This 3-Hour Doc Will Crush Your Basketball Dreams (Hoop Dreams)

➡ “Hoop Dreams” is a 1994 documentary that follows the journey of two 14-year-old boys from Chicago, William Gates and Arthur Agee, who aspire to become NBA players. The film, which spans several years, provides an honest look at the challenges they face in their pursuit, from high school to college. Despite their efforts, neither of them makes it to the NBA, reflecting the reality for the majority of those who aspire to play professionally. The documentary is highly rated and often listed among the best basketball documentaries ever made.
➡ Only a small percentage of college basketball players make it to the NBA, and the journey is often tough. This story follows two players, Arthur and William, who face challenges both on and off the court. Arthur struggles with school and finances, while William battles recurring knee injuries. Despite their hardships, both players find ways to continue their education and pursue their passion for basketball, highlighting the harsh realities of aspiring to join the NBA.
➡ This text discusses a documentary about two aspiring NBA players, William Gates and Arthur Ag, and the struggles they face. The documentary highlights the pressure on these players to succeed and lift their families out of poverty. However, they face numerous challenges, including injuries and the murder of family members. The text also discusses the fleeting nature of sports achievements and the exploitation of young athletes.
➡ This text discusses a basketball documentary that didn’t quite capture the speaker’s interest due to its length and lack of well-known personalities. The speaker suggests that the documentary might have been more engaging if it was shorter and featured more familiar faces. The text also includes a promotion for merchandise from a website called Paranoid American, and ends with a rap verse that seems to express the speaker’s feelings of being misunderstood and underappreciated.

Three hour documentary about two kids that don’t make it into the NBA. The end. Ahoy mateys. This is under the docks with Paranoid American and Sean Criss. Mainstream Mondays where we sail through normie docks to tell you which ones sink and which ones swim. Set course to paranoidamerican.com kill them mockingbirds.com. that’s where the real treasure is hidden. Like subscribe and share. And don’t forget to drop a comment and tell us which documentary we should check out next. And speaking of the next documentary, this is Hoop dreams. It’s a three hour documentary from 1994 by director Steve James and it follows two kids that are about 14 years old in Chicago and they’re trying to make it into the NBA.

And here I’ll just summarize the entire three hours right now. Three hour documentary about two kids that don’t make it into the NBA. The end. All right, we’ll see you guys. The next one that’s pretty much summed up, man. There’s more to it than that. So here if we, if we plot the course it. Interestingly enough we just reviewed the Last Dance which was about the Chicago Bulls and Jordan like this epic six year span where they, they get different championships. This takes place right in the middle of that kind of towards the beginning part of it, 1994.

And we’ve see these two kids, one is William Gates and the other One is Arthur AG. They’re both 14, they’re both in Chicago. They’re both obsessed with watching the Bulls. I think one of them might be a Detroit Pistons fan. Even though he’s in Chicago. That could be like detrimental to your life if you let people know about that. But that they’re trying to get into the NBA and, and it basically follows them in high school and like what it actually takes to, to put yourself on that trajectory and who you’re comparing yourself to. And it follows them all the way into their college careers.

So this takes place over a few different years of watching this. Hoop Dreams is also I think one of the highest rated basketball documentaries on the planet to ever exist. So if you go and search best basketball documentaries, Hoop Dreams will consistently be in that like top five list across the board. I hadn’t seen it before. Had you seen this before now? I had not seen it before. I, I would, I thought I had because I heard the name but I think I confused it with like a movie because when I started watching it and if I had I completely forgot about it.

But I will say it’s crazy. Because the movie comes out in 1994, but it spans from 87 to 92, like around that, that time frame of like you said, from high school to, to college. And it, it’s one of these old school. This is going back to our roots, bud. Like, this is a. Documentaries that we, we were talking about had like kind of got us on this trajectory of like, hey, let’s just film a bunch of stuff for a long like five, six years and see what we get. Yeah. And I’m glad that we ended up watching this one.

