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      in Theater

      Review: ‘Flex’ Hits the Right Rhythms on the Court and Off

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      The writer Candrice Jones and the director Lileana Blain-Cruz show a mastery of the game in this play about a girls’ basketball team in rural Arkansas.Their knees are bent, palms outstretched, eyes darting and alert.The young women of Lady Train, a high school basketball team in rural Arkansas, are training for every possibility on the court — which, in the beloved tradition of sports-powered coming-of-age stories, also means preparing for adult life.Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that in the first scene of “Flex,” which opened at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse on Thursday, all of the players appear to be pregnant. As this tip-off to a slam-dunk New York debut makes clear, the playwright Candrice Jones excels equally in sly, sitcom humor and in the swift-tongued rhythms of teenage and athletic talk.The lumpy bumps beneath Lady Train’s various fly-casual printed tees (it’s 1997, and the spot-on costumes are by Mika Eubanks) are obviously fake, contraband from a home-ec class. But for April (a tender Brittany Bellizeare), the prospect of childbearing is no joke; she’s been benched since the team’s zero-nonsense coach (Christiana Clark) learned of her pregnancy. The bumper-belly drills are both a protest and show of solidarity.Threatening that bond is the requisite rivalry between two top players: the scrappy and headstrong team captain, Starra (a glowering Erica Matthews), who is trying to prove her mettle to her late mother, and Sidney (Tamera Tomakili, delightful), an eye-rolling, hair-flipping transplant from Los Angeles who talks smack with a smile. There’s a delicate romance, too, between the even-keeled Donna (Renita Lewis, the show’s subtle M.V.P.) and Cherise (Ciara Monique), a youth minister whose faith is at odds with her desires, and with April’s consideration of an abortion.Jones and the director Lileana Blain-Cruz (both former high school basketball players) demonstrate a dexterous mastery of the game, not only in narrated action sequences on the blond-wood, half-court set (by Matt Saunders), but also in the pass-or-shoot dynamics that bind these friends and teammates.The teammates bond while driving around in a dusty-blue Chrysler convertible and singing along to Aaliyah.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere’s even an alchemy to “Flex” that conjures ardent home-team affinity from the audience (whoops and applause escalated in enthusiasm throughout the performance I attended). Maybe that’s inspired by Lady Train’s spelling-bee cheers (“big,” “bad” and “boss” are prominent), or their Aaliyah singalong with the top down on Donna’s dusty-blue Chrysler convertible (another impressive feat of design).But the special sauce is also in the careful economy of Jones’s character development, which offers just enough detail to inspire curiosity about who these women could become without claiming to know exactly who they are. (They’re teenagers, after all.) Whether Starra ascends to the W.N.B.A., she’ll have to wrestle with her ego. And Cherise doesn’t seem likely to let go of God, but what will happen if her devotion comes to feel like a trap?That “Flex” manages to garner such interest in its characters’ potential is a testament to the extraordinary synergy among Jones, Blain-Cruz and the cast members, who are as present and engaged in dialogue as they are nimble at the net.Tropes of the sports genre trotted out here — a betrayed purity pact, competition for scouts’ attention — are attended by the broader considerations that make young people and team sports such fraught and fertile ground. What do we owe ourselves, and at what cost to one another? Why learn the meaning of fairness when life is so unfair? To rebound when it knocks you down, and to savor the moments when it delivers on your wildest dreams.FlexThrough Aug. 20 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Stephen Curry: Underrated’ Review: Court Transcript

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      Initially considered too short and too scrawny, Curry went on to be an N.B.A. superstar. But there’s little that feels fresh or spontaneous in this earnest portrait.Toggling between time frames, the earnest documentary “Stephen Curry: Underrated” portrays Stephen Curry, the Golden State Warrior routinely described as the greatest shooter in the history of the N.B.A., as an underdog during at least two crucial points in his career.It tells the story of Curry the high school and college athlete who was, initially and repeatedly, seen as too short and too scrawny — but who went on to take Davidson College, a liberal arts school in North Carolina, to 25 consecutive wins in 2008. It also trails Curry at the start of this decade: The movie begins in December 2021, when Curry broke Ray Allen’s career record for 3-pointers, and then follows him through a period of relative doldrums when commentators are heard speculating about whether he’s still at the top of his game. (He went on to be named the 2022 N.B.A. finals M.V.P. after Golden State, the Bay Area’s team, won its fourth championship in eight years.)Off the court, Curry is shown raising a family and working to complete his unfinished degree at Davidson. His college career is recapped in detail, with his undergraduate years depicted as a string of second chances and triumphs through perseverance. One interviewee notes that when Curry began playing, Davidson games weren’t generally broadcast. Seeing these early highlights is part of the movie’s appeal.The director, Peter Nicks, previously specialized in fly-on-the-wall portraits of Bay Area institutions (the Oakland police documentary “The Force”). But there’s little in “Underrated” that comes across as spontaneous. That may be because Nicks didn’t discover much that feels fresh. Or it may be that the project, like Curry today, doesn’t have anything to prove.Stephen Curry: UnderratedRated PG-13 for language. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      in Theater

