Love & Basketball

A first-time filmmaker tells a story that only she could tell, and does so to incredible effect

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Directed By: Gina Prince-Bythewood
Other Notable Films From Prince-Bythewood: Old Guard, The Woman King, Beyond the Lights
Starring: Sanaa Lathan, Omar Epps, Pedro Cerrano from Major League, the mom from Crooklyn
Screenplay By: Gina Prince-Bythewood
Movie Synopsis: A girl who loves basketball and a boy who loves basketball grow up next door to one another. Over time, they fall in love, break up, then eventually find their way back to one another. 
Signature Line: “Hey… double or nothing.” 

THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context 

I don’t know when exactly he said it, or how exactly he said it, or who exactly he said it to, but the story often told is something close to this:

At some point after he’d become a globally famous trumpet player, somebody asked Miles Davis if he could define what distinguishes truly great records from unremarkable music. He thought about the question for a second, took a pull from the cigarette he was holding between his index and middle finger, looked out from behind a pair of very large sunglasses, and then rasped his answer: “It’s not the notes you play,” Davis said, “It’s the notes you don’t play.” 

It’s a remarkable bit of insight from the person many consider to be the greatest jazz musician to have ever lived. It’s also, as it were, the thought that jumps into my brain whenever I watch Love & Basketball.

There are a large number of things that make Love & Basketball such an enjoyable movie. The casting, of course, is impeccable—Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps, who play Monica and Quincy, the two leads, were the exact right actors caught at the exact right moments in their careers. And the basketball, of course, is wonderful—everybody who stepped onto the court during shooting was either already an accomplished basketball player or underwent months and months of intensive training to look the part. And the soundtrack, of course, is pitch-perfect—each song feels like it was written specifically for whatever moment it is that it arrives at. But what makes the movie truly great is the thing it never does:

Love & Basketball never compromises. 

Not once does it do that. 

Because Gina Prince-Bythewood, in a mammothly impressive debut showing as a big picture director, never allows it to. 

There's no moment where a complicated question gets a straightforward answer. (For example: The most important non-romantic relationship in the movie is between Monica and her mother, and it reaches its apex with a teary-eyed confrontation between the two in which neither can fully grasp why what’s most important to the other is what’s most important to the other.) And there's no moment where a significant conflict is met with a tidy resolution. (For example: Quincy goes five years without speaking to his father after his father cheats on his mother, and when they do finally talk, the conversation ends with both of them seeming to accept that it may be their last.) And, perhaps most crucially, there's no moment where the movie sees Monica prioritize her love for Quincy over her own ambition. (In fact, when Monica is presented with this very proposition as a freshman in college, the dilemma ends with the couple breaking up and Monica eventually moving to the other side of the planet to continue chasing her dream of playing basketball professionally.)  

Love & Basketball never asks its characters to compromise. 

And as a result, the audience never has to either. 

THE VIEWING
A timestamped viewing of Love & Basketball 

0:33: Love & Basketball is a movie is told in four quarters. The First Quarter is Monica and Quincy as children. 

1:18: Three preteen boys—Quincy and his two friends, Kelvin and Jamal—are playing basketball in a driveway. As they shoot around, Jamal says he wants to be like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which prompts Quincy to declare, “You wanna be like Kareem?! Man, all his big butt do is stand by the basket.” That's an incredible way to summarize the career of a guy who, by 1981, had already won six league MVPs and two NBA championships. 

1:32: A new boy wanders over to join the game. Quincy, Kelvin, and Jamal are confused because they heard that their new neighbors only had daughters. The new boy asks if he can play basketball with them, then takes his hat off to reveal that he’s actually a girl (Monica). Quincy jokes to Jamal, “What a dog.” When Jamal warns that Monica can hear him, Quincy loudly responds with, “Nuh-uh, she can only hear dog whistles.” Quincy’s a fucking menace, lol. 

2:15: The group’s playing two-on-two. And Monica is giving these boys the fucking business. It’s just bucket after bucket after bucket. Nobody can stay in front of her. Whenever your teammate starts looking at you like this, that's how you know you’re getting your ass busted by the person you’re supposed to be guarding:

3:28: Monica gets loose for yet another layup against Quincy. He responds the way every guy responds when he’s tired of getting embarrassed by someone on a basketball court: with a flagrant foul. He shoves her in the back right as she jumps, sending her crashing into the yard behind the rim. The result: Her face is all bloodied up because it dragged across the ground as she slid to a stop. This shit turned into an ‘88 Bulls-Pistons playoff matchup real quick. We need Dick Bavetta out here A.S.A.P.

