I watched this one even before I thought about starting this project, for multiple reasons.
Like any other basketball fiend, I'm a huge fan of director Steve James' Hoop Dreams, the award-winning documentary about two high school basketball players in Chicago, William Gates and Arthur Agee (note: no Google needed), and they respective journeys through their senior year and beyond.
Secondly, I'm an Allen Iverson fan; have been from Day One — Georgetown Day One, not NBA Day One either.
Lastly, stories like this intrigue me — and often end up annoying me — so when I got the box set back at the end of October, No Crossover was one of the first films that hit my DVD player.
Before he was "The Answer," Iverson was "Bubba Chuck," a two-sport star at Bethel High School in Hampton, Virginia. Before he was a polarizing figure in the NBA, he was high school kid who almost never made it to college, let alone the pros, as a result of the bowling alley brawl that serves as the focus of this excellent film.
If you ever wondered why Allen Iverson played with such a chip on his
shoulder, check this movie; you'll find out of the reasons.
Here's the quick version of what happened:
On a February night in 1994, high school superstar Iverson and several friends get into an altercation with another group at a bowling alley, an incident that allegedly began when the other group — all of whom were white and slightly older (think 20s, not 50s) — shouted racial epithets at Iverson's group, all of whom were black.
To paraphrase the movie Anchorman, things really escalated quite quickly that night in the bowling alley, culminating in chairs and punches between thrown, the commotion caught on camera.
Though the melee involved numerous people, only four persons faced charges: all of them black, with Allen Iverson facing the stiffest penalties of the bunch, singled out amongst all the participants as having struck a white women with a chair during the altercation.
Only 17 at the time, Iverson was convicted as an adult of maiming by mob, a felony conviction rarely pursued, and originally intended to combat lynching. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, with a 10 year suspended sentence.
After four months at the Newport News City Farm, Iverson was granted clemency by the outgoing Governor, with the conviction being overturned a year later due to a lack of evidence.
Those last three words and the fact that of everyone involved in the situation only four young black males were charged are what have stuck with me since watching the film.
They are the elements that fired me up as I watched it the first time, made me shake my head when I watched it a second time yesterday afternoon, and have me wondering what in the hell is wrong with the world as I type this now.
What's frightening to me is that I don't doubt that this same situation could still happen today, nearly 18 years later, and it would still only happen if the most visible participant in the crowd was black.
Some people aren't going to like that statement.
That's fine; they can choose to stop reading, now and forever if they'd like. I plan on calling things how I see them, and this was 100-percent a racial issue. The fact that just four participants in the February altercation were charged and all of them were black high school students makes that abundantly clear.
There are a bunch of conspiracy theories thrown around in the film about why Iverson was targeted, but I have a much easier explanation:
He was a young, black athlete experiencing a great deal of success at the high school level, and a bunch of white folks in Hampton, Virginia didn't take to kindly to it.
I have no idea whether Iverson did the things he was charged, convicted, and then absolved of doing that night at the bowling alley; I wasn't there, and there has never been any concrete evidence on either side of the coin.
I am fairly certain, however, that if the roles were reversed — that if a group of white athletes engaged in a brawl with some older black folks, those white kids wouldn't have been facing 15 years in prison for maiming by mob.
I like to consider myself a pretty tolerant guy — there isn't much that really bothers me, and I'm cool with you as long as you're cool with me, no matter your skin color, religion, political views, orientation, or whatever else you want to throw into the mix.
But I can handle racism; not when it's blatant and overt, not the little "we don't really mean it" comments far too many people make supposedly in jest, and not anywhere in between the two.
Stories like this make me frustrated — annoyed at the intolerance of some people who would change their stance in an instant if the roles were ever reversed.
What frustrates me even more is that we're still battling most of the same issues of intolerance, racism, and bigotry in 2012, and we've been facing them since long before 1994 too.
When the hell are we going to learn?
We are one race — the human race; accept it now, so we can build a better world for future generations.
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