      Why Basketball Is So Popular Off Broadway

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      Basketball is central to the plot in new shows, including “Flex” and “The Half-God of Rainfall.”In Inua Ellams’s new play, “The Half-God of Rainfall,” the gods play thunderous games of basketball in the heavens. For Candrice Jones’s “Flex,” high schoolers practice their defensive stances while scraping by in rural Arkansas. Near the end of Rajiv Joseph’s “King James,” the two main characters play a one-on-one game of basketball using a crumpled up piece of paper after waxing poetic about the greatness of the N.B.A. star LeBron James.Basketball hasn’t just been on the playgrounds of New York City this summer. Hoop dreams are also playing out onstage, highlighting a theater, ahem, crossover that has become more pronounced in recent years.While basketball is not as popular as, say, American football, its cultural reach surpasses that of other American team sports because its players are among the most publicly recognizable. (Three of the 10 highest-paid athletes in the world, when including endorsements and other off-field endeavors, according to Forbes, are N.B.A. players.)“Watching a basketball game is the same excitement I get from watching great theater,” said Taibi Magar, the director of “The Half-God of Rainfall.” “It’s like embodied conflict. It’s executed by highly skilled performers. When you’re watching Broadway, you feel just like you’re watching N.B.A. performers.”For Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, basketball is the most culturally important sport partly because so many international stars play in the N.B.A., like the Denver Nuggets’s Nikola Jokic, who is Serbian, and the Milwaukee Bucks’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, who’s from Greece.“It’s drawing from every place on the planet, which means that the sport has become a really important athletic pursuit globally,” said Joseph, whose play “King James” just ended its run at New York City Center.In Inua Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” at New York Theater Workshop, Demi (played by Mister Fitzgerald) is a half-Greek god who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd basketball’s prevalence in pop culture — including in the worlds of hip-hop and fashion and more recently in film and television — has also penetrated the theater space. Dwyane Wade, who retired from the N.B.A. in 2019, was among the producers of the Broadway shows “American Son” and “Ain’t No Mo’.”“Even if one hasn’t played on a team or hasn’t played organized ball, we all have access to basketball,” Jones, who wrote “Flex,” said in a recent interview. “You go in any hood or any small town, someone has created a basketball goal.”In casting “Flex,” which is in previews at the Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, prospective actors recorded themselves playing basketball as part of the audition process. Jones and the show’s director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, who both played basketball in high school, said they wanted the basketball being played onstage to look authentic.“People have different styles, different ways of shooting, different personalities, different kinds of swagger,” Blain-Cruz said. “We care about the individual in the role that they play and how they’re playing it. And I think that aligns itself to theater.”Jones’s play, set in rural Arkansas, tells the story of a girl’s high school basketball team in 1998, which aligned with the second year of the W.N.B.A. So as the audition process advanced, the actors were asked to dribble, shoot and do layups for the creative team. Once the cast was set, some rehearsals weren’t about staging at all: The cast had basketball practice at nearby John Jay College.“There’s a kind of ensemble quality to it,” Blain-Cruz said about the sport. “Like an ensemble of actors playing together, a team of basketball players performing together. Together, they create the event.”Minutes later, as Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” blared, Blain-Cruz led a warm-up with the cast that included hip openers and upward arm stretches. It could have doubled as pregame preparation. The set itself had a basketball hoop hanging in the rear, and a basketball court painted on the floor. “Flex” refers to a type of play basketball teams run, and the staged work features several instances of game play.“There’s a real rigor. It is real,” Blain-Cruz said. “That’s what’s so satisfying, I think, about sports onstage. There’s an honesty to it, right? Dribbling the ball is actually dribbling the ball. We’re not performing the idea of dribbling the ball.”After a recent outing to a New York Liberty game, the actress Erica Matthews, whose character, Starra Jones, is the 17-year-old point guard of the fictional team, said watching the players reminded her of watching live theater.“Basketball is very intimate. You can play a one-on-one game in a small amount of space,” Matthews said. “They’re actually performing on a stage and with the way the audience is surrounding them, the way they’re cheering, it’s basically storytelling.”Downtown at the New York Theater Workshop, Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” a Dante-inspired “contemporary epic” about a half-Greek god named Demi who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A., is in previews and is scheduled to open July 31. While “Flex” deals with down-to-earth issues, such as teen pregnancy, “The Half-God of Rainfall” transports basketball to a mythical world for immortals to deal with.At a recent rehearsal, cast members pantomimed slow motion basketball movements at the direction of the choreographer, Orlando Pabotoy. The actors Jason Bowen and Patrice Johnson Chevannes worked on setting up a proper screen, and Bowen later practiced a Michael Jordan impersonation — complete with the tongue wagging. (Jordan is referenced in the play.)As Ellams and Magar, the show’s director, looked on from desks cluttered with tiny inflatable basketballs, they worked on reallocating lines as the choreography required. Though this version of Ellams’s poem has a cast of seven, he said it can be staged with as many or as few performers as the production desires. (A 2019 production at the Birmingham Repertory Theater in England had only two actors.)Ellams, a Nigerian poet and playwright, who has played basketball since he was a teenager, said he created the character Demi to “do all the things that I never could” on the court. He mused that basketball has a greater draw to the stage because it is “a far more beautiful sport.”In Rajiv Joseph’s “King James,” which just ended its run at New York City Center, Chris Perfetti and Glenn Davis play two men who bond over their love of LeBron James.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“There’s something humbling and mortal about basketball in the sense that there’s a simple equation,” Ellams said. “The ball bounces; it comes back up to your palm. You can break that down. This is solitariness, which invites the blues and what it means to play the blues. There’s a longing.”“There’s a natural melancholy about it,” he added, which makes it “easier to pair with the human spirit.”Of course there have been other basketball-related plays. In 2012, “Magic/Bird” explored the friendship and rivalry between the 1980s basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird on Broadway. The 2011 Broadway musical “Lysistrata Jones,” inspired by Aristophanes’s “Lysistrata,” followed a group of cheerleaders who withhold sex from their boyfriends on the basketball team because they keep losing games. Lauren Yee’s 2018 Off Broadway play, “The Great Leap,” also directed by Magar, tells the story of a teenage basketball prodigy who travels to China in 1989 to play in an exhibition game between college teams from Beijing and San Francisco.Daryl Morey, now an executive with the N.B.A.’s Philadelphia 76ers, commissioned a musical comedy called “Small Ball” that played in Houston in 2018. It depicts a fictional character named Michael Jordan — not the Jordan — as he finds himself playing in an international league with teammates who are six inches tall.“I think basketball is just the most important of all of the sports among the up-and-coming directors and playwrights, at least the ones I’ve spoken to,” Morey said.Not that basketball has a lock on the theater. Baseball has long been an object of fascination for playwrights, including classic shows like “Damn Yankees.” Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning 2003 play, “Take Me Out,” about a baseball player who comes out as gay, had a Tony-winning revival on Broadway last year. In 2019, “Toni Stone,” written by Lydia R. Diamond, depicted the life of Marcenia Lyle Stone, who became the first woman to play in a men’s baseball league when she took the field for the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro Leagues.Football and boxing, too: “Lombardi,” a biographical play based on the life of the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, ran on Broadway in 2010, and 2014 brought a stage adaptation of “Rocky,” the famous 1976 underdog boxing film, to Broadway.But for the moment, it is basketball that is having a renaissance in theater. Or to put it in basketball terms, playwrights who take on the sport currently have the hot hand. More

