Above the Rim, Below the Lights
The air is crisp. You're alone on a court. Sounds of Tupac & Snoop ring in your ears & scenes from Above the Rim play in your mind. You take shot after shot with no end in sight. What could be better?
Below the 8-Foot Rim: Hoops, Dreams, and a Season Inside U8 Rec Basketball is being called by some the greatest sports book they’ve read. I won’t tell you who called it that, but they did. Here is an excerpt about the best basketball movie ever made.
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Above the Rim, Below the Lights
My favorite moment from my favorite movie about basketball is remarkable for what’s missing: An actual basketball.
Above the Rim released in 1994. I was eleven, and I fell in love with the movie the moment I watched it. In love with the soundtrack—a New York City basketball movie with a West Coast sound. In love with how Nate Dogg made the words “East Side Motel” melodic and iconic. In love with Tupac and how he chewed up scenes with menace and charisma, a frightening figure impossible not to root for and a mesmerizing presence too magnetic to turn from. His entrance into a crowded high school gym is as captivating now as it was thirty years ago.
I fell in love with the basketball played. And while it will never be confused for the best hoops on film, when played in that city and set against that soundtrack, the actual basketball played counted less than the feelings the basketball scenes inspired.
I fell in love with Above the Rim because every time I watched it, I needed to go play.
Now that I’m older, I miss that youthful craving.
Leon, fresh from his star turn as Jamaican bobsled captain Derice Bannock in Cool Runnings, plays Tommy “Shep” Sheppard, a never-was New York City basketball hero returned home and haunted by a past he can neither escape nor forget. In the scene I want to talk about, Shep doesn’t move so much as he glides alone inside a playground late at night, each jab step he makes or dribble he fakes illuminated below the park’s lights. He spins, then crosses over. Goes behind his back, then through his legs. Each move stacks a new block building to the next. He rises—floats in the air a breath longer than a human should—and flicks his wrist.
There’s no basketball to shoot because Tommy Sheppard doesn’t need a basketball to dance on the hard court. He’s playing an imaginary game with an imaginary ball alone in a park, and that’s why this moment is so perfect. His arms. His legs. The way he twists, turns, and soars. It’s all in perfect concert, a blessed union of player and sport. Watching Shep, we feel the gravity of his game and the weightiness of his moves, and we know he doesn’t need a basketball to be great.
We see Shep playing from outside the park through the metal of a large fence. In a car also watching are three men. Marlon Wayans mocks Shep, delivering the classic line, “Yo, he’s playing ball . . . without a ball,” with such disdain it gets Wood Harris, who otherwise only scowls overtop a twirling toothpick while calculating his next move, to raise his eyebrows and almost smile.
The most important reaction, though, comes from Duane Martin’s Kyle Lee Watson sitting in the back seat. Kyle, an all-star high school point guard in New York City with hopes of playing at Georgetown, laughs at Marlon Wayans, but it’s forced and uncomfortable. He knows he isn’t watching a joke. More importantly, he knows the someone he’s watching isn’t a joke, either.
Kyle’s laughter fades. So, too, does his fake smile, disappearing while his eyes narrow on the very real scene of someone who not only might love the game more than him, but someone who might be better at it, too. As the car drives away, Kyle slips deeper into the backseat. His eyes hold onto Shep as long as he can, and he knows—ball or no ball—he’s witnessing greatness and that he has more work to put in to ever soar that high.
Not long ago, I walked past the house where my family lived until I was fifteen. I stood, for a moment, and looked onto the driveway that doubled as my basketball court. I smiled, seeing the concrete had been paved and no longer wore the cracks and fissures I memorized so long ago. The basketball hoop my dad hung on the garage in the early 1990s was still there. The net was fresh and new, but the gray backboard hadn’t changed much, its color only fading as the years had rolled by. I looked above the basket at the three spotlights I once played under. I remembered feeling like they were a gift from the basketball gods. Three little bulbs whose lights meant my childhood basketball games never had to end.
The early afternoon sun burned at super-strength, and I didn’t want to stand too long stuck in my nostalgia. Still, while looking onto my old driveway and up at my old hoop, I couldn’t help but close my eyes and remember beautiful, steamy summer nights spent playing on this court. Nights spent side-stepping or juking the cracks and potholes. Nights spent watching Above the Rim and then playing out their moves on my driveway court to the sounds of Snoop Dogg, Tupac, and more from the movie. Nights spent dribbling, breathing, sweating, and imagining. Nights spent playing out my dreams below the lights shining from above.
Jump shot after jump shot sent into the dark sky. I’d lose the ball for a moment then see it, again, as it came down, caroming off the rim and onto the same driveway where I now stood. I pictured all the dribbles and all the funny little bounces of the ball. The ones that hit off a crack and jumped loose the wrong way. The ones that crossed smoothly from one hand to the other, part of the dribble dance needed to score at the rim.
I remembered nights spent practicing layups and shooting free throws, begging the rubber ball to drop in as it rolled around and around the rim. My body moving in hard, short bursts in one direction only to stop and pull back the other way. Bounce after bounce of the ball into my hands, teaching me to feel the game as much as to see it.
Playing under the lights meant I could practice later than the sun could stay awake. It meant all my just one more shot, and then I’ll stop or one more dribble, and then I’ll be done wishes could always have another one more after them.
I stood there and thought of those old summer nights when the air was so thick I could start sweating just thinking above moving. Ten jump shots here. Ten more there. Ten free throws in between. Mosquitos coming and going. Lightning bugs sparking, hiding, then sparking again. I’d wipe my forehead with my t-shirt and clean my dirt-coated hands on the sides of my shorts. With each gasp, I’d suck in more of the heavy, Ohio air, and I’d wish for an evening breeze to bless me with a little break. Shot after shot, bounce after bounce, the next move was always the most important one I needed to practice. The next move was always the one I needed to make alone, in the night, playing under those lights.
Above the Rim is my favorite basketball movie, and the scene with Tommy Sheppard playing basketball without a basketball and under the lights my favorite moment in it.
As a kid, it made me feel things. It made me feel that I needed to be playing basketball because nothing else mattered as much. That someone else could be out there dribbling, shooting, and practicing in the loneliness of their own night and playing below their own scattered lights, so I needed to be practicing, too.