ESPN casts a lovely spell with 'Black Magic' documentary

Between Black History Month and the start of the NCAA Tournament, ESPN presents a new miniseries called "Black Magic," and it's all the more powerful for not trying to elicit the usual formula responses.

Produced by Earl "The Pearl" Monroe, who isn't exactly your typical documentary filmmaker either, "Black Magic" never suggests, "Hey, it's January, time to learn some black history that's good for you and just happens to concern sports figures so it goes down easy." Neither does it say, "Hey, it's March Madness, time to celebrate the pageantry and progressiveness of college hoops."

Oh boy, does it not say that.

Instead, when the two-part, four-hour miniseries debuts at 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday on ESPN, "Black Magic" takes a more humble approach, anecdotal and matter-of-fact rather than strident and lecturing.

It traces the slow, gradual, incremental and yet undeniable alterations in race relations as they've been reflected through changes in basketball over the last 60 years. And because it looks at individual people and players, not grand movements, it makes those changes both more immediate and more meaningful.

Although ostensibly about the impact of black colleges on basketball, it touches on much more than that. This is a lovely piece of work that, yes, goes down easy because it focuses on people simply telling their tales, but it also moves a viewer, by turns, to newfound anger and respect.

"Black Magic" opens with a "secret" 1944 game between Duke and the North Carolina College for Negroes, in which NCCN supposedly ran Duke off the floor 88-44. The game produced a young player named John McLendon, who would go on as a coach to develop a uniquely black style of basketball, brisk and athletic, urging a shot every eight seconds.

McLendon figures in much of "Black Magic" as a coach at NCCN and Tennessee A&I and later in the pros with the Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League, but it's not his story. Rather, it keeps circling back to him because he touched so many players, as when he brought Dick Barnett and his distinctive foot-kicking jump shot to A&I in the late '50s.

There is also Clarence "Big House" Gaines, who learned all about hoops from McLendon and would go on to produce Earl "The Pearl" himself at Winston-Salem State.

The rising profile of black college basketball, combined with Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball, led to Earl Lloyd joining the NBA in 1950. After Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 came the deluge: Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson, Sam Jones.

Their stories are already familiar, so "Black Magic" concentrates instead on lesser-known figures: Cleo "Skywalker" Hill and Richard "Pee Wee" Kirkland, who, the documentary states without hysteria, led a wild life apparently dealing drugs off the court and dealing out assists on it. In fact, Kirkland rejected an offer from the Bulls by supposedly saying, "I have more money in my pocket."

Then there's a lovely little vignette on the extended rivalry, from high school to the pros, between Willis Reed and Bob Love. By the '60s, race wasn't as much of a hurdle, but it still pops up. Reed says he admired the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent movement because "I couldn't do it. Somebody hit me, I hit back."

And notice the subtle pride in Love telling his tale of conquering a stuttering problem to excel at school.

"I had to go to college," he says, because it was the only way out of the South. But the stuttering problem pursued him right into the pros.

"I didn't pray for love. I didn't pray for money," Love says. "All I wanted to be able to do was speak."

"Black Magic" doesn't talk about movements, so much as it lets people talk of their own struggles, and in that it does a far better job of tracing the course of history.

In the air

Remotely interesting: CBS has the "NCAA Basketball Championship Selection Show" at 5 p.m. Sunday on WBBM Channel 2, after the Big Ten tournament championship. … WPWR Channel 50 airs the boys' IHSA 3A and 4A basketball finals this weekend. The 3A semis are at noon today, the 4As at 6:30 p.m. Then the 3A consolation and championship games are at 11 a.m. Saturday, followed by the 4As at 6:30 p.m. Channel 50 will also air 18 Fire games this year.

Comcast SportsNet Chicago reruns a classic 1971 Blackhawk game against Toronto involving Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita and Tony Esposito at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday. Hull and Mikita will join current play-by-play man Dan Kelly as hosts. By the way, I loved last Friday's TV coverage of the pregame ceremony featuring Hull and Mikita; it stopped conversation in the bar at Gene & Georgetti, where I was watching it, and that's saying something. CSNC runs "The Emerald Diamond," on the Irish national baseball team, at 2 and 11 p.m. Monday.

End of the dial: Steve Stone again joins Ed Farmer on the Sox' broadcast of their game with the Cubs at 2:55 p.m. Saturday on WSCR 670-AM. WGN Channel 9 has the TV coverage.

Farmer sounded awful flying solo earlier this week (almost as bad as Dan Bernstein alone), but the "interactive" element with Chris Rongey was interesting and engaging. None of that Saturday; Farmer and Stone will do the full game.

-- Ted Cox