Black History Month

I cannot recommend this fantastic documentary enough:

This remarkable four-hour documentary by Dan Klores, to be shown in two installments without commercial interruption on ESPN on Sunday and Monday nights, is as heartbreaking as any about civil rights. He sets it against the indignities of segregation but depicts the black colleges as educational safe houses where children of cotton pickers and sharecroppers felt nurtured and motivated. Like the grainy film of Mr. McLendon’s teams, archival footage from places like the Tuskegee Institute offers a vision of separateness.

Mr. Jobe, another McLendon disciple, is the documentary’s moral center. Like Mr. McLendon, he moved across the coaching landscape, from black colleges to mainstream universities and back again. His dignity is flecked equally with wit and anger. Reflecting on the praise accorded Duke in the late 1970s for a fast-break attack that he, like others, adapted from Mr. McLendon, he said: “Duke did it, it was genius. We did it, it’s jungle ball.”

If there is joy in “Black Magic,” it is in the dominance of African-American players (if not coaches) in colleges and the pros. Still, if there is regret that black players entered the mainstream, it comes from Clara Gaines.

“In the end we just all wish that integration hadn’t taken place,” she says, perhaps venting frustration about her husband’s difficulty in later years in attracting top talent to Winston-Salem. “Because it did change things.”

I don't know where to watch it other than buying it on Apple TV like I did years ago but it's 10000% worth searching out.