Guru of Go on Easter

From "The Blind Side" to "Hoosiers," sports movies often remind us that real events can seem more incredible than fiction, and that some stories and characters might seem simply too good, too sentimental or too far-fetched if they weren't already true. Add the sports documentary "Guru of Go" (4 p.m., Saturday, ABC, part of the ESPN "30 for 30" series) to that list of films.

Who would believe a Shakespeare scholar as a basketball coach who inspired his players with quotations from the Bard? The "Guru" here is coach Paul Westhead. His remarkable story takes him to the peaks of coaching Kareem Abdul Jabbar and a new kid named Magic Johnson to an NBA championship to getting fired in short order. He then accepts a coaching job for a relatively obscure college.

But at Loyola Marymount, he executed his "System," a fast-paced, high-scoring strategy that some described as track meet and others denigrated as "street ball." There Westhead also coached a remarkable tandem from the housing projects of his native Philadelphia, Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble.

With plot twists and turns worthy of a big-budget movie, "Guru," directed by Bill Couturie, recalls how Loyola's enchanted 1989-90 season came to a tragic halt when Gathers, born with an enlarged heart, collapsed and died on the court in the middle of a game. Kimble would later pay tribute to his fallen comrade with a gesture that left few dry eyes in the basketball world. The team would rally and come close to the NCAA championship that year, but that Hollywood ending was not to be.

Gather's sudden death would later inspire litigation, and Westhead would leave Loyala amidst controversy. Like the ancient mariner of basketball, Westhead would meander through the NBA again and later find himself exiled to Japan, coaching his unorthodox "System." More recently, he has found success in professional women's basketball and is now the only coach to have national championships in both the NBA and WNBA. "Readiness is all," a quote from "Hamlet," is Westhead's motto. He might as well have been the inspiration for the phrase "You just can't make this stuff up."

-- More than a half-century old, the 1956 epic "The Ten Commandments" (7 p.m., Saturday, ABC, TV-G) has been a staple of Easter-weekend programming for decades and continues to command respectable ratings.

-- TCM devotes Easter Sunday to films about religion or inspired by biblical tales, beginning with "One Foot in Heaven" (6 a.m., Eastern, TCM) and concluding with the 1928 silent film "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1:45 a.m.). Highlights include the 1973 hippie Jesus musical "Godspell" (8 a.m.).

-- The presence of a baby often inspires adults to speak in a voice louder than normal, and utter cute and corny phrases they would never share with another adult. Disney sitcoms appear to have the same effect. The two symptoms combine and gather strength under a gale-force laugh track on the new cable comedy "Good Luck Charlie" (8:30 p.m., Sunday, Disney, TV-G).
Baby Charlie inspires plenty of chances for loud one-liners from two teen siblings, a 'tween and two harried parents who all wonder how their lives will be changed as they take turns changing the sudden bundle of joy. Like most Disney live-action fare, this hearkens back to annoying, cartoonish sitcoms of yore in a thoroughly review-proof fashion. Help yourself.

-- Some of the best documentaries answer questions you never thought to ask. Tonight's "Nature" (8 p.m., Sunday, PBS) installment "Moment of Impact" does just that. To this day, I never really wondered how a woodpecker can rattle away at a tree and not give itself a little birdy concussion. Apparently, the bird's beak hits the tree with roughly the same force as Mike Tyson's glove striking an opponents jaw. Luckily for the woodpecker, he has internal shock absorbers, including a long bug-probing tongue that recoils inside the bird's skull to protect its brain.

These and other "Nature" nuggets are revealed with informative computer graphics to demonstrate how wild animal's anatomy helps them to become either successful predators or evasive prey. It's a jungle out there.

In other critter programming notes, "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" (7 p.m., Sunday, Animal Planet) profiles Dr. Lynn Rogers, known as "The Bear Walker of the Northwoods," who has the skill and bravery to place tracking devices on some of the biggest woodland creatures.

Meanwhile, "Life" (Sunday, Discovery, TV-PG) continues with "Birds" (8 p.m.) and "Creatures of the Deep" (9 p.m.).

-- Easter Sunday is more than a major religious holiday. This year it marks the beginning of the Major League Baseball season. Archrivals meet as the Boston Red Sox host the New York Yankees (8 p.m., Eastern, Sunday, ESPN 2).