In Gina Prince-Blythewood’s film Love and Basketball there is a series of scenes in which Lena Wright and Quincy McCall, a girl and boy who grow up together and fall in love around their shared passion for basketball, play one-on-one games that reflect the changes in their relationship in their basketball lives. As preteens they battle on the court over the fact that he cannot accept being beaten by a girl; as young lovers they play strip basketball, connecting their physical love for the game with their physical love; as troubled young adults, they play through injury and psychological pain, which we can see in their striving, emotive bodies. They play their games in domestic spaces – driveways, backyards, bedrooms. There are no spectators (except us), no coaches, no institutional sponsors. When they play they bring their whole loves as characters with them. We know that her mother disapproves of her athleticism and competitive drive; we know that he has been disillusioned by the father he idolized. They are both star players in elite basketball, and we see them playing in those contexts a well. Both make it to the professional leagues (Lena to the brand new WNBA), and we see them competition at the highest levels in the biggest spectacles. But in this film we see not just their official basketball lives but their personal lives, and we see the ways that the game shapes and is shaped by their personalities, their relationships, and the fabric of their everyday experience. We see, in other words, what we can not see in basketball games on TV, which abstract the game from its culture and its connection to the lived experience of its players. Television basketball can provide its audience with knowledge about the game tactics and playing styles, but it cannot otherwise capture the culture of the game, which exists in relationships and histories and local contexts that cannot be broadcast live. In order to see basketball culture represented in mass media, we have to go to the movies.

Television images tend to flatten and narrow experience, simplifying the game so that it fits broadcast conventions and audience expectations. The strict visual and discursive conventions of game coverage tent to simplify and prepackage basketball into an embodiment of sports cliches and corporate values. Television coverage abstracts the game from its lived culture and presents it as pure spectacle, on display so that it can be framed and domesticated. Every game looks the game on TV, because of the exigencies of production conventions, and every game means the same on TV, because of the sociological requirements of sports broadcasting. The game loses the lived complexity present in communities of players in real social circumstances, surrounded by dense local cultures. In TV coverage, the cultural gap between the practice and its representation is at the maximum.

In recent American films about basketball, on the other hand, the representations of the game are fuller, more complex, more realistic. Films capture the culture of the subjective feel of the game, not just its spectacular performances. They take their audiences into practice gyms and pickup games, into schoolyards and backyards, and into local cultures that surround the game and shape the lives that the players bring to the court. Films have this power because the genre of realistic narrative, with its emphasis on character, setting, and point of view, can convey the personal, social, and cultural complexity of the game. The cultural style of the practice lends itself to a media genre that is designed to focus audience attention on personal lives and interactions in a believable visual space. Recent American basketball films, even the ones that are less than satisfying as films, do collectively construct a rich and various portrait of the game. I take it as axiomatic that no representation does full justice to experience, since the rules of its medium always reshape the patterns of the practice, but movies are better adapted to basketball culture than television, with its much more limited narrative resources.

In this analysis of media representations of basketball as a cultural practice, I am evoking two- to some extent – contradictory traditions of thinking about the role of narrative in human understanding. The first sees narrative as falsifying, ideological, deceptive imposition of simplifying structures on complex experience, functioning as a legitimation of prevailing political realities. The second sees narrative as a privileged mode of knowledge that requires its own subjectives and cultural positions but engages with the felt complexity of experience – less detached, less systematic, more engaged, more opportunistic, more improvised than empirical approaches, and therefore more appropriate for cultural studies.

Television’s basketball narratives elicit the first critical tradition for me because they are so highly stereotyped in plot and character and so thin in their physical and social setting. There is a very limited repertoire of plots operating in televised basketball – David versus Goliath stories, vengeance scenarios, transformation narratives – and these plots are imposed on the unfolding events of virtually every game. They demand stock characters, easy to recognize and evaluate, easy to fit into comfortable categories of race and gender and comfortable moral discourse of selflessness and heroism. This radical simplification of events in turn requires a thin sense of context and locale. Simple stories are imposed for the very purpose of repressing the complexity of contexts – television stories must be “universalized,” abstracted, portable, open to many cultural uses. Context and complexity attach stories to the local, the interplay of human histories and styles, the improvised world of daily practices. The purpose of highly stereotyped narratives is to reduce the practices to formulas that serve as conceptual and affective comforts, reassuring reminders of the status quo.

Basketball movies are open to the same critique. They too rely on stereotypes characters and predictable plots, sometimes in the worst Hollywood style. But unlike the simple narratives imposed at the moment of play in live television coverage, basketball movies have the time and techniques necessary to create more complex characters enmeshed in thicker environments, even if they do often sell out to easy plot devices. As a result, they provide more complex and sophisticated narrative understanding of basketball’s everyday culture. Mainstream Hollywood narratives are of course highly conventional, playing to the largest audience possible, but the conventions of realistic fiction, in which a complex and believable character is placed within a recognizable social context and engages in psychologically believable action and interaction, make it an appropriate genre in which to explore the personal, interpersonal and local nature of basketball practices.

Excerpted from “Give and Go: Basketball as Cultural Practice” by Thomas McLaughlin, pp. 195 – 197 (c) 2008 State University of New York Press. All Rights Reserved.