I don’t think I saw it either. Even though it had always been rated as like one of these best ones. And it gives you a really brutal, honest look at trying to get into the NBA. Like I said already, spoiler alert. Neither of these kids make it into the NBA, which is like 99.9% repeating. Of all people that think they’re getting into the NBA. And you can see some of the reasons going into it. So William Gates seems like he’s got the most promising out of the the two of them. He’s got a little bit more confidence, a little bit more skill.

Arthur Ag, we will see he’s got the skill, but he lacks some of the confidence. And they, they’ll say like he’s rough around the edges a little bit. And as Arthur puts it in his words, he’s like, man, I’ve never been around this many white people before. So it’s like you can see the like trying to break into playing basketball professionally is putting them both out of their comfort zone. William Gates is in the Cabrini Green housing projects, was in Chicago and Arthur Ag is in a west Garfield park, which is like a suburb just outside of Chicago.

So we’re both talking about in the thick of the Chicago. And the difference is that William Gates is talking about this like, I love basketball. I want to be the best kind of like that motivation. When we’re talking to 14 year old Arthur AG, he’s like, I’m about my mama house. I’m about my dad a house. I’m gonna get cars for everyone in the family. He’s already spending the money on, on his like paychecks that he hasn’t earned yet. So it’s, it was interesting to see the two different motivations and approaches like one of them and I’m sure they both have the same thoughts in their mind.

But Arthur is very much like, I want posters, I want my own shoes. He like makes his own shoes and puts his name on them. So like that’s his motivation. And I get the impression from watching Gates, like, Gates just wants to ball. He just wants to play basketball, and. And that’s his main motivation and nothing else. Like, he doesn’t even, like, the schooling part aspect of it. Like, I think that frustrates him. And in, like, during the film, you could kind of see that frustrates him because he just wants to play ball. And Arthur, I think, is real skilled.

Like, he. I think he has a lot of skills, but he does not know how to use it. And he. He hangs around people and his grouping and selection of the people he chooses to pick because it’s not like, a drastic change. It’s not like, oh, one guy’s in the hood, and the other guys, yeah, he’s in a suburban type of level, but they’re not too far apart from each other. The. The lifestyle they live. I just think what was installed in them and what was important to them, and I think career, success, legacy was important to Gates.

And then Arthur was more like money, fame, like, you know what I mean? That’s, like, the different mindset that I got. And even though Arthur was technically in, like, a community and not in the projects, they show he’s playing basketball, and in, like, the back corner, they’re. They’re doing, like, drug deals. So it’s. You know, it’s still Chicago. It doesn’t matter where you’re at in Chicago at this point. And then. Then it starts following this guy named Earl, who is kind of a freshman coach, but he just goes to neighborhood ball games, and he’s scouting, and he’s like, oh, look at that 14 going over there.

That guy is gonna go somewhere, right? Like, bro, you can’t rewind the clock any further. They’re trying to get the first jump. Yeah. And they make a point of it later when you start talking to the. The college coaches, and they’re like, you want to be the first one that sends that kid a letter? You want to be the first one that. That introduces themselves to their parents and says, like, hey, I can give you all these opportunities. Because the second that they get on the radar and they’ve got, like, 10 schools on their back, sometimes just the first person to reach out.

So this guy Earl, he’s kind of like, this way early scally. He’s gonna just, like, watch you play in a neighborhood and be like, hey, kid, you ever think about joining the NBA? So he knows what the dream is. He’s trying to get a little piece of that. That money as well. So he’s as the scout. He sees Arthur playing. And basically Earl takes Arthur to see the coach at St. Joseph High School. So St. Joseph High School is a private Catholic school, I assume, hence the name Saint Joseph. And this is where Isaiah Thomas also went to school for basketball.