5:36: Quincy and his mom are at Monica’s house. Quincy has a handwritten apology note for Monica and his mom has a store-bought cake for Monica’s mom that she’s pretending she baked herself. That's a crazy first impression to make: “Hi. Sorry about my son calling your daughter a dog and then scarring her face forever. Here’s a grocery store cake that I’m gonna lie to you about. Welcome to the neighborhood!” 

10:40: It’s the next day. Quincy and Monica are supposed to ride their bikes to school together. Quincy, who is impressed either by (a) how Monica looks in a dress, or (b) the fact that she’s somehow still walking around after he Jordan Rules’d her, asks Monica to be his girlfriend. She wants to know the conditions of the relationship. The framework he suggests: “I guess we can… play ball and ride to school together. And when you get mad at me, I gotta get you flowers.” She has a counterproposal. She wants Twinkies to be the default apology gift because she doesn’t like flowers. He agrees, and so now they’re a couple. 

Quincy: I think we outta kiss now.
Monica: For how long?
Quincy: Five seconds?

This is remarkably efficient relationship building. Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes spent the entirety of Romeo + Juliet trying to figure out how to be together, and that movie ended with both of them dead. Quincy and Monica had their whole relationship contract laid out in 45 seconds.  

11:53: Never mind. Everything has just fallen apart. Quincy said that Monica needed to ride on the back of his bike because his dad drives his mom everywhere. Monica, who wants to ride her own bike, says that she doesn’t care what Quincy’s dad says or does because he plays for the worst team in the league (he’s a role player on the Clippers). Quincy shoves her to the ground and calls her a dog again. This time, Monica responds in kind. The way you know an argument with your girlfriend didn’t go the way you wanted it to is if it ends with her doing this to you:

12:03: These kids—Kyla Pratt as Monica and Glenndon Chatman as Quincy—were on screen for less than a dozen minutes and put up two two all-time child actor performances. Great work by them.

12:19: Second Quarter. 1988. Monica and Quincy are high school seniors now. From here on out, Sanaa Lathan is playing Monica and Omar Epps is playing Quincy. 

13:18: By the way, here’s what the turn of the century looked like for Sanaa Lathan: She was in 1998’s Blade, 1999’s Life, 1999’s The Wood, 1999’s The Best Man, 2000’s Love & Basketball, 2002’s Brown Sugar, and 2003’s Out of Time. That's an unreal five-year run. That's the Warriors going to the Finals five years in a row. 

14:52: Monica’s parents are trying to get her to give up on her dream of being a professional basketball player. Her mom (Alfre Woodard, who most will remember as the mom from Crooklyn) tries to convince her that she has other things going for her besides basketball by saying, “You would be pretty if you’d do something to your hair.” It’s like a serious version of that joke in Barbie when Barbie is crying about how she’s not pretty anymore and then a narrator comes on and says, “Note to the filmmakers: Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point.”

16:19: Quincy’s playing in a game now. Regarding movie athletes, Epps is the best there's ever been. And just to be clear here, I don’t mean to say that nobody has ever been as believably athletic as Omar Epps in a movie, I mean to say that no working actor has ever played as wide a range of athletically dominant characters in film. He’s been a professional basketball player (Quincy goes on to play for the Lakers in this movie), a professional baseball player (Major League II), a highly recruited college running back (The Program), a highly recruited college track star (Higher Learning), and also a championship boxer (Against The Ropes). Nobody has a resume that can compete with his.¹

19:59: Quincy and Monica are riding home together after Quincy’s game. Great chemistry together, these two. They’re effortlessly charming, even (and perhaps especially) in the slower, quieter moments. (This right here feels like a good time to mention that, in addition to having been cast together as a couple in The Wood the year before, they were also secretly dating in real life by the time they were shooting this movie.) 

20:04: Monica has a note for Quincy that another girl (Shawnee, played by Gabrielle Union) asked her to pass to him. She reads it to him while he drives. Shawnee wants Quincy to take her to an upcoming dance, promising that if he does she’ll make it worth it for him. Monica laughs at the message, calling the girl a hoe. When Quincy asks Monica if the girl is a hoe just because she wants to sleep with him, she responds, “She’s a hoe cuz she’s sending her coochie through the mail.” I wonder what the postage is for a package like that? It costs about $3 to mail a book to someone. Do you think it costs more or less to mail someone your coochie? 

