I Hate Sports, Let’s Watch a Sports Movie:
Coach Carter
Coach Carter is a 2005 film directed by Thomas Carter (no relation) starring Samuel L. Jackson as the titular Ken Carter, a former high school star basketball player and now middle-aged father and conspicuously successful owner of a sporting goods store.
Welcome Back, Carter
He receives an offer from his old high school in Richmond, CA to come and coach the unruly band of misfit students that make up the current basketball team, the Richmond Oilers. The pay (which he does not need) will be a joke, the time investment (which he cannot spare) will be huge, and the kids are a bunch of assholes. So, of course he’s in. The old (in both meanings) coach introduces Carter to the team and then just turns around and walks out. I thought it was because he was just so utterly relieved to wash his hands of those buttheads, but then he shows up several times throughout the movie to offer support from the sidelines, so I guess maybe his absorbent undergarment just needed tending.
Carter quickly sets the tough-but-fair tone. You will address him as sir, and he will address you likewise. If you’re not five minutes early for practice, you’re late. You show up for games in a sport jacket and tie or you don’t play. And, most controversially, you must maintain a 2.3 GPA to stay on the team. He presents all this in the form of a paper contract that all parties involved will sign and commit to. At this point the top player on the team says to hell with this and bails, never to return. “IDGAF LOL” replies Carter, because he’s going to transform the rest of these complicated young men into self-respecting winners.
We Need a Montage!
And he does just that. It’s a whirlwind of drills, arguments, rousing speeches, dripping sweat, and hot basket-sport action. The assholes get better, stronger, somewhat less asshole-ish, and immediately start to utterly demolish every other team they meet. Along the way we also get to know some of the young players and their personal struggles, like Angry Mustache (torn between Carter’s team and the violent gang life), Expecting Father (knocked up girlfriend and doesn’t know if they have a future together), Magic Mike (bad at wearing hats) and Worm (character is actually named Worm).
After winning a tournament, the entire team hurls itself onto Coach Carter’s shitlist by sneaking out of the motel to go to a party at a fancy Bel-Aire mansion, hosted by several female students from their rival school. It looked (to me) like sore-loser rich kids laying a trap, and it didn’t help that the girls were lavishing distinctly Stepford Wives-flavored attention on the players. But, it turns out it was just a bangin’ party.
At least it was until the house owners/parents show up with Coach Carter right behind them. While reaming them out on the bus ride home, angry mustache sincerely pushes back at Carter, pointing out that they got there by doing what he told them. They were winners. So what’s wrong with celebrating it?
Yeah, But No
Because Coach Carter finally gets hold of their academic progress reports, and it looks like the Oilers are in breach of his contract. Furious and disappointed, he locks the gym and puts up a sign summoning the team to the school library, where he drops the bomb that all practices and games are canceled until they get their grades up.
This is as good a time as any to mention, if you didn’t already gather from the links above, that this movie is pretty faithfully based on real events. And the shitstorm that follows Ken Carter padlocking the Richmond H.S. gymnasium is exactly why this movie got made. Everyone is absolutely livid at Carter for shutting down the basketball team. The principal, the players, the parents, even random locals who got caught up in Richmond Oilers fever are frothing with rage. Reporters are all over it, a brick gets thrown through the front window of Carter Sporting Goods, eventually the school administration has a hearing where they’ll vote to overturn Carter’s decision and cut the locks off.
Carter says he’ll quit if they do that. They do that. He quits. But when he goes to the gym to pack up his office, he finds the team sitting at school desks arranged in perfect rows in the middle of the gym, ready to put their noses to the grindstone. Magic Mike says, “Sir, they can cut the chains off the door... but they can’t make us play”. Angry Mustache recites a damn sonnet. It’s a lot, almost too much to take seriously, which is why I was a little miffed by the tear welling in my eye.
And they do just that. It’s a whirlwind of studying, arguments, rousing speeches, page turning, and hot math-tutoring action. They get better, smarter, somewhat less resentful about their coach caring about their futures, and manage to drag themselves past the 2.3 threshold. Does Coach Carter give those kids their ball back? Yes, yes he does.
The movie then makes it seem like they go straight from nothing but studying for weeks to immediately showing up for a game without any fresh practice. I was prepared to be a little annoyed if they actually won their first game back. So, I was a little annoyed. Maybe grinding all that geometry homework helped them refine their aim.
It’s the All-Valley Karate Tournament!
Uh…I mean the State Basketball Tournament. You know what happens now, right? Yeah, they lose in the quarterfinals. The end. Seriously. And you know what, even aside from the fact that they’re telling a true story here, it was a refreshing subversion of my expectations, and Carter’s final rousing speech to them made it all make sense. They WERE winners, they accomplished more than they ever thought possible, and he was incredibly proud of all of them.
I glossed over or straight-up skipped a lot of movie for the sake of keeping this a readable length, but that’s pretty much Coach Carter. There’s a lot of movie still to be discovered though. Dance parties! Gunfights! Abortions! Carter’s son has a whole subplot! Oh yeah, Carter has a son. So if this even begins to sound like a movie that interests you it’s available on Netflix until the end of the May. Yeah, it’s actually a recommend. I enjoyed it.
- Does the movie expect you to understand the sport being featured going in? Does not understanding get in the way of following and enjoying the story? Absolutely not. This question is good but was written more with football movies in mind, since I know less than fuck-all about football. I don’t follow basketball and have made no particular effort to learn about it, so I think it’s safe to say that middle school gym class provides more than enough background to follow the action here. Anything I didn’t know was either filled in by watching (suicide drills?), or didn’t matter at all
- How much does the featured sport actually matter to the plot of the film? Could it be swapped out with another activity without changing the plot? This question made sense when I wrote it, but now that I’m confronted with trying to answer it I’m a little confounded. In short, I guess not, in as much as you could re-write the movie around any other competitive high school sport. And of course, this is based on a true story, so if you changed that much it would be…well…NOT a true story.
- Is it a good movie? Do I care about the characters? Am I invested in the outcome? Yes! It really is a decent movie, and I do not regret the time I spent watching it, although it did start to feel a bit long by the end. But it IS long: 2 hours and 16 minutes. There were some overly-dramatic moments that made me roll my eyes, but some of those caught me in the feels at the same time. More than once it veered around a sports movie cliché and caught me off guard, but it always made sense. It was well-acted, especially by the members of the team. Angry Mustache, who’s character was actually named Timo Cruz and who was played by Rick Gonzalez, was outstanding. His mustache wasn’t even angry ALL the time, sometimes it was scared, or sassy, or even happy, and seriously he was captivating to watch pretty much any time he was on-screen.
- Do I have any more interest in basketball after having seen this movie? Nope. Not even a little bit.
What’s up next week? Something…something…the Titans. Recognize the Titans? Redistribute the Titans? Eh, I have all week to remember.
