Hustle

And A Simple Show Of Faith

When I was a kid, one of my favorite movies was “Major League”. Most of the time, when they say they can’t make a certain movie anymore, it’s being said by someone with no imagination who enjoys the art of yesterday because it coddled their own insufficiencies. But sports movies inhabit a different and more specific world. “Major League”, which is about a Cleveland Indians team that is designed to lose and wins anyway, is an R-rated movie made with the cooperation of Major League Baseball, who allowed the use of their logos and weren’t so defensive about the public perception of the professional league.

Today, the major sports leagues don’t need the exposure, so they’re not going to approve just any script that shows their sport in a negative light. In “Major League”, the story revolves around a vindictive, hateful owner who strips their team down to scraps, signing players to minimum contracts and rooting for them to lose enough so that ownership can move the team. It’s still a funny movie, but that premise is no longer a joke – it happens every year. There are multiple owners in different sports intentionally holding the purse strings and building purposely-bad teams.

Understandably, the pro leagues are touchy enough about it that they’ve approved movies like “Draft Day” and “Moneyball” that lionize executives and suggest that success happens in the clubhouse before it happens in the field or on the court. Last year, a script was being heralded as dealing not with Kobe Bryant the athlete, but the actual drafting of Kobe Bryant by executives – specifically the non-drafting, as it was centered on executives with the New Jersey Nets, who could have drafted Bryant but didn’t. This is the representation pro sports loves now. Real heroes wear suits, apparently.

Which is to say that “Hustle” is an NBA-approved movie about a scout, one that doesn’t dare say anything too critical of owners, or too perceptive about players who are competing in a world distorted by advanced stats, social media, and premature levels of fame. “Hustle” can be called many things – “enjoyable”, to be fair, “engaging” is another. But it won’t dare be interesting, because then the NBA wouldn’t let them use their precious logos. Such is the compromise today when you’re making movies about real-life brands, brands that want to be seen as attractive and exciting. It’s been the same case with biopics for a while now, which are now only made with the cooperation of the estate in exchange for the legal rights to the true stories. I understand many are excited for the upcoming Michael Jackson biopic “Michael”, though you don’t really have the chance to enjoy “Billie Jean” onscreen in a movie that earnestly examines the damning sexual assault allegations against the man. The producers had to choose a side, and what do you think they picked?

All this as preamble for “Hustle”, one of Adam Sandler’s infrequent “real movies” where he plays recognizable human beings and not nonsense-sputtering manchildren in endless racks of oversized polo shirts. Here, he’s a scout stuck in a professional rut. After a dispiriting demotion within the Philadelphia 76ers organization (played straight by Ben Foster as a spiteful exec, an actor who would normally be encouraged to go over-the-top in a more traditional Sandler outing), Sandler’s Stanley ends up shifting internationally, listlessly following tips on would-be prospects on the other side of the world. This leads him to a streetball court in Spain where he sees Bo Cruz.

Cruz, played believably by real-life NBA player Juancho Hernangomez, is the total package. Massive, muscular, limber, with a world of talent, Cruz is a menace on both sides of the court. Playing against amateurs, Cruz appears as the perfect prospect to Stanley, the dream discovery that scouts pray to witness. After a brief conversation, Cruz reveals himself to be a lived-in character in an unremarkable life. Though he’s young, his responsibilities lie with his small child and his girlfriend, building a family by working day and night. The NBA sounds like a thrill to Cruz, but he lacks the capital to bet on himself.

As an NBA guy, I do love this fantasy, even if I irrationally disbelieve it from time to time. Sometimes, you go to a small German village and you implausibly find Dirk Nowitski, or you end up in Greece watching Giannis Antetokuonmpo. And unfortunately, sometimes you’re the guy who is insisting that Bruno Caboclo is gonna be the future of the sport. I’m a Knicks fan, and when I was in prison in 2015, the Knicks had the #4 pick in the NBA draft. All the other prospects were from America, and there was plenty of footage of them, their skills and athleticism. But then there was one potential draftee, a giant from Latvia, and the footage they had of him was the player alone in a gym, chucking three pointers with no one else present. Even in 2015, it looked less like a showcase video and more like a found footage horror film. I prayed for the Knicks to take anyone else, but they ended up picking Kristaps Porzingis. And I was wrong, because the funny-looking Euro kid could really play, even though the scouting footage looked like it was shot by a spree killer.

