Visualizing Basketball’s Past: The Historical Imagination of ESPN’s Basketball Documentaries

There’s No Place Like Home

There’s No Place Like Home premiered on October 16, 2012, and has since aired many times. The film, narrated and codirected by former University of Kansas student Josh Swade, portrays his successful efforts to persuade a wealthy Kansas alumnus to purchase the original rules of the sport and to donate them to the University of Kansas. James Naismith, inventor of basketball as well as the first basketball coach and a longtime faculty member at Kansas, had the original rules typed on two pieces of paper in 1891. Upon announcement of an upcoming auction of this document, Swade concocts a plan to approach wealthy Kansas alumni with the news in hopes that they will donate funds to purchase the rules. Swade, in fact, originally conceives the documentary as a means to garner him access to potential donors and begins his pitch by saying only that he is making a documentary about the rules. Over time, though, he comes clean and—against all odds and in the face of a succession of setbacks—convinces alumnus David Booth to spend US$4.3 million to buy the rules.

Swade portrays himself in the documentary as a superfan of Kansas basketball, whose passion and loyalty propel him on his odyssey to secure the historic documents for the University. He appears, as the film’s title suggests, as a basketball Dorothy on a quest to bring the rules back “home” to Kansas. Though not its focus, the film nevertheless offers a story of the invention of basketball and of its significance to basketball culture and, moreover, provides views of the importance of history in general, what is entailed in making contact with it, and what it means to narrate bygone events. In this way, viewers’ identification with Swade’s school spirit opens up an affective channel through which they may also identify with his quest to connect to (and in this case secure ownership over) that past, or at least its remnants.

The film’s opening title sequence deepens this identification, offering the image of a desired destination and an invitation to join in a journey toward it. That destination appears in the opening shot: multiple images of several sheets of faded, yellow paper, close-up shots of some sheets superimposed over longer shots of others. In the 2 s these images appear, we might make out a few typewritten words, fragments of sentences. For example, in the background, we can read “fouls, and notify the referee when three consecutive fouls have been made. He shall have the power to disqualify men according to Rule 5.” In the foreground, and so larger, we see “infringement of this” and “second shall disqualify him.” Clearly, these are the rules for something. But whether we know how to interpret the words on the page, we’re likely to feel—just on account of the yellow paper and old-fashioned typewriter print—that we are looking at an archival document and so moving toward the remote past.

This image quivers for a moment before giving way, through a smooth dissolve, to another image of what appears to be the same yellow paper. Here, three words appear in the same typewritten, lowercase font as the rules: “espn films presents.” This transition, fleeting and subtle though it may be, suggests through its continuity an identity between the historical document and the film itself, between the distant past and the present, and between history itself and historical representation. This identity is the promise of There’s No Place Like Home. It tells us that the past can be accessed and captured, that, however distant or different it may be, we can possess it, and so become one with it. As the opening sequence unfolds, this promise will be reiterated and deepened.

But if the promise were already fulfilled, if history were already ours, and we, already, one with it, then there would be no need for the film, or for the historical quest it portrays. And so, even as the film’s opening teases us with its promise, it introduces several complicating elements to inform us that we will have obstacles to overcome to fully get ourselves into the presence of the past. First, we are yanked roughly out of our archival fantasy by the offscreen sound of a gavel, while the ESPN production credit image cedes abruptly to an exterior shot of the Sotheby’s auction house in New York City with the intertitle “December 10, 2010.” Next, we are taken inside the building to hear the auctioneer welcome us to a “special afternoon” featuring “three separate sales.” Then, just as another close-up of the original rules gives way to another production credit, Swade’s offscreen narration interjects, “What could a piece of paper possibly be worth?” Over the next 45 s, the film continues this same rhythmic alternation of images and sounds: from the seamless shift between original rules and production credits to original footage of the auctioneer listing and describing each of the items up for bid. Even as the images promising us contact with the past persist, the contemporary shots of the auction house, the auctioneer and not least, the precious items themselves, each protected behind framed glass and carefully set apart on a podium at the front of the room, away from the audience of bidders, put a distance between viewers and the relics, between us and the past. That distance moreover is not only spatial, but economic. This is an auction. The items and the past are not ours. They belong to someone else. The juxtaposition of images thus stirs a desire for the past and a narrative tension: How will we get them?