And it sounds. My impression they don’t get too much into the details on this, but my impression is that if you’re in Chicago and you want to get yourself on the track to. To a play really great in high school and then get scouted and recruited and get a scholarship to college, that for a lot of people, that pathway is through St. Joseph because St. Joseph has this pedigree of great coaches and great basketball players. So it’s just like the first step on all the different stepping stones that you have to go through. That first one is going to St.

Joseph. Yeah. Because it’s going to get you on the radar. They already have scouts that come there that regularly check this stuff. It’s opening these pipelines they call them in sports. You know, like you. You have this school that’s pumping out players and pushing them through because they may not all get to the NBA like you said, spoiler alert earlier that, hey, these guys don’t either. And I wanted to mention that I pulled up the statistic. It says one, this is just out of college. So 1.2% to 1.3% of people that play college basketball, Div. 1 go to the NBA.

So I’m sure that the high school two to NBA is even less. Right. I would assume that’s at least half of 0.12. So that’s like where you see that everything’s branding. Everything is like building yourself. Like these scouts, like you said, everybody has their. That this is getting fed. So St. Joseph’s is feeding the college players, which is feeding them. And it’s this chain that continuously keeps moving and it’s all business. There’s actually a really interesting clip in here a little bit later, after you meet a bunch of the kids and they’re going around Nationals, I guess there’s this one point when they, like all the best high school players in the country get together to play.

And like Isaiah Thomas is there again. He’s like talking to them all. And Spike Jones is there, right? Or Spike, Spike Lee. And Spike tells him. He’s like, look around you, man. This is a business. The only reason that they want you on their team is because you’re good at playing. And if you. If you’re good at playing and you win games, they make money. That’s it. That the whole thing is just. They’re making money off of you, they’re profiting off of you. And that was interesting. Like, he’s. He’s dropping some real facts to these kids right in front of the people that are going to be the ones profiting off of them.

And it. And it starts following how they’re actually doing. So once Arthur gets to St. Joseph, they interview the coach. And the coach is brutally honest. He’s like, yeah, I don’t know about this Arthur, you know, he’s got the skill, but he keeps reverting back to his environment, like, which is like the white version of being. Like, he’s starting to act a little bit too hood on the court, right? That he’s immature and that he kind of implies that William Gates is able to do the opposite, that William Gates can, like, turn it on. He can have the confidence.

He can focus on just the game. So, like, you’re starting to see the difference between Arthur and William. And you’re. You’re watching, you’re like, yeah, I guess this. This. This William Gates guy, he might actually be something. They show he’s being covered in the news in, like, local newspapers. They’re announcing him. It’s like, oh, here comes William Gates. He scored 13 points in the second half, but he misses the last shot of the game, which is pret. Pretty crucial. He didn’t sink that Jordan. And then you see him screw his knee up again and again and again.

And I think by like the third time, you kind of get the idea. Like, damn, bro. Even though he was the one, he would have been the one that you would pick to have made it all the way. Just his knee didn’t agree and he. It wasn’t able to sustain him all the way through that. And even. Even as they’re going through it, you. You get this idea that William’s family can’t afford St. Joseph, Arthur’s family can’t afford St. Joseph. So William. And I’m gonna. I’m gonna make some assumptions here, but because William is able to focus on ball and to like, not act super hood, he ends up getting a sponsor, like this nice little Christian family, this lady Patricia and her husband.

And they’re like, oh, yeah, we’re gonna just sponsor this. This kid so he can keep playing basketball and win us some games. Arthur doesn’t get a sponsorship probably because he’s a little bit rough around the edges. And then you can immediately see it’s. It’s halfway through the school year. He Gets kicked out of St. Joseph because moms can’t come up with the rest of the tuition. So he gets kicked back to public school. And because he was halfway through the school year, those credits don’t transfer. So now, not only is he no longer allowed to play basketball for Saint Joseph’s but he’s behind by at least, like, one or a half of a school year from everyone else.

