{Full Court: The Life of Spencer Haywood makes its World Premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival on Saturday, May 21 (8pm) and Sunday, May 22 (2pm) at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Haywood, plus director Martin Spirit, and producers Dwayne Clark and Andy Streitfeld are scheduled to attend. Tickets and more information can be found here.}
For me, it’s difficult to overstate the greatness or importance of Spencer Haywood. When he joined the SuperSonics in 1970, he was pretty much the first superstar, professional athlete Seattle has seen. Joining the Sonics, though, was hardly an easy road for Haywood, who was barred from playing in the NBA because a rule said a player had to be four years out of high school. Players from opposing teams refused to play against him and often forfeited games so they wouldn’t be on the court with him. Haywood was 20 when he sued the NBA in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. He won that case 7-2. While playing for the Sonics, he was dominant and one of the very best basketball players at the time. He was an all star in four of his five season with the Sonics and averaged about 25 points per game during that time. He was also, at 19 in 1968, the youngest person to play for an US Olympic basketball team.
Haywood vs. National Basketball Association also made it possible for nearly every subsequent NBA superstar to enter the league without four seasons of college ball under their belt. LeBron James, Kevin Garnett, and Kobe Bryant (among others) entered the league straight from high school.
Spencer Haywood’s life is the subject of an excellent new documentary that is making its world premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival this weekend. The documentary, called Full Court: The Spencer Haywood Story, is narrated by Public Enemy’s Chuck D. and it traces Haywood’s life from growing up poor in Mississippi through his basketball career, its unwinding due to some substance addiction, his marriage to supermodel Iman, and his eventual (and long overdue) induction to the Basketball Hall of Fame last year. It’s hardly hagiography and not everything explored in the film is sympathetic to its subject. It’s accentuated with interviews from Charles Barkley, Pat Riley, Bill Bradley, Lenny Wilkens, and several others.
While in town to attend the premiere screenings of Full Court, I met with Spencer Haywood at a downtown Seattle restaurant to talk about the movie, his basketball career, the current state of college and pro basketball, and more.
One thing I really enjoyed about this movie was that it was very raw and, I thought, painted as full of a portrait as it could in 90 minutes and I learned a lot about you from the movie.
(Laughs) You got to know it all. There was no polish, it’s straight up.
How did you know decide that a documentary was the best way to tell your story?
Dwayne (Clark, executive producer) and I got together at Russell Wilson’s golf tournament. I was there as a celebrity and we met and kept talking and talking. I always wanted to have a Seattle-based film. He said he has a new company called True Productions and would like to talk with you about this film. It just happened like that and we kept working on it and working on it and just got it done.
I fell in love with this process and these people because it wasn’t a big Hollywood deal, they are all basic Seattle people from which I grew up in. I came here when I was a 20 year old kid and my whole life, including fighting all the way to the Supreme Court, was about Seattle. I didn’t have my parents here so it was like the Seattle people were my parents and my brothers and my sisters. And it was a trying, trying case. It wasn’t like I just filed a suit and that was it. I was thrown into the streets, I was beaten down by fans, so when I got back to Seattle, I always looked for my loving arms. Seattle just loved me up.
It really surprised me to learn how rough it was for you in your rookie NBA season because you would go into cities and veteran players would refuse to suit up or teams would refuse to play against you.
No, they would walk right on. The veterans were concerned that the younger players would push them out. It does have some validity today, I think. I was like a junior when I fought my case, but you see guys one year after high school pushing out veterans. Something should be done, maybe a two-year rule and not just a one-year rule. I hope the NBA and NBA Players’ Association can come up with an agreement through collective bargaining like the NFL’s version of the Spencer Haywood rule. They have a three year moratorium. I would like to see a two-year limit.
It pushes out the veteran players, but it’s also because the fan is being cheated. We tell the fan who is working hard at the fish market or Starbucks or wherever, “Don’t worry, he’s going to develop in two years.” Why am I paying for him to develop for two years? He should play in college or overseas. This isn’t a place to develop! The fans are being robbed! It’s the only job out there where you have to wait for the entertainment. I know that’s a hard thing for me to say.
You really saw something like that in Philadelphia over the past several years, where a team was basically being intentionally terrible for several years with the hope of stockpiling high draft picks that might eventually develop into a good team in the future.
Exactly. Every year you would get the number one or number two pick and that player never really came into the league ready to play. So you would get another player next year. Then you get another who might not play because his foot got hurt because he never developed. Or he is only 19 when he comes into the league. Duh! They keep telling the [Sixers] fans “Don’t worry, we got another one coming.” Meanwhile, you’re spending your hard-earned money just waiting.
