‘Sweetwater’ Review: An Intriguing But Sketchy Biopic of Nat Clifton, the Harlem Globetrotter Who Broke the Color Barrier of the NBA
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“Sweetwater” is a biopic about Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, the Black power forward who broke the color barrier of the NBA in 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson accomplished the same feat in baseball. It’s telling that Robinson remains one of the most celebrated heroes in sports history, while Clifton is still a somewhat obscure figure. (He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2014, but still.)
There’s a biting irony to that contrast. It relates to how the integration of basketball totally changed the game (the way it was played, the way fans thought of it), even more than the integration of baseball changed baseball. “Sweetwater,” written and directed by Martin Guigui, is a straight-down-the-middle inspirational sports movie — and, one regrets to say, a kind of benign sketchbook version of the form. Yet it also tells the tale (or, at least, one slice of it) of the Harlem Globetrotters, the fabled team of barnstorming trickster prodigies who Clifton started off as a member of. There were several levels to the Globetrotters’ athletic magic, and the film captures how intricately tied it was to the way that Black players remade the game.
At Madison Square in 1949, we see a match between the Globetrotters and the NBA championship team, the Minnesota Lakers. The Globetrotters win, which establishes just how good they are. But the NBA doesn’t allow Black players. That’s why the Trotters weren’t allowed to launch an NBA franchise, and why they couldn’t even play inside the Garden if they didn’t face off against a white team.
The Globetrotters might have been the best basketball team on the planet, but they presented themselves as a novelty act, perpetually described by words like “hotdogging” and “razzle-dazzle.” Their brand of futuristic athletic slapstick showmanship created a kind of grand illusion. They were pranksters, comedians, a traveling circus of men doing elaborate stunts on the court. Audiences, in a way, saw the talent on display, since it was right in front of their eyes. But in another sense they were blind to it, because the Globetrotters signified as clowns. That was their greatest trick, and one that’s indivisible from the racism of America: They put their virtuosity right in front of the audience’s faces and made light of if at the same time.
What the Globetrotters had, in a word, was skill. Mad skill. They perfected a rubbery sleight-of-hand mastery, so they could literally run circles around the white players, but it was all palmed off as a joke. That’s how they got away with it. In “Sweetwater,” we follow the Trotters as they travel from gig to gig in a broken-down bus, always at the beck and call of the team’s owner-manager-coach, Abe Saperstein — played by Kevin Pollak as a decent-hearted but penny-pinching exploiter who has a bond with his players yet treats them, financially, as second-class citizens. The members of the Globetrotters are mostly from Timbuktu, Illinois, but presenting them as an outfit from Harlem lends them a certain mythology. The problem is the way Saperstein profits off that mythology. Even the white teams who get trounced by the Trotters get paid more than the Trotters do.
Nat is the Globetrotters’ star attraction, a force on the court who stands 6’8” and has hands large enough to palm the ball. (That was a Clifton signature.) He’s also got presence — a balance of fury and grace. That, along with the fact that he’s a World War II veteran, is what attracts the eye of Joe Lapchick (Jeremy Piven), the coach of the New York Knickerbockers (at this point hardly anyone calls them the Knicks), who looks at Nat and sees the future: of his team, the NBA, and basketball itself. That future is tied to the astonishing dexterity of Nat’s on-court tricks — which, as the film recognizes, are no mere “tricks.” They’re the signature of a new vision of basketball, in which the fluidity and power of Black players will recharge the game like an electric current.
The Globetrotters scenes hold us, though the actors, while pretty good at imitating the team’s routines, can’t match their astonishing liquid jazz quickness. (Who could?) “Sweetwater” makes you want to see a full-on drama about the Globetrotters, or maybe a biopic about Meadowlark Lemon, who joined them in 1955 (and who Wilt Chamberlin said was his choice for the greatest basketball player in history).
Jeremy Piven, trying to get as far away as possible from Ari Gold, invests Lapchick with a menschy warmth that rings true for a hard-nosed coach trying to steer the game forward. But a lot of “Sweetwater” is taken up by crusty powerful white men — the NBA Board of Governors — sitting around rooms debating whether the NBA can afford to keep itself an all-white league. These scenes are heavy and unilluminating. A number of the team owners are dead-set against integration, Mike Starr plays the Jewish team owner who’s for it, and Cary Elwes, all cigar-puffing bluster, is Ned Irish, the Knickerbockers owner and basketball promoter who’s portrayed as being on the fence, until he sees the future and makes Saperstein an offer he can’t refuse — not a threat, just a lot of money — to buy out Clifton’s contract.
Everett Osborne plays Nat with a quiet dynamism, until he gets onto the court with his potential Knickerbocker teammates, at which point he starts to coach and interact with them almost by instinct. He simply sees a world of plays — of basketball logic — that’s beyond their experience, and he can’t help wanting to teach it to them. It’s not about tricks; it’s about making a pass as tight and purposeful as if your life depended on it. Nat is the first Black player to sign an NBA contract, though not the first on the court; he opens the door for two other draft picks, and because Mo Podoloff (Richard Dreyfuss), the president of the NBA, doesn’t want any trouble, he sneaks in a game with another Black player, Earl Lloyd (Bobby Portis Jr.), in Rochester on Oct. 31, 1950, one night before Nat’s debut with the Knickerbockers in Madison Square Garden.
No matter. Nat’s first Knickerbockers appearance at the Garden causes a firestorm, mostly in the form of the refs labeling every move he makes a foul. What’s funny is that, in a certain way, they’re right. When he flies up to the basket and dunks the ball, they give him a “traveling” violation, but it’s because they’ve never seen anyone do that before.
“Sweetwater” is watchable but pedestrian, full of too many situations that remain undeveloped, like Nat’s connection with a nightclub singer played by the radiant Emmaline. The movie is full of anachronisms that clunk, like a sportscaster following Nat’s first dunk with the line, “I think that was a new kind of shot! Looked like a donut being dunked in a cup of coffee! Let’s call it a dunk!” (The shot was actually named by Arthur Daley of The New York Times in 1936, after John Fortenberry performed one on the U.S. basketball team at the Berlin Olympics.) But “Sweetwater” does give you a glimpse of something. Like “Air,” it makes you realize that the history of basketball is ripe with vital stories that haven’t gotten near the big screen.
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