25:09: It’s later that same night. Quincy’s parents are having a full-on yelling match about his dad (Dennis Haysbert, who most will remember as Pedro Cerrano from Major League) not being around enough. Quincy can hear them fighting through his bedroom wall. After a beat, he gets out of bed, puts a t-shirt on, hops out of his window, wanders across the yard to Monica’s window, then knocks on it. Monica, who was asleep, hears the knocking. She gets out of bed, opens the window, then hands him a blanket and pillow, at which point he lies down on the floor and goes to sleep. The two never say a single word to each other; this is clearly a thing that's happened a bunch of times before. There are a bunch of really warm, really sweet moments in Love & Basketball. I think this one is tops among them. It’s just such a beautiful sequence; the type of interaction that lets you know that Monica and Quincy care deeply about one another. 

29:28: California High School State Championship game. Monica’s team is down by four with under a minute to go. She pulls up for three, drills it, forces a steal, then scores over two defenders to give her team a one-point lead. The ref makes an absolutely atrocious foul call on Monica on the next play, sending her opponent to the free throw line with a chance to get the lead back for her team. TENSE MOMENTS HERE.

29:55: The opponent drills both free throws. Ten seconds left. Monica brings the ball up court, her team down one. We hear her inner dialogue as she dribbles her way into position for what could be a championship-winning shot. As she offers the shot up to the Basketball Gods, she very meekly says, “...Please.” That's not the right mental space you need to be in when you’re shooting a game-winner. You can’t plead with the Basketball Gods in that moment; you have to demand of them. Go back and watch the clip of, say, when Arike Ogunbowale hit the championship-winning 3 in the 2018 NCAAW Tournament. There was no “...Please” in Ogunbowale during that play. There was only “Give me the fucking ball right fucking now.” That's how you gotta be in that moment. Nothing else works. 

Anyway, Monica missed the shot. Game over. They lose the championship by one. Tough break. 

30:40: Incidentally, Monica’s mom isn’t at the game, only her dad and her sister. How do you not go to the state championship that your daughter, a high school senior, is playing in??????? 

34:00: It’s the spring dance at school. Quincy’s there with Shawnee, and Monica’s there with a college guy that her older sister set her up with. (The college guy is played by Boris Kodjoe.) (More on him in the FOOTNOTES video.)

34:15: Quincy’s dancing with Shawnee. He sees Monica in her dress, fully stops dancing, says “Damn!” to himself, then looks at Shawnee and says, “Aye, hold on,” and then walks away to talk to Monica. Quincy is still a fucking menace, lol. 

34:49: Shawnee is jealous that Monica has drawn Quincy’s attention. She wanders over to the two of them, puts her arms around Quincy, then snipes to Monica, “Damn, girl. I didn’t know Nike made dresses.” Great delivery. Great joke. Great writing. Let’s do this scene for the FOOTNOTES…

37:15: It’s the end of the dance. Quincy and Monica look past their dance partners to stare at each other while Roger Troutman’s “I Want To Be Your Man” plays. They’re both figuring out that they love each other. It’s happeninggggggggg. 🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹

42:37: The dance is over. Monica and Quincy are chatting with each other in the yard between each of their windows. Monica has just found out that USC wants to recruit her, which prompts Quincy to reveal that he’s also headed there. He starts to hug Monica after congratulating her, but she leans in and kisses him. Startled, he steps back and asks, “What was that about?” Monica, who is so spun around inside her own head, can only respond with a sheepish, nonsensical, “...I know, right?” Love & Basketball has always been billed as a “romantic sports drama,” because, at its heart, that's what it is, but it’s also secretly a truly great rom-com.

44:21: Monica and Quincy are about to have sex with each other for the first time. As they get ready to do so, they both get naked completely first. Not while they’re kissing or anything, mind you. They’re just there. Taking their clothes off. Until they’re both naked, sitting on the edge on a twin bed. It happens like that in the movies a lot, the thing where both people get fully naked beforehand rather than gradually doing so while making out or whatever. Is that how you’re supposed to do it? Because if so, I’ve been doing it wrong for my entire life. 

