Good basketball


If I were filming a sports movie, I would hire athletes to simply play the game in question on film, and edit the movie to find the sports scenes which fit my needs (and NOT the opposite: telling the actors/athletes to enact specific plays and circumstances, which always comes across as forced and scripted).

It seems to me that they did something similar for Blue Chips. Maybe they didn't actually do it my way, but the basketball looked legitimate and unforced. I also appreciated the coach speak by Bobby Knight and Rick Pitino which seemed pretty authentic, if not perfectly performed.

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I'm not familiar with many of the college aged ball players of the early 90's, I was only like ten years old at that time. But looking back on the movie, they used a lot of guys who had just used up their college eligibility within the year of that film. For instance, one name that immediately stood out was Rex Walters. He was the starting PG for the first team that Western played. He had just finished playing ball at Kansas the year before. I couldn't believe they used actual names for players. Having been born and raised a Jayhawk living in Kansas, I couldn't believe my ears. I had to do a double take when the announcer said his name in pregame. And sure enough, there he was! The white guy bringing the ball up the floor.

Another thing I was surprised about. The very young looking Dick Vitale called Bobby Knight by that name. He never says that now. He always calls him Robert Montgomery Knight. But you know you will never get anything fake with Knight, he is as real as it gets!

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i remember years ago hearing on tv (when the film was in production) about the scrimmages between the squads and how intense they were getting. i believe the western team led by penny and shaq did really well against those other teams in full on games

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I noticed a whole lot of real-life college basketball players on the rosters for Texas Western, Indiana and Coast. Two of the players on Indiana in the movie, Calbert Cheaney and Greg Graham, played for the Hoosiers in real life.

Being inconsistent is better than being consistently bad.

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