Mike Tollin

None had obviously played a minute of NBA ball.

One was playing in like, you know, Greece and Turkey and thought he was as good as Derek Fisher and, you know, just didn't get the breaks and luck was against him.

One had been in and out of jail.

One was like a club promoter.

But they were still, you know, kind of living that dream and hanging out in Morningside.

Remember, we were the state champs.

It's fucking depressing.

My mom always said, you know, you're jealous of the big man on campus.

There was a kid in my high school who was the three sports superstar who's now selling shoes at Macy's.

You don't want to peak too soon, right?

Yeah.

I peaked at 17.

So speaking, I mentioned Allen Iverson, who was one of those kids who was, you know, sort of zipped through the system in Hampton, Virginia.

And you probably remember the bowling alley incident where he actually went to jail in high school for sort of a gang fight.

One of the shows in 30 for 30, the ESPN documentary series, is following that incident and kind of dissecting it and what happened in sort of a race war.

That's overstating it.

Steve James, who did Hoop Dreams, actually grew up in Hampton, and so he was intimately involved, knew the family, played ball there himself, and he's now gone back and done this really amazing and thorough look back at Allen and how that shaped his character and what it did to divide this town and all.

It's

Kind of amazing, you know, you think of ESPN as kind of like the bully on the block who just devours all of the rights to everything, every sporting event, it does whatever it wants.

So these guys decided for their 30th anniversary that they basically wanted to just sort of give over the territory to filmmakers.