Basketball Movie Review
No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson
Steve James returns to Hampton to examine the 1993 bowling-alley case that almost swallowed Allen Iverson's future before Georgetown, Philadelphia and global fame.
A better cultural companion to an Iverson career documentary because it stays with the unresolved local history underneath one of basketball's most famous origin stories.
Movie details
2010 · 1h 20m · Documentary · Drama
Director Steve James
- Allen Iverson
- Ann Iverson
- Hoop Dreams director Steve James directed No Crossover for ESPN's 30 for 30 series, revisiting his hometown of Hampton, Virginia.
- The documentary examines the February 1993 bowling-alley brawl, Iverson's conviction and the racial divisions surrounding the case before his Georgetown career.
01
The Take
No Crossover refuses the clean superstar-biography structure. Steve James goes back to Hampton, Virginia, where a 1993 bowling-alley brawl, competing witness accounts, race, policing and a high-profile conviction divided the city before Iverson ever became an NBA icon. The adult fame never makes the teenage story simpler.
02
Does the Basketball Hold Up?
Basketball sits just outside the courtroom but changes the stakes of everything inside it. Iverson was already a transcendent high-school athlete with a future people could imagine, so the case becomes inseparable from questions about who gets protected, punished, believed and allowed to keep moving toward opportunity.
03
Best Basketball Moment
The archival high-school material around Iverson, because every glimpse of the player he already was sharpens the question of how close that basketball future came to disappearing completely.
04
Ball Cred
Hoop Dreams director Steve James made the film for ESPN's 30 for 30 series and returned to the Virginia community where Iverson's high-school career and criminal case collided.