TV REVIEW : ‘Final Shot’ Misses Basket

His heroism as a sports icon ironically embellished by the AIDS virus, Magic Johnson seems destined now to have his life celebrated in a slam-dunking movie biography. And Arthur Ashe has become another top candidate for Hollywood’s movie list.

Don’t expect too much, however. Although fictional sports stories have been successfully filmed on occasion, the lives of actual sports figures almost always make for bad movies (Martin Scorsese’s dark account of Jake LaMotta in the great “Raging Bull” being a dramatic exception).

Last year’s “Babe Ruth” on NBC didn’t alter the negative imbalance. Nor does “The Babe,” a just released theatrical movie about the Great Bambino that never gets to first base.

Nor does an unspectacular story about the short life of Hank Gathers, the Loyola Marymount basketball star who died March 4, 1990, after collapsing during a game. Tribune Entertainment’s syndicated “Final Shot” airs at 8 tonight on KTLA Channel 5.

Airrrrrrr ball!

For most Americans who knew of Gathers at all, he became much bigger in death than he had been in life. TV pictures of him crumpling to the court were to be his lingering legacy, as even those who had never heard of him were moved by this videotaped tragedy and the way life seemed to drain from a brilliant athlete right before their eyes.

But the controversy surrounding Gathers’ death from a heart disorder--including his family’s partially settled lawsuits charging the school and others with doing too little to prevent him from dying--is absent from this account. That would be fine if there were something equally distinctive or compelling about the less public side of Gathers’ life. There isn’t.

Along with many of his contemporaries in the drug-infested projects of North Philadelphia, the outgoing Gathers spends his youth playing playground basketball, cocky about his athleticism and confident that he’ll someday reach the NBA. His caring mother enrolls him in a Catholic school, where a no-nonsense priest refines his flashy skills and “bad attitude.”

Ultimately, the story becomes a celebration of Gathers’ friendship with Bo Kimble. Initially bickering rivals as high school teammates in Philadelphia, they accept athletic scholarships at USC, where they become inseparable. After their freshman year, they transfer to Loyola Marymount, becoming superstars in a runaway fast-break offense.

Victor Love and Duane Davis are adequate as Gathers and Kimble, respectively. And to its credit, “Final Shot” mostly avoids the brand of formulaic nonsense that helps sabotage “The Babe” and a slew of other hackneyed sports movies.

But although Gathers is depicted as likable, there is nothing in this story that captures the heroic qualities alluded to in the many public eulogies that followed his death. Nor does it capture his sports qualities.

The basketball sequences are largely unconvincing, with the relatively awkward Love an especially tough sale as a superb athlete who led the nation in both scoring and rebounding despite being a bad foul shooter.

Although well intended, “Final Shot” ends up missing as badly as many of Gathers’ free throws.