And he’s struggling in school, and William Gates is struggling in school. Like, neither of them are doing very well to this end. And then it starts interviewing Arthur. AG’s like, Mom. And mom is not happy. Mom is basically like, the system screwed us, and they sold us this lie. And now we’re in all this, like, financial turmoil. And so you can see in real time her attitude and then Arthur’s attitude. Like, they both basically regret. They’re like, we wish we never would have went to St. Joseph. Wish we never would have even, like, gone down this path.

So it goes real rough for them. And I. And I feel bad for Gates because, like, he does everything right, man. But, I mean, if you’re getting surgeries on your knees at, like, 15 and 17 and 19, like, I don’t know how well that bodes for an NBA career. It’s not going to bode very well. I mean, even when you get your knee injuries in the beginning of your NBA career, that’s, like, bad. And you’re already in your 20s, you know, so being so young, and you could see the frustration from the. The surgeries adding up, because that does take a lot of time in rehab.

And they obviously had St. Joseph really liked Gates and what he could bring, because if not, they don’t do this extra stuff. Like, as you see what happened with Arthur, he’s kind of like, all right, man, you’re no use to which all these schools do. People think of it as just on the college level, but in high school, it’s just as bad, man. Like, there’s people that are, like, transporting, driving three, four hours away, kids that are far, football and basketball that drive them all the way there, five school districts away. You know what I mean? However far, they don’t care.

It’s about winning because that comes back to the program. They saw Gates can help them. They got through them. They got him a tutor. They got him a sponsor. They. They were helping them through the rehab. This is what you get if you have that potential. If he doesn’t have this potential, then he’s not at all. Because then that helps for their brand, right? And their Boosters, because they’re like, oh, we put another guy in college, we put another guy to the NBA. That’s what these high schools could bank on. So they’re constantly feeding that so that people like Earl like going out there just scouting.

The reason he’s doing that is because then he could become a scout for high school or he could become a college scout. He’s building his own brand. So, like you said, everybody’s hands are out. And it. It’s something that I liked about this film is that they show a lot of people with their hands out and how the system kind of works. It was very. A raw look at the real system. It wasn’t any glamour and glitz. This remind me something that I’d be watching on PBS randomly back in the 90s that they would just play and you’d see the raw, gritty details of what really goes on in a life.

Yeah, this. This is definitely not a glamorous version of getting in the NBA. If anything, like, if. If you want to join the NBA or if you’ve got like a kid that wants to get NBA. It does seem like this should be almost like a required viewing of. And. And here’s how it’s going to work for, like, 99 of everyone that tries to go down this path. Here’s the problems you’re going to run into. And. And at the. When the documentary ends, I mean, you kind of get the idea that neither of these kids are going to make it to the NBA.

They kind of summarize that. But I. Way after this came out, I mean, tragedy after tragedy befalls everyone that’s featured in this documentary. So if you look into the backstory, first of all, the good news. So Arthur Ag, the one that was a little rough around the edges, he does go on to play basketball for Arkansas State Red Wolves, and then he even plays professionally, but it’s not for the NBA. I don’t even know about the iba, the International Basketball Association. He ends up playing professionally for the Winnipeg Cyclones. So, okay, he. He actually goes somewhere with it.

William Gates, after he screws his knee up for like, the fourth time, he ends up. He does play a few seasons for Marquette, where they show him in part of this. But when we see the. The coach at Marquette, talking to him and his family, he tells him, he’s like, look, you don’t know if your knee is going to blow out, and you might not be able to finish out the rest of the season, but if you go with this scholarship, you’ll still Be able to stay in school, your tuition will be paid for. You can still get a degree.

That’s exactly what happens with William Gates. He ends up not going all the way basketball, but he stays in and he gets like a marketing degree or something. So he, he still ends up making it work for him. So both of them come out ahead a little bit, except for the. Where it goes bad. So where it goes bad is that you meet through the course of this. William Gates has a brother, Curtis Gates. And Curtis was originally going to be the brother in the family that was going to make it to the NBA. And he’s going to bring everyone with him and it just didn’t work out for him.