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      in Television

      Different Sides of Bill Walton and Wilt Chamberlain in New Series

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      New documentaries explore the star-crossed careers and delicate spirits of Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Walton, two of basketball’s greatest.Pity the poor 7-footer.That’s the message of two new documentary series about storied basketball players: “The Luckiest Guy in the World,” about Bill Walton (available in the “30 for 30” hub at ESPN Plus), and “Goliath,” about Wilt Chamberlain (premiering Friday at Paramount+ and Sunday on Showtime).Serious and thorough, “Luckiest Guy” and “Goliath” are positioned to draft on the success of an earlier basketball biography, ESPN’s popular Michael Jordan series, “The Last Dance.” But while they are also portraits of men with supreme physical gifts, they are less focused on their subjects’ on-court exploits and more determined to get inside the players’ heads. The sportswriter Jackie MacMullan delivers what could be a thesis statement for both in “Goliath”: “I’ve found that big men are much more sensitive than we realize.”Chamberlain, who died of heart failure in 1999, and Walton both have well-defined personas, which they participated in creating. Each series spends a lot of its time picking apart the received wisdom about its subject while also indulging, for the sake of dramatic impact and storytelling shorthand, the very stereotypes it wants to deconstruct: Chamberlain the unstoppable, insatiable giant; Walton the goofy, fragile flower child.The four-episode “Luckiest Guy” was directed by the accomplished documentarian Steve James, always to be remembered for “Hoop Dreams,” and was made with the full cooperation of Walton, 70, who revisits old haunts and sits down for an entertaining round table with Portland Trail Blazers teammates like Lionel Hollins and Dave Twardzik. It’s engagingly introspective and personal, in part because James pushes back against Walton’s incessant recitation of the title phrase. How can Walton call himself the luckiest guy in the world, James asks from behind the camera, when his career was utterly ravaged by injuries that eventually crippled him and drove him to consider suicide?That, broadly speaking, is the idea that haunts both documentaries. The conundrum of Walton’s and Chamberlain’s careers is that they were marked by success — college and professional championships, statistical domination (in Chamberlain’s case), reputations for unmatched athletic skills — and defined by disappointment. Neither won as often or as easily as he should have, in Walton’s case because of injury and in Chamberlain’s because of the dominance during the 1960s of the rival Boston Celtics and their center, Bill Russell, enshrined in sports mythology as the hard-working Everyman to Chamberlain’s sex-and-statistics-obsessed egotist.“Goliath,” directed by Rob Ford and Christopher Dillon, is a more workmanlike and conventional project than “Luckiest Guy.” But across three episodes it makes a persuasive case for Chamberlain as a generous, sensitive soul who was both blessed and constrained by his stature and his extraordinary all-around athletic ability.It does its sports-documentary duty, laying out Chamberlain’s triumphs and more frequent setbacks on the court. But it is more interested in the trails he blazed as a Black cultural figure and self-determining professional athlete, and it favors writers, pundits and scholars over basketball players in its interviews. (The scarcity of images from Chamberlain’s younger days in the 1940s and ’50s is compensated for with shadow-puppet scenes reminiscent of the work of Kara Walker.)Watching the series side by side, the differences between the two men are less interesting than the sense of commonality that emerges. Both were self-conscious stutterers who learned to endure, and perform under, the most intense scrutiny. Chamberlain may have been more flamboyant, but Walton, in “Luckiest Guy,” is just as conscious of his affect — there’s an ostentatiousness, and no small amount of ego, in the way he performs modesty. (James also challenges Walton’s lifelong, generally debunked claim to be only 6 feet 11 inches tall.)The veteran sports fan might see another commonality: As good as they are, neither “The Luckiest Guy in the World” nor “Goliath” is as exciting to watch as “The Last Dance.” This is a bit of a conundrum, because both Chamberlain and Walton are, quite arguably, more complex, interesting and moving figures than Michael Jordan. But Michael Jordan is a nearly unparalleled winner. And while winning isn’t the only thing, it is, for better or worse, the most compelling thing about the subject of a sports documentary. More

