Basketball: A Love Story Is Phenomenal—But It Has a Glaring Blindspot

For the basketball fanatic, the idea of a 20 hour documentary featuring the sport’s most important figures, past and present, talking about its history, major milestones, controversies, social impact, in addition to the x’s and o’s of strategy, should produce the kind of high promised by every rapper who has ever popped a Xanax. And for the most part, ESPN’s Basketball: A Love Story, delivers. Nearly all of basketball’s living legends are present, from Bob Cousy and Julius Erving, to Rebecca Lobo and Kevin Durant (noticeably absent is Michael Jordan, but he has his own lengthy documentary for ESPN that will be released via Netflix next year). It covers everything from James Naismith’s creation of the game to the Golden State Warriors’ dynasty. It goes around the globe, hits the college and pro game, men’s and women’s, playground and more.

Basketball: A Love Story, directed by Dan Klores, is formatted somewhat like ESPN’s critically acclaimed “30 for 30” documentary series, with individual segments that promise a focus on a specific subject, while carrying the length and ambitiousness of a Ken Burns project. Online, you’re free to pick and choose the segments at your discretion (or watch all 20 hours straight through like I did). It’s not in chronological or narrative order, so you don’t have to follow any specific throughline other than a love of the game.

The a la carte approach means that you can skip over some of the parts you may already be overly familiar with (I don’t think I have anything else left to learn about the Lakers-Celtics rivalry), but it also might mean missing out on some fascinating history—like the college basketball point shaving scandal of 1951, or geeky tidbits about Wes Unseld perfecting the outlet pass—if you neglect the pieces that don’t immediately appeal to your interests.

However, what I found most frustrating about this fragmented formatting choice was that the sections that begged to be in conversation with one another are now left marooned on their own island, their stories denied an opportunity to complicate the familiar and disrupt the comfortable. Nowhere is this more clear than in the presentation of the stories dealing with Latrell Sprewell and Bob Knight.

Sprewell, you may recall or have heard through basketball folklore, famously choked coach P.J. Carlesimo in practice, supposedly after a terse command from the coach regarding Sprewell’s passing, when both were members of the Warriors. The attack cost Sprewell, an all-star shooting guard, a year of his career and millions of dollars.

At the time it happened, it was one of the most shocking things to ever occur in the sports world. Physical confrontations were nothing new, but a player physically assaulting their own coach was unheard of. Twenty years after the fact, we should probably have a better understanding of why this happened, of what precipitated this action, but the documentary does little to illuminate. Instead, it falls back on a familiar, and troubling framework. Sprewell is talked about as a spoiled multi-millionaire athlete with no respect for authority. George Gervin, who played in the ABA in the 1970s where fights were a near nightly occurrence, is heard bemoaning the loss of morals and values. Players and coaches alike decried the lack of respect for authority that came with players who felt entitled, and Sprewell was the shining, violent example.

There are a couple people, the legends Oscar Robertson and Walt Frazier primarily, who offered up a tepid defense of Sprewell, but the overriding sentiment from others was that Sprewell, no matter the circumstances, was in the wrong. Carlesimo was virtually exonerated.

Of course, he was the one who was choked. It makes sense that there is some compassion for him. But his coaching style is not called into question. He halfheartedly admits that he may have been too hard on guys at times, but that’s never interrogated. What does it mean to be too hard? What did he actually say to Sprewell to elicit that reaction? Neither of these questions are answered, but there is repeated condemnation of Sprewell’s action.

There is not the same level of disapproval of Bob Knight’s behavior. Not even close. In his more than forty years of coaching, Knight established a reputation as abrasive and short tempered, but even that does not come close to accurately describing the verbal and physical abuse he unleashed on players and others. He was fired in 2000 after video of him putting his hand around a player’s throat during practice surfaced (the video was from 1997, the same year Sprewell choked Carlesimo), and Indiana University instituted a “zero tolerance” policy toward his behavior, which he then violated by grabbing another student’s arm. I’m not sure they understood the meaning of “zero tolerance,” as at that point Knight had racked up quite the resume of abuse.

Unlike Sprewell, Knight is praised as a genius during the segment addressing his coaching career, despite a highlight reel of his public displays of abuse playing underneath the adulation. And nearly every person featured in the documentary came to his defense. Knight himself was not interviewed, and neither was Sprewell, but he didn’t need to be present to excuse his actions. Former players extolled the virtues of his approach, admonishing us all to ignore the way he said things to accept the truth of what he was saying. His temper is presented as a quirk, almost the byproduct of his genius and pursuit of excellence. Via archival footage of an interview he did with David Letterman, Knight is able to recast his famous chair throwing incident as a lighthearted fable of trying to provide an old woman with a seat. He’s really just misunderstood, we are to understand.

At one point, Knight’s admiration for General Patton is mentioned and presented as a reason for why he coached the way he did. Except, where was Bobby Knight’s war? He was teaching college students the game of basketball, not leading soldiers into battle. But the conflation of these types of authority lend these segments a problematic framework. It’s never even suggested that Knight, or coaches generally, should respect players. It’s taken as a given that these players need discipline, which comes in the form of abuse, in order to play the game. And this idea goes virtually unexamined in context of largely black players being coached by mostly white men.

It mirrors our broader cultural and political deference to white patriarchal authority. White men are the heads of government, businesses, households, and other institutions with the assumption that their wisdom is infallible, objective, and stable—even if they’re the type to throw chairs. Even when we think we know better, we default to this stance. It’s striking that in other parts of Basketball: A Love Story there is necessary attention paid to the plight of black players coming up through the Jim Crow era of segregation and the outright discrimination and bigotry they faced. This is obvious to the filmmakers. But this subtler framing issue, with Sprewell and Knight, escapes their notice.

A different framework would have called this issue of respect into question, and pondered how it has so long been seen as a one way directive. It could’ve dug deeper into the player/coach relationship dynamic to see why it had been established one way and what players who rejected that approach were trying to say about it. As it stands, the segments on Sprewell and Knight sit by themselves, separated by hours of material if you view it straight through, without so much as a hint that they are related or that there is more to these stories than what is presented.

There is tons of good stuff in Basketball: A Love Story. There are a number of things they get right when discussing issues of authority and race. But everyone has their blindspots.