Meanwhile, Swade’s voice-over invites us to reflect upon the deeper meaning of our desire: “How do you put a price on history? Why are these treasures important to us? Maybe because these things changed not just our country but the world.” In doing so, he reinforces the assumptions we presumably share with him that such documents are history, and that they are treasures we want. As this sequence of images unfolds, and Swade’s narration verbalizes the questions we might be reflecting upon, a musical theme quietly but firmly builds. An electric guitar plays a descending and unresolved series of minor chords, which impart to the viewer a sense of longing, a longing which the visual cues orient toward the past and the objects embodying it, and which, moreover, because they repeat insistently add a sense of urgency to that longing. We may not yet know exactly what we want at this point in the film, but we want, and we want something in relation to the past.

Perhaps this is why the film next identifies—in less than 30 s—the specific piece of history we’ve been looking at and tells us why it matters enough that we, like the narrator it turns out, want it. The transition between the auction/production credits sequence I’ve just described and this short informational segment goes by way of a now familiar close-up of the original rules document. But rather than apparently randomly selected fragments of sentences, the camera now zeroes in on the left-hand side of a page and pans the document from left to right to mimic the act of reading. Along with it, we read the following, handwritten in brown ink: “First draft of Basket Ball rules. Hung in the gym that the boys might learn the rules—Dec. 1891”; and, in the same handwriting but in black ink, a signature: “James Naismith” and the date, “6-28-31.” Just to be sure we’ve taken it in, Swade’s narration supplements the visual image: “On December 21, 1891, James Naismith tacked up these two pieces of paper in the gymnasium of the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts.” The camera has now panned out so that we can see the two pieces of paper arrayed side by side on a surface, perhaps a bulletin board (evoking Naismith’s original “tacking up” of the rules), and then swings up the surface to an archival image of the Springfield Y and then to the right to an image of Naismith himself, circa 1891.

The film next seals the deal of our investment in a sequence that establishes its view regarding the importance of the rules, while providing not so much a history of basketball as an exhibition of what the filmmakers appear to think constitutes historical representation. We see a rapid series of archival photographs of basketball players, laid via special effects over the original rules, each player appearing on top of the preceding one: first a White man in a Kansas uniform, probably from the first half of the 20th century, then the White Boston Celtics star from the 1950s Bob Cousy, Black superstar Wilt Chamberlain holding up a piece of paper on which is written the number 100 (just after he scored that many points in a single game in 1962), then Julius Erving (from the 1970s and 1980s), Magic Johnson and Larry Bird (together, from the 1980s), Michael Jordan (the 1990s), and finally LeBron James (the 2000s), superimposed upon whose close-up image we can see the palimpsest of the original rules. Over this, Swade explains the historical importance of the document (and implicitly narrates the sequence we are seeing): “It was the birth of a game that has gone from an idea to a global phenomenon.”

This view, which will be echoed in short order by experts from Sotheby’s auction house and by others in the film, recapitulates in miniature what I have elsewhere called the “myth of creation” (Colás, 2016, pp. 19-20). The content of basketball history, simply put, appears as the incarnation of an “idea”—an immaterial, idealized “essence” of the sport first set down in its original rules, which the film repeatedly figures as basketball’s “commandments.” This static essence, purveyed by this and other narratives, has been mobilized throughout the history of the sport as a standard against which to judge and police the technical, stylistic, and cultural innovations introduced by players, especially by African American players. They, the myth of creation presumes, require the guidance and discipline of coaches and institutional structures to avoid the excesses of selfishness, ostentation, laziness, or violence. And, in fact—this flipbook of player images notwithstanding—There’s No Place Like Home elsewhere supplements the view of basketball as an idea embodied in the rules conceived by Naismith with a portrayal of basketball history as running through the subsequent generations of college coaches “descended” from Naismith and his protégé at Kansas, Phog Allen.

