Columnist Dean Juipe: Documentary traces life in the minors

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, June 12, 2002 | 9:17 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

There's a bleakness to minor league basketball, as we in Las Vegas can attest. Games are sloppy, players come and go and fans quickly tire of the routine.

From a player's perspective, it's a poor way to make a living given the dreams once harbored. It may beat working at a hamburger stand's drive-through window, yet it's demeaning in its own right and offers little in the way of long-term satisfaction.

Few would miss it if every minor league team were abolished, as was demonstrated when the ABA moved a team here last season and the public couldn't even muster a collective yawn as a reaction. Same thing with an upcoming tournament that's scheduled for here later this month that looks to be staged with vagabonds.

Yet to truly comprehend the belittling elements of playing in the bushes, let me recommend a documentary currently being seen on an intermittent basis on ESPN and ESPN2 entitled "Down Low: Life in the D League." Produced by the NBA as a way of showcasing life in the National Basketball Development League that is based in the Southeast, the film has a dark quality to it that reflects the bitterness and disappointments of its participants.

I was transfixed.

Using the randomly selected North Charleston (S.C.) Lowgators as its focal point, "Down Low" follows the team through a season that started with cohesiveness and victories yet ended with divisiveness and losses. In between, seemingly every player on the roster takes a turn or two at being disruptive.

Some, such as journeyman center Makhtar Ndiaye, are so repetitively unhappy that it's a wonder any basketball team would ever offer him another job. He not only led a player uprising against overmatched coach (and former NBA star) Alex English, he was verbally abusive to anyone who crossed his path; he also can't play a lick.

The Lowgators plumb any number of depths, yet for those of us who have seen teams from a similar strata in the past it's all too typical. Money is short -- one player is seen scrubbing his shoes with a toothbrush -- and the "team" concept is lost as everyone plays for himself.

English comes across as unfit for the challenge and as ill prepared for his job as his players are for theirs. "It wouldn't hurt to have a psychologist sit down and talk to them," he says at one point to his assistant, having lost contact with his club. Later, after a public airing of everyone's griefs, English calls the players a "bunch of cry babies" and tries a threatening approach as a last resort.

The 56-game NBDL season can't end too soon for the players or their few fans, who barely dot the mostly vacant stands. There was no interest in the team and no reason for either the players or community to even care.

No one from the Lowgators was summoned to the NBA, although one (Terry Dehere) once played there and two (Neil Edwards and Galen Young) were briefly scouted during the season by the Atlanta Hawks. The league's basic premise -- that it exists to groom prospective players for the NBA -- was shown to be faulty if not an outright failure.

As a documentary, "Down Low" was intense and revealing. It shows low-level basketball for the drudgery it actually is.