45:18: Two things to mention about this sex scene that stand out: (1) The Maxwell needle drop (“This Woman’s Work”) is absolutely wonderful. There was literally no better song to play here. It matches the mood and the moment perfectly. And yet, despite that fact, it’s somehow still only the second best needle drop in the movie. (2) Gina Prince-Bythewood made it a special point to not skip past the part of Quincy reaching for, unwrapping, and then putting on a condom. I’ve read stuff before where people have argued that doing that in a movie or TV show can take the audience out of the scene. I disagree. It’s a great touch here. 

46:48: Third Quarter. 1988-1989. Quincy and Monica are both freshmen at USC. More importantly, though: THEY’RE A COUPLE AGAIN! 

52:15: USC retired Cheryl Miller’s jersey (number 31) in 1986. I mention that here because during an argument in the locker room between Monica and an upperclassman, we get a quick glimpse of a number 31 jersey that’s now been assigned to somebody else hanging in a locker. We never see who that player is, but I have to assume she’s the best one on the team, given that USC was willing to unretire the jersey of the person many consider to be the greatest women’s basketball player to have ever lived. 

53:47: Quincy and Monica are in his dorm room playing one-on-one on a miniature hoop. The stakes of the game: Every time someone scores, the other person has to remove an article of clothing. Adam Silver should adopt this strategy for the NBA All-Star Game. People are always complaining that no one plays real defense during it. I guarantee you the defensive intensity of the game would ratchet up a few notches if guys were suddenly at risk of having their dicks flopping around on TNT during Inside the NBA’s postgame show.  

1:00:19: Quincy and his dad are talking in a sports bar (owned by Spurs legend Terry Cummings, by the way). Quincy’s dad warns him of some distressing news that’ll be public soon: A woman is claiming Quincy’s dad is the father of her child (which is decidedly not ideal, considering that he’s still married to Quincy’s mom). He assures Quincy that it’s not true. Quincy is happy that his dad is such a stand-up guy.  

1:02:41: Gah. Quincy’s mom has photos of Quincy’s dad with the woman. I take back my previous comment. Quincy’s dad is not a stand-up guy. He’s a… lay-down-with-other-women guy. (I’m so sorry.)

1:05:43: Oh, man. Quincy is confiding in Monica about his father betraying the family—and the pain of losing his role model. He wants to keep talking, but Monica’s under a strict curfew set in place by her coach. She offers for him to go back to her room with her but he doesn’t wanna run into anyone he knows. Quincy’s feelings are really hurt that she won’t break curfew for him. Her feelings are really hurt that he’d ask her to break curfew. This sucks. I hate this. 

1:18:41: Things have gone south for Quincy. The reverberations of his father’s betrayal have disrupted the most important parts of his life: We see him play horribly on a basketball court for the first time, pick a fight with Monica for the first time, and show real interest in other women for the first time. It’s all falling apart. This Sucks. I Hate This. 

1:22:19: Oh no. Quincy just broke up with Monica. And he’s DROPPING OUT OF SCHOOL to enroll in the NBA Draft. WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING????? THIS SUCKS. I HATE THIS

1:23:59: Fourth Quarter. It’s five years later. Monica is a star player in a professional basketball league in Spain. Her team is about to play in whatever their version of a championship game is. The coach, a very intense Spanish man, is giving the team a rah-rah speech beforehand. His whole spiel is basically: “Just give the ball to Monica and get the fuck out of the way.” He’s a disciple of the Doug Collins School of Basketball Coaching. 

1:26:10: Jump cut to a post-game dinner between Monica, whose team won the championship, and the upperclassman she used to clash with when they were at USC, who’s now a player on the opposing European team. They’re both homesick for America, but neither can pull the trigger on moving back because there's no professional basketball league for women there yet. (This is three years before the start of the WNBA.) 

1:28:04: Quincy’s dad is sitting in a bar watching the Lakers play the Knicks on TV. Quincy made it to the league, but not as he’d hoped: Rather than achieving his dream of becoming a star player for the Clippers, he achieved my nightmare, which is he’s a bench player for the Lakers. 

