The '90s were arguably a golden age for basketball, but they were absolutely a golden age for basketball movies. In 1996 alone, we got Space Jam, Eddie, Sunset Park and Celtic Pride. Not all classics, necessarily, but try to name four non-documentary basketball-themed feature films of any quality that have come out this decade and we might be here for hours as you try to remember the name of that Kevin Durant movie where he loses his basketball powers to a goofy Oklahoma kid. (Thunderstruck, by the way. And yeah, it's pretty bad.)
It wasn't just '96 - the whole decade was chock full with major (and slightly less major) hoop-related feature releases. Some were awesome, some were terrible, many were awesomely terrible, but two decades later, all are educational as to what '90s basketball was all about. Each movie was, in its own way, representative of overarching themes in the sport at the time - trends, issues, influences and everything else. If you weren't around for hoops in the '90s, the dozen or so movies made about it over the course of the decade make a pretty good syllabus for learning about it.
Here's some of the more important parts of '90s basketball culture, as exemplified by their presence in some of the decade's bigger movies on the topic.
Diva Stars
In the 1990s, as blockbusting contracts and endorsement deals were making stars richer and more visible than ever before in the NBA, it bred the perception (and in some cases the reality) of many of the marquee stars being spoiled, selfish and uncoachable. This image would dog players like Derrick Coleman, Kenny Anderson and Stephon Marbury throughout the decade - particularly as some of them failed to ever live up to their on-court potential or win in any meaningful way, and as they started shuffling from team to team in search of a home that would really bring out the best in them.
Consequently, the "diva star" - a rich, showboating player, usually a guard, who cares more about his shots and his shine than his team's success - was an extremely common trope in '90s basketball movies. It was hardly the invention of the character - 1984's Teen Wolf, for one - but it nailed the particular archetype on multiple occasions.
In Above the Rim, Duane Martin plays Kyle Lee Watson, a high school point guard who drives his coach and teammates crazy with his refusal to pass the ball. His pro equivalent was Celtic Pride's Lewis Scott (Damon Wayans), a star for the Utah Jazz whose blinding talent leads the team to the finals, but also draws the ire of his teammates, his coach and especially his rival fans for his ball-hogging ways. And in Eddie, the team's fortunes turn around when coach Whoopi Goldberg benches Stacy Patton (real life NBA player Malik Sealy) and the team starts sharing the ball again.
Passing, unsurprisingly, turns out to be the redemption of all three players. In the climactic game in Above the Rim, Watson's team starts winning when he starts passing out to his teammate Shep for an endless succession of long twos. Scott is able to win Game Seven against the Celtics by becoming a playmaker at the end. And the go-ahead bucket is scored in Eddie's final game of the season when Patton serves as a decoy on the last offensive possession.
The lesson was likely internalized by the next generation of basketball stars, since the perceived issue of the ball-hogging, difficult star mostly died out with Allen Iverson, replaced by stars like LeBron James and Kevin Durant, who if anything are accused of not acting like stars *enough* on the court. Today, if you saw a player in a movie who unapologetically demanded touches and diva treatment, it'd probably seem downright anachronistic.
International Players
The '80s may have marked the start of the NBA going global, with the Association debuts of European-bred players like Sarunas Marciulionis and Drazen Petrovic, as well as African-born players like Hakeem Olajuwon and Manute Bol. The '90s, though, was when basketball really went international, as Petrovic and former countryman Vlade Divac both became stars, Olajuwon won an MVP and a couple titles, the 1992 Dream Team brought American basketball new worldwide exposure, and even imports like 7'7" Romanian center Gheorge Muresan were becoming popular enough to appear in their own commercials and feature films.
The international player, usually huge in both size and name and with a goofy, almost simpleton-like persona, also made his way to many of these '90s movies. Eddie's Ivan Radovadovitch - real-life big man (though not real-life foreigner) Dwayne Schintzius - was one of these, a Serbian player so clumsy and unskilled that in the climactic game, rival coach John Bailey (Dennis Farina) diagrams his final play around attacking Ivan's inability to draw a charge. (After much training from Coach Whoopi, however, Ivan manages to stand his ground as the buzzer sounds, marking the most dramatic walk-off charge-draw in fake NBA history.)
Radovadovitch is one-upped by Celtic Pride's Ilya Wertz Bronfermaker (Vladimir Cuk), unaffectionately referred to throughout as "Lurch," a similarly lumbering, clueless Croatian big man who consistently insists to his disdainful teammates and coach on his having "the good stuff." With his star teammate yet to show up to the big game, Coach Kimball (Christopher McDonald) is forced to insert Lurch into Game Seven for the Jazz, much to his own irritation - but the big man does get the game-winning bucket at the end, thanks to the newly found passing touch of the late-arriving Lewis Scott.
The biggest example of the international import player in '90s film, though, is Saleh (Charles Gitonga Maina), the 6'8" teenage member of the fictional Winabe tribe of Kenya, recruited by St. Joseph's scout Jimmy Dolan (Kevin Bacon) in The Air Up There. Like Ivan and Lurch, Saleh is given a kind of innocence and simplicity, though he at least gets to show some legitimate intelligence and skill in the movie, feigning ignorance to the game to humorously dupe Dolan before showing off his all-around ability.
