Question: how do you possibly make yet another story about an underdog athletic team worth the effort to get to the part they win the big game? Well, of course, you could go retro by taking the route of the original Rocky and have the underdog actually lose the big game (match). And since it’s been so long that anyone adopted the one single original thing about the original Rocky that taking this tack would actually seem inspired and original all over again. Or, you could take the route which Abe Streep takes in his true-live tale titled Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana.
So, just how exactly does Streep go about making an undergo athletic tale worth getting to the big game? That’s an answer almost as long as the book’s subtitle and twice as necessary to explain. In the first place, as the subtitle indicates, this is a sports story that takes place on a Native American reservation. And while there are lots are great sports stories featuring Indians and Redskins and Chiefs and Braves, there are precious few of them featuring actual Native American athletes. (Actually, before the appearance of this book, there was really only one: the Jim Thorpe story and that has a terrible ending.) So right there, in telling the story of a high school on a reservation that hasn’t gamed the system to draft black and white superstars from outside the district, but is actually competitive because their centers and guards and forwards really represent the indigenous tribes populating the reservation, you’ve got a story that makes Rocky Balboa losing to a guy named Apollo look like a pathetic stitching together of overused B-movie tropes.
But wait, there’s more. Pretend for a moment that you are movie studio executive trying to justify your outrageous salary and Streep comes to you and tells you he’s got a sure thrilling sports movie leading t the big game with the twist that the players are Native Americans attending school on America’s most shameful ground. Well, how do you top that? What do you possibly come up with to add to it that will justify your salary and keep you from getting fired? You think and think and then, suddenly, it comes. Wait, you tell Mr. Streep, instead of making the story about this underfunded, undervalued, underperforming school on a reservation nobody’s ever heard defying expectations and making it all the way to the championship game—which, unlike Rocky, they are good enough to win—how about you instead make it a story where the champs themselves are the underdogs? Sure, the Arlee Warriors were mighty enough to pull off the Cinderella gambit and prove to all of Montana how they should never discount the underdog. But what is a bigger underdog than a team nobody expects to win? A team that that has already won it all and nobody expects to repeat because, hey, that first time had to be a complete fluke, right? You just saved the whole studio because nobody has ever told that story before? Native American basketball players who are both the champion and the underdog? That is gold!
But wait, there’s more. Since the story is now about a team trying to repeat as champion and not a story about the underdog, what you gain in the form of “it’s never been done” you lose in the form or heart. You can have a sports story with heart when the underdogs are already the champs. And so here is the final way you make yet another underdog athletic story worth getting to the big game: you add in the real-life heartbreaking fact that at the time this story was taking place the state of Montana held the dubious distinction of being number one in the country for the rate of suicide. And an enormous chunk of that state-wide epidemic was taking place on Native American reservations. Therefore, it is simply a case of statistical probabilities that suicide impacts members of the basketball team. But it is nothing more than pure heart in action that the team unanimously adopts suicide awareness and prevention as a social issue around which to rally and about which their popularity can do actually do something positive about.
And that is how Brothers on Three manages to pull off the seemingly impossible: making yet another story about an athletic underdog worth reading.
