“This is no cautionary tale. This…is a success story.” – Director Mike Tollin
Though it’s a line delivered toward the end of the film, it would almost be better served as a prelude to the new ESPN documentary Morningside 5, a coming-of-age story about the titular 1992 California state high school championship team from Inglewood.
Equal parts Hoop Dreams and the Up series, Morningside 5 follows the starting members of that squad – Stais Boseman, Dwight Curry, Donminic Ellison, Sean Harris, and Corey Saffold – over a 25-year period as they pursue their dreams of NBA stardom and are ultimately forced to adjust to life after basketball.
As in the Chicago of Hoop Dreams, chapter one of the film is set against the backdrop of poverty, gang violence, and social unrest in Los Angeles circa 1992. Similar to the Up series, chapters two and three revisit their lives 10 and 25 years later, respectively. Morningside 5 is the third installment of a trilogy that debuted as Hardwood Dreams in 1993 and the 2004 follow-up Hardwood Dreams: Ten Years Later.
Like Up (and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood), one of its more striking cinematic features is watching the subjects’ physical transformations on film. Producer Mason Gordon told DIME that, after attending a screening of the movie at the LA Film Festival earlier this summer, one of the players involved admitted to him privately that the experience haunted him for weeks after.
Yet, that’s scarcely the most poignant aspect of this story.
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In 1992, the Morningside Monarchs became Inglewood’s first and only state champs. The school had had a long basketball tradition and boasted famous alumni like Byron Scott and Elden Campbell, but the one thing that had always eluded Morningside High up to that point was a state championship.
And it wasn’t just about taking home the title. It was the manner in which they did it. The Monarchs had an unapologetic streetball flair to their game, and in many ways acted as avatars for the civic rebelliousness permeating Los Angeles at the time.
They even inspired a young Baron Davis, who makes a cameo in the film to reminisce about his experience following the team: “They were crazy. It was like, the team from the hood that everybody wanted to root for and support. And for a young kid like me, I wanted to be like them.”
By the following year, the state title had transformed them into folk heroes and garnered the attention of recruiters from Division 1 schools. Each of them returned for their senior season to make a run at a second consecutive state title, but for various reasons, they fell short of that goal.
The film then follows each player as they transition to college and semi-pro basketball – along with all of the personal and political travails that accompanied it – and the heartbreaking realization that an NBA career just wasn’t in the cards.
It’s a familiar story, and the young men who make up the Morningside 5 are practically a ready-made cast of archetypal figures, at once tragic, redemptive, and captivating.
“The whole part of what made these guys so attractive in the outset was that they were such an interesting mix of characters,” Gordon told DIME. “One of them’s an [academic star] at the school. One of them was the best athlete in the state. One of them is a loud mouth that keeps getting in his own way. It’s like they all have such distinctive character profiles.
“It was just so much to like about these guys, and as I got to know them over the course of just kind of aggrandizing this incredible 25-year arch, they just have such amazing hearts, and they’re so forthcoming. They just kind of can’t help be who they are.”
One of the film’s central preoccupations is the oftentimes nebulous and problematic nature of success in American sports. Amid their title defense in 1993, Dwight Curry gave voice to the lofty collective dream of promising young athletes everywhere: “I feel like we’ve all got the talent to do it. I believe we’re all gonna make it.”
It is at this point in the film that legendary Notre Dame coach Digger Phelps meets with the team and does his best to strip them of this illusion. It’s a scene that turns out to be darkly prophetic, yet Phelps doesn’t endeavor simply to impart a fatalistic outlook. His primary message is one that coaches everywhere try to drill into fledgling athletes: have something to fall back on, or as Boseman adds later in the film, “you need a backup plan to the backup plan.”
Even outside of the NBA, the quest to maintain a professional basketball career has its own baroque impediments.
For many young fringe players (or at the opposite end of the spectrum, stars who are past their primes), playing basketball overseas is either a brief detour on the NBA journey or a final destination before being put out to pasture. But for Stais Boseman and Donminic Ellison, who both played in various European basketball leagues, it was something else entirely.
“That was probably the best experience of my life,” Boseman told DIME. “Because it broadened my mind as far as different cultures, different people. It humbled me as far as seeing a lot, and seeing other cultures is kind of humbling just being American. It kind of just made me thankful.”
“I was living my dream in terms of going overseas,” Ellison said. “Experiencing different values, different cultures, and learning a whole lot about myself, and the world, learning all these interpersonal skills.”
Eventually, however, they and the rest of their teammates would have to reconcile themselves to the fact that their disparate paths would not be leading to the NBA. That realization came much sooner for some than for others.
“When I was 27, man, I said, ‘You know what? I think it’s time for me to kind of pursue a regular lifestyle,’” Ellison said. “Which is finishing my education, taking a stab at working 9 to 5, or taking a stab at working in corporate America, or just kind of finding a different means to generate income.
“That’s kind of what it was. I was away from my family, year in, year out, and I would only be able to see them over the summer, didn’t have any long-term relationship. I was just kind of a floater. I just wanted something a lot more stable. I wanted something that was tangible. I wanted to be in an everyday type of situation. I had gotten over my whole dream of making it to the NBA. I was kind of playing basketball more like as a job but at the same time as a hobby and a pastime. But I kind of wanted to test myself to see if I can really swim in the real world.”
The 38-year-old Corey Saffold, meanwhile, was still clinging to his dream of making an NBA Summer League roster and/or getting drafted into the Canadian Basketball League at the time of the most recent filming, despite having not played organized ball in several years.
The rest have settled into adulthood and continue to pursue their careers away from the hardwood, and it’s a transition that has been smoother for some than for others. But since this is no cautionary tale, the consensus among Boseman, Ellison, and Gordon is emphatically not that never achieving their NBA ambitions constitutes a personal failure.
Despite their immense talent, they are the rule rather than the exception. What the filmmakers and the players all seem to agree on is the need to recalibrate the meaning of success, in basketball and in life.
“From my perspective, the most important part of this whole film is getting to know yourself,” Ellison said. “what I really want [them] to take out of this film isn’t just the message to go to college, or get your education, or have a plan B…take a deep thought, and a deep evaluation of themselves…and I think that if you are okay, and you understand who you are as a basketball player, as a person, whatever happens along the road, whether you make it or you don’t make it, you’ll be okay with it.”
Morningside 5 premiers Tuesday at 9:30 ET on ESPN.
