1 Love

If director Leon Gast's Academy Award-winning documentary When We Were Kings was a knockout, then this celebration of basketball and its social and cultural impact is a slam dunk. While it lacks the dramatic focus of Gast's earlier film chronicling one of Muhammad Ali's most spectacular victories, 1 Love efficiently charts the evolution of the sport, with vintage footage and interviews with past and current coaches and superstars, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Phil Jackson, Allen Iverson, Jason Kidd, and a pre-scandal Kobe Bryant. At the heart of the film (and the sport) are such hoop dreamers as the elderly members of the South Florida Basketball Fraternity (former players and champions), whose undiminished love of the game plays out in a coffee shop where they talk nothing but basketball. For every sad story such as the life of street legend Joe Hammond, who never made it to the NBA, and is now said to be homeless, there are such inspirations as Pee Wee Kirkland, who gives back to the community with the outreach basketball program he founded. 1 Love does for basketball what When It Was a Game did for baseball. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (D. Liebenson)