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      in Movies

      Why the Original ‘White Men Can’t Jump’ Is Timeless

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      Unlike most sports films, the original tale of streetball adversaries, played by Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes, wasn’t about winning or losing.“White Men Can’t Jump” was released on March 27, 1992. On the morning of March 28 — according to a wonderful if apocryphal sports legend — Michael Jordan rolled up to the Sunset Ridge Country Club in the suburbs of Chicago, drank around 10 bottles of Coors Light and played two rounds of golf. He had a game that night. Brimming with beer, Jordan posted 44 points, six assists and three steals to help the Bulls beat the visiting Cavaliers 126 to 102.The writer-director Ron Shelton’s brisk, lighthearted basketball comedy isn’t about the N.B.A., and the only time Jordan is mentioned, it’s somewhat disparagingly: Sidney Deane, the stylish, loudmouthed streetball virtuoso played by Wesley Snipes, brags that Jordan was impressed with his skills and advised him to join the summer league, an offer he declined. (Professional training, Sidney balks, “might mess up my game.”) But there is something of Jordan’s brazen, bravura post-beer performance in “White Men Can’t Jump,” which fairly thrums with cocksure athletic swagger. It’s not, like many sports movies, about what it takes to win. It’s about what it takes to win with panache.A hit with audiences and critics back then — in The Times, Janet Maslin praised its “raucous wit” — the movie’s reputation has swelled enormously in the intervening three decades. “White Men Can’t Jump” has since emerged as a bona fide classic, adored by basketball fans and cherished for its loving depiction of streetball. On Friday, Hulu will release a remake starring Sinqua Walls and the rapper Jack Harlow, though it hardly seems likely to recapture the singular magic of the original (which is also streaming on Hulu).Sinqua Walls, left, and Jack Harlow in the Hulu remake of the film.Peter Lovino/20th Century Studios, via Associated PressPart of the appeal is in how grounded the movie seems in its time and place. Billy Hoyle (Woody Harrelson) is a gifted hooper who makes a precarious living for himself and his girlfriend, Gloria (Rosie Perez), by hustling Black streetball players who underestimate him because he’s white. When he shows up to the courts of Venice Beach, Shelton shoots our entree into this world with a local’s eye for color. We see sand being combed, people performing tai chi, bodybuilders curling dumbbells: the rich sense of detail establishes us firmly in this community. And what we appreciate immediately is that we are far, far away from the world of professional basketball: this is real Venice Beach streetball, and it’s basketball as a fixture of everyday life.Billy is there to take Sidney’s money. But other than a few cracks about race — Sidney and his friends mock the uncool-looking Billy as a geek — it’s clear that he fits right in. What Billy understands, and what the movie so beautifully expresses, is that streetball is about more than merely who is the most accomplished player. Streetball is about attitude and verve, about bombast and braggadocio. When Billy drains a three-pointer in a shootout, Sidney nonetheless derides his style: “No aesthetic beauty whatsoever,” he jeers. Or as one of Sidney’s friend puts it, after Sidney’s more elegant three in reply: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever. My man John Keats said that!”Other sports movies have captured the power of victory. Only “White Men Can’t Jump” has captured the power of talking smack. The movie is a master class in mockery and ridicule. On the court, Sidney and Billy eloquently extol the virtues of the incisive barb or well-timed insult, demonstrating the degree to which winning and losing in streetball comes down to disturbing an adversary’s concentration and preserving one’s own clarity of mind. “It’s different than your country club,” Sidney teases Billy, insinuating that he won’t be able to cut it on a real streetball court, where mental toughness more than simple proficiency is the name of the game. But Billy can malign with the best of them. “Let’s stop and gather all these bricks. Let’s build a homeless shelter,” he snickers, “so maybe your mother has a place to live!”Billy thinks he has Sidney’s number. “You’d rather look good and lose,” he tells him, “than look bad and win.” It’s an apt diagnosis, but it cuts both ways. Billy’s game is wrapped up in his ego and pride, too — a fact made clear when he later takes an ill-advised bet to prove that he can dunk, simply because he can’t stand to be insulted. Billy and Sidney both strive for what the Italian courtier and writer Baldassare Castiglione called “sprezzatura”: studied carelessness, “which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless.” They want to dominate, but more to the point, they want to make dominating look easy.It’s not that the movie endorses this point of view. In fact, it wisely complicates the idea, later making Billy pay for his hubris when Gloria leaves him over his obsession with the game. “Sometimes when you win, you really lose,” Gloria cautions Billy, in the film’s most memorable monologue, and perhaps the closest thing it has to a thesis statement. But the film understands the driving force that keeps Billy and Sidney in the game even when they should quit, and it’s one of the few movies of its kind to depict that pure streetball attitude with real wisdom. For these guys, ball is life. They can turn down a challenge about as easily as they can stop breathing.“White Men Can’t Jump” opens and closes on the same court on the same beach, with the same a cappella trio, the Venice Beach Boys. The circular structure is fitting for a movie about what is in essence an endless pastime — and we can well imagine Billy and Sidney remaining there, draining shots back and forth until the end of time. That may account for why the movie has endured for more than 30 years, and why its appeal seems timeless. It’s not just about a few games of basketball in the summer of 1992. It’s about the magic of streetball — and that magic is forever. More