1:28:25: The in-game announcer says that Quincy’s checking into the game for Nick Van Exel. That means this has to be the 1994 Lakers, which was a pretty miserable team. They finished that season nine games below .500 and missed the playoffs entirely. They also had zero All-Stars, zero All-NBA First, Second or Third Team picks, and zero All-NBA Defensive First or Second team picks. Their best player was Vlade Divac, who ended up being traded two years later for Kobe Bryant. All the evidence here tells us that Quincy was a Reggie Jordan level NBA player. And if you’re asking yourself, “Who the hell is Reggie Jordan?” that's pretty much the point I’m making right now.² 

1:28:26: Since we’re here: Seven meaningful real-life things that happened in the NBA that season: (1) Michael Jordan unexpectedly retired one month before the season began. (2) The Rockets beat the Knicks to win the first of their back-to-back championships. (3) Penny Hardaway joined the Orlando Magic. (4) Isiah Thomas retired after tearing his Achilles tendon. (5) Magic Johnson coached the Lakers for part of the season, and they were so bad that he refused to return the following year. (6) David Robinson scored 71 points in the final game of the season to win the scoring title. And (7) The Nuggets became the first ever eighth-seeded team to beat a one-seeded team in the playoffs. Okay, back to the movie…

1:28:53: Oh no. Quincy just blew his knee out after a dunk. It would’ve never happened if he was on the San Antonio Spurs, God’s favorite team. 

1:30:43: Quincy’s dad (who hasn’t seen his son in five years) is visiting him in the hospital. He walks in, makes a joke about how Quincy finally made it onto SportsCenter, then blames Quincy for the two having not seen each other in half a decade. This guy sucks. Get him outta here. 

1:32:39: MONICA’S HERE! She came to visit Quincy in the hospital! He’s so happy to see her. TELL HER YOU STILL LOVE HER, QUINCY! DON’T LET HER LEAVE! 

1:35:52: Gah. Quincy has a fiancée. She just showed up. Dump her, Quincy! Dump her! Dump her and be with Monica! 

1:35:59: By the way, Quincy’s fiancée is Tyra Banks. That means all in the same movie he dated Sanaa Lathan, Gabrielle Union, and Tyra Banks. That's up there with Rachel McAdams dating Ryan Gosling and James Marsden in The Notebook, or Reese Witherspoon dating Tom Hardy and Chris Pine in This Means War. Quincy might be Reggie Jordan on the basketball court, but he is apparently Michael Jordan in the bedroom.

1:37:15: Monica’s talking to her mom about Quincy’s upcoming wedding. She wants Quincy back and asks her mom what to do about it. Her mom’s response: “Find out where they’re registered and send them a gift.” This lady sucks. Get her outta here. She should date Quincy’s dad. 

1:39:10: Monica and her mom are arguing about the merits of their respective life choices. Sanaa Lathan and Alfre Woodard are so fucking good in this scene. They feel like an actual mom and daughter who for real lived in the same house for 18 years but never figured out how to connect with one another. There’s clearly a lot of love between the two, but it doesn’t translate to understanding. It’s all guarded emotions and measured confrontations. Top level acting. 

1:41:50: Jump cut montage. Quincy is rehabbing his knee, Monica has taken a job at the bank with her father, both are trying to work up the courage to talk to the other, and the clock is ticking down as Quincy’s wedding creeps closer and closer. SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING, GODDAMNIT. 

1:43:25: One of the things that makes Gina Prince-Bythewood such a great writer and director is the subtlety with which she crafts a moment. Take this one, for instance. Monica has just come home from a day of work at the bank. As she wobbles her way up the yard in her high heels and business attire, Quincy approaches. The two of them haven't talked since she saw him in the hospital several months prior. But they’re talking now, and the brilliance of the scene is two-fold: 

Firstly, they never get around to saying exactly what it is that we know they need to say. They talk in subtext. We hear them discuss his wedding, and her job, and how they’ve both begun to drift away from basketball. But we also see them wordlessly pleading with the other person as their eyes and their tone and their posture have an entirely different conversation. “I miss you. I love you. You’re the person I’m supposed to spend my life with. And the fact that you’re not with me is why my lifelong love of basketball has turned into a sad, shapeless mist. So say that you love me. Say that you need me. Say that I’m your other half. If you say it, I’ll say it.” It’s the conversation (or lack thereof) that sends them toward each other later that night. 

The second brilliant thing is that this all happens in the exact same spot where they became a couple for the first time as kids. They’re on the same sidewalk, and in front of the same tree, and standing in the same position relative to one another, and even wearing philosophically similar clothes (Monica in skirt, Quincy in a shirt with buttons). It would’ve been really easy to make a meal of this moment. But Gina Prince-Bythewood plays it with the deftness of someone who is completely confident in her own style, and her own judgement, and her own visual language. It’s expert craftsmanship. 