And they keep going back. And you get in these interviews with Curtis, Curtis can’t find a job. Curtis is like, man, this whole, this whole thing’s riding on, on William now. Like, now William’s got to make it to the NBA and pull us all out of poverty. Like you can see this weight on the shoulders. Well, in 2001, Curtis ends up getting shot to death on his lawn in Chicago in like a weird love triangle situation. And then Arthur Ag, his dad gets murdered in 2004, who was like the, the guy that got him into basketball.

And Ag’s half brother, d’, Antonio, who we actually see get interviewed in this, this documentary, he gets killed on Thanksgiving morning in 94, right when this documentary comes out. So pretty much everyone you see in this documentary, except for the players get murdered. Hidden treasures overboard moments. Three hour documentary of hoop dreams. What you got? One of my hidden treasures is actually something that Gates says towards the end. He talks about how people are always like, hey man, when you get into the NBA, don’t forget about me, right? Like there’s this notion of like, if you make it, don’t forget about me.

Whether it’s NBA, NFL move, movies, whatever. And then he goes, I want to tell them that, hey, if I don’t make it to the NBA, don’t forget about me. And I thought it was like really significant to this film because it is true, right? Like, everybody wants to ride the gravy train. Everybody wants to be on board. When you’re successful, bring me with you. I don’t have to do nothing. You know what I mean? I’m gonna live in your house, you’re gonna buy me a house, a car, all this stuff. But when it doesn’t, your fruits of your label don’t come to fruition.

You’re like stuck in this position where you’re like, oh, Can I get help? And they’re like, remember when you fit, like, you’re. You’re a failure now to everybody. And nobody wants to, like, give you a hand up to even get you a job. I’m gonna have to pull in deep on the Hidden Treasure. So deep I’m gonna go back to Last Dance that we watched previously. But there was this quote that Michael Jordan was talking about that relates exactly what you’re saying. And he was talking about not just winning a game, but even, like, winning a championship, even being, like, mvp.

He said that when it comes to sports, any kind of a sports achievement happens right then in the present. Like, after a day goes by like, you were a champion yesterday, but right, like today, now, like, that’s gone now, like, even. Even if you’ve got the. The accolades and you can show, like, all of your awards, it’s still this, like, constantly fleeting thing. And they make that really evident in this because, again, like, Gates is doing fine. And then he screws his knee up. And you can see all of these different scouts that are sitting there, like, watching these kids get together and play this ball.

When he walks off the court and he has to lay down, like, crying, grabbing his knee. No one cares about that, bro. Like, no one’s following him to see if he’s okay or, like, asking him what his name is or, like, where he’s from. He’s got, like. He’s just completely eliminated the second that happens. And it’s. It’s wild to be able to see that happening in real time. And it’s a little bit heartbreaking because he’s doing everything right. You know, he’s doing the best that he can. And just. Just the physical world is not on. On his side on this one.

And then also, I real. My favorite part in this was when you see Spike getting up in front of these kids and he’s like, look, you win games and the school makes money. This whole thing’s about money. And he. It wasn’t like he was giving him some ancient knowledge or, like, motivational speech. He was just like, be careful of. Of all these hucksters, bro. Like, these hucksters are here to take advantage of you and nothing more. And again, I. I do think that it was smart for William Gates to have gone with that particular offer where they’re like, look, even if you blow your knee out, you’ll still get the scholarship.

You’ll still get this full ride. And it shows like, he’s. He probably came out ahead more so than a lot of People going down this path would ever go out. One thing I was not expecting in this documentary is that we get a full on knee surgery like medical video. Like you just straight, oh, I guess now we’re seeing blood and guts all of a sudden. Oh, I’m, I’m not super squeamish, but I was watching a documentary about basketball and then all of a sudden I’m watching like a legitimate surgery video. So I don’t know if I would consider it overboard, but I was not expecting it.