All three characters are very much products of their time, and probably couldn't be featured in a movie today without coming off as horribly offensive. Lurch is a cartoon, Saleh comes dangerously close to being the Noble Savage being rescued by Dolan's White Savior, and Eddie actually includes a scene where Coach Whoopi cracks up in the shower over what a small penis Ivan has. They reflect America's fascination with, but also their ignorance to, these new breeds of basketball player becoming increasingly influential on the pro and college games.
Branding and Product Placement
Julius Erving and Michael Jordan certainly set the bar high in prior decades for how athletes could be used to sell products, but in the '90s, commercials made stars as much as the other way around. Larry Johnson and Grandmama. Penny Hardaway and Lil Penny. Grant Hill and the laws of gravity. The '90s were the decade where basketball and advertising became forever inextricable, a likely inevitable consequence of the sport's booming popularity and increased television exposure.
This phenomenon was parodied in one of the best scenes in Celtic Pride, where Lewis Scott, held captive by Mike (Daniel Stern) and Jimmy (Dan Aykroyd), is offered his freedom if the two can flip through every one of Jimmy's 125 TV channels without finding a single station airing one of his commercials. Scott loses when the two eventually flip across one of his ads for Oscar Mayer, featuring the fictional star going one-on-one against a cartoon hot dog, a dangerously plausible commercial for the time period.
Advertising also made it into these movies in subtler ways, including in the mostly serious-minded Blue Chips, featuring Nick Nolte as beleaguered college coach Pete Bell at the fictional Western University. In that movie, no such commercials air, but the presence of Pepsi as a brand is absolutely overbearing. Bell's players sip from Pepsi cups for hydration during timeouts, and Bell and his assistant coaches never missing an opportunity to open their mini-fridge and guzzle a can of the country's then-#1 soft drink when in the locker room.
And then, of course, there's Space Jam. As a vanity project for superstar-of-superstars Michael Jordan, the movie was essentially a 90-minute love letter to Nike - no surprise for a movie whose roots in Looney Tunes / NBA hybridization date back to a 1993 Super Bowl commercial for Air Jordans. At one point in the movie, Jordan even makes Bugs and Daffy sneak into his house to get his stuff to play in the big intergalactic showdown game - if you haven't seen the movie already, don't ask - a completely unnecessary detour that neatly serves as a Nike commercial break.
Unlike some other trends in '90s basketball film, this is one that's held pretty strong and probably not going away anytime soon. If those rumors about LeBron starring in a Space Jam 2 ever turn out to be true, you can bet Nike (as well as Samsung, Sprite, and whatever else LBJ is hawking those days) will be an even bigger presence than ever.
NCAA Recruiting Violations and Scandals
College basketball had a pall cast over it in the '90s by scandals controversies some of its best and most popular teams. The title-winning early '90s Runnin' Rebels of UNLV, the Fab Five Michigan Wolverines of '92-'93, the Camby-and-Calipari-led UMass Minutemen of the mid-'90s - all would find their accomplishments overshadowed (and in some cases nullified) by scandals over allegations of illegal recruiting tactics, improper player benefits, even game-fixing. The big business the NCAAs had become, particularly in the '80s, had made money a more inextricable part of the sport than ever, and threatened to ruin the "purity" of the game for many.
This was most obviously reflected in Blue Chips, a movie whose central conflict concerned the esteemed Coach Bell wrestling with the dilemma of whether or not to buy a trio of five-star recruits after enduring the first losing season of his career. Bell eventually gives into the demands of sweet-shooting forward Ricky Roe (former Indiana big man Matt Nover) and playmaking point guard Butch McRae (Magic star Penny Hardaway), hooking them up with $30,000 and a better life for their family, respectively. Chips doesn't even stop there - there's also a subplot about Tony (Anthony C. Hall), one of Bell's trusted upper-classmen, shaving points off the spread in a game three years earlier, the revelation of which serves as the emotional low point for Bell.
After scoring an upset win over top-ranked Indiana to start the season, however, Bell is consumed by guilt and quits, but not before giving the media a long (and rather self-serving) monologue about the evils of corruption in the sport he loves. That kind of moralizing is later echoed in The Air Up There, in an opening scene where Dolan gives a star recruit a tour of the St. Joe's campus. When Dolan realizes that the kid is more concerned with the kind of perks the team will provide for him than anything basketball-related, he humiliates him and purposefully drives him away.
Less heavy-handed with the dilemma is Spike Lee's He Got Game, whose main drama was over graduating High School senior Jesus Shuttlesworth (Ray Allen, in a role still inextricable with his real-life superstardom) deciding what college to go to, or whether to skip the NCAA and go pro. Illegal recruiting on the part of the universities isn't a big theme, but Shuttlesworth's high school coach offers him some money to give him the early scoop on his decision, the fictional Tech U pushes for him with some particularly persuasive female boosters, and an agent gives him the hard sell to go pro, offering him a platinum-and-diamond Rolex to sign. Jesus is tempted by each, and even enjoys some of their fruits, but ultimately shuns them all to sign with the fictional Big State for the sake of his incarcerated father (Denzel Washington).
