Today we sing the praises of one of the true giants of our era. Shaquille O'Neal, one of the greatest basketball players to ever breathe air, retired from the NBA yesterday via Twitter, and in so doing self-bequeathed yet another in a line of many nicknames built around the idea of his large size (ie “The Big Aristotle,” “The Big Daddy,” “The Big Baryshnikov”), this time choosing “The Big 401k.” Over the two-plus decades comprising ol' Shaq Palance's basketball career, he augmented his stunning achievements on the court—seriously, watching him play was like watching a steamroller modded with low-rider hydraulics and nitrous oxide hyperdrive tanks and seismic speakers, only if that mindboggling automobile had an AI chip and talked very witty trash in a rumbling monotone—with a wide variety of extracurricular endeavors. These ranged from ambling by a Walmart or Home Depot and hanging out at the registers for an afternoon paying for everybody's stuff and signing autographs and stuff, to a hip-hop career most charitably described as unfortunate, to an acting career that is most often described in similar terms. It's that last that concerns us here today.
Now, it's true that he wasn't exactly Shaq Nicholson up in this (Ed. Note: there's a lot more puns coming, and there's nothing you can do about it), and his music did clearly suck (just about the only human being to ever be a worse rapper is Abhishek Bachchan), but there are a couple extant, demonstrable circumstances of Shaq Bauer puttin' in some respectable thesping. One notable instance was his cameo on Curb Your Enthusiasm as himself, where he plays entertainingly off Larry David; he displayed sharp timing and was great fun. Another, also playing himself, in Tom Green's legendary Freddy Got Fingered, wherein he's fucking Tom Green's mom, but that's kind of hard to gauge his talent because the whole movie's so wonderfully strange. But the most extended glimpse at his Shaqtastic mummery was in his debut, 1994's Blue Chips.
Basketball movies are rarely very good, and so few of them are made that the title of “best basketball movie ever” is a default term. It's usually applied to 1986's Hoosiers, which is a pretty good movie and everything. But—he said, tapdancing on a political third rail—it's deeply problematic to have a movie be about basketball and the only black people in it are the bad guys . . . and the white guys win the big game at the end. Not only is the notion of the humble white underdogs from the country beating the big scary flashy black guys from the city fucking stupid on like eighty levels, there's the problem in basketball of there only having been six truly transcendent white players in the history of the sport: Larry Bird, Bill Walton, John Havlicek, Jerry West, Bob Cousy, and Jimmy Chitwood (Ed. Note: by down-is-up basketball racial standards, Europeans aren't white; don't look at me, rules is rules). Not only are those guys spread out over the entire hundred-year history of the sport, Jimmy Chitwood, the star of the victorious team in Hoosiers, is fucking fictional. For comparison's sake, there are as many truly legendary black players currently active in the NBA. That's not even including the recently-retired Shaq Lemmon. But I digress. And I'm already in enough trouble as it is.
Blue Chips, much like Spike Lee's He Got Game, has the advantage of being directed by an enormous basketball fan. William Friedkin, looking to rebound (Ed. Note: you're welcome) from a series of flops starting with the underrated (but low-grossing) Sorcerer, took on Blue Chips, a story about corruption in college basketball, starring a college coach who stubbornly insists on following the rules about recruiting athletes, and thus never attracts elite talent. Worn down by losing, he makes a Faustian bargain with the school's alumni something-or-other (read: evil white guy in a suit), who gives him a shitload of money to get the three best freshmen in the country to play on his team. The coach does it, gets his players, they kick ass left and right, but his conscience gets the better of him and he blows the whistle on himself and everyone more or less lives happily ever after except the evil white guy.
It's a fairly run-of-the-mill Hollywood plot, but Friedkin films the basketball scenes well, and cast the picture very well. He got a (relatively) sober Nick Nolte to play the coach, which he does well. Mary McDonnell is her usual awesome self as his kinda sorta off and on love interest, and the late, great J.T. Walsh is outfuckingstanding as the evil-white-guy-in-a-suit alumni plutocrat asshole. The most memorable performances in the picture, though, come from the non-actors, among whom is the above mentioned Shaq.
He's not the only one, though. When Nick Nolte goes shopping for stud players, one of whom is a gigantic 7-footer from the sticks in Louisiana (Shaq), who while an utterly unstoppable player could not give less of a fuck about studying if textbooks were on fire. He's flanked by two other star players, each of whom provides insight into ways in which the system of college athletics is hopelessly corrupt. There's also Butch (Shaq's at-the-time real-life teammate Penny Hardaway), the kind of black athlete about whom white sportswriters say all kinds of condescending, unintentionally racist shit like “he's so clean-cut” and “well-spoken,” who got like a 1400 on his SATs, but whose mother realizes she can profit greatly from her superstar son—whose game, modeled after Hardaway's real-life outlier 6'7” point guard, is the kind that gives scouts orgasms—and gets every dime she can out of the colleges competing for her son's talents. And finally, most insidiously, there's a white player (Matt Nover) who realizes full well the degree to which media and fans overrate white players to the point of myth, and who intends to use that bargaining chip, much like Butch's mom, to get every last bit he can from the recruiters.