I will say overboard for me, but it’s not, it’s not more for the film. It’s just how it was. When Gates comes back to his trip from Marquette, he’s talking to the principal or a, a teacher. I’m not sure the, the guy’s title, but he’s someone that works for the school. And he’s like, yeah, so did you talk to the head blacks over there and what do the head blacks do? I’m like, what the hell on here? He’s like, yeah, you know. And then even Gates looks confused. Like, what do you mean? He’s like, you know, the most like highest ranked black guy over there.

Like you get and ask him how things go over there. I’m like, oh my God, bro, this is a white guy in Chicago. Super out of touch. And I was like, all right, this is that peppered into racism. Like when we do joke around about a lot of this, this politic, this racial politics and bull crap that people pull, don’t let’s not forget there is super racist people that are subtly rac. Even know it. Yeah, he wasn’t doing it to be funny. He was like just doing it because that was his life for sure. The other thing too, I mean, since I usually will bring up this in the overboard three hours.

I mean it’s a great documentary. When it came out, it’s. It’s again, it’s still highly rated. But man, I gotta say that last hour does drag quite a bit. I feel like it could have been edited down to two, but I’m, I’m. I guess I’m just being like nitpicky at that foreign. You think about Hoop Dreams, Sinker Swim. I thought the film was a good insight to how it. So many kids probably go through this, right, that they want to go to NBA a little bit different, but getting the perspective of like the raw, grimy like scenario of like where people are trying to like recruit you, trying to.

How you can use this as an opportunity, right. As being a prospect. I Think they did well of it. I think there was a lot of stuff that could have been cut out in the editing floor. I like the film. It dragged for me. And I’ve been weighing on this what I’m gonna give it. And for me, unfortunately, I am gonna give it a sink. I. I think it was a good film. I’m not saying people should. I would suggest it to people. I think it’s something that you need to watch if you want to show your kids how hard it is to get into exclusive things that are like, small percentages of, like, what could happen.

Also, you could show them, like, hey, you might want to go to the NBA, but look at these undertones of what you can do. Like Gates. Hey, get a degree in marketing. You may have something that stands in your way that gets the. But my ultimate thing was like, there was just way too. It’s like, did you edit anything or you just. But I guess it’s like six years of worth of material. And it must have been one of those guys that’s like, no, man, I’m not dropping anything. It just drags a lot through the film.

But so it was hard for me because I like the film. It was just too long for me, so I had to give it a sink. And I got to say that this one didn’t have the same, like, nostalgia bias playing into it that maybe Last Dance did. Where Last Dance, we both gave that a swim. Even though it’s 10 hours of playing basketball. This one, Yeah, I give it a sync too, man. Mainly because it could have been an hour and a half or two hours. The other one, too, was that it didn’t make me care a whole lot about basketball while I’m watching it.

And again, it’s impossible for me to remove the Jordan and Bulls bias from Last Dance. But that one I felt so compelled about. Just like the human stories and the insider stories. Maybe because they’re celebrities and we know who Dennis Rodman is, and they’re like, name dropping all these other celebrities. And this one, you don’t know who anyone is. I mean, Isaiah Thomas is the biggest name and everything else is just high school coaches and kids that aren’t making into the NBA. I think it’s a fascinating watch. If it were half the length, I’d probably give it a better shot.

But this is not a sports ball documentary series. Right? We just watch documentaries, and some of them happen to be about sports. So maybe Hoop Dreams is one of the better basketball documentaries. But I don’t put it as like, One of my favorite documentaries in general, so I guess I got to give it a say. We should do our numerology test on all this basketball stuff. You know, two plus three equals five. Or you could just go to the occultic calendar that you can purchase@panoidamerican.com. don’t forget to check out kill thembirds.com. this is under the docs Peace.

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