By Michael Graham | InsideSources.com | Trice Edney Wire
(TriceEdneyWire.com) – Long before actress Blake Lively publicly accused him of attempting to silence her about his problematic on-set behavior, actor Justin Baldoni and his production company, Wayfarer, were silencing a Black activist and former NBA star who wanted to tell his story.
Baldoni and Lively, who starred in the film “It Ends With Us,” have been making headlines for weeks, publicly battling over their private reputations. Lively’s lawyers say Baldoni and his Wayfarer team used a media smear campaign hoping to “safeguard against the risk of Ms. Lively ever revealing the truth about Mr. Baldoni.”
The actor responded with a $400 million lawsuit against Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds.
In the case of legendary Chicago Bulls three-point shooter Craig Hodges, it was his truth, he says, that Baldoni and Wayfarer silenced.
To basketball fans, Hodges is the dazzling outside shooter who helped the Bulls win back-to-back championships during the Michael Jordan era and still holds the record for most consecutive shots made (19) in the NBA’s Three-Point contest.
For civil rights activists from the past 30 years, however, Hodges is known as something bigger: One of the few athletes of the previous era willing to use his talent and fame to promote social justice.
They know Hodges as the NBA star who showed up in a dashiki for the 1992 White House celebration of the Bulls’ championship season. While he was there, Hodges gave President George H.W. Bush a handwritten letter criticizing the administration’s treatment of minorities and the poor.
It’s one of the stories featured in Hodges’ 2017 autobiography, “Long Shot: The Triumphs and Struggles of an NBA Freedom Fighter.” His book caught Hollywood’s eye after the massive success of ESPN’s 2020 hit documentary series “The Last Dance,” a retrospective on the Bulls’ basketball dynasty.
Hodges struck a TV deal with Wayfarer — a production company run by Baldoni and tech billionaire Steve Sarowitz — for a project looking back at that Bulls era through the lens of Hodges’ experiences.
For Hodges, it was an opportunity to tell his story as laid out in his book. “I don’t feel like it’s just a story for the NBA or for Black people. I feel like it’s a story for everyone,” Hodges told InsideSources.
Hodges has long maintained that he was blackballed by the NBA for his political activism. After his White House appearance, the Bulls waived his contract for the next season, and no other NBA team picked him up. Despite his success, Hodges’ career was over.
“This is a game that you’ve been playing on a competitive level since you were 12 years old,” Hodges has said of his situation. “And now you’re 32 years of age, you’re in excellent shape. You just won these championships. You’re the best shooter on the planet … and it’s a game that is about putting the ball in the basket. And you can’t get an agent?”
Hodges thought he had a story to tell, and Jivi Singh — a British-Indian producer who read the NBA star’s book and fell in love with the story — wanted to tell it.
“I think it was the day after the book was released, we read an article in The Guardian, I hit my partners and said, ‘Hey, check this out.’ We ordered the book and within 24 hours (of reading it), we were on a call with Hodges,” Singh recounted.
He and Hodges began putting a movie together under working titles like “Whiteballed” and “The Lost Dance.”
Enter Baldoni and Wayfarer.
While Baldoni and Wayfarer CEO Jamey Heath liked Hodges’ story, they disapproved of the director he chose to tell it. And, Hodges and Singh told InsideSources, they were stunned when they heard the reason.
Singh is racially suspect.
The two recounted a Zoom call for InsideSources in which the Wayfarer executives critiqued Singh’s racial qualifications.
“I promise you that as much as I feel you feel, no one knows (Hodges’ life) better, no one knows it better than me,” Heath, who is Black, told Singh. “You might be a wonderful filmmaker, but the story is something that there might be some blind spots for you.”
Baldoni added: “We, as people who are not Black, can never put the emphasis on the Black people to tell us and teach us.”
(The Zoom call and its content have previously been reported by Deadline, which reviewed the audio.)
Hodges told InsideSources he was approached by Heath, who, he said, played the race card against Singh.
“He comes to me on the ‘Brotherhood’ level, and I’m laughing because I’m like, ‘Dude I don’t even know you.’”
“And y’all coming at it from a standpoint of (Singh) is not Black enough?” Hodges added.
Asked for a comment, Wayfarer sent InsideSources a previously released statement from Heath.
“The Craig Hodges story is one we at Wayfarer, and in particular myself, care a great deal about: a Black man being denied the opportunity to professionally practice his craft all because he wanted to highlight what was happening to Black people in America in the 1980s and ’90s,” Heath said.
“While all stories involving Black people don’t need to be told by a Black person, some do indeed require someone that has lived the experience, which is something Justin Baldoni understood and expressed vocally to those involved,” Heath added.
Ironically, Singh noted afterward that the director Baldoni and Heath wanted to replace him with “was a man of Jamaican descent who grew up in Jamaica.”
Singh said he was willing to step aside as the director, but he wasn’t willing to let the truth of Hodges’ life get lost in the telling.
“The film’s called ‘White Balled,’ which means to silence Black people for political reasons. The simple premise of this film is that Craig Hodges is a man who had been silenced. And this film is the vehicle that would give him his voice back.”
Because that voice could sometimes sound critical of the NBA or Michael Jordan, it wasn’t the story Wayfarer wanted, Singh said.
For Hodges, it’s about staying true to the story he wrote in his autobiography.
“When I talked to the new director, the first thing I asked him: ‘Have you read my book?’ And he said ‘No,’” Hodges recalled.
That outraged Hodges, who was trying to tell Baldoni that he trusted Singh with his story.
Baldoni and Wayfarer eventually pulled their support from the project, though they still hold the rights. They want Hodges to pay $175,000 to get the rights to his own story back. Hodges says it’s his life, and, as a Black man, he rejects the idea that others should determine who he can choose to tell his story — particularly when the judgment is based on race.
Others agree.
“From producing to directing to deciding on creative vision to upholding a project’s ultimate vision, Black and Brown people in Hollywood are consistently being overruled and written out of the process — with implications for us all, as who shapes and guides stories can fundamentally alter the end results and the way important stories are told,” said Ricky Clemons, an adjunct lecturer teaching sports management and media at Howard University.
Singh told InsideSources he’s still shocked by Baldoni and Heath’s stance on this project.
“It’s the hypocrisy of a man who thinks it’s OK to tell a man of color that he can’t tell a story of color, but it’s OK for him (Baldoni) to tell a story of a female victim of domestic violence, right?” Singh said. “That hypocrisy really struck a chord, and it’s kind of jarring.”
Meanwhile, Hodges rejects the premise that his story is somehow critical of the NBA or Jordan, or that his life of political activism is a tale too troublesome to tell. He’s shown a rough cut of the film he and Singh have put together to about 100 people, and he says the response has all been positive.
“Everybody who sees it — Horace Grant, John Paxton, all of them — they all say the same thing: ‘When is it coming out?’
“There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be out. It would be great.”
Michael Graham is Managing Editor at InsideSources.com, which was the first to publish this article.