Film review: Semi-Pro

Since the formation of the NBA in 1946, some decidedly medium-sized cities have been home to big-time professional basketball teams: among them Fort Wayne, Indiana; Moline, Illinois; Omaha, Nebraska; Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and Waterloo, Iowa. Flint, Michigan was not one of them, but that didn’t stop the 2008 Will Ferrell film Semi-Pro from focusing on a fictional team from the hometown of Michael Moore.

The American Basketball Association, or ABA, was a competitor to the NBA which lasted from 1967 to 1976, and which featured three-point shots (later adopted by the NBA) and a red, white, and blue ball. When it merged with the senior circuit in 1976, four of its franchises were accepted into the NBA: the Denver Nuggets, the Indiana Pacers, the San Antonio Spurs, and the New York-cum-New Jersey-cum-Brooklyn Nets. Semi-Pro presents a counter-factual history in which those four places were determined by the teams’ results in the league’s final season.

The opening scenes show Ferrell as Jackie Moon, a platinum-selling disco singer who has purchased, and is the captain-coach of, the Flint Tropics, a perennially bad ABA team who play in front of more cheerleaders than paying spectators. Over drinks at the fashionably multi-racial Kremlin nightclub, he learns of the ABA-NBA merger, and at a meeting of team owners he further learns that only four franchises will be accepted into the NBA for the 1976-77 season. The remainder will be dissolved; Moon asks “is that even a word?”

The protagonist convinces the other owners (the names of real-life ABA teams are displayed around the table in front of each Old Rich White Guy) to change the terms of the merger agreement to allow on-court results in the 1975-76 season to determine which four teams will make the jump. (If this had been done in real life, the Kentucky Colonels would have joined the NBA in 1976 instead of the Pacers.)

Former Boston Celtics player Ed Monix (Woody Harrelson) is recruited from the Colonels, traded, unbelievably, for a washing machine. Despite his own personal issues, he takes over as coach from Moon in a Western Bulldogs-style player revolt (Moon, however, retains the style of coach while Monix takes on the Orwellian title of ‘offensive and defensive co-ordinator’). Under Monix’s leadership, the Tropics learn some new tactics and begin to climb off the bottom of the standings.

Meanwhile, in a satire of the increasingly show-biz nature of pro sports, Moon and his team-mates get involved in a series of barmy-as-a-pot-of-whitewash matchday stunts, culminating in him ‘fighting’ a live lion. (In a case of life imitating art, the Brisbane Lions have announced plans to have a live lion on the field of play next season.) All this is rather a distraction from the plot; it is unclear whether its purpose is to critique the commercialisation of the modern NBA, or to pine for the comparatively innocent stadium atmosphere of the seventies.

The final game of the season sees the Tropics at home to the most successful of the post-ABA franchises, the Spurs; in true Hollywood fashion, the Michiganders need a win to qualify. This is where the film gets ridiculous: a Tropics player traded to the Spurs switches sides mid-match, and a concussed Moon has a conversation with his dead mother, who, mind-bogglingly, is African-American. One can probably guess the ending: the Tropics win by one point with an after-the-buzzer shot, and Moon gets a job with the NBA even if his team doesn’t.

There are many ways to interpret Semi-Pro. One possibility is that the film represents a longing for the small-city teams which once populated America’s pro sports leagues, and of which only the Green Bay Packers remain. The film, however, doesn’t focus much on Flint itself (perhaps due to it not being directed by Michael Moore), and the possibility of the Tropics being admitted into the NBA remains live until near the end. A more realistic idea is that it is a paean to simpler times, before the world of sport was taken over by commercialism and when players simply went out and played, not worrying much about tactics or fitness.

Like most imagined pasts, this supposed golden age was not what it seemed. All sports are better to watch now that their players are full-time professionals, and all are better for the tactical revolutions engendered by men like Lobanovskiy, Barassi, Gibson, and Lombardi. On the other hand, television coverage has had a negative impact on most sports, as the type of gameplay and presentation favoured by casual fans in their living rooms often differs from that appreciated by the rusted-on fan in the stands. Basketball presents good examples of this: just look at the NBA’s codes regarding players’ off-court dress and behaviour, which are designed to make the league’s predominantly African-American players more acceptable to white, middle-class America.

Semi-Pro doesn’t deviate from the usual script of Hollywood’s treatment of sports. It sheds little light on the real history of the ABA, and it valorises amateurism and tactical innocence while failing to identify What Went Wrong for professional sport in the last few decades of the twentieth century.

What would make a better sporting film? One that highlights the key problems of sport in the neoliberal age: the greater dependence on television revenue than on gate revenue, the de-proletarianisation of crowds, the trend towards taxpayer-funded all-seater stadia, the increasing tendency of the managerial state to intervene in the affairs of once-autonomous sporting organisations, and the exploitation (in the Marxist sense) of players by clubs and leagues. Semi-Pro has very little to say on the social and political aspects of professional sport.