In the '80s, the definitive high school basketball movie was the '50s-set Hoosiers, a "simpler time" sort of movie in which the game was all and money was never even a consideration. By the much more complicated '90s, such a movie probably wouldn't have been possible - it would have strained credibility, or just seemed out of touch or inauthentic.
Streetball
As a concept, streetball of course predates even the NBA. As a movement, however, streetball reached new heights in the '90s, thanks to the exposure given to its more higher-profile performers like Aaron Owens, God Shammgod and Rafer "Skip to My Lou" Alston through venues like the And1 Mixtape Tour and the rise of SLAM, one of the first hoops magazines to give focus to the sport at a street level. It was even a huge decade for streetball-oriented sneakers.
Part effect and part cause of all this was White Men Can't Jump, one of the most popular sports films of the decade and one that obviously put streetball back in the forefront for basketball culture. In the movie, whose plot centers around two basketball hustlers, Billy (Woody Harrelson) and Sidney (Wesley Snipes), actual hoops action is matched in importance by smack-talking, showmanship, fashion and monetary prowess. The movie is as famous for its scenes of "Yo Mama" joke-sparring and a losing baller (played by former Bucks star Marques Houston) attempting to rob a liquor store to pay off his on-court debt as it is for any of its actual 2-on-2 showdowns.
Streetball was less of a plot fixture for Above the Rim, but it is telling that the film's climactic game isn't some kind of high school state championship, but at a five-on-five shootout tournament at New York's legendary Rucker Park, with unclear stakes beyond the gambling interest of some involved. Similarly, in Eddie, to help reconnect the increasingly out-of-touch Patton with his baller roots, Coach Whoopi engineers Patton's limo to stall outside the similarly renowned West 4th Street NY court, goading him into playing and stoking his long-dormant competitive hoop flames.
As framed by the '90s, streetball was both a showier and still purer manifestation of the game than the pros or college, one where flashiness could outweigh actual skill, but at least it was still about basketball, with pride and machismo at stake instead of endorsements and fat new contracts. The kinetic, visceral appeal of the game would continue to balloon in popularity well into the new millennium, eventually getting its own shows on MTV and ESPN and even an EA video game.
Hip-Hop
The cross-pollination of hip-hop and basketball was hardly new in the '90s - on 1979's "Rappers' Delight," the first rap crossover hit, the Sugarhill Gang bragged about having a "color TV so I can watch the Knicks play basketball," and Kurtis Blow's "Basketball," still the definitive hip-hop song on the subject, was released in 1984. But the '90s took it to another level, and then some.
Shaquille O'Neal became the first NBA star with a top 40 rap solo hit of his own. The B-Ball's Best-Kept Secret compilation saw ballers like Dana Barros and J.R. Rider testing their skills on the mic against one another. And Allen Iverson gave the Association its first walking (and ultimately league-defining) personification of hip-hop culture, bringing the music and fashion into the NBA to a degree that would eventually make a whole lot of white people - including commissioner David Stern - rather uncomfortable.
As present as hip-hop was in the NBA in the '90s (and vice versa), the connection to the basketball-related themes of the era is even more undeniable. The soundtrack to Above the Rim featured a who's who of big names in West Coast rap at the time, including Snoop Dogg, DJ Quik and of course, film co-star Tupac Shakur - though the biggest hit was still easily Warren G. and Nate Dogg's G-funk classic "Regulate." Two years later, Sunset Park's soundtrack would further up the ante, matching West Coast (2Pac, Dogg Pound) with East Coast (Mobb Deep, Junior M.A.F.I.A.) in a compilation that's arguably outlived the accompanying movie. Two years after that, He Got Game got one of film's first single-artist hip-hop soundtracks, courtesy of longtime Spike Lee collaborators Public Enemy.
And in a discussion of '90s basketball movies and hip-hop, one name reigns over all: Coolio. Hard as it is to believe now, in 1996, Coolio was in the running for biggest rapper in the country, and his popularity was reflected with his selection to perform advance singles for both Eddie ("It's All the Way Live (Now)") and Space Jam ("Hit 'Em High," also featuring a cavalcade of other major rappers of the mid-'90s). Both songs had accompanying hit videos that featured clips from their accompanying movies, though the cumulative over-exposure may have caused Coolio's career momentum to stall somewhat, as his 1997 album My Soul was much less successful than his first two LPs.
Two decades later, it's virtually impossible to imagine a movie about basketball today whose soundtrack isn't largely hip-hop-centric, unless the movie was to take place 50 years ago or on another continent or planet. But in an era dominated by Larry Bird and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, it certainly wasn't unimaginable - even by 1992's street-oriented White Men Can't Jump, hip-hop hadn't yet supplanted jazz, funk and heartland rock. If it wasn't for the '90s, those genres might still be populating the soundtracks of our best ball movie soundtracks, and that would be a travesty of pretty unimaginable proportions.