But the principal topic and motor driving the story in this film is neither the rules, nor Naismith, nor coaches, but rather money: the millions of dollars in disposable income that some individual must have to possess the history embodied in the original rules document. The opening sequence therefore concludes with the camera “flying” backward through history, accelerating in reverse past the same images of players and settling on an extreme close-up of the word “basket ball” in the rules before panning down the page and finally being replaced by a title card, again replicating the archival documents, that reads simply “There’s No Place Like Home.” Over this sequence of images, Swade explains—“There were people out there willing to pay millions for this document. I didn’t know exactly how much it was worth. But I knew there was only one place they belonged.” Meanwhile, the insistent, unresolved guitar chords crescendo and then fade into a simple, quasimartial drum beat: It is time to begin our march home.

That place—home—of course is the University of Kansas. And despite some ups and downs, Swade will get us there. At the end of the film, living the dream of many college sports fans, he takes the floor at the University’s basketball arena, occupying the space that will soon be taken by the unpaid, mostly Black players whose performance fans have paid to watch. As the packed house roars, Swade announces that the original rules of the sport they love, penned by their first coach more than a century before, will be back where they belong, at Kansas, at home. But his fellow Kansas fans are not the only audience for this announcement. We viewers also witness it. Recall that the opening credits have tied a tight affective and symbolic knot binding Swade and the viewer, the rules and basketball history, and knowing the past and owning its remnants. They thus promise a viewer that to watch the film will be to gain, at least vicariously, access to and ownership over the history of the sport. So that the “home” of the film, to which the rules and history itself are safely and properly returned, is not only Kansas, but our own hearts and minds as basketball fans.

In several ways, this opening sequence may be seen as a metonym of the ESPN Films basketball documentaries as a whole. For one thing, the notion that historical knowledge amounts to riffling through a series of static, decontextualized images of individuals replicates what appears to be the governing historiographical logic of the series which, taken as a whole, offers a history of the sport by way of profiles. One can see the still images—of Goose Tatum, Len Bias, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Allen Iverson, Christian Laettner, and Reggie Miller, among others profiled in the series—flipping one after the other. Moreover, most of these profiles tend to provide only the minimal social and cultural context necessary to comprehend their more central focus: the dramatic trials, tragedies, and sometimes, heroic triumphs of their individual subjects. The “real history” to be revealed through the series is not the complicated nexus of society, culture, and sport in which basketball history unpredictably unfolds, but rather the lightly contextualized individual life. Nevertheless, these glancing historical treatments, like the story of the invention of the game in There’s No Place Like Home, accrue authority by their structural positioning as historical backstory, the authoritative voice-of-God narrator, archival footage and images, use of expert testimony, and, not least, by the desires the films have primed in a viewer to get the “real story.”

However, There’s No Place Like Home also stands as an outlier as the only film that documents actions in the present. Though it does offer a history of the origin of basketball, the film explicitly aims only to tell the story of one fan’s contemporary attempt to acquire a valuable historical document at auction. By contrast, the rest of the network’s documentary offerings explicitly center on explorations of bygone events, mostly on figures and events from the 1980s and, especially the 1990s. Therefore, though looking at There’s No Place Like Home illuminates the underlying historiographical stance of the series as a whole, we should look as well at how the series portrays the era with which it is primarily concerned.

The Fab Five

The Fab Five tells the story of a group of five Black freshmen basketball players who entered the University of Michigan together in 1991, became starters, and led their team to consecutive national championship game appearances in 1992 and 1993 while challenging and transforming the norms of college basketball on and off the court and affecting American society more broadly. But in the decade after their departure from the University, the team would become embroiled in a scandal when one player—star Chris Webber—was found to have violated National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) regulations by accepting, while still enrolled, several hundred thousand dollars in loans from a Detroit businessman. After investigations by the University, the NCAA, and the FBI, voluntary self-sanctions and external penalties were imposed on Michigan’s basketball program including the nullification of most of the team’s wins during Webber’s era and the removal of the banners they earned for playing in the NCAA Final Four in 1992 and 1993.

The film opens to a pitch black screen. Then, a name, in white, uppercase sans serif font, fades in to the lower right corner: “Jimmy King.” We hear a voice begin to speak, “When the banners were snatched down, and . . .” As the voice continues, the name remains but the black screen gives way to a tight close-up of King’s face who, inclined slightly forward, looks steadily at his interlocutor just to the right of the camera as he goes on, “. . . rolled ’em up and put ’em in the basement, it rocked me to the core because we had put so much into that.” King pauses, blinks slowly and then adds, with an ironic smile, “Like, it’s like snatching your life dreams away.” There is a cut and King continues, shaking his head ever so slightly, perhaps in resignation, “When you mess up, there are consequences. And know that you can pay for ’em by being,” he pauses as the screen goes entirely black and we hear his final word, “erased.”