1:47:41: HERE WE GO, BABY. It’s nighttime. Monica’s tossing around restlessly in her bed. She knows she needs to go talk to Quincy. She knows it has to be right now. She climbs out of her window, knocks on his, and gets him to come outside. She’s finally saying the things she wanted to say earlier. (She tells him that she wants to be with him, that she’s loved him since she was eleven.) He tries to walk away. He says that he’s angry that she’s telling him this two weeks before his wedding, but she knows he’s still speaking in subtext. He wants her to fight for him. And so that’s what she does:

Monica: I’ll play you.
Quincy (confused): What?
Monica: One game. One-on-one.
Quincy (realizing what’s happening): For what?
Monica: …Your heart.

This movie fucking rules. 

1:51:08: Game on. Both parties have agreed on the terms: If Monica is victorious, Quincy leaves his fiancée and begins his new life with Monica. If Monica loses, she buys Quincy and his fiancée a wedding present. First one to five wins. Ball up top. 

1:51:26: Monica tests Quincy’s knee with her first move, hitting him with a shot fake and then zipping past him for an easy layup. 1-0, Monica. 

1:51:39: Monica tests Quincy’s knee again, this time jab-stepping to get him off balance and then pulling up for a midrange jumper. Splash. 2-0, Monica. 

1:51:52: Monica tests Quincy’s knee for a third time, crossing him over so thoroughly that he’s still facing the completely wrong direction as she scores behind him. This is a brilliant (and ruthless) in-game strategy by Monica. She knows his weakness and is constantly attacking it. She’s up 3-0. She’s talking shit now, too. (“Where’s the D? You sleepy? Your knee hurt?”) She’s a shark in an aquarium with a seal. If she keeps this strategy up, Quincy is done for.

1:52:09: Uh-oh. She got a little too cocky. Rather than using her speed against him, she tried backing him down. He immediately overpowered her, blocked her shot, then scored. He took his knee brace off, shoved her, pulled up from deep for another bucket, then splashed in a third consecutive shot before she could even react. Just like that, tie game. 3-3. NERVOUS TIMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. 

1:52:42: (Right here is when Meschell Ndegeocello’s “Fool of Me” kicks on. Remember earlier when I said that the Maxwell needle drop was the second best needle drop of the movie? Here’s your first place winner. No hyperbole, no joke, no exaggeration, it’s one of the 50 greatest needle drops in movie history. It’s just such a moody, affecting, almost haunting song. It feels like loss, or like what would play while your body was slowly evaporating into nothingness.³ The scene itself is already incredible. When this song kicks in, though, it becomes bonafide movie magic.) 

1:53:10: Lots of hand fighting and physical defense from Monica, but it’s not enough. Quincy is looking like USC Quincy right now rather than Los Angeles Lakers Quincy. He’s unguardable. He just hit another stepback jumper. Game point. 4-3. Now he’s talking shit. (“I don’t hear you talking. I don’t hear you.”) She’s panicking. 

1:53:36: MONICA SWIPED AT THE BALL AS QUINCY GATHERED IT FOR WHAT WOULD’VE BEEN THE GAME-WINNING LAY-UP, GETTING JUST ENOUGH OF IT TO KNOCK THE BALL OUT OF HIS HANDS! SHE SCORED AGAIN! TIE GAME! 4-4! IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THIS! (POOR TYRA BANKS IS PROBABLY AT HOME FLIPPING THROUGH WEDDING MAGAZINES DAYDREAMING ABOUT WHERE SHE AND QUINCY ARE GONNA GO ON THEIR HONEYMOON, MEANWHILE HER FUTURE IS BEING DECIDED BY A PICKUP BASKETBALL GAME CURRENTLY TAKING PLACE IN A LOS ANGELES DRIVEWAY.)

1:54:14: Okay, let me tell you what I thought was gonna happen here, and what I suspect most people who watch Love & Basketball for the first time think is going to happen here. What I thought was gonna happen was the game was gonna get to 4-4, as it has, and then on the last possession Monica and Quincy would jostle around for a bit, kind of playing defense and offense but also suddenly kind of not. And then as each person realized that the other person wasn’t trying their hardest anymore, the game would come to a stop. And they’d just be standing there staring at each other for a couple seconds. Then one of them would say something beautiful, and then the other would say something beautiful back, and then whoever was holding the basketball would drop it, and then they’d kiss. That's what I thought was gonna happen. That's what I thought Gina Prince-Bythewood was building toward. Neither person wins the basketball game, but both people win the larger prize. That's how I expected the moment was going to play out. That's what I thought was gonna happen.