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      in Music

      Two Creative Directors on Sports, Hip-Hop and Faith

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      For the Taking the Lead series, we asked leaders in various fields to share insights on what they’ve learned and what lies ahead.The birth of the partnership between the creative directors Free Richardson and Phil Cho hinged on, of all things, their shared faith. In 2018, Mr. Cho, the founder of NoLedge Productions, pitched a collaboration between his company and Mr. Richardson’s creative agency the Compound.“I go to slide two, and he goes, ‘Yo. Turn that off,’” Mr. Cho recently recalled. “He’s like, ‘Do you love God?’ I was like, ‘Yeah. I’m a believer,’ and he goes, ‘All right. We’re good.’”Of course, it wasn’t just spirituality that brought them together. Mr. Richardson also was impressed with the effort Mr. Cho showed when documenting an event through photos and videos at the Compound’s art gallery. “Phil has something special about him,” Mr. Richardson said recently. “You can just feel a good presence of energy.”The two companies are now a major force in the world of marketing, particularly around the intersection of sports and hip-hop. Together, they have curated an impressive portfolio of campaigns for brands including the shoe company Clarks, ESPN, the software company Niantic and DraftKings. Last year, the duo won three Cannes Lions advertising awards and five Muse Creative Awards, given for inspirational marketing campaigns. Last month, they won 12 Clio Awards, given for creativity in advertising.Mr. Richardson, 50, also known as Set Free, is African American and was born in the Bronx. He grew up in Queens and Philadelphia and was deeply involved in the hip-hop community and the world of street basketball culture. In 1998, he created the AND1 Mixtape Tour, a traveling basketball competition, and in 2007, he founded the Compound.Mr. Richardson’s story has helped shape and inspire many, including Mr. Cho.Born and raised in Edison, N.J., Mr. Cho, 33, is Korean American and grew up with a passion for both basketball and hip-hop music. He was a middle school student when the AND1 Mixtape Tour debuted. (“Some moms in Korea probably know about AND1,” Mr. Cho said about the tour’s reach.) Since starting NoLedge at the age of 26, he has collaborated with a variety of brands including Toyota, the record label 300 Entertainment and musicians like Akon and Year of the Ox.Today, Mr. Richardson and Mr. Cho are innovators in the crowded landscape of creative marketing, and consider themselves family as they “navigate the invisible handcuffs of corporate rule,” as Mr. Richardson put it.“Authenticity is a word that gets thrown around a lot in our industry,” Ari Weiss, chief creative officer at the advertising agency DDB Worldwide, wrote in an email. But “you’re either authentic or you’re not. Mr. Free Richardson and Mr. Phil Cho are pure authenticity.”The two spoke at the Compound’s headquarters in Brooklyn to discuss remaining authentic to their craft, being relevant and their shared faith. The conversation has been edited and condensed.Adriana BelletHow do you stay current?FREE RICHARDSON I think it always goes back to staying authentic and storytelling. Everybody has a story, and you can tell it through A.I., pictures, music, all the creative elements. Look at the NFT [nonfungible token] world. It came, and though it’s not gone, the whole time, I was like, I’m still going to go with touchable, feel-able art. Authenticity within. Look at a tree. The leaves will die before the root of the tree dies. A lot of things are happening through technology, and a lot of things are going to happen, but I don’t know anything that is bigger than the Mona Lisa. No matter what happens in technology, the root of creativity will always be around.PHIL CHO The root of what we are is: It’s always been about relationships. When I walk into the Compound, and I see all this artwork, like Jonni Cheatwood, and you see how long it took for them to come up with these ideas and wasn’t A.I.-generated, I feel like that’s what drives more value.RICHARDSON Yeah, I think it’s a lot of relationships. That’s with everything. The two things in life are communication and relationships. If we don’t communicate, you can’t make the relationship. Creativity is a revolving door. I still work with people that I worked with 20 years ago. It’s the reason we still hear Fleetwood Mac and Marvin Gaye songs in the same rotation that you hear Drake. And so when things are authentic and true, the creativity never goes away.How are you navigating challenges and opportunities facing the advertising industry?RICHARDSON I think the ratio of African Americans and Asians is very small. I don’t blame everything on race, but I think it’s a tougher role for me and Phil being a minority, because there’s not a lot of dominance of minorities in the advertising agency world, especially with Fortune 500 companies, C-suite level and businesses, especially small ones. [According to a 2022 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, of workers in “advertising, public relations, and related services,” 7.8 percent were African American and 6.6 percent were Asian American.] We’re kind of small, SWAT-style — boutique-small. That’s what I consider Compound and NoLedge. It’s a strategic partnership that executes some of the same things that big advertising agencies execute, without the red tape.CHO Before doing Compound, there weren’t people telling me how to facilitate production, and I felt like I had to just learn from trial and error. And a lot of the people that I would meet, they did happen to be white. So again, I’m not trying to make it a race thing either, but I just felt like there’s not a lot of people with my skin tone that are doing this and can help me out. So I think even merging with the Compound, it was a whole new world for me of just trying to be confident in what I’m doing and understanding that. What’s a lesson that you learned from your staff, team or peers?RICHARDSON At the end of the day, everybody makes mistakes. And myself, just looking people in the eye and just being like, “All of us are the same.” I think learning and working with NoLedge, it takes time. Everybody needs time — to execute a task, to learn, to communicate, to talk. To respect time and respect people and giving them time. Not to where you just want to get them to or the client, but just everybody needs time.CHO With the guys that are in NoLedge, for me, it’s patience. I’ll say this, but it’s harder to practice it. You might be able to do X, Y and Z, and you want the same from your guys, but you got to understand that they also need to learn X, Y and Z first. So you can’t expect people to move how you move. Adriana BelletHow do you keep campaigns authentic and meaningful?RICHARDSON I try to give everybody their own white box. When you go look at an apartment, you’d rather see the apartment empty so you can dream of how you’re going to decorate and design it. But if you go into a home that’s already furnished, it already blocks you in. You can’t really put your ideas on it. And so walking into brands and working with companies, I try to give them the white box and tell them, “How do you want to design this?”And then my job after that is just to put a magnifying glass on your ideas. You’re there to help the brand, not really to put your ideas on their brands. And doing it that way, it always helps expand what the goal is. The goal is not for my ideas to be presented. The goal is for my ideas to latch onto your ideas and make them bigger.CHO I really do feel like Free kind of sets his own trend. And I think that’s what a real creative is, right? To me, the better creative director you are, the more you don’t care about what other people think about you, and I think that’s given me confidence, too. It’s just what comes out of when we facilitate a project — just do what we feel would be dope. Just be comfortable with it.What are the challenges of a partnership?RICHARDSON Time. We can’t do everything we want to do. I mean, you have to understand what you’re going into with partnerships. It’s like a marriage. Phil, I love him. He’s my brother, my little cousin and a son. Then there’s times that he’s my uncle. I got to look up to him in certain areas. CHO It’s always about communicating. People have different work flows. It’s not like mine is exactly the same as Free’s. But I think the reason this works is so many young guys want to run the ship, right? So even while doing production, there’s certain things that I would do differently if I was shooting. But at the same time, a good leader is a good follower. I feel like these years right now, I’m soaking up the game. The same way Free was talking about clients and how you got to support their vision. I’m kind of doing a similar thing with Free. I’m supporting his vision. How do you stay inspired?RICHARDSON God. I want the world to understand that. He’s just the creator of all. If you can’t be inspired by thinking of that, I don’t know what else you’re going to be inspired by. God is my source of creativity.CHO I agree. All the stories in this world from different people and backgrounds — he’s the biggest artist. More

