‘Amateur’ on Netflix Updates The ‘Blue Chips’ Template For Basketball Scandals

The timing for a movie on the much-maligned amateur basketball circuit couldn’t have been any better for Netflix. The streaming company couldn’t have predicted the scandal that has ensnared the NCAA (and to some extent, the NBA), but the release of its original film, Amateur, dovetails into the ongoing controversy of pay-for-play athletics. With March Madness fading into view, this dramatization is a reminder that while the NCAA being neck-deep in corruption is nothing new, the grassroots level in big-time high school and AAU (American Amateur Union) basketball is equally rotted.

Amateur tells a slightly different tale than what’s been told in the “sports scandal” genre over the years. The story arc for protagonists in similar stories – especially African-American ones – is typically told through heavy financial burdens and the plight of absentee relatives, usually fathers. Yet, while the financial side is a major part of the storyline, the personal cross that Terron Forte must bear is about overcoming a learning disability that his talent can’t always hide.

Terron, a talented eighth grader played by Michael Rainey Jr. (Power), hoops for a struggling school team in an unnamed city when Coach Gaines – portrayed by the always charming Josh Charles (The Good Wife, Sports Night) – literally emerges from the shadows of a playground basketball court to recruit Terron for his out-of-state Liberty Prep team.

In portraying Terron, Rainey will remind you of that bright-eyed 14-year-old son, nephew or cousin of yours whose overwhelmed by new and challenging environments, even as he finds ways to adapt. We typically hear about the hardships of many athletes after they’ve been chewed up by the system, but Rainey plays up Terron’s initial naivete to provide a bird’s eye view of all the terrible stories you’ve heard about. And considering that his generation has grown up with current technology almost from the womb, Terron’s point of view plays itself out in multiple calls to those platforms from showing his skills on social media to the conversations between adults that these young athletes weren’t supposed to know about.

While not directly based on a real-life athlete, you will recognize familiar pitfalls that have become part of being a sports fan, from academic fraud to outright pay-for-play. And though not directly stated, there’s even the human trafficking angle in the case of one international teammate who looked much, much older than your typical high school student.

Clocking in at an hour and 34 minutes, a film like this can never dive too deep into the full breath of misdeeds in prep-level basketball – the good, the bad and the really ugly. In some ways, Amateur is surface-deep because despite frequent mentions of the NCAA, the NBA and the sneaker companies which have their hands all over organized basketball, they are silent characters in the film whose presence creates the chaos from a distance.

One can see that director Ryan Koo might have borrowed the template of two sports movies from the early 1990s that played with similar themes of corruption in amateur sports, The Program and Blue Chips, except from a high school purview. Amateur is actually Koo’s second telling of the story, as he originally began with the indie short film, Man-child back in 2011. After a successful Kickstarter campaign and the long process leading to Netflix financing, Koo’s feature film could have not been timed any better for release than right now with the real-life scandals still on the minds of sports fans and media.

Amateur provides an updated dramatization of how young athletes can find their love for sports tested by the adults whose motives have at least five-to-six figure price tags. While you can watch documentaries on real-life cautionary tales like Lenny Cooke or dive deeper into books such as George Dorhmann’s Play Their Hearts Out to understand how the dirty world of amateur basketball can impact athletes, Netflix’s Amateur gives you a good feel of how that 14-year-old ballplayer in your life could see that world in 2018.

Jason Clinkscales is the managing editor for The Sports Fan Journal, editor at Yardbarker and contributing writer for Awful Announcing. A New York City native, he is also a former media research analyst in both television networks and advertising agencies.

Watch Amateur on Netflix