In his column Notes on Hoops, Hanif Abdurraqib revisits the golden age of basketball movies, shot by shot.

Still from White Men Can’t Jump. © 20th Century Studios.

I can always tell which one of my friends didn’t grow up around hustlers by how they look up and lock eyes with the person at the mall kiosk, who—by virtue of that enchanting eye contact—doesn’t even have to wave them over. They drift into the grasp of the salesperson without even being aware of it. And that’s when their money is no longer theirs. On the street in a city my pal had never been to, a woman sells her a bracelet before she even knows what’s happening. Compliments her skin tone and lays the bracelet over it. Leans in to get a good look and then stands back as if she is witnessing a gateway to the promised land creaking open right there on the sidewalk.

And let me be clear: I am not opposed to hustles, and I am certainly not opposed to hustling. When I say I came up around hustlers, I mean that I know what it takes to keep the lights on and so I’ve rarely been in the dark. I have exchanged cash for some things I don’t want to know the history of. I’ve spent time on both sides of the hustling coin before and certainly will for whatever time I’ve got left on this twirling rock. A rock that, by the way, is spinning faster now than it was before. I don’t understand the science, but I know that time itself is a hustle. Spend a few days in Franklin County corrections and you might come to realize, urgently, that time is a currency. Silence is a currency. Any currency that can be interrupted can be the source of a hustle. Which brings me, again, back to intimacy—though I promise I won’t linger here too long, except to say that not all hustles are intimate, but the best ones have an undercurrent of intimacy. I’m not only talking about physical or romantic intimacy, though the tongue and the song and the tips of fingers and the voice in an ear are all mighty vessels for the hustle. What I’m getting at is how the hustle requires a type of knowing. Knowing of oneself, of course. But also a reading of an other, rapidly, before they can realize that you are acting upon that knowing. I am not the best hustler because I do not know myself as well as I want to, which leads to a series of ongoing self-hustles. Like setting my alarm for seven thirty when I’ve already crossed well beyond the midnight hour, immersed in the glow of my phone. But it’s the promise I think I’m chasing. Like my dear pal, looking at a bracelet reflecting off the sunlight, dancing on her skin.

White Men Can’t Jump dissects the hustle solely as a game of optics. Billy Hoyle used to hoop in college but now makes a living hustling streetballers. He’s white, wears baggy shirts and a backward hat to the courts populated by Black players who are taller, fitter, dressed for the game. But, most importantly, he’s white. Sidney Deane is Billy’s initial, primary target. Sidney is talented, loud, boastful, approaching a caricature of a nineties streetball archetype. Depending on the viewer, one might relish in the moment when Billy beats Sidney twice in their first encounter. The second time, revealing himself, whispering, “I’ve hustled a hell of a lot better players than you” in Sidney’s ear before Sidney misses a jump shot.

For all of its other moving parts, White Men Can’t Jump relies on teasing out the part of a hustle that I am most fascinated by in real life. The part that relies on looking, and how a person responds to that looking. There are many ways people tell on themselves, one of them being how they choose to react based solely off of what their eyes tell them, and how that connects to what they inherently believe. In the film, we are to understand that Billy’s hustle is effective because the Black players are incapable of seeing who he is, and by the time he has been fully rendered, it is too late. The Sidney/Billy pairing works because of this—on every court, Sidney convincing two opponents to saddle him with Billy as a teammate, Sidney sinking into the performance of begging to not have to play with the white chump who looks like he can’t make a shot, and so on. Read More

In his new column, Notes on Hoops, Hanif Abdurraqib revisits the golden age of basketball movies, shot by shot.

Still from Love & Basketball © 2000 Alliance Films

ONE

Before any of this unfolds, I must first be honest. Before I can talk romantically about the way a basketball hoop, ornamented by a clean net, glows even as a starless nighttime empties its dark pockets over a cracked court. Before I can talk about the way when a well-worn ball begins to lose its grip it spins wildly in your palm, but is still the ball you have known and therefore you must care for, as you would an elder who whispers the secrets of past and future worlds into your ear. Before that, it must be said that you, reading this now, from whatever cavern you are riding out this ongoing symphony of storms, could beat me in a game of one-on-one if the opportunity arose. If you have ever made two shots in a row on any court anywhere. If you have known, by the sweetness left on your fingers, that a shot was going in before it reached the rim. If you have talked some shit that you could back up, even one single time. I want it to be known that I am getting too old to not surrender to the truth, and I know I am no good in one-on-one. It is not my game and has never been, though it isn’t for a lack of trying. Depending on the day, I might give you some thrilling competition. I don’t want to oversell myself, but I also would never ask you to take it easy on me. That’s a fine line to walk. One that requires an opponent at least a little curious about mercy, as I am sometimes.

Here’s what I will say, for the sake of whatever confidence I still carry around: there are some very strict circumstances that might allow me to take a game off of you, and they would all have to work in my favor. Let’s say we were playing first to five, and let’s say I get the ball first. Let’s say whoever makes a shot gets the ball back, as it should be. Let’s say that I’m feeling good and hit a few long jump shots over your hand, which is maybe skeptically outstretched on the first two shots, but then urgently outstretched on the last one. And then we’ll say that you are a smart enough defender to push up on me and take my jump shot away. I’ve still got enough of a first step to get by you once for a layup, probably. And then, finally, let’s say you are the easily discouraged type. Who, down 4-0, might throw in the towel, ease back and go through the motions. I could steal a winning bucket. But that’s never how it goes, is it? It’s always a game to ten, at least. I’m always finished before we even begin.

It was the held-over bitterness of this knowledge that likely animated my distaste for the iconic ending to Love & Basketball when I first saw it, tucked underneath a blanket on a high school Friday night in the crowded basement of a girl I’d gotten a crush on. Quincy and Monica, lifelong neighbors, rivals, once romantic partners, play one-on-one. By the film’s final act, the two haven’t spoken since their breakup in college four years ago. Quincy is back home, recovering from an ACL tear. Monica, upon visiting him in the hospital, finds out he’s engaged. This sets up the grand emotional collision two weeks before Quincy’s wedding.

It has to be said now that I have great affection for Love & Basketball and all of its romantic movie clichés. It was, when I first saw it, one of the first times I’d seen those clichés played out with a Black cast. Black characters playing a sport I loved, complicated Black families with complications that were not all that close to my own interfamily complications, but were familiar enough. In retrospect, I appreciate that the clichés were given room to flourish here, as they were in all of the mostly white teen rom-coms of the era. We are to believe, somehow, that Monica (Sanaa Lathan) is not attractive, but could be, if she would just do something with her hair. We get that scene—packaged within a school dance, of course—where Monica “becomes” beautiful, her beauty pulled to the surface by the hands of her sister, accented by the pearls her mother places around her neck.

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