Film Review Of Steve James 'No Crossover'

No Crossover is a 30 for 30 short documentary films produced by ESPN. The film is directed and narrated by Steve James a 55 year old white man that’s from Hampton, Va. Steve James’s film is a retrospective film about his home town’s most famous and controversial athlete Allen Iverson and a trial that divided the city of Hampton, Va. The film focuses on two events the first event was a brawl that took place in February of 1993 in a bowling alley. According to witnesses a group of young black men who included Allen Iverson got into an altercation with white patrons, which lead to several people being injured, and one woman being seriously injured after she was struck with a chair. The second event the documentary focuses on was the

In addition to the controversial trial the director also focused on the controversial sentence of 15 years in prison for the four young Black men and the likewise controversial Governor’s pardon that commuted all four men’s sentences that still provides disagreements till this day. Director James frames his documentary on rhetorical questions of Was Allen Iverson the best basketball player pound for pound? Or was Allen Iverson just a street thug in shorts? Was he coachable? These questions were continually on my mind during the film, as the director would interview people who lived in Hampton during the time of the events. To illustrate these points director Steve James’s began his documentary by describing his experience growing up in Hampton, VA, which was twenty years before the Allen Iverson incident. I theorized that the director wanted to present the racial divide that existed in his hometown before Allen Iverson and the

Allen Iverson was described as a complicated individual that was allowed to violate rules, i.e. misses school and still play sports. However, according to the documentary he missed school in order for Iverson to take care of his siblings, these contradictions were throughout the documentary. Some blacks that lived in Hampton at the time described Iverson as the best person to have for two hours for a basketball game and the worst person to deal with for the other 22 hours of the