It has been a pleasant surprise that ESPN, a station known mostly for it’s live sports coverage and commentary, has contributed some of the best narrative programming of the last year.

The documentary series “30 For 30,” celebrating the network’s thirtieth anniversary, has used gifted filmmakers (not just from the sports world) to revisit some of the more profound sports stories of this period. These movies go beyond athletic cliches to tell complex stories about how sports inform and reflect society around them.

Iverson, not on his best day.

The series already has one certifiable classic under it’s belt in Muhammed and Larry. Documentary legend Albert Maysles recalls the painful 1980 bout where a punchdrunk, past-his-prime Ali came out of retirement, forcing tortured champion Holmes to unpopularly hammer on a living legend for ten rounds. That movie stands among the best sports documentaries ever, but No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson (only the tenth in this series) is even better.

Hampton native Steve James has continued to be a respected documentarian for well over a decade, but his career will always stand under the shadow of Hoop Dreams. This epic documentary is one of the great American movies. James followed two Chicago high school prospects over four years and came up with an endlessly deep story about much more than basketball. Hoop Dreams winds up being about no less than America itself, particularly the intersections of race, inequality, and exploitation that complicate it.

James was in Chicago finishing Hoop Dreams when Iverson was arrested, and regretted not being able to cover this extraordinary story unfolding in his own hometown. Seventeen years later, he has used the ESPN series to revisit Hampton and the incident that practically tore it in half. No Crossover is only half as long as Hoop Dreams and smaller in focus, but it has the same strengths in using a story about an athelete to explore broader themes in American life. Perhaps because Iverson himself unsurprisingly declined to participate, the movie becomes as much about Hampton as it does the basketball hero.

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Hampton doesn’t come off great, but it doesn’t come off terribly unusual for America in general, or the South/Mid-Atlantic in particular. There is poverty. There is crime. There are broken families. There is class divide. There is racial divide. What is amazing is how an incident involving a young black athelete has the power to pull these differences into sharp, passionate relief. Even years later, the people of Hampton James speaks with talk of the incident like it was yesterday, and are dead set on their opinion of what happened.

It can be determined that Iverson was in a bowling alley with a group of young black people who wound up in a chair throwing brawl with a group of older white people. A few seconds of shakey video illuminates little. One can’t make faces out of the altercation, nor tell who is doing what to whom. Testimony of witnesses and participants vary wildly and along unambiguously racial lines. Nearly everybody who wasn’t there, however, seems entirely convinced of what happened. Iverson was quickly escorted out before violence erupted after the white group started assaulting the teenagers with racial slurs. Or the perfectly nice white party was interrupted from minding their own business by an unprovoked attack by a group of feral vicious savages, including Iverson, accused of smashing a chair on an innocent female bystander. Hampton seems to still be stuck in this shitty racist Rashomon scenario.

All the video reveals is what one may call a melee or, more elegantly, a clusterfuck. Beyond sharply contradictory testimony, there is little evidence suggesting a compelling case for the truth beyond a hunch, or which side one chooses to side with. This is why it was so incendiary when four young black men, Iverson included, were arrested and zero middle-aged white men were arrested. Then the young men were tried as adults. Then, with one exception, they were found guilty by a judge and sentenced 3 to 5 years each (a whopping five for Iverson). Departing governor Doug Wilder–the nation’s first black governor, incidentally–pardoned him four months later, and the original case was found to suffer from insufficient evidence. Still, Iverson’s life came very close to going very differently.

It is inescapable that Iverson’s race and celebrity inform nearly every situation and response surrounding the controversy. Were he not a genius athelete, surely his arrest wouldn’t have gained such notice, or maybe he wouldn’t have been arrested at all. The perverse severity of the five year sentence (unheard of for regular joes who are actually proven to have smashed chairs on women in public) was certainly motivated by his celebrity. The massive organized support from sections of the black community is just as star specific. This gets carried to a comic extreme when the various conspiracy theories emerge.

Sports stories are good for taking a look at people and communities, because as a society we tend to identify with and idolize our teams and atheletes all out of proportion, positively and negatively. Iverson has pouted before that all of the trouble he’s gotten into over the years have prevented people from seeing “the real me.” While such complaints are heavy on self-pity, there probably is some truth there, in at least the fact that our passion for and against atheletes grotesquely obscures and distorts whatever real humanity might lay behind the image.

Iverson particularly is an ideal object for fans and haters to exorcise their own issues on. I liked him initially because of the local connection and then from the beauty of watching him play. At only six feet, I buy the hype that he may be the most talented player, inch-for-inch, in NBA history. I also liked his association with hip-hop culture (indeed, he would actually be a rapper if David Stern hadn’t put the kibosh on that), complete with corn rows and tats just in case there was an old person out there he hadn’t already scared or offended. Like the best rappers, he’s emotional and crammed to the gills with fascinating contradictions that alienate just as many as they entrance. Unlike the previous generation’s hero, Jordan, the selfless superstar who made his teams better, Iverson’s apparent disability to stay cooperative with coaches and teammates for more than a month or so at a time seems to have kept him from the championship that would validate him as one of the greats.

There is much to love and hate about Allen Iverson, and on most points the choice is yours. Icon or thug? Perserverence or defiance? They might not be mutally exclusive. The whole city of Hampton can’t seem to agree to this day. There is, thankfully, a little more subtlety and diversity on display. Characters both white and black express views that are all the more surprising when everybody else seems to cloy to predictable opinions.  he legal savior for Iverson’s support appears to be a gay man. James personalizes the story with the context of his own Hampton basketball history and conversations with his mother, a post-integration public school nurse.

Ultimately James has made a great sports documentary, again proving himself a master of the form. He has also provided Hampton with a look at who it was and, possibly, what it still is in many ways.