Overshadowed Movies

Like Chevalier, there were other small movies in theaters lately that were overlooked due to blockbusters. I enjoyed Are You There God, It's Me Margaret, which was funny and cute. It's been a while since I read the Judy Blume book, so at first I was confused about Nancy claiming that she got her period while in Washington DC, but that was a lie. She clearly got it and had a meltdown in front of Margaret at a New York dinner instead. Margaret's struggles with family and religion and peer pressure felt genuine and relevant even though they took place in the 1970s.

Then there was Sweetwater, a biopic about Nat Clifton, a Harlem Globetrotter who joined the NBA as one of the first black players. I've always been curious about who the Harlem Globetrotters were ever since I saw them guest star on Scooby Doo with other '60s, '70s pop culture stars. The whole idea of "exhibition" games of basketball as opposed to actual sports games was weird to me, because I didn't know why people liked watching the fancy tricks breaking all the rules. Also as a young kid, I had no idea yet of the history of racism in sports, forcing people to create Negro teams for athletes excluded from all-white professional leagues. So this movie, showing the early days of the Harlem Globetrotters in the 1950s, helped me see the way the team operated, going on a bus town to town to play fixed games. The team owner Abe Saperstein is Jewish and often protests when hotels discriminate against the players, and he'll sleep in the bus with them. But Nat often complains that it's unfair that Abe pays more money to the players of the losing team, especially since the Trotters are genuinely good basketball players who don't need to rig the games. Saperstein thinks he has to run the business this way, otherwise there wouldn't be enough exhibition games to sell tickets and make money at all.

Meanwhile Nat gets recruited by a coach from the New York Knicks (Knickerbockers is their real name), and the team owner tries to convince other NBA owners to integrate their teams too. It's a little distressing how their board meetings go, arguing about the novelty of the "flash" and "showy tricks" of the black athletes, likening it to a circus. Eventually, the Knicks buy Nat's contract from Saperstein, and he joins the NBA. However, the basketball referees keep ruling against Nat in the games. It's not like I understand sports rules or anything, but it's clearly due to racism, when they are harsher on him than on white players doing similar things. Eventually things get better as Nat and other new black players fundamentally change the sport, but there's still segregation and discrimination outside of basketball. Just because he worked in New York doesn't mean there weren't racists there just as bad as in the South. Overall an interesting movie about a forgotten sports pioneer. The weird thing is they never explain why Nat's mother changed his name as a kid or why Nat became a taxi driver after retiring from basketball.

I think sometimes that I might see the George Foreman movie too, but the ads say he became a Christian preacher, so I'm leery of religious overtones in that. I might watch it on streaming later so I can fastforward through parts of it.