I’m cribbing the title of this from the 1995 Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Basketball Diaries. If the film, you could be considering, “Waitaminute—is Eric is about to cop to promoting his physique in a toilet stall for cash to get excessive?”
No.
The Basketball Diaries is a cautionary story about youngsters and medicines, a recurrent theme for many of my younger life. What started as a PSA involving an egg and a skillet ends in a unclean rest room stall. I don’t know if that’s the pure development of this stuff, however The Basketball Diaries terrified me excess of an authoritative father-figure scowling in disapproval whereas making breakfast. Please, bro—I noticed that day-after-day.
In a case examine of 1 particular person—me—The Basketball Diaries was efficient propaganda. Seems you may be scared straight. Nevertheless, as a basketball film, it’s a whole letdown. This may increasingly sound shallow however no matter, I used to be 17 on the time—I solely watched it as a result of basketball was within the title. Image young-me settling in, considering I’m about to see an suave tackle White Males Can’t Leap and as a substitute discovering it’s about an emaciated Leo significantly feening for medicine.
On the time, I devoured something to do with basketball.
If you’re taller than everybody else, the default assumption is you play. So I did. However I didn’t get critical till highschool. After we moved to a distant space of Northern Michigan—image the Antarctica settlement from The Factor however with extra lederhosen—my brother and I lived on the group heart. It was solely a few blocks from our home, and there was actually nothing else to do.
