It wouldn’t quite be accurate to call Untold: Shooting Guards a tale of two halves, but it’s pretty close. At a certain point in the 85-minute feature from Walter Thompson-Hernandez, things take a turn. The story becomes a sad cautionary tale about the pressures of sporting success, celebrity, and disgrace, kick-starting a run of severe misjudgements and culminating in a sadly avoidable tragedy. Before that, though – and remember, this is the part most people are interested in – it tells what is possibly the pettiest high-profile sports story in history.
You might recall it. In fact, you almost certainly do, which is somewhat bucking the trend of Netflix’s Untold series, which largely shines a light on lesser-known sports stories like drug scandals and sailing championships. Shooting Guards is much closer to something like Malice at the Palace, which was about the NBA’s biggest brawl. But where that film felt like it was unravelling valid and complex systemic issues and emotional overspills that had far-reaching implications for the league, Shooting Guards feels like it’s gradually revealing how ridiculous what happened in the Washington Wizards’ locker room on Christmas Eve, 2009, really was.
What happened was that Wizards players Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton pulled guns on one another. It was a silly display of macho showmanship, still partially a joke, at least as far as Arenas was concerned, stemming from a dispute over a card game and several threats that clearly weren’t to be taken especially seriously (Crittenton threatened to shoot Arenas in his surgically repaired knee, and when Arenas countered the knee was already ruined, Crittenton said he’s shoot the good one instead.)
After a heated but ultimately uneventful stand-off in which Arenas left two of his flashiest guns by Crittenton’s locker accompanied by a note instructing him to choose one, and Crittenton responded by throwing one of the guns across the room and pulling out his own that he had brought with him, both players considered the incident over. And then the D.C. press got hold of the story thanks to a leak, causing a media firestorm and the NBA Commissioner at the time, David Stern, to hand down performatively lengthy suspensions.
The careers of both players were irrevocably altered, but Crittenton came off much worse. He was a rookie player, whereas Arenas was a beloved household name who was putting up record-breaking numbers, so his ostracisation from the league was instant and total. He returned home to the Atlanta projects with a target on his back thanks to his fame and fortune, leading to several robberies, a wholly misguided revenge mission, and the death of Jullian Jones, an innocent and uninvolved 22-year-old mother of four.
Crittenton was sentenced to 23 years in prison and was released in 2023 after serving ten of them. Untold: Shooting Guards posits a theory for why his sentence was cut so short without the consent of the Jones family, but the angle is under-explored, a mere footnote in a broader story that is less about the NBA’s cultural power and influence and more about how two men from very different backgrounds were thrust into a combustible situation.
Gilbert Arenas in Untold: Shooting Guards | Image via Netflix
Both Arenas and Crittenton were extensively interviewed for the film and offer their own version of the events leading up to and immediately following the locker room clash. Arenas, raised in Los Angeles by an aspiring actor single father and growing up around celebrities, obscured his worries about not being good enough by adopting a comedian persona. Crittenton, on the other hand, was raised almost exclusively by women in impoverished Atlanta and believed strongly in getting and giving respect. In other words, he wasn’t inclined to take the kind of jokes and pranks that Arenas thrived on. They were chalk and cheese, and their clash was inevitable.
But the film makes no secret of how silly that clash was. Everything from the card game that led to the initial disagreement all the way to Arenas’ giddy excitement over getting to the locker room early to plant the guns, smacks of playground antics getting out of hand. Their various teammates, who all feature, reiterate this idea. And it’s perhaps this feeling of pettiness, of being completely avoidable, that gives the latter portion about Crittenton’s spiral more emotional power. This section also lets Crittenton do the talking almost exclusively, allowing room for the family of his victim to have their say, keeping the less-serious Arenas sidelined.
Arenas, in my view, doesn’t come across especially well in Untold: Shooting Guards, but his later acknowledgement of the impact of his needling on Crittenton’s life rings true, as does his admission that he deserved his lengthy suspension because he was essentially using NBA private planes to smuggle firearms across the country to develop his personal collection. The two men are still in contact, and the film, which is shot and edited with real skill, seems to implicitly understand their dynamic and how to frame the overarching narrative. There’s one shot in particular that settles on Crittenton’s contemplative face as Arenas recounts the various insults and wind