Of course, the reality, portrayed in “Hustle”, is that Stanley can’t just import his Spanish Porzingis. He has to get the kid invited to prestigious scouting events, put his reputation on the line to convince people the completely unknown Cruz – who is older for a prospect at 22 – can somehow play with American kids who have been scouted and evaluated since the sixth grade. He also has to get Cruz to America physically, a challenge considering a prior criminal charge. On top of that, he has to develop the guy, still raw from hours of playing streetball. That means booking Cruz for a few shadier tryouts where he competes with would-be prospects with their own issues. One of these is a very funny Boban Marjanovic, one of the most delightful NBAers in the sport’s history, and also, paradoxically, a career benchwarmer – you have a lot of time to build character when your team needs you on the bench but you can’t play defense. Boban was really having a moment there – you’ll remember him as the towering librarian who brawls with the hero at the start of “John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum”. Boban, who seems absolutely delighted to be 7”4, should be in more movies.

In regards to those plot developments, “Hustle” feels authentic in unglamorously depicting just how challenging it can be to develop a young player, feuding with the league gatekeepers and standing up for a young talent that isn’t old enough to really know himself. But it does seem like the movie picked the less-interesting subject. This story should be about Cruz, who very quickly is a fish-out-of-water as he trains for a sudden career shift. If the NBA doesn’t work out for him, he still needs to help feed his family, except now he’s financially in a hole after spending months trying to get into combines to impress management from only thirty NBA teams. Sandler’s Stanley, in contrast, has a relatively well-adjusted and financially-secure family life, even if Queen Latifah as his wife makes for one half of an extremely unlikely couple. You hope for more and more time on the court, where the well-shot action (and extensive NBA cameos) creates an intense forward momentum that tends to flag as the movie succumbs to formula. Sandler is likable and, like his surroundings, plausible in this part, in what is probably the most honest NBA movie one can make given the licensing issues. You wish Hernangomez was a slightly more captivating performer – the plot machinations are so involved that you don’t really root for him as much as you simply watch him. On the court, though? You don’t find a lot of power forwards who can give this, or any sort of, performance.

I wanted to emphasize that, obviously, when I’m talking about prison, I’m referring to how difficult it was, how much pain it caused myself and my loved ones, how cruel and barbaric it could be. I can’t whitewash that, and frankly, I’d love to find anyone who casually whitewashes that, specifically when they’re alone in an alley. I’m not a fan, if you didn’t get those context clues. But there were moments of bright light, moments towards which I look back with fondness. Moments where, for a brief moment, you weren’t being treated like cattle. There weren’t many, and as time passed there were less and less. Even now, I still feel like less of a person sometimes and more of a lumbering beast just waiting to be shepherded into the next warehouse.

In county jail, when I was in holding, we were presented with an unusual challenge – a trivia contest, made up of 100 questions from a variety of disciplines. This was a jail, so we did not have access to email, let alone the internet. So we got together and tried our best to guess the right answers. Some of them were quite difficult, and some seemed unfair in their dubious wording and syntax. But you’re not going to let a question about Michael Jackson’s “Ben” slip past me! We all cheated, of course, getting on the phone to our loved ones in the outside world, but many of the questions were not exactly easy to Google.

There were a lot of “high scorers” for that competition, and our reward was to leave our unit for one afternoon and head to the staff mess hall. There, they rewarded us with slivers of beef, salads, hot dogs, corn, food we hadn’t seen in ages, and massive portions. This was especially exciting because in county jail, they had the absolute worst food, and there were several meals where I sat down and ate without actually knowing what it was beyond “meat”. What the warden said to us sticks with me, however. He noted that he knew so many of us would cheat, he expected that we’d try to call people at home to get the answers. It didn’t bother him. The point of this exercise was to get us to connect with each other, connect with other people, and work towards problem solving together, trying to solve 100 unique and sometimes peculiar puzzles. It was a show of faith. You don’t feel like you earn those a lot in captivity.

Next week, I’m tired, y’all – taking the week off! I’ll be back the following week with FAILED OSCAR BAIT!