A Most Beautiful Thing chronicles the tale of a unique group of athletes from Chicago’s West Side, and how their lives changed over 20 years
The plan first called for a 17 March public debut in Austin, Texas, of A Most Beautiful Thing, a documentary about America’s first all-Black high school rowing team. Like so many other activities, though, the SXSW Film Festival was cancelled, an early victim of the coronavirus pandemic, and the debut was pushed back four and a half months.
It was not exactly the worst thing that could have happened. A lot unfolded in America in those four and a half months, certainly not the least of which was the police killing of George Floyd in May. Floyd’s death sparked widespread public protests nationally and heightened interest in the Black Lives Matter movement.
“The message is even stronger,” Arshay Cooper, 38, a member of the rowing team, who hailed from Chicago’s tough West Side, and a focal point of the documentary, tells the Guardian. “Now, people will watch it with a bigger sense of awareness – to watch it with a sense of openness.”
Rather than appearing nationwide across the US in cinemas at the end of July, the film was made available for streaming. So the documentary has been pushed a bit off-course, so to speak. But, hey: Cooper and his Manley High School teammates overcame much bigger setbacks over a 22-year period that begins with the founding of the rowing program and ends with a reunion – and a race that includes four unlikely teammates as members of their eight-man crew: Chicago police officers.
“All of these people kind of knew we’d done this when we were younger,” Cooper says of the reunion, “but we wanted to give our families and our kids a chance to see us doing it. We thought it was powerful for them to see it with their own eyes.”
You need to watch the film to see how they fared at the Chicago Sprints in July 2019, but the results actually don’t matter that much. It was an astonishing feat just to assemble a rowing team from a neighborhood besieged by rival gangs and comprised of kids from families torn apart by poverty and drug and sexual abuse.
Cooper, a chef who now lives in Brooklyn, became the catalyst for the story when he decided five years ago to write a self-published book about his experience, Suga Water: A Memoir. He remembers looking on YouTube for videos with the search words, “how to write a memoir”. He knew he had a good story to tell.
A Most Beautiful Thing will be available to audiences in the US from 1 September on NBCUniversal’s Peacock platform and in mid-October on Amazon.