Most viewers probably know exactly which banners King refers to and what he means when he speaks of them being “snatched down.” But if not, even casual viewers likely will be familiar with the practice of hanging banners from the ceilings of sporting venues to commemorate the accomplishments of teams that played in them. It is perhaps the most visible means by which a professional franchise, or college, recognizes the historical significance of an individual or team. So when Jimmy King speaks of these banners being snatched down, rolled up, and put in a basement, we know that at least one important version of history has been revised. We may not know yet what that history was, or what prompted its revision. But King makes clear that the revision was tantamount to being “erased.” So already here—like in There’s No Place Like Home—The Fab Five sets up a gap between the lived present of a protagonist and viewer and the historical past embodied in a relic. However, where the images of the former film promise to close that gap, what follows in the opening credits of this film offer only more distance. Moreover, where There’s No Place Like Home uses typography to represent words as the guarantor of our eventual identification with the past, The Fab Five’s opening sequence uses images of words to suggest that language complicates, as much as it clarifies, our relationship to the past, particularly when the words portrayed clearly convey the cultural and political tensions around race and class that are at the heart of that past.

A tracking shot leads us through the stacks of an archive, down a dimly lit aisle lined with shelves laden with labeled cartons. A cut brings us face-to-face with one carton, but its label is out of focus and illegible. Offscreen, narrator Taye Diggs’ voice enters to guide us: “Deep within the archives at the University of Michigan lie the remnants of a revolution.” Slowly the camera sharpens the image of the writing on the box: “University of Michigan. Dept of Intercollegiate Athletics. Box 9. Bentley Historical Library.” That image gives way to another tracking shot, now moving across the ends of the aisles, showing us stacks of boxes punctuated by the pitch black end panels of the shelving housing them. The narrator continues, “To some it was the flashpoint of a cultural rebellion. To others the essence of all that was wrong with college sports.”

In these few seconds, the dim lighting, the overwhelming quantity of archival material, and the blurry, illegible label on the box, particularly with King’s opening words still fresh in our minds, suggest that the very site that harbors and safeguards the past—“the remnants of the revolution”—may also present obstacles to freely accessing it, let alone to knowing how best to assess the interpretations the narrator has offered us. But regardless of where we stand, we’ve been challenged to understand basketball in relation to culture, politics, and morality. Moreover, the blackness with which the film opened and which persists as the camera pans past the black end panels of stack shelving may suggest blackness as a racial category that bears, as I will show below, a significant and complex relationship to this history and to the possibility of telling it.

Throughout, the gentle, slow, opening piano melody of the Machine Vandals song “North Bank” evokes the familiar musical background to so many scenes in ESPN’s documentaries, where similar sounds accompany moments of emotional vulnerability and cue viewers’ empathy. But as the camera tracks across the last black end panel to open out into a wide shot of the University’s empty basketball arena, a lone guitar intrudes upon this familiar sonic terrain with a dissonant screeching crescendo, followed by a heavy metal percussion section and the roar of a ghostly crowd. We see next a rapidly shifting montage of archival footage of Michigan basketball players making facial gestures—snarling or sneering or smiling broadly or laughing, talking, celebrating, and dancing on the court as an announcer shouts “Michigan’s going to the NCAA Final Four.” Are these images of the revolution whose remnants lie in the library? If so, they tell us, along with the soundtrack accompanying them, that it was an explosive, chaotic affair in which not only athletic feats but personal styles and behaviors played a large role.

Now, the “revolutionary” montage ending as abruptly as it began, we return to the quiet stacks, as a camera tracks backwards down one of the aisles, and the narrator tells us “Where these hallways end, a legacy lies in limbo and our story begins.” The music dies back down and the camera moves from the box we saw a few moments ago to a close-up image of two objects, one piled on top of the other: These are the banners that Jimmy King informed us were “snatched down,” rolled up in protective plastic, and labeled “1992 NCAA FINAL FOUR BANNER BENTLEY HISTORICAL LIBRARY” and beneath it “1993 NCAA FINAL FOUR BANNER BENTLEY HISTORICAL LIBRARY.”

