Jonathan Hock's groundbreaking documentary explores the business of professional basketball through the eyes of 18-year-old Sebastian Telfair, a talented teen from the Coney Island projects who pins his family's every hope on his acceptance into the NBA. Banking on a high-paying career to support his mother and siblings, Sebastian shuns a college education for the less certain outcome of making it big. Will his gamble pay off?
Even if the outcome is already known by those who follow basketball, Through the Fire makes for a suspenseful movie with an emotional climax that exceeds any fictional screen treatment of sports heroism.
With a real-life athlete as talented and charismatic as Coney Island hoop prodigy Sebastian Telfair, almost any outcome would probably have made for good drama, but Hock lucked out when life provided a happy ending.
Valuable not because of sebastian Telfair's ultimate triumph, but because of how effectively it contrasts his achievement with the plight of so many other aspiring athletes for whom the fantasy of a pro career ultimately fails to materialize.
Hock's most illustrative footage is of the dazzling, sophisticated action found on today's high-school courts; the most obscene shows the execution of 18-year-old Telfair's $12 million endorsement deal with Adidas.
Stylistically, it plays like an ESPN profile more than a serious documentary, but the issues and drama is all real enough -- and so is the big-league money.
It's a pleasure to see the articulate, disciplined Telfair succeed where so many other young men have failed, but ultimately his path to success is so smoothly upbeat that there isn't much urgency to it.
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