The Athlete’s View - Spring 1995

Joel Kirsch, Ph.D.
American Sports Institute

Hoop Dreams is an almost three-hour documentary that is getting rave reviews from movie critics and the public. Poignant commentary on this captivating life drama has shown up everywhere—from major magazines and the editorial pages of our nation's newspapers to our classrooms and street corners.

The story is about two African-American, inner-city adolescents—William Gates and Arthur Agee—who live in Chicago and are seeking to fulfill their dream of making it out of the ghetto and into basketball's professional ranks via collegiate athletic scholarships. While both barely make it to the college ranks, neither Gates nor Agee have the education they'll certainly need once their playing days are over.

The intense dialogue ranges from how well the story of these two young men is told to the compelling story itself. And the story of these two protagonists is one that thousands like them are living each day: Are athletically talented, African-American males being exploited by the educational system that is supposed to help them become intelligent, responsible, caring, and self-supporting citizens?

Are these young men being used for their athletic skills in an all-too-real, win-at-all-costs game that really doesn't care if they get an education so long as they can put a ball through a hoop and can bang the boards incessantly?

The all-too-apparent line is, "There's no doubt they're being used." And the data is there to back up the line. Studies show that a high school athlete has about a one-in-twenty chance of playing collegiate sports, and a college athlete has less than a one-in-fifty chance of making it to the pros. It's been said that a cruel hoax is being played on these kids.

While these odds are extremely unfavorable for anyone, no matter what their socio-economic status, they are certainly much greater than those of becoming an astronaut. Yet no one would discourage an adolescent boy or girl from pursuing this dream because to be shot into space requires high level skills in math, the sciences, language arts, critical thinking, and problem solving, to name just some of the requirements. And these skills could certainly be used in other professions if the student didn't make it as an astronaut.

The message is: To be a successful astronaut requires a complete education. To be a successful athlete requires only a limited education.

To be straightforward, a person's education is not determined by what will fulfill the individual but rather how he or she is going to make a living. Money rather than dreams is the motivating factor. Careers rather than spirit comprise most of education's unspoken but true focus.

The pursuit of sport need not require a limited education. Those adolescents who dream of playing in the National Basketball Association could get as good an education as any future astronaut if our culture and its educational system valued people's physicality as much as their mentality. Just because there are a limited number of professional sports positions available does not mean sport is not a valuable discipline from which a person could learn and grow.

How many sport-minded students would want to study the physics and kinesiology of a successful jump shot if they knew this would improve their field goal percentage? How many of these students would be interested in mathematically determining and charting all the dimensions of their game? How many students would want to write a story, poem, or essay about their own quest, their own human drama and compare it with Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea or Maya Angelou's quote, "Courage is the most important virtue."

While these opportunities are endless, the vision to create them in our schools and have sport-minded kids fully engaged and excited about learning is almost nonexistent. What's missing for all kids is an educational experience that is interdisciplinary and integrates the body and spirit with the mind.

The Hoop Dreamers are kids who are not headed in the wrong direction, but powerful, graceful, and spirited messengers of positive change, pointing us in a direction that we simply are not fully aware of at this point and time in our growth as a culture and our evolutionary development as a species.

Without a doubt, an insidious hoax is being perpetrated on many Hoop Dreamers. But what is truly cruel is that there is no vision that would lead to all those like Gates and Agee having the opportunity to pursue their dreams and get a meaningful education at the same time. This is true whether these dreams have to do with rocketing into outer space or being able to shoot a basketball and have it arc its way up into the atmosphere, travel through space, and glide back down through a basket.

For the sake of these kids, we need this vision to help keep their dreams alive.