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      in Television

      Damar Hamlin and the Existential Crisis of ESPN ‘Monday Night Football’

      by

      Fans are used to seeing gruesome injuries. But there was no media playbook for what happened to Hamlin.A seeming eternity of live television had elapsed since Damar Hamlin, a 24-year-old safety for the Buffalo Bills, collapsed on a field in Cincinnati after a hard blow to chest. “Monday Night Football” had ground to a halt, and like everyone else who had been tasked with speaking on air while emergency medical personnel tried to save Hamlin’s life, the ESPN studio anchor Suzy Kolber was at a loss for words. “There’s really not much more we can say,” she said, ashen-faced. “I think we’re all feeling the emotions, we’re all joined in prayer together.” Then she paused and, with a measure of disbelief, teased a commercial break: “And we’ll be back.”Sports fans in general, and football fans in particular, have been coarsened over time to gruesome injuries — to the sight of joints bending in unnatural ways and grown men writhing in pain while their teammates huddle up, yards away, for the next play. What happened to Hamlin on Jan. 2, in front of a prime-time audience of millions, was a chilling reminder that silence and stillness can be far worse. You could see that this time was different, because you could hear it: Hamlin fell silently, and then he lay there silently, and then the hush around him spread, fast, from the playing field to the sidelines and then over the stadium. Eventually it reached the broadcast booth, where Joe Buck, ESPN’s play-by-play announcer, tried to let the images of sobbing players and the jarring sight of an ambulance on the field do the talking, and tried not to sound too astonished that league officials appeared intent on resuming the game. A broadcast production crew has a whole playbook for these situations: which replay angles to show and a sense of how often to show them, a list of bromides announcers can use to paper over the discomfort while we wait for the fallen player to give us a reassuring thumbs-up as he’s stretchered off the field. But this time there was no thumbs-up. ESPN just kept repeating the playbook, over and over, until all we could see was the artifice of it.It was around 8:55 p.m., late in the first quarter, when Hamlin first went into cardiac arrest. The N.F.L.’s commissioner, Roger Goodell — the only person in the league with the authority to not just temporarily suspend the game but also postpone it altogether — didn’t officially do so until 10:01. This left the corporate broadcaster with an impossible hour of live television to fill: The game was, technically, still in progress, making it difficult to simply cut away to whatever was on ESPN2 or to skip ahead to SportsCenter and its flawless anchor, Scott Van Pelt. The network’s “Monday Night Football” crew performed with remarkable grace, under the circumstances. But for viewers, it was still an hour of talking heads’ acknowledging that there was nothing to say, with seasoned on-air personalities all but pleading into their earpieces to get off the air. A live N.F.L. broadcast is a preposterously large, complex and expensive operation that exists for one mass-entertainment purpose. Suddenly that purpose wasn’t merely gone; it was borderline unmentionable.The commercial breaks were a mixed blessing — a respite for the broadcasters, whose own emotions understandably kept tumbling out, but a lousy time to peddle light beer, and an inconvenient reminder that in the absence of news about Hamlin’s condition (which would not be forthcoming anytime soon), and in the absence of an actual football game (which no decent person was in the mood to resume), this advertising money was the only reason the cameras were still rolling. We were, in other words, watching a young man’s near-death be commodified in real time. The second time Buck repeated some variation on the phrase “there’s nothing left to say at this point,” it sounded less like a directive to the production truck — let someone else flail for a while — and more like a reproof to the audience. Why are you still watching? Why haven’t you changed the channel? What kind of person still cares about a football game now?More on Damar Hamlin’s CollapseA ‘True Leader’: As a professional football player and community mentor, Damar Hamlin has reached two of his life goals: making it to the N.F.L. and helping others along the way.N.F.L.’s Violent Spectacle: The appetite for football has never been higher, even as viewers look past the sport’s toll on players’ lives. Mr. Hamlin’s collapse should force a reconsideration, our columnist writes.Danger