In 2018, journalist Abe Streep published an article in the New York Times Magazine about a basketball team situated on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Arlee, Montana. Three years later he published a greater expanded version of that article as the non-fiction book Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana. Taking a cue from the legendary Oscar-winning documentary Hoop Dreams, the book offers and up and close personal look at members of the high school basketball team populated by teens from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes.
One day, perhaps, a great story like this will be told about a team that never even had a shot at winning the championship, but rest assured this is another tale that derives dramatic conflict and satisfaction from the fact the team at the center is facing all the requisite pressure of pursuing a chance to win the big game as the climax of the story.
Of course, it is also true that most stories such as these tend to focus on the Cinderella story that somehow manages to get to the finals only by overcoming incredible odds working against them and it is here that Streep’s story does part company with tradition. The book details the 2017-2018 season for the Arlee team in which they are not underdogs at all, but are instead attempting to repeat as Montana “Class C” champion after having done the underdog bit the year before.
And, finally, no story that fits comfortably into this sub-genre of the high school athletics narrative can ever really be just about the sports. In addition to drawing upon the reserve of drama that naturally comes with the effort of trying to repeat as champions, the book also explores the social milieu surrounding it in which underprivileged Native American athletes playing who are also Native American students at an underfunded school desperately try to transform the game into a pathway toward a better a future. Of notable interest is the unexpected introduction of a subplot of sorts in which the coach launches an effort to raise awareness of suicide prevention within a community experiencing an unusually high spike among its residents.
