In the pecking order of professional sports, is being a scout considered an undesirable gig? I have no idea. General managers probably take all the credit when the team lands a star in the making, and lay all the blame on scouts when a sure thing flames out. These kinds of grievances are true of any number of professions that don’t have anything near the sex appeal of being able to say you work for an NBA team, but the Netflix movie “Hustle,” starring Adam Sandler and his beard, takes it as a given that the job blows.
Look, maybe it does. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to move up the ladder, as Sandler’s Stanley Sugerman so clearly does. A longtime and exhausted scout for the Philadelphia 76ers, he gets bumped to assistant coach for half a second before getting bumped back down when the team’s owner dies (a blink-or-you’ll-miss-him Robert Duvall) and his insufferable son (Ben Foster) takes over and sends Stanley out on the road to find that cliched “missing piece” the team so desperately needs.
If a long sigh were a person, he would be Stanley Sugerman. He’s burned out and his dreams have been dashed. Or as tells his wife (Queen Latifah): “Guys in their 50s don’t have dreams, they have nightmares. And eczema.” So he swallows his pride and drags his suitcase through Europe, looking for potential international draft picks. When he arrives in Spain, he spies a 6-foot-9 ringer in Timberlands (Utah Jazz power forward Juancho Hernangómez) crushing it in a street game and walking away with a fistful of cash.
