This story seems in SLAM 251. Get your copy now.
One of the vital profitable streetball groups in New York Metropolis—yr after yr after yr—is the Sean Bell All-Stars, coached by Jamaica, Queens, native Raheem “Rah” Wiggins. A embellished new brief movie, Carry Your Title, reminds viewers of the story behind the group’s title.
Sean Bell was a former highschool baseball star from Queens celebrating his impending marriage in November, 2006, when he was shot by plain-clothes law enforcement officials. He died that night time at age 23. Wiggins was a childhood pal of Bell’s who had been impressed to turn out to be a basketball coach by New York-area legends Jimmy Salmon and Tiny Morton. Wiggins was already getting into streetball tournaments beneath the group title DDN (Dat’s Dem N—s), however he renamed the squad in honor of his fallen pal. And the group—not a highschool AAU squad however a group of adults, usually with professional expertise like Lance Stephenson or Tyshawn Taylor—has been a powerhouse ever since.
“We’re one of the best group within the metropolis,” Wiggins says within the movie, which takes you up shut and private to a sport at Brooklyn’s Gersh Park. “Individuals ask once I’m gonna stroll away? So long as once I lose, folks make an enormous deal out of it, I gotta come again.” He provides later, of the importance of the group’s title: “That’s my job, to maintain [Sean’s] title to the general public ear.”
Carry Your Title is directed by Raafi Rivero, the filmmaker and artist behind the continuing Unarmed mission, which exists “in memoriam of Black victims of police violence.” Rivero additionally labored on an upcoming docuseries across the 2024 NBA postseason that may air on ESPN.
Carry Your Title will make its world premiere on the BlackStar Movie Competition in Philadelphia in August. From there, Rivero hopes to display it at playground basketball venues in New York Metropolis in addition to at different movie festivals. And what does Rivero need viewers to remove from the movie? “I hope they’re impressed,” he says, “by the on a regular basis heroism of individuals like Rah Wiggins.”
Portraits by Jon Lopez.
