I originally saw One on One when it came out in 1977 and was impressed by Lamont Johnson's direction, Robby Benson and Jerry Segal's (Benson's father) script and Donald Morgan's straight forward cinematography, though I did not care much for the Seals and Crofts songs. I was nervous seeing it again but it actually holds up pretty well, especially the relationship between Benson, a scholarship basketball student at a Los Angeles college, and the estimable Annette O' Toole as his tutor and eventual lover.
All the corruption that makes college basketball (and other big time college sports) still so odious are there: the bullying coaches, the no-show jobs, the tutoring and the easy courses, Benson is a naive guy from a small town and has trouble playing along; he is eventually asked to renounce his no-cut scholarship and refuses, even when the coach has other members of the team beat him up. Benson triumphs in the end, when the coach is left with no one else to put in the game and Benson scores the winning points.
Most of Lamont Johnson's films were made for television but he always came through when he had the chance to make a theatrical film with a good script, a good cast, and a medium budget, including The Last American Hero (1973) and the Burt Lancaster Western Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981), also movies about triumph against difficult odds.
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