TV REVIEWS : ‘Goals’: Education vs. Athletics

NBA superstar Isiah Thomas urges inner-city children to consider that education, not athletics, is their best hope “to escape the ghetto” in “Higher Goals” at 6:30 p.m. today on KCET-TV Channel 28.

The half-hour program is a collage of interviews with school officials and former college and professional basketball players, mildly comic vignettes with Tim Meadows of “Saturday Night Live” and profiles of a teen-age girl and boy with big dreams of professional basketball careers.

Thomas, however, says that making it into the pros is as much a long shot as “walking through the jungle and not being bitten by a mosquito.” Skip Dillard, who was drafted by the Chicago Bulls in 1982 but didn’t make the final cut, speaks from prison, where he is serving time for armed robbery. Devastated at not making the team, he says, and with nothing else to fall back on, he turned to drugs. Now his dream is to finish his college education and get his degree in physical education.

The two teens, Kim Williams and William Gates, are both indifferent students when the film begins. But with encouragement from parents and school officials, both begin to apply the same dedication to studying that they do to basketball practice and see that the pattern for success is the same: You practice, you do better, you gain confidence and you do even better.

And it feels good.

The show is part of a national outreach program involving 4,000 inner-city schools, sponsored by Toyota, in part, according to press material, because, “We recognize that business can prosper only in a healthy, well-educated world.”