Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Reconnecting With The White Shadow

By Bob Wire, 9-30-08

	Put me in, coach!

The year was 1978. The Blues Brothers made their debut on Saturday Night Live, setting the hook for an eventual feature film that would be watched dozens of times by every bar-band hack in the country (I’ve seen it 42 times myself, twice in Spanish). Jimmy Carter presided over a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Gas was 62¢ a gallon. Teachers went on strike (Yay!), and Volkswagen stopped cranking out Beetles (Boo!). Space Invaders made its debut (Woo-hoo!), and the Son of Sam got six life terms for his NYC killing spree of the previous summer (Apparently he wasn’t tried in L.A.)

And on the tube, a white, six-and-a-half-foot tall ex-NBA player sauntered into the gym of an L.A. ghetto high school, forever changing the (pale) face of American television. He presided over his mostly-black team of miscreants with an iron hand, and promised that in return for their hard work, he would be behind them all the way.

Like a White Shadow.

During my recent recuperation, my good friend Jonathan stopped by and dropped off the first two seasons of The White Shadow on DVD. He had been obsessed with the show when it originally aired, and was ecstatic when they released the series on disc a couple years ago (by all accounts, Season Three was a lame-ass, Love Boat-esque mishmash that had everything but Coolidge jumping over a shark to slam dunk).

I don’t remember a lot of specifics from the late-70’s TV landscape, except maybe Mork and Mindy, or the Doobie Brothers showing up on What’s Happening! And of course everyone was all wrapped around the axle about Dallas, the nighttime soap opera with Major Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie. But when I kicked back in my recliner and started in on the White Shadow DVD’s, it soon became clear that this series would have been head and shoulders above the standard fare of the day. And not just because they were tall.

I mean, back then you had Erik Estrada threatening to bulge through his polyester shirt on CHIPS, an aging Jim Garner aw-shucksing his way through the Rockford Files, and even M*A*S*H was starting to slide, what with the departure of Frank Burns and Trapper John, and the increasingly bleeding-heart writing. But the White Shadow was a show that gave the viewer some credit.

First off, I didn’t notice it until about halfway through the second episode, but the show had a very spare, almost non-existent musical score. We’d been taught to respond emotionally according to the music accompanying a certain scene, but the Shadow just let you figure it out for your damn self. It was refreshing not having those buttons pushed.

Secondly, although this was a show about high school kids, it was definitely for adults. They dealt with some serious issues every episode. None of this “oh no, I’ve asked three girls to the school dance” Richie Cunningham bullshit. The brothers at Carver High School wrestled with gang violence, teenage pregnancy, point shaving, drug addiction, homosexuality, and several other issues that play out daily on the Senate floor.

Of course the theme of race relations is the main event, and this was the first prime-time TV show to feature a regular cast of African-Americans. In a perverse but sublime reversal, the three non-blacks on the team were pretty much token stereotypes: Gomez the Mexican, Salami the Italian, and Goldstein the Jew. Seriously! Look it up! The black characters were given all the depth, and it was just like nothing we’d ever seen on TV. Not one actor had a “Dynomite!” or “Whachoo talkin’ ‘bout Willis?” to utter every week. With the possible exception of Thorpe’s acting-by-overenunciation technique, these guys were pretty believable.

Another unique facet of the White Shadow was that all the actors were excellent roundballers. The veracity of the basketball scenes was extremely important to the show’s creators, and all the game scenes were carefully choreographed to come off as realistic as possible. If there was a schoolyard one-on-one that went to ten points, by god, they were going to show you all ten points. One unbelievable scene had me replaying the thing about ten times to look for an edit or some camera chicanery. In the episode where Thorpe is dating the school hose monster, she walks by the schoolyard court where the guys are shooting around. Thorpe sees her, and in an effort to impress, takes a pass and jumps into the air, spins a 360, and buries a 12-foot jumper. No edit. No shit.

Hell, even the coach, Ken Howard, is obviously a player. The way he moves, the way he handles a ball, the way he walks into a room and seems to expect all the women to drop their panties. He’s a riot as the gruff coach with a heart of gold. The story line is that he went to Boston College and was drafted into the NBA, where he played 10 years with the Bulls. He looks Irish enough, with the blond hair and ruddy complexion, but his accent (“Gimme dat!”) makes me wonder when they moved the Bronx to Boston.

He refers to the guys on the team as “animals” and “gorillas,” terms of affection that, if used on TV today, would have hundreds of ACLU lawyers parachuting into Hollywood. He routinely threatens them with physical harm (“I’m gonna put you t’rough dat wall, Jackson!”) and actually pops a kid in the mouth at one point. Granted, the kid took the first swing, and was later caught trying to rape the vice-principal. But this was the inner city, man. South Central. It takes the guys on the team forever to develop trust and respect for the coach, and it’s tenuous at best.

I remember going with Barb and a couple of friends from Missoula to Chattanooga about ten years ago, and participating in the Bessie Smith March in the black part of town. We’d gone to see Luther Allison play some blues, and wound up marching with thousands of people down Martin Luther King Boulevard in the parade, a celebration of African-American pride and culture. There were no other white people for blocks. We looked like a maggot on a Hershey bar.

Our white-bread Missoula existence insulates us from a lot of cultural diversity, and being able to transport myself back 30 years to relearn the lessons presented in this addictive high school drama was one of the high points of my time in The Chair these past six weeks. The sling comes off tomorrow, and the long road of physical therapy begins in earnest.

I think I’ll start with shooting a few hoops in the driveway.

[What cultural artifact will Bob turn up next? Hey HEY hey, you’ll just have to check back here every day. AAayyyyyy! Better yet, go to the Community Blogs page and punch that RSS thing.]

Stumble It!

http://www.top-blogs.com/cgi-bin/rankem.cgi?id=ednor59

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.