go to college, but the professional option is on the table and being pushed by Lala, who stands to benefit the most from Jesus earning a payday right away. From the viperous agent to the local gangsters who want credit for protecting Jesus from gangbangers, and even the governor himself, everyone wants a piece of Jesus. There was a time when that happened a little later in life, but by 1998, it was becoming de rigeur, and kudos to Lee for giving us a taste of what that feels like.

It ties back to the images that opened He Got Game. Basketball is a sport of grace connecting fathers and sons and mothers and daughters,  and although it has become corrupted by racism and capitalism, its beauty cannot be snuffed out. Lee’s choice to use Copland’s triumphant, haunting score, bursting with America’s beautiful dissonance, draws out the contradictions in the game, the relationship between Jake and Jesus, and even America itself. It forgives the movie of all manner of sins. But ya know, the world is complicated. Why should He Got Game be any different?

Next in 1998 in Review: “Bulworth”