Isiah Thomas never appears in the flick Hoop Dreams, but he fills the picture like a great spirit,  hovering overhead Arthur Agree and William Gates, as the boys use basketball and the Isiah Thomas story to recreate his ideal of American Dream through basketball.  It unfortunately fails, but in the process see where Isiah succeeded tells a lot about all the players.

          Growing up Isiah

The official time of Isiah is 10 PM, Chicago time but that symbol (HS 7 Sagittarius) — stacks of books in a library — is so crazy, we could not even consider it. Once again like President Trump we thought of DST and sure enough, while that failed for the President, succeeded for Isiah, for he was born the very day DST occurred. Jumping ahead to 11 PM, we get 19 Sagittarius and “the face of love accepted,” and we saw kismet.

Sagittarius 19 is apropos because of Isiah’s comments about his love for his family, and in particular his mother Mary, (his father abandoned the family early on) and ,wife, Lynn.   His chart agrees  it is an important part of his life:  Venus at 12 Aries 45 Rx in the fourth house  shows his mother’s devotion & his wife’s loyalty have meant a lot to him.

Looking above at his Midheaven 11 Libra 57 directly opposite supports how that support has kept him en pointe, and also shows how his mother was both father and mother to him, guiding him with love and keeping his nose to the grindstone when he wanted to give up or party too hard.

The Thomas Connextion

• Asteroids that make Isiah’s chart come alive are:
  • Edolsen (Marshall Field’s curator) at 28 Capricorn 04 conjunct Saturn — shows a black man from Chicago West Side.
    1. It opposes Mars at 27 Cancer 30 conjunct Asteroid Lord at 28 Cancer 41 pertinent because  Lord is his middle name.
    2. Asteroid Sugiyashi is at 25 Cancer 33 conjunct Mars 27 Cancer tells us his native facility with the ball:  Sugiyashi is named a judo move and highlights Thomas’s spatial awareness and opponent eye contact.  The seventh house is where one directly works with open enemies and opportunities presented.
  • Asteroid St. Joseph is for Isiah’s high school is at 12 Gemini 5.– i.e. Isiah “taught” intellectually by the strict discipline of the St. Joseph’s curricula how to be successful.
    • Opposite his Ascendant at 19 Sagittarius shows he believed in his coaches and teachers at St. Joe and realized they knew how to make him his best. This was integral to his success –he could surrender his own ego, accept and internalize theirs.
  • Asteroid Bal at 13 Aries 14 for the Semite god Bal. His love of basketball took on an almost totemic significance in his life.  It also is a good metaphor for his role in Hoop Dreams, where he is portrayed as a mythic figure.
  • Asteroid Ball 16 Scorpio 49 for the Mayan invention of ball-playing. It is conjunct the Moon and via a translation of light Neptune all in Scorpio. For Isiah, basketball playing was the only way “out — it filled his dreams and fantasies.
    • This is probably because his Moon at 13.37 was average and his Mercury is equal to the Sun. Isiah was not a stellar student and knew  his grades alone would not get him into any college basketball program; he had to excel as a ball player — there was no fallback position.
  • Isiah is a see-saw temperament type with his chart split at the mid heaven between growing up poor in Chicago’s ghetto’s and his dreams getting away from it vs. the Western side his chart and his phenomenal skill: he is a 12-time NBA All-Star and named one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History.
  • He has been inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts a recommended trip for any Basketball aficionado.
  • Isiah is President of Isiah Thomas International.

As for the boys, we hate to be spoilers, instead watch the film & find out for yourself how their Hoop Dreams turned out. It is