Bob Cousy plays Nick Nolte's athletic director, and in one memorable scene shot in one continuous take, manages to skillfully play a “things ain't like the old days” scene with Nick Nolte while hitting a couple dozens free throws in a row in an empty gym (this is thirty years after he retired from the game, no less). A few other basketball people show up as themselves: Larry Bird, the legend himself, shows up for a cameo facilitating the introduction between Nick Nolte and Matt Nover. And in a funny running gag, several real college coaches (Jim Boeheim, Jerry Tarkanian, and Rick Pitino all of whom got accused of and/or popped for real-life recruiting violations at one time or other, too, which is awesome) play themselves, traveling in a pack one step behind Nick Nolte as he lands his players with J.T. Walsh's filthy lucre.
The above-mentioned performances are all quite good. The one that really stands out, as mentioned earlier, is Shaq's, because Shaq cannot but stand out anywhere he goes. He's a hair under 7'2”, considerably more than 300 pounds, very dark-skinned, and possessed of a smile that lights and warms the earth like the sun. Especially when he was young, before he put on a bit too much weight and got injured too many times, Shaq was one of the most physically astonishing athletes ever seen. Where many extremely tall people are slower or not as well-coordinated as “normal” sized people, Shaq (as many basketball writers observed) was like you put a “normal” person in an enlarger and set it to 1.5. He was not only bigger than everyfuckingbody in the universe, at the time Blue Chips was filmed, he was also faster. Friedkin's camera captures Shaq performing some truly stunning physical feats, and without trying too hard either: just by existing, he inspired facial expressions like in Jurassic Park when Sam Neill and Laura Dern first see the dinosaurs.
All this would be “so what/who gives a fuck” kind of like the taller, funnier-looking, nowhere near as talented Gheorghe Muresan in the crap Billy Crystal picture My Giant, if Shaq wasn't such a gifted performer. The phrase “like a kid” is often used in a patronizing way, but it fits Shaq in Blue Chips quite well. His apparent guilelessness, ready smile, well-developed sense of fun, and underdeveloped sense of giving a flying fuck about anything serious all fit this description. Kept hidden, except when called for, is his intelligence. There's a bit of business early on in the movie about how Shaq needs to get a certain minimum grade on his SAT in order to be allowed to play on the team. Shaq initially protests, maintaining—not without basis—that shit like SATs and IQ tests are racially biased (Shaq's character makes the point quite incisively and cogently), but Mary McDonnell, hired by Nick Nolte to tutor him, hits on a system of incentives for correct answers. With something in it for him, Shaq starts giving a fuck and just barely squeaks his passing grade. This whole business escapes that loathsome “white person helping out the poor unfortunate blacks” bullshit through the fact that Shaq's near Mallarmé-an absence of giving a fuck drives her nuts to the point when he gets his result, she's proud of him but also partly like, “Jesus Christ, Sisyphus is a fucking pussy compared to getting this motherfucker to give a fuck.” (Ed. Note: verbatim quote from Mary McDonnell's inner monologue, surprisingly).
Of course, Shaq truly comes alive in the basketball scenes. Penny Hardaway was pretty damn great back then, too (though largely forgotten now, for a few years Penny Hardaway was the most elegantly efficient basketball player in the world) but it's hard to compete with the giant tear-assing around the court like the camera's undercranked, destroying worlds with the smallest of motions, laying waste to cities, hearing the lamentation of the enemy's women. Blue Chips arguably owes its entire existence to these scenes, capitalizing as they did on two of the game's bright young stars (Penny but especially Shaq) doing what they did better than just about everybody in the world at that time. Blue Chips' continued relevance as a movie, if any, will likely rely heavily on its being a document of “holy shit, remember when Shaq was young?”
Really, this post was just an excuse to write about Shaq, and salute the big fella upon his retirement. It is very hard, unless you're one of his ex-wives or Kobe Bryant, to look at Shaq and not just smile. Shaq brings the light. But I'm not entirely talking out the side of my ass about Shaq's acting ability: the fucking guy made a late-period Billy Friedkin movie watchable. That's an impressive feat of, at the very least, charisma. And that warrants a salute on a movie blog. Peace, Shaq. Thanks for the memories, dude.
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