Power forward Spencer Haywood didn’t get inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame until September of 2015, which is probably why Martin Spirit’s sports documentary of the looked-over athlete’s life, “Full Court: The Spencer Haywood Story,” is only arriving now in 2016. It’s the perfect conclusion, maybe the only appropriate ending, to the narrative of Haywood’s troubled life. Over the course of the film, that narrative arcs full circle all the way from his childhood in Silver City, Mississippi, to the peak of basketball stardom, to the utmost human lows, and back again to the house he grew up in. In the present, it’s a burned-down, overgrown, erstwhile drug den, both a grim reminder of where Haywood came from and what life might have held in store for him in an alternate timeline where he isn’t a sports legend with an abiding influence that’s felt even today.
That’s the capacity in which ‘Full Court’ is at its best. Anyone with only passing knowledge of Haywood’s history is aware that he grew up dirt poor and caught in the grip of a sharecropping economy. You can imagine the temptation to cast only a brief glance back at its subject’s early life, so as to get to the good stuff — the success, the fame, the lasting impact of both on basketball as an athletic pursuit — that much faster. But Spirit gives Silver City its full due, and carries the through-line of racial inequality, economic disparity, and social injustice onward for the better part of the film’s first hour (not unlike the sociological-spanning “O.J. Simpson: Made In America,” minus about six hours). ‘Full Court’ marries these interests with Haywood’s budding career as a ball player, of course, because those two elements go hand in hand; it’s impossible to make a movie about Haywood without addressing racism.
It’s the film’s dogged commitment to addressing bigotry thoroughly and without blinking, though, that makes ‘Full Court’ noteworthy. The basketballer spent his youth as a witness to slavery’s lingering legacy, a kid born out of the cotton fields and stuck in the starkest cycle of poverty on the onset of the civil-rights movement. Haywood even fished his first basketball out of the trash, and his mother bought him sneakers with what money she could scrape together plus a pecan pie. Haywood didn’t just beat “the odds” to become the man who made inroads into the NBA for players like Kevin Garnett, LeBron James, and Michael Jordan. He beat, or at least outmaneuvered, an old and powerful system of oppression, the kind that you don’t escape just by leaving one city for the next.
Silver City to Chicago, Chicago to Detroit, Detroit to Mexico City: Prejudice followed Haywood wherever he went, even as he moved further and further away from his roots. The filmmaker allows Haywood himself to do a lot of the talking on the matter, for good reason: Haywood lived it, and knows better than anyone else interviewed in the film — friends, family and professional associates — what it was like to work at a country club for white people who put on friendly veneers that just barely hid their rancorous prejudices. “In Mississippi,” Haywood tells the camera at one point in his gentle, sonorous way, “if you looked a white man in the eye, they would punch you in the face.” Earlier, he mentions an anecdotal incident where a man threatened to castrate him if he ever got involved with the civil-rights movement himself.
For the viewer, the appropriate reaction to these revelations is shock. But neither ‘Full Court,’ nor Spirit, nor Haywood is out to shock anyone. Each nod to the racial brutalities of American antiquity is presented matter of factly, reminding us that this once was, and in many ways still is, how America operated, and what too many Americans had to contend with every day of their lives. Even Americans like Spencer Haywood, who managed to vault beyond the barriers erected before them by the whims of institutional discrimination to achieve, and to thrive, and to simply be. Even Public Enemy MC Chuck D, who narrates the film from start to finish, affirms his own recollections of the 1967 Detroit riot as ‘Full Court’ ushers us into Haywood’s emerging adulthood.
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Spirit sows the seeds of Haywood’s eventual rise early on, and as those seeds begin to sprout and bear fruit, we feel a surge of triumph. The documentary does well to invest us deeply in the athlete as well as his past; it helps us to better appreciate his present, and it lets us relish in archival footage of him dominating the court. ‘Full Court’ avoids hagiography, too, by emphasizing the effect his cocaine addiction, acquired during his time playing for the New York Knicks, had on his game, his relationships, and his livelihood. Spirit allows us to see Haywood as flawed, though he also manages to keep the tone of ‘Full Court’ fully in the neighborhood of “exaltation.” Maybe that’s okay. Maybe Haywood deserves cinematic genuflection. He has earned the respect and adulation given him, both by the film, its participants, and the generation of players he paved the way for. But the film’s easy mood softens its hardest edges when perhaps they needed to be keener.
‘Full Court’ meets the documentarian standard: It’s adequately made outside of some awkward reenactment footage, and it’s packed with information, so much so that you may be surprised when it ends to find that it only lasts around 90 minutes. But Haywood’s story is bigger than Haywood himself. It’s the story of a harder side of the American experience, a shameful period in the country’s lifespan, and the story of basketball as an industry. Maybe Spirit has done right by Haywood, but it’s possible he could have done even better. [B-]
