“Blue Chips”

The NBA Finals is fast approaching. We now that some players of the NBA also act in movies. One of them is Shaquille O’Neal. In 1994, with fellow NBA player Anfernee Hardaway, they portrayed varsity basketball players who later joined the NBA in the movie “Blue Chips”.

Coach Pete Bell (Nick Nolte) is a university basketball head coach who gave his school several championships before. However, his current team suffered succeeding losses in its games. In the team’s latest defeat, he sat down with his four assistant coaches, to analyze their setbacks and how they can develop again a championship caliber team. An option came out which is to recruit players using incentives that are being practice in commercial teams. This was termed “program” which funds are being bankrolled by an alumna of the university. Bell, initially did not want to participate in it, but relented later because his back is against the wall. He was able to recruit three key players, two of them were played by O’Neal and Hardaway. Hardaway’s character was recruited from the high school ranks by the coach when he gone scouting in the said ranks. The character played by Shaq was recruited from a very far rural place where he was seen by the coach playing in a make shift basketball court. The other key player was from a farm.

Coach Pete is very wise in inviting players to join his team. If he asked what church the family of his prospective player is attending, he will lie that he is attending the same church. He also looked for famous basketball personalities who will serve as his point persons in locating prospective players. However, when the family of these players asked for conditions that will allow their sons to play for the coach’s team, it forced him to really bite the bullet in the offering of incentives.

The incentives given to the families of the prospective players were a job in a large company, expensive condominium unit and heavy duty tractor. In the case of Shaq’s character who did not attend high school, a series of qualifying IQ tests were given to him in order to join the team, which he passed. With the trio of new players, Coach Pete’s team won its succeeding games. However, when a sportswriter discovered the reasons behind the winnings in terms of the incentives given, the team’s rejoicing was short lived since it was exposed to the public which caused scandal to the school. Later, Coach Pete resigned from his position as its head coach. He went back to coaching, this time at the high school level. He also found out that one of his previous mainstay players was involved in a point shaving scheme in a game of the previous year. The team won that game but the player had below par performance. He castigated this player.

This film is recommended for players, coaching staff and team management of the different sports disciplines where values can be learned by watching this movie. For the general public, we can also learn the lives of the athlete and sports personalities and the challenges they face in times of victory and defeat.

The image used for this post was taken from online sources as references.

That’s all for now.

Until the next post.

TRIVIA

The sports celebrities who made special appearance in this movie were former Boston Celtics stalwart Larry Bird and Coaches Bobby Knight and Rick Pitino.

Happy Weekend!