Across Sports: Mr. Hamlin’s collapse has brought attention to sudden cardiac arrest and the vulnerability of athletes from the youth leagues to the professional ranks.Faith and Football: The outpouring of public piety from players and fans shows how Christianity is embedded in N.F.L. culture in a way that goes beyond most sports.This was uncharted territory, the guy on the television more or less telling us to turn off the television. The very program itself was having an existential crisis. There was no game to show, no update on Hamlin’s condition to share, no cutting to black. The moment Joe Buck said “CPR,” “Monday Night Football” was over. Only it couldn’t end.Just 250 miles across Ohio, in a different sports universe separated only by a few TV channels, Donovan Mitchell of the N.B.A.’s Cleveland Cavaliers was pouring in 71 points against the Chicago Bulls. It was the highest single-game total in 17 years, and it makes Mitchell one of only seven players in N.B.A. history to top 70. Mitchell is powerful and balletic, with a 6-foot-10 wingspan that has earned him the nickname Spida; the Cavaliers, thanks in large part to him, will most likely reach the playoffs for the first time since 1998 without LeBron James on the roster. On the emotional spectrum of sports fandom, Mitchell’s night was the polar opposite of the tableau in Cincinnati: jubilation in the stands, gobsmacked teammates on the bench, escalating delirium in the announcers’ voices. When the Cavaliers won, in overtime, Mitchell’s teammates kept drenching him with water bottles, as if to put out flames, and then they all posed together for a photo with the night’s hero.This was all of the reasons we watch sports. But it didn’t merely happen on the same night as Hamlin’s injury; the two events unfolded in lock step, over the same hour of real time. On social media, many fans experienced both dramas at once. As I traded texts with friends about Mitchell’s swelling point total — 58! 66! 69! 70! — I kept toggling apps and scrolling through Twitter, where stats about the basketball game sat alongside uninformed speculation about blunt-impact cardiac arrhythmias and ghouls blaming Covid vaccinations for Hamlin’s collapse. This wasn’t just any regular-season N.F.L. game either: The Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals are Super Bowl contenders, and their matchup had major playoff implications, and it was “Monday Night Football,” a multibillion-dollar American institution. Then, suddenly, by swift consensus, the game didn’t matter at all. It was almost generous of Skip Bayless, the Elon Musk of sports trolls, to step up and tweet a take about not postponing the game abominable enough to give the entire platform someone to unite against in disgust. (He even managed to offend Shannon Sharpe, the ex-N.F.L. tight end with whom Bayless hosts Fox Sports 1’s “Undisputed,” enough for Sharpe to stand him up for their broadcast the next morning.)But social media also created avenues for catharsis. Hamlin was an unheralded sixth-round pick coming out of the University of Pittsburgh, near his hometown, McKees Rocks, Pa. He cracked the Bills’ starting lineup only in September, after the first-string safety Micah Hyde suffered a neck injury and had to leave the stadium in an ambulance. In 2020, Hamlin set up a GoFundMe to support a toy drive back home in McKees Rocks, and as of that Monday afternoon, just before the game, he’d raised about $2,500. By Friday, the helplessness we all seemed to be feeling on Hamlin’s behalf had poured more than $8 million into his toy drive.On Monday night, though, you could find Mitchell on one television broadcast, soaked and smiling. On another was the Bills’ wide receiver Stefon Diggs, his cheeks wet with tears. I couldn’t decide if there was something subhuman about juggling these two emotions, trying to compartmentalize them on the fly, or if that was closer to the definition of being human. Mostly I thought about Hamlin. I thought about how I’d feel if I were the one on the ground, how badly I’d just want people to look away, stop filming, turn off the television, go do something else, go watch Donovan Mitchell drop 71 on the Bulls — anything but watch me fight for my life in front my teammates, my friends and my mother, on the field during “Monday Night Football.” And I thought about Hamlin waking up, opening his eyes and hearing about his toy drive.Source photographs: Kevin Sabitus/Getty ImagesDevin Gordon is a writer based in Massachusetts. He is the author of “So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets — the Best Worst Team in Sports.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Redeem Team’ Review: Squad Goals