We now are in a better position to understand Jimmy King’s opening words. For we now see that the archive here, unlike in There’s No Place Like Home, is not merely a benign repository for keeping the past safe until we may access it and even—if we are authorized by position or means—possess it. It is also a gatekeeper, a prison even, that guards the remnants of the past in the name of an institution that controls access to history and in this way attempts to determine its meaning (Colás, 2013). King’s final word—“erased”—reminds us of the power dynamics at work and the stakes in play and stands already as a counter to the view of the archive as repository. Taken with the narrator’s own final declaration of the beginning of “our story,” we may already expect what follows to complicate, or even challenge, the history controlled by the institution, even if only because of the implication that “erasures” on the part of the latter catalyze a supplementary narrative.

Set to a series of introductory drum beats, the screen now fills with a rapid montage of close-up shots of printed words from archival documents: “scandal,” “investigating,” “indicted,” “banned,” “banners from,” “removed,” “NCAA,” and “sanctions,” then zooms in to the first title credit “ESPN Films,” which is typographically—in white caps on a black screen—differentiated (again, and unlike There’s No Place Like Home) from the words taken from the archive. As “North Bank” crescendos once more, the rest of the title credits alternate with more archival footage of Michigan basketball players, close-up shots of the basketball floor in the empty arena and, finally, an unidentified middle-aged, professionally dressed woman at a news conference soberly intoning “This is a day of great shame for the university” as the camera pans along the block capital letters of the word “MICHIGAN” running along the end line of the court. An abrupt cut gives way to a frenzied zoom through a cloud of words, shown in gleaming white capital letters against a blue background. Prominently centered in the sequence, we easily read “Baggy shorts,” “Trash talk,” “Time out,” “Pride,” and “Scandal,” while words like “Brash,” “Cocky,” “black,” “failure,” “fraud,” “socks,” “legacy,” “disgrace,” “bald,” and “heads” move past on the periphery. The camera pulls rapidly away from these individual words, distancing itself from them, and revealing in the process that they make up the words of the film’s title “THE FAB FIVE.”

The Fab Five, like other films in the corpus, may work primarily in what Nichols calls the expository mode, but what it expounds, and exposes—by contrast with There’s No Place Like Home—is its own fraught, ultimately unresolved and possibly unresolvable, relationship to the past and to historical portrayal. It is this fraught relationship that it invites its viewers to share. Whereas the words of Naismith’s rules document seamlessly gave way to the words of the production credits in There’s No Place Like Home and the words of Josh Swade’s narration guided us into a satisfying (and satisfied) quest for ownership of the past, the words of The Fab Five offer us only an asymptotic journey toward a past we may never fully know. What keeps filling the gap between ourselves in the present and that past are more words, not only spoken, but prominently highlighted visually, as in this title sequence. Whether spoken by Jimmy King or the narrator, or portrayed in close-up shots of archival documents or designed as part of the word cloud I just described, the words may serve in part to evoke the group of players and to identify some of the content the film will cover. But they also draw attention to the way that these very words are more than neutral descriptors of reality. They mark the varied perceptions of those who witnessed the team’s emergence in the early 1990s. And, moreover, they emphasize that those perceptions, embedded in charged fragments of language, not only mediate our retrospective view of that era (“the legacy”), but were already at work in that time, shaping the phenomenon itself and, arguably, playing a part in the erasure to which King alludes, leaving the “legacy,” as narrator Diggs puts it, “in limbo.”

To grasp this fully and, simultaneously, to shed light on why the corpus of 30 for 30 as a whole focuses on this period, it may be helpful to step back and look at what the era—between the arrival of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson into the National Basketball Association (NBA) as rookies in 1979 and the second retirement of Michael Jordan in 1998—signifies in the cultural history of the sport. For many, it appears as a Golden Age in which basketball resolved long-standing racial tensions on and off the court, married the principles of team play to the exciting improvisational aspects of individual play, proved capable of eluding persistent social problems such as drugs, violence, and racism off the court, and became a global economic powerhouse. However, Jordan’s first, unexpected retirement announcement in 1993 generated—even after his return 2 years later—a panicked search to find his heir: an athletic, exciting player who could achieve the same racial crossover consumer appeal of Jordan.

