With the NCAA tournament—also known as March Madness, also known as the best sports time of the year, also known as the reason you won’t get any work done in the next few days—about to resume, I randomly recall “Blue Chips,” the 1994 movie about college basketball that’s by far the best acting performance of Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway’s career.
OK, so he didn’t do any other acting after that movie, unless you include a 2001 performance on MTV’s “Cribs,” which you shouldn’t. But I remember, in my best (amateur) preteen version of evaluating movies, thinking that Hardaway was pretty good in the film, at least better than his co-star Shaquille O’Neal … the one who did go on to star in several more movies (“Kazaam,” “Steel”), impressing absolutely no one with his ability to do anything other than be tall and sometimes say things people sort of understand.
I had forgotten that “Blue Chips,” a gripping tale of violated ethics in the cutthroat college sports world, had such a pedigree: It was directed by Chicago native William Friedkin (“The Exorcist,” “The French Connection”) and written by Ron Shelton, who’s pretty much the prince of writing movies about sports between “Bull Durham,” “White Men Can’t Jump” and “Tin Cup.” It stars Nick Nolte, the Prince of Tides and always the person on screen who seems most likely to have gargled with gravel that morning. The actor popped up in a small role last week in “Run All Night,” and I chuckled when I saw him. Nolte’s got a one-of-a-kind gruffness, and I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for the making of 1994’s “I Love Trouble,” a movie I really enjoyed as a kid and that reportedly struggled to get finished because of how much Nolte and his co-star Julia Roberts hated each other.
In “Blue Chips,” he’s a coach who succumbs to the temptation to illegally pay top prospects in order to improve his team. Though I haven’t seen the movie in years, I suspect it remains as relevant as ever at a time when people still debate whether or not college athletes should be paid, and all levels of many kinds of sports deal with varying degrees of cheating, from the recent Jackie Robinson West scandal to the endless string of performance-enhancing drug suspensions/fines/controversies.
In fact, 1994 was a great year for movies about getting ahead via inappropriate ways. Robert Redford’s Oscar-nominated “Quiz Show,” a movie you should go catch up with if you’ve never seen it, is a fantastic drama based on the true story of 1950s TV game show contestants who got the answers to questions before the show. When I think back to movies I saw that made me feel like I was seeing things in a different—not better, just different—way than my friends, I remember walking out of the Old Orchard theater, getting into the car (I don’t remember whose parents picked up) and my friend commenting on how boring he found “Quiz Show.” I absolutely loved it.
But back to basketball and “Blue Chips.” Part of what makes the NCAA tournament (and sports in general) so exciting is feeling like anything can happen, and no one can definitively predict it. No one can control it but the players, all of whom want to win so badly. It’s why I still remember Nolte screaming, “Did you shave points?!” at a former player he suspects of cheating, and why that behavior is so horrifying to anyone who loves sports. Whether you’re 6, 20 or 50, you’re supposed to try as hard as you can. Which really applies to everything in theory, even if it’s something you’re only going to do once. On that note, I give you NBA three-point- and free-throw-shooting legend Ray Allen’s one and only acting role in “He Got Game,” another movie that asks what makes highly recruited athletes go to one school or another. Are they all partying like Jesus Shuttlesworth? Probably not. But you gotta think some of them are.
Anyway. Go sports.
Watch Matt review the week’s big new movies Fridays at 11:30 a.m. on NBC.
For more movies, click here.
Want more? Discuss this article and others on RedEye’s Facebook page.
