Published on November 24, 2021 at slamonline.com
In a mechanical sense, a lynchpin is one of, if not the most vital piece of any massive traveling vehicle—a pin passed through the end of an axle that locks the wheel into position. It is the indispensable piece that makes the machine go, often lost in recognition due to the overpowering size of the locomotive. AAU, college basketball, and the NBA are all structural necessities amongst the entire basketball ecosystem. Amidst them resides the lynchpin, which is the very namesake of Mike Nicoll’s latest film, LYNCHPIN: Inside the Business of Basketball.
Nicoll, who directed and wrote the 2016 AAU basketball documentary At All Costs, is back with his latest short film that takes viewers inside the business side of the game. The story of that indispensable piece resides in Compton, CA with Etop (Tope) Udo-Ema, the CEO of the grassroots powerhouse program Compton Magic, as the film follows the hidden hand of the AAU scene leveraging his program’s dominance to achieve unprecedented sponsorship success.
“I always tell people the reason I’m so fascinated by it (AAU) is because it’s sort of this quintessentially American space, where the streets are colliding with corporate America,” Nicoll tells SLAM. “And it has a way of marshaling, like, all of America’s core values, if you want to call them that, that are just all bouncing around this space.”
As Nicoll sits in the backyard of his producer’s house in Los Angeles, he describes the basketball landscape as a solar system, planets rotating in and out of orbit around one another in a cohesive, nuanced balance. Through his own interpretation, he’s discovered that people like to think of AAU, college and the NBA as their own separate entities. According to Nicoll, that’s the wrong way to look at it. (READ THE FULL STORY HERE.)