Some Dirt and Some Mud

“You know, I met him the gym,” says Master P, in an interview included on the DVD of Hooked: The Legend of Demetrius “Hook” Mitchell. “The first time we met, we was gonna fight. I walked in the gym, and Hook was a hell of a ball player but he talked crazy to ya. He’ll do whatever. So when I met him, I was like, ‘Man, hold up, we don’t live like that.’ We ended up being the best of friends because we both was on the same page. But I was able to get it together and Hook ended up going the other route. He ended up in jail. But I mean, this guy, he used to jump over cars.”

Master P narrates his friendship with Hook Mitchell, who’s been called one of the best basketball players never to make it to the NBA, while standing in a parking garage, swaying his weight from foot to foot, restless like he always is, respectful in his recollections of “the legend.” This from a man who came up as a New Orleans hustler, an unlikely millionaire success story, and yet, a stunning exemplar of entrepreneurial craft and canniness. But for Master P, who knows a little something about ambition and hoops, “He’s probably the best street player I ever seen in my life.”

In this moment and in many others during the documentary Hooked, Hook appears to be Master P’s opposite. Indeed, he movie has Hook, the man with so much potential, opposed to nearly everyone who speaks of him, not in moral or emotional or even intellectual terms, but in outcome. Coming up in the rough streets of West Oakland, the “Lower Bottom,” as they call it, Hook didn’t have a chance. Unguided and uncared for, he fell in with hard characters and into drugs, a frightening spiral of self-destruction.

The film sets up that this tragedy—such a common one in the annals of U.S. streets and prisons, especially those inhabited by young men of color—is all the more extreme because of Hook’s prodigious talent. All his friends and associates, from Gary Payton to Jason Kidd to Antonio Davis—describe Mitchell’s feats of athletic prowess with awe. “He was better than everybody,” says Payton in the film’s first moments. And yet, adds Kidd, “You can have all the talent in the world, but also, at one flush of the toilet, watch it all go down the drain.” As Davis puts it, “I knew he was kinda hanging out with some guys I was scared of.”

From these introductory notes—at once celebratory and cautionary—the film cuts to Hook’s face in black and white, behind bars, and then to an exterior shot of his home for some 51 months, boom-boom-boom, with edits slamming like bullets firing. It’s the California Men’s Colony, where Mitchell appears, in orange prison coveralls: “To me, waking up here is like sleeping by a swamp. You know you sleeping in some dirt and some mud, but you can’t do nothing about it.”

The film is sober and overtly instructive. Intercut with incredible court footage, more than one interviewee suggests that Hook’s story is admonitory: kids, watch and learn. Do not follow this young man’s example. “He was 5’9, had incredible hops,” says Payton. “He could do anything he wanted to.” At the time the film was shot, Mitchell was playing ball in the prison yard, a stunning talent confined and resigned to a life far from the bright lights of the NBA. Remembering the power point guard prospect he once embodied, Bill A. Duffy, president of BDA Sports Management, shakes his head sadly. “I knew when he first met him, that he didn’t have the polish, and the social skills to deal with coach, and I knew that would always be his detriment.” A cut to Mitchell shows he understands the problem, but can’t quite manage it: “You take me to the Sizzler, and I’m gonna eat with my hands.”

“They call me The Legend,” smiles Hook, slowly, “because I was in Slam magazine,” maybe, he thinks, third or fourth on a list of all time street ballers. As Joe Wolfcale describes Hook, “He had this innate ability to do some incredible athletic things on a basketball court.” The film illustrates with helpfully collected home video footage of the player in his element, slam-dunking with skills that honestly need to be seen to be believed. When Master P says this guy was jumping over cars, he’s not kidding. Anything that anyone else can do, says a childhood friend, “He can do it and add 50 inches of vertical.”

Hooked‘s assembly of such imagery makes clear the loss that Hook represents for the sport of basketball—he’s as showy and as thrilling a player as Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, or LeBron James—but also for the culture that abandons such young men, because it can. After children are left alone to survive pain, violence, and alienation, legal and penal structures pick up the “responsibility,” putting away these “deviants,” that is, logical products of their environments.

Hook’s only father figure was a drug kingpin, Oakland’s Larry Parker, whose death while Hook was in junior college (after adults helped him to fake a high school diploma) sent him “off the hook,” deeper into drug use and despair (“I was doing drugs as long as the court was long,” he recalls). At the same time that his friend Gary Payton was entering the NBA draft 91990), Mitchell was on his way to prison. The film suggests the primary difference has to do with parental guidance (Payton had a strict father, Mitchell’s mother shot heroin), but allows for more complex explanations as well, and does not shy away from indicting the social, political, and cultural systems that forsake boys like Hook Mitchell.

In prison, converted to Islam and named Waliy Abdur Rahim, Hook is mentored by Ralph Moore, who worked 25 years on the streets as a counselor (his own incarceration is a terrible story that he tells in one of the DVD’s extra interviews, which include Master P, Orlando’s Steve Francis, and New Orleans’ Baron Davis). Moore sighs as he recalls his first impression of Mitchell: “I saw something in him that I’ve seen in a lot of kids, that raw potential, that raw talent that was let go to waste.” He asks, “Why there was no one in his community that didn’t try to mentor him?” Hook turns this part of his life around, you learn in a brief epigraph: released in 2003, he now runs Project Straight Path, an organization designed to help other boys avoid his experience.