This baskelball soap opera keeps it real

Sporting News, The, May 21, 2001 by Fritz Quindt

It was an eventful senior year for Eddy Curry, big (6-11) man on campus at Thornwood High on Chicago's south-South Side. It'll continue through summer reruns.

One of the republic's top players and a likely NBA lottery pick, Curry and his life are magnified 65 times on Preps: Chicago Hoops, Fox Sports Net's weekday half-hour documentary. See: Long practices. Longer sessions in the classroom. A night of introspection. A day of getting a flat tire. Drink-dunk-dunk. Committing to DePaul. Chatting at United Center with Clippers rookie Darius Miles, who advised Curry to skip college. Dunk-dunk-dunk. Tasting defeat at the state finals. Declaring for the NBA. Chillin' with his family and poodle. All captured by the Sony mini-cam tailing him six-to-16 hours a day. Says Curry, "Feels like I've been on The Truman Show."

Another comparison: Hoop Dreams on the small screen. Or MTV's Real World on hardwood, or The White Shadow, but sans script. Reality TV was never like this. Rashid Ghazi, executive producer for Chicago-based Halo Sports & Entertainment, boasts: "We don't drop them off in the Australian outback."

Last December, Ghazi and co-documentarist Peter Rudman pitched this no-star, no-plot idea with only a three-weeks turnaround from shooting to the final edit. Tough sell? Fox green-lighted 65 episodes, so long as the package premiered February 5 (first-run episodes end May 22). Five months of 18-hour days editing 2,000 hours of tape ensued. (They're developing a sequel: Texas football.)

For Chicago Hoops, cameramen were assigned to Curry, suburban star Kyle Kleckner and inner-dry junior Sean Dockery. Their circles of friends and families spawned enough characters to fill a soap opera. "We could've been thrown out after three weeks, and the show would've died," Rudman says. Instead, trust and access developed.

Documentary subjects usually act differently when cameras roll. But after early stiffness, Preps looks honest, even raw. On one episode, touring a housing project, Halo's 6-5, 350-pound cameraman is attacked.

Black is the dominant color of Preps--70 percent of the subjects; a rapping narrator calls Kleckner "the most respected white guy since MacGyver"; the soundtrack, urban; the backdrop, Chicago's mean streets. Yet life in the 'hood isn't necessarily desperate. Curry's friend, Jason Straight, optimistically discusses gang infestation; this Chicago Hope ends up passing his SAT, earning a hoops scholarship to Wyoming.

Preps gets 0-point-something ratings, but its 5 p.m. slot makes this a kids' cult favorite. And voyeuristic adults watch. Specifically coaches, scouts, agents. See: Preps offers unprecedented long-term peeps at prospects. Duke, already sending Dockery recruiting letters, has requested tapes. Meantime, producers seeking a final interview with Curry moan, "Since he declared for the draft, Eddy bought an Escalade and is hard to get hold of." Typical star.

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* Obituary: The XFL, a made-for-TV league and illegitimate son of the died of ratings deprivation May 10. It was 1. An autopsy cited "not enough football ... not enough shtick." It is survived by Vince McMahon, father, and mother, Dick Ebersol, whose NBC network lost $50 million on this rotten kid. Services and auctions are pending.

* Technical double play: Baseball's FoxBox is evolving to a sleek strip on top of the screen; ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball introduced a cool "Dead-Center" camera, directly above and behind the pitcher.

* The Buzz: ABC is filming a remake of Brian's Song (Sniff.)

* Vital Stat: The PBA signed with ESPN--bowling's first all-network presence since ABC gutterballed it in 1997--and increased prize money from $1.8 million to $4.3 million.

* Sound bitten: "This is the best entertainment in town, even though irs on NBC."

--CBS president Les Moonves, nabbed by Entertainment Tonight at Kings-Lakers Game 2.

* Do Not Adjust Your Set: While Jim Rome got The Last Word with Chipper Jones, Rick Barry and Don King on Fox Sports Net, last week's "guest list" on ESPN's Up Close was Dick Vitale, Dan Patrick, Mike Tirico, Stu Scott and Chris Berman. --F.Q.

Contributing writer Fritz Ouindt covers TV for THE SPORTING NEWS. E-mail him at fquindt@sportingnews.com.