‘Sweetwater’ Review: An Intriguing But Sketchy Biopic of Nat Clifton, the Harlem Globetrotter Who Broke the Color Barrier of the NBA

Sweetwater is a biopic about Nat Sweetwater Clifton, the Black power forward who broke the color barrier of the NBA in 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson accomplished the same feat in baseball. Its telling that Robinson remains one of the most celebrated heroes in sports history, while Clifton is still a somewhat obscure figure. (He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2014, but still.)

Theres a biting irony to that contrast. It relates to how the integration of basketball totally changed the game (the way it was played, the way the fans thought of it), even more than the integration of baseball changed baseball. Sweetwater, written and directed by Martin Guigui, is a straight-down-the-middle inspirational sports movie and, one regrets to say, a kind of benign sketchbook version of the form. Yet it also tells the tale (or, at least, one slice of it) of the Harlem Globetrotters, the fabled team of barnstorming trickster prodigies who Clifton started off as a member of. There were several levels to the Globetrotters athletic magic, and the film captures how intricately tied it was to the way that Black players remade the game.

At Madison Square in 1949, we see a match between the Globetrotters and the NBA championship team, the Minnesota Lakers. The Globetrotters win, which establishes just how good they are. But the NBA doesnt allow Black players. Thats why the Trotters werent allowed to launch an NBA franchise, and why they couldnt even play inside the Garden if they didnt face off against a white team.

The Globetrotters might have been the best basketball team on the planet, but they presented themselves as a novelty act, perpetually described by words like hotdogging and razzle-dazzle. Their brand of futuristic athletic slapstick showmanship created a kind of grand illusion. They were pranksters, comedians, a traveling circus of men doing elaborate stunts on the court. Audiences, in a way, saw the talent on display, since it was right in front of their eyes. But in another sense they were blind to it, because the Globetrotters signified as clowns. That was their greatest trick, and one thats indivisible from the racism of America: They put their virtuosity right in front of the audiences faces and made light of if at the same time.

What the Globetrotters had, in a word, was skill. Mad skill. They perfected a rubbery sleight-of-hand mastery, so that they could literally run circles around the white players, but it was all palmed off as a joke. Thats how they got away with it. In Sweetwater, we follow the Trotters as they travel from gig to gig in a broken-down bus, always at the beck and call of the teams owner-manager-coach, Abe Saperstein played by Kevin Pollak as a decent-hearted but penny-pinching exploiter who has a bond with his players yet treats them, at least financially, as second-class citizens. The members of the Globetrotters are mostly from Timbuktu, Illinois, but presenting them as an outfit from Harlem lends them a certain mythology. The problem is the way Saperstein profits off that mythology. Even the white teams who get trounced by the Trotters get paid more than the Trotters do.

Nat is the Globetrotters star attraction, a force on the court who stands 68 and has hands large enough to palm the ball. (That was a Clifton signature.) Hes also got presence a balance of fury and grace. Thats what attracts the eye of Joe Lapchick (Jeremy Piven), the coach of the New York Knickerbockers (at this point hardly anyone calls them the Knicks), who looks at Nat and sees the future: of his team, the NBA, and basketball itself. That future is tied to the astonishing dexterity of Nats on-court tricks which, as the film recognizes, are no mere tricks. Theyre signature of a new vision of basketball, in which the fluidity and power of Black players will recharge the game like an electric current.

The Globetrotters scenes hold us, although the actors, while pretty good at imitating the teams routines, cant match their astonishing liquid jazz quickness. (Who could?) Sweetwater makes you want to see a full-on drama about the Globetrotters, or maybe a biopic about Meadowlark Lemon, who joined them in 1955 (and who Wilt Chamberlin said was his choice for the greatest basketball player in history).

Jeremy Piven, trying to get as far away as possible from Ari Gold, invests Lapchick with a menschy warmth that rings true for a hard-nosed coach trying to steer the game forward. But a good amount of Sweetwater is taken up by powerful white men the NBA Board of Governors sitting around rooms debating whether the NBA can afford to keep itself an all-white league. These scenes are heavy and unilluminating. Jim Caviezel is the official whos dead-set against integration, Mike Starr is the Jewish coach whos for it, and Cary Elwes, all cigar-puffing bluster, is Ned Irish, the Knickerbockers excutive and basketball promoter whos portrayed as being on the fence, until he sees the future and makes Saperstein an offer he cant refuse not a threat, just a lot of money to buy out Cliftons contract.

Everett Osborne plays Nat with a quiet dynamism, until he gets onto the court with his potential Knickerbocker teammates, at which point he starts to coach and interact with them almost by instinct. He simply sees a world of plays of basketball logic thats beyond their experience, and he cant help wanting to teach it to them. Its not about tricks; its about making a pass as tight and purposeful as if your life depended on it. Nat is the first Black player to sign an NBA contract, though not the first on the court; he opens the door for two other draft picks, and because Mo Podoloff (Richard Dreyfuss), the president of the NBA, doesnt want any trouble, he sneaks in a game with another Black player, Earl Lloyd (Bobby Portis Jr.), in Rochester on Oct. 31, 1950, one night before Nats debut with the Knickerbockers in Madison Square Garden.

No matter. Nats first appearance there causes a firestorm, mostly in the form of the refs labeling every move he makes as a foul. Whats funny is that, in a certain way, theyre right. When he flies up to the basket and dunks the ball, they give him a traveling violation, but its because theyve seen anyone do that before.

Sweetwater is watchable but pedestrian, full of too many situations that remain undeveloped, like Nats connection with a nightclub singer played by the radiant Emmaline. The movie is full of anachronisms that clunk, like a sportscaster following Nats first dunk with the line, I think that was a new kind of shot! Looked like a donut being dunked in a cup of coffee! Lets call it a dunk! (The shot was actually named by Arthur Daley of The New York Times in 1936, after John Fortenberry performed one on the U.S. basketball team at the Berlin Olympics.) But Sweetwater, like Air, makes you realize that the history of basketball is ripe with stories that have never gotten near the big screen.