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      A documentary looks at the 2008 U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team and its mission to bring back gold after a humiliating loss.As narratives of national uplift go, the 1992 U.S. Olympic men’s basketball consortium, known as the “Dream Team,” was one of the most shamelessly contrived. Once international players started to get the hang of hoops, how was America to maintain hegemony? Blitz them with the cream of the professional crop. This strategy wasn’t foolproof. A humiliating loss to Argentina in 2004 deprived the United States of the gold. This aggression would not stand.“The Redeem Team,” a documentary about the 2008 squad that was charged with getting the Americans back to the top spot, is smart in not asking the viewer to feel too bad for the 2004 group. The Argentine player Pepe Sanchez nailed the issue right after the match: “This is a team sport. You play five on five, not one on one.”Taking charge for the 2008 run is the Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, a figure both respected and despised (the team member LeBron James is frank: “Growing up in the inner city, you hate Duke”). Krzyzewski makes teamwork the priority, and he holds to that even when he brings aboard Kobe Bryant, then a notorious lone wolf.The movie, directed by Jon Weinbach, offers several eye-opening mini-narratives on the way to a rematch with Argentina. Doug Collins, a member of the U.S. team in 1972, speaks to the 2008 players about his painful experience in a game arguably stolen by the Soviet Union. Bryant softens up his old friend Pau Gasol, a member of Spain’s team, the better to execute a shocking “who’s the boss” move on the court. The intimidating presence of Argentina’s ace shooter Manu Ginóbili causes no small concern. While no realistic observer of American sports could call this movie inspirational, these sequences definitely make it engrossing.The Redeem TeamNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More