I want to bring this back to the film for the moment. I grew up as a big Public Enemy fan, so I was delighted to see that Chuck D is the narrator of your documentary. How did he become involved in the project?
Chuck D is a friend of mine. I kind of wanted him to do the soundtrack, personally. He wanted to be on board. He did do a song, too. He was a fan who loved me and said he would love to do the narration.
We’re also marketing somewhat to a younger demographic and the players in the NBA right now don’t have any idea who I am. And they came into the league under my ruling! Anyway, with Chuck in it, they might associate him with “Fight the Power” in Spike Lee’s films and everything. It’s kind of educating the audience in that way.
One thing I love about documentaries, like this one, is that there is a real-life happy ending, and you were finally inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame last fall…
It was all because I sued the NBA, 45 years ago, in Seattle. They held it against me for all those years. The people on the committee are NCAA. Coaches and management and chairmen of the board hate them some Spencer Haywood because they think I took four years of income from them for players not playing in their universities. Yet their incomes still steadily rose and they made so much money.
That’s just stupid.
I know! But that’s how they view it. I have the NCAA mad at me for that and the NBA is mad because I sued the NBA and they lost. They lost the case but they won everything.
There’s so much money being made from players like LeBron James or Kevin Garnett, who never played college basketball.
Or Kobe (Bryant), or… Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and Michael Jordan all made it to the NBA playing under my rule. But Kareem is my greatest, but I understand.
I can’t imagine how the NBA could survive without those marquee players.
Can you imagine the NBA stuck on 17 teams instead of 32? And who was going to get all those players? The ABA! They changed that rule when I came in. That’s why Julius Erving, George Gervin, Moses Malone went right to the ABA. The ABA would be the NBA today but they said “That Heywood is a problem.”
Plus, there’s so much money, billions and billions of dollars, in college sports, and it never trickles down to players. It’s just obscene.
They say they’re “student athletes.”
But then you have a situation like at the University of North Carolina where the athletic department went to great lengths so that their players learned as little as possible.
What education? You have practice, games on the road. You can’t do your academics with all that going on. And you might have three or four games where you have to be across the country.
Another thing I wanted to ask about was that just a moment ago you said that Kareem was your favorite of the NBA greats. He’s an important part of your life story because you say in the movie that he was the veteran first player to welcome you and say he’d play against you and not just have his team forfeit instead of facing your team.
He was also one of those veterans – he was only a year older – who said “No, he belongs here.” He walked out on the floor, breaking the code of never walking on the floor when I was there. It was only to be under duress. But he said no and said I’m going to embrace him and I’m going to love him. That’s when the other players thought that maybe that wasn’t the best idea anyway. But I had to go through that for a year.
How important was it to get your film into SIFF?
It was life and death for me because I couldn’t imagine it premiering in another film festival. It’s a Seattle story, it’s a Seattle-money-backed story. It’s not just me. The financing for the film came from Seattle. Dwayne Clark is Seattle. What better way to meet someone than to meet at Russell Wilson’s golf tournament. I actually met Dwayne before that. Do you know who he was with? The Save Our Sonics guys and the guys from Sonicgate.
Just before I came down here, I got a text message from my dad because he saw you on TV talking about your movie. He asked if I was going to see it since I told him I was going to be at SIFF. He was a big fan. I told him that I was actually going to meet you for an interview in like an hour from then. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to mention this, but he said he remembered when you had an injury…
I slipped on the floor because the ceiling was leaking! We were so young and so new up in Seattle that they didn’t fix the roof on the Coliseum so it was leaking. And they wouldn’t stop the game! I came around the corner and slipped and tore up my knee. It’s classic. (laughs) Think about that, you have the number two or number one player in the NBA and you have a leaky ceiling and you can’t stop the game.
Another amazingly ironic part of that is that part of the reason for Seattle’s not having an NBA team right now is that that exact same building didn’t have enough luxury suites for the NBA’s liking.
There you go. Could you imagine something like that happening with LeBron or Steph Curry? You couldn’t just wipe the floor? It’s unbelievable.
I’ll ask one last question. Is there anything you want people to take away from this film and from your story when they see it at SIFF this weekend?
I want them to takeaway that life is going to throw you curve balls. You’re going to have obstacles. Everything will be thrown at you. Stay focused, stay positive, and stay close to the Ultimate Design in the Universe – or, for me, God. You’ll come out on top.