What the league got instead was what has come to be known as the “hip-hop” generation: a cohort of players, in both the college and pro ranks, who showed little interest in manufacturing personas that would appeal to White, middle-class consumers. Instead, even as they continued to innovate new styles of play on the court, they unapologetically displayed the markers—tattoos, hair styled in corn rows or fades, or shaved altogether like the Fab Five, baggy shorts, chains, and of course, rap music—of their challenging upbringing in the urban cores of America that had been devastated by public policy and deindustrialization during the Reagan–Bush era. Both the pro and college game were thus caught during this period in an unresolvable tension between a stoked desire for “black basketball” and an aversion to the unprocessed cultural accompaniments of it (Colás, 2016, p. 122). In the midst of this, media commentary and institutional responses mobilized the myth of creation’s normative notions of basketball as an idea properly embodied only by the right combination of style (unostentatious team play), moral virtue (humility, dues-paying hard work, and self-effacement), and racial transcendence (adherence to cultural markers of Whiteness).

Crucial to all these developments was ESPN itself. Created in 1979, ESPN provided an avenue through which the exploits of Bird, Johnson, Jordan, and a host of college players would be viewed by broader audience than ever before. Their nightly SportsCenter newscast, including the popular Top Ten highlight segment, curated the basketball tastes of a generation (Vogan, 2015). Some basketball purists criticized the network arguing that its showcase of dunks and flashy crossover dribbles incentivized styles of play and values counter to the unselfish, team-first ethos characterizing the true spirit of basketball (Kretchmar, 2008). Nevertheless, the network rapidly grew to occupy a central role in basketball culture during the very same period most often subsequently portrayed in its basketball documentaries. Indeed, much of the archival footage of basketball play in these documentaries comes from ESPN’s own expanding vault (Vogan, 2015). In this sense, the documentaries’ focus on this period entails, for ESPN and those fans who grew up with it, a look in the mirror at their own formative years. But it also implicitly affirms ESPN’s status as self-appointed custodian of the visual remnants of sporting history. And, in this regard, ESPN itself appears as aligned with other entities that safeguard the power to narrate the past by policing the historical archive, such as the University of Michigan athletic department or the University of Kansas, which control access to the banners in the Bentley Library and the original rules of basketball, respectively.

Nearly 3 million viewers tuned in to watch The Fab Five when it aired on March 13, 2011, making it the most popular not only of the 22 basketball-themed films produced by the network, but of all ESPN documentaries (Paulsen, 2011). No surprise, as, in the words of cultural historian Todd Boyd, the Fab Five phenomenon revealed “the changes taking place in college basketball and the culture at large from the 90s through the early 90s” (Boyd, 2008, pp. 142-143). Filmmaker Jason Hehir covers all the important themes regarding the importance of the Fab Five as an athletic and cultural phenomenon, reiterating what historians of the sport, like Boyd, have already emphasized: the players’ distinctive sartorial choices, their style of play and demeanor on the court, their relationship to hip hop, their impact on fans, their stirring victories and heartbreaking defeats, their economic exploitation, and the scandal. But as important as all this information may be, it is not the most important story told by The Fab Five. For the “story that begins” where “the hallways” of the archive end is a tale of the capacity of language and culture—both structuring and structured by the power vectors running through institutions like the media, universities, and the market—to shape the course of events, our memories of the past, and our ability to access and narrate that past.

This may be why language plays such a prominent role in the film. Words spoken by players and members of the media in archival broadcast footage, or taken from archival media clippings, court documents, or the letters penned by Michigan alumni are portrayed as images. These words offer not only snapshots of the past, but are presented as among the constitutive forces that shaped the course of events in the past. They also foreground, unlike the words portrayed and spoken in There’s No Place Like Home, the racial tensions and undertones that inform fantasies about a normative essence of basketball. And to all this language from the past, more words, now exclusively from the present—the voice-over narration, or interviews with participants and witnesses—are added to offer often conflicting interpretations of the words we see and hear on screen.

For example, at one point, a discussion of the significance of trash talk (more, and more charged, words) segues into one of the more chilling appearances of words in the film. By contrast with the creative and affirmative use of language exemplified by trash talk as understood by the players themselves and the journalists who covered them, we are shown the words handwritten and typed by Michigan alumni in letters addressed to Coach Steve Fisher and members of the team. As the camera pans in close-up over the letters referring to players by name or to their “bald heads” and “baggy trunks,” employing racist slurs and leveling threats, Coach Fisher supplies the bare facts: that he received many letters with racist content from Michigan alumni. Players Ray Jackson and Juwan Howard briefly explain the letters brought the players closer together, while teammate Jalen Rose describes the letters as “almost the devil’s work.” But the most striking response, as so often in the film, comes from Jimmy King, whose steady gaze we see in a close-up intercut with more panning close-ups of the letters themselves as he says, “These are from people who went there and, uh, cared a lot”—here King smiles ironically—“about their school and felt like they needed to voice their opinion. And they voiced their opinion. We don’t wanna see five”—the camera cuts back to King, whose eyes look away and eyebrows raise, as if in skepticism or disgust—“niggers on the court. This is not, you know, the Michigan way.” What is, then, the Michigan way, we might ask? Is it to write racist letters threatening violence?

By ironizing his generous articulation of the letter writers’ motivations and repetition of the worst of the racial slurs with subtle facial gestures, King’s speech powerfully defuses—without trivializing—the force of the words on the printed pages. The speech also exhibits the emotional strength, intellectual power, and linguistic agility displayed by all the players, but especially King, throughout the film (Colás, 2012). Thus words, again, become not only an instrument by which the film conveys information about the past, but are explicitly reflected upon as part of the story of that past itself. And, in segments such as this one, the film implies that even telling the story involves an ongoing contest of words, so that the struggle to challenge the official history buried in and by the archive, continues, today, in language. In the end, the film offers no resolution to the conflicts it portrays, whether within the culture of the sport or in relation to the historical past. Though viewers may find this unsettling, it may also provoke them to explore independently the Fab Five phenomenon and the era it symbolizes and to reflect on the possibly obscure motives driving their frustrated desire to get not just a story full of words, but a definitive history.

We may frame the complex political stakes of representing sport history in many different ways. Within the culture of basketball, mythical modes of narrating that history uphold a static image of the game, as though it had not changed in essence since 1891. Whatever changes these myths do accommodate must still conform to the moral parameters supposedly embodied by this static image of the sport. These myths express an unconscious tension with respect to the increased presence and then dominance of young Black men, like the Fab Five, in basketball. Ultimately, they function as what Gilles Deleuze called an “apparatus of capture,” a symbolic and material net extending over moral, tactical, stylistic, and social dimensions of the sport that is used to arrest the experimental creative force of players and the unpredictable chaotic flow of the game (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 424-473). Confronted with the autonomous, creative technical, tactical, stylistic, cultural, and even political innovations of basketball players, these mythic modes either appropriate them to fit preexisting terms, reject them as cancerous foreign bodies, or ignore them entirely. This tendency clearly minimizes or distorts the contributions of the mostly Black players who have driven the sport forward. But it also impairs the ability of fans of the sport to grasp and think critically about the political vicissitudes of historical representation.

Within this context, The Fab Five provides a more complex, if unsettling, view of basketball history and of what it means to approach, understand, and narrate historical events in documentary film than what is offered in There’s No Place Like Home. The latter offers a simplified version of that past and a comforting familiar narrative inviting viewers to partake in a fantasy of directly accessing and possessing it and it is no surprise, given the broader racial politics of basketball culture I have described, that the hero of this film is not a player, let alone a Black player, but rather a White fan. By contrast, The Fab Five centers its story on the athletic, cultural, and political agency of five young Black players and foregrounds the ways in which their ability to narrate their own story may be compromised by the very political and cultural forces they sought to challenge. It suggests, moreover, that the past, comprising distinct material events, broad social forces, and linguistic and cultural expressions, cannot be easily accessed, definitely known, nor, therefore, portrayed through conventionally resolved narrative arcs. The past, viewed in this way, we come to understand, is conflictual, confusing, contradictory, and thus generative of stories; stories that may never end but that may be further unfolded in the future by our own contributions to it in the present.