by Ryan Jones

What up T-Mobile? It hasn’t even been a week yet, but I know you hear me. Let’s make this happen, dammit.

Anyway… couple things on my mind as I look forward to a lovely Labor Day weekend in the tri-state area. First, the Elite 24 high school game went down at Harlem’s Rucker Park tonight. Billed as a showcase of the 24 best high school players in the country, it was more accurately 24 OF the best HS ballplayers in America. The good news is, the game was pretty good, and a lot of guys who will be making a lot of NBA money a few years from now did their thing. I’ll update tomorrow with details, but for now I’ll just share three things I learned tonight: Kevin Love is a bleeder, Jason Kidd rolls deep, and the two-time reigning NBA MVP can ride a crowded New York City subway for 150 blocks and not be bothered once.

Oh, and one other thought. Why do basketball movies suck? There’s this dude who’s a film publicist who seems to rep every single hoop flick that comes out. Whether it was Juwanna Man or this new streetball movie or anything else with a basketball in it, I’ve got an email in my inbox from this guy asking me to come see a free screening. But I pretty much never go, because without fail these movies are always garbage.

I find this interesting, only because basketball has made for some great documentaries over the years (Hoop Dreams, obviously, and Through the Fire, which I would’ve loved even if I didn’t know Bassy pretty well), but almost never makes for good actual movies. Yeah, Hoosiers is a classic (except to those people who think it was racist… but I’ll leave that one alone), and I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Blue Chips. I have a good reason for that, honest: I was in college when Blue Chips came out, and one of those classic Big Ten refs played a ref in the movie. Not long after I saw it, I was at a Penn State home game against some Big Ten squad, and I realized the same ref was doing the game. So I yelled “Loved you in Blue Chips!” and he turned and winked and me and my friends and said thanks. This was dope. I’ll try and figure out dude’s name next time I post, but he’ll always be my favorite ref…

Anyway, I read a brief review of Crossover today that made it sound like it was the worst movie ever, and I was not at all surprised. So I’m asking for input on this one: Why do hoop movies, at least those released in recent years (Like Mike, Juwanna Man, Crossover, hell, even Finding Forrester) tend to be horrible? Or have I missed a lot of basketball movies that don’t suck? Was Glory Road really good and nobody told me? Let me know…