EXCLUSIVE : Justin Baldoni spent much of the summer embroiled in a hushed battle with his It Ends with Us co-star Blake Lively. Now, he’s become entangled in another row, this time involving race and basketball. In 2021, former NBA star Craig Hodges , who won two championships with the Chicago Bulls, struck a deal with Wayfarer , the production company run by Baldoni and billionaire Steve Sarowitz, to turn his 2017 book into a documentary.
Given the success of The Last Dance , the hit ESPN series featuring his former teammate Michael Jordan, the idea was to take a different look at the same period, using Hodges’ book Long Shot: The Triumphs and Struggles of an NBA Freedom Fighter as source material. However, the three-point expert has spent much of the past 12 months trying to get the rights to the project back after it was shelved by Wayfarer last year. There are financial issues at play, as happens regularly in Hollywood, but this latest skirmish also raises the question of race, and who should be allowed to tell the story of a Black man like Hodges.
In his book, Hodges claims that was blackballed from the NBA in the early 1990s for using his platform to stand up for justice and was unable to find another team after he was cut from the Bulls, in part, he says because he criticized fellow Black athletes who “failed to use their considerable wealth and influence to assist the poor and disenfranchised”. When the Chicago Bulls were invited to The White House in 1992 aft.