What I did not think was gonna happen was that Quincy was going to snatch a rebound off the rim, size up Monica, plant his shoulder into her chest, and then fucking SHAQUILLE O’NEAL ON CHRIS DUDLEY power dunk her and the ball through the rim. I did not see that coming. I absolutely did not see that coming. Game over. Quincy wins. 5-4.⁴ Devastation. 

1:55:10: Quincy’s response after winning the game: An icy, defiant “All’s fair in love and basketball, right?” Monica is heartbroken. She’s walking away. This is the worst day of my life. 

1:55:29: But then…

1:55:34: …

Quincy calls to her. 

She stops. 

The music fades out. 

It’s just the two of them, the silence of the night, and the history they’ve shared together across the tangle of their lives. 

And he says one of the most beautiful, most textured, most layered lines that's ever been said in a movie: 

“...Double or nothing.”

I’M GONNA FUCKING CRY.

1:57:30: Time jump a couple years. The WNBA has been invented, Monica is the starting point guard for the Los Angeles Sparks, and she and Quincy are married and have a daughter together. What an ending. What a final stretch. What an absolutely perfect final fifteen minutes.

1:57:52: The movie’s over. Good movie.  

ACCIDENTAL SIMILARITIES
Things that last week’s movie (Kill Bill) has in common with this week’s movie 

• Both movies have chapter sequences. 

• Both movies have scenes where the heroine is lying on the ground and her face is bloodied after being sneak-attacked by a guy.

• Both movies have scenes where the heroine travels overseas to get something she can’t attain in America. (In Kill Bill, it’s the Hattori Hanzo sword. In Love & Basketball, it’s a professional basketball career since the WNBA hasn’t yet been founded.) 

• Both movies have scenes where someone visits someone in a hospital. 

• Both movies have scenes where someone is supposed to marry someone but it ends up not actually happening.  

• Both movies have ending moments that reveal the heroine has a daughter.

THE LAST BITS
Things that I Googled while watching Love & Basketball 

• Does Sanaa Lathan have a scar on her face in real life? She does. According to a 2007 Esquire article, she got it as “the result of an unfortunate childhood encounter with an oven and a lump of Play-doh.”

• How long has Sanaa Lathan been playing basketball? She actually never played before Love & Basketball. She said during an interview on The Jennifer Hudson Show in 2024 that she was able to mimic the moves of a basketball player because she has a background in dance. I genuinely thought she’d been playing her whole life the first time I watched this movie. I can’t believe how good she got with just a few months of training.

• What’s Omar Epps up to these days? He’s still acting. He had a 30-episode arc on the TV series Power Book III: Raising Kanan and last year he was in a Lee Daniels movie called The Deliverance with Mo’Nique, Cruella DeVil, and Lucas from Stranger Things. 

• Where can I stream Major League II (1994)? Omar Epps plays leadoff hitter Willie Mays Hayes in Major League II. It’s not that great of a movie, but he is wonderful in it. There's a really great scene in it where he shows a teammate the trailer of an action movie his character is starring in alongside Jesse Ventura called Black Hammer, White Lightning. It’s a legitimately hilarious bit. (You can rent Major League II on Amazon Prime for $4.) 

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Next week’s movie: The Departed (2006)

You can rent it for $4 from all the places you rent movies from. 

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This essay was edited by Hannah Giorgis. The FOOTNOTES video was produced by Richie Bozek.

1. The only person close is Morris Chestnut.

2. Reggie Jordan was a journeyman NBA player who bounced in and out the league for six years in the ‘90s. He played 23 games for the Lakers in 1994.

3. In 2020, ESPN did an oral history of Love & Basketball. For part of it, they talked to Ndegeocello. She said that she wrote “Fool of Me” because “Someone I had deep emotions for all of a sudden cared nothing at all about me, as if I had never existed.”

4. Incidentally, it would’ve made absolutely no sense for the game to end the way that I thought it was going to end. In fact, it would’ve undone everything we’d watched the characters do and say for the whole movie. The game had to end exactly the way Prince-Bythewood wrote it.