Even though Ben Gordon has played a handful of preseason games in front of lackluster crowds at the Palace and one regular season game on the road wearing Pistons red, white and blue, it wasn't until his name was announced to a sold-out crowd at Detroit's home opener Friday night that he was officially welcomed to the team by the fans. And as fate would have it, Gordon's introduction came with all the fanfare and pyrotechnics befitting the arrival of a budding star, as he was introduced along with the rest of the starters, filling in for the injured Rip Hamilton. It's a nice start for his Pistons career -- and should provide a fitting conclusion for a documentary seven months in the making.
In the tradition of Kobe Bryant's Doin' Work and LeBron James' More Than a Game, Gordon is the subject of a forthcoming documentary, A Scorer's Aura, which will tell the story of his final months as a Chicago Bull up until his first home game as a Detroit Piston, offering fans an insider's view of what it's like to be a coveted NBA free agent signing with a new team for the first time in his career.
"I have my last bit of filming to do the first home game," said Daemian Brown, the filmmaker driving the project and one of Gordon's childhood friends. "I know it's going to be hectic, he already has like half of his family coming."
"March 1st was the first day that we started shooting, and that was when the Bulls didn't really know if they were going to end up in the playoffs," Brown said. "There was a bunch of teams last season that were real close, and they were all one game or a half-game apart. ... It just so happened, we got them going in this race to get into the playoffs, and we all know how that ended up with them playing the Celtics in a great matchup in the first round."
In addition to capturing Gordon's off-court preparation for that epic series, Brown's motivation for the film was Gordon's experience as a restricted free agent the previous two summers, which consisted of long, drawn-out negotiations with the Bulls that weren't completed until shortly before each season began. Brown hoped to make a summer full of negotiations the focal point of the film but needed to adjust on the fly when Gordon quickly signed with the Pistons.
"That drama was played out for the last two offseasons, so I'm expecting, 'OK, this is going to be great stuff for a documentary, this is going to be really good with him going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,' " Brown said. "And it didn't happen like that, so I had to really change the scope of the doc. That really was going to be the selling point for the documentary -- 'OK, here's this athlete, the talking, the first day that you can talk to teams and he's going back and forth between Chicago and whoever else is interested' -- but that didn't happen. He genuinely, really loved the Pistons organization."Even if the story arc changed, the most compelling aspect of the documentary should be Brown's access to Gordon, who usually maintains a polished front with the media but let his guard down in front of a long-time friend.
"That's the aspect I want people to realize -- it's really that candid. So candid that I can't use everything. It's really that good," he said. "No one is going to be feel comfortable talking to someone that they don't know. But when it's a friend asking you questions, it's like, 'OK, what do you want to know?'
"It turned out to be quite an experience for both of us. There would be times where he would be like, 'I don't really feel like being in front of a camera right now,' and I'd just have to respect that. But for the most part he is gung-ho about it.
"He's going to let people know how he feels about everything that has happened. He's a strong believer that you have to be able to separate the business from the sport aspect of it -- he lives by that. ... You'll see that this dude is like any other 25-year-old. He likes to party, he loves to have fun with his friends. That's another side of him that I'd want to show. On the court you might say he's real stoic, you hardly see BG get excited about a lot of things on the court, even when he scores. But he loves basketball.
"Especially now that the season has started, it's hard -- he's executive producing this project -- it's hard to even communicate with him about anything else except for basketball. ... I remember when he started training, that was it. All the partying basically stopped. He's like, 'You know what? It's time now for me to get serious about basketball.' He worked out three times a day, and you'll see the footage in the trailer from his workout, but that's nothing -- there was a point where I'm like, this is turning into a damn workout DVD, I don't want that. That's all he would do."
When will fans at home get to see A Scorer's Aura? That's yet to be determined. Filming has been a virtual one-man show -- with the help of some other friends as well as Gordon's personal assistant and manager -- and Brown is still editing the final product. Once completed, he hopes to find distribution on the film festival circuit, possibly landing a deal with ESPN or another outlet.While the documentary didn't go in the direction that Brown expected, he still hopes viewers will appreciate an intimate look at what's it like for a player to have his life turned upside down over the course of several months, a glimpse at someone making decisions affecting not only the rest of his career but also his life.
"It's a story," Brown said. "Stories are usually interesting if told properly. It's not just him as a basketball player, it's him as a person, a person who's in the public eye."
