Nearly 10 years ago, I remember hearing about a crazy high-school basketball coach who locked his undefeated team out of the gym for poor academic performance in Richmond, California—about 40 miles west of my home town. As a suburb of Oakland, it shares many of the same neighborhood issues, such as street gangs, drug problems, and violence. In this dramatization, as in real life, Ken Carter (Samuel L. Jackson) takes the tough-love approach in order to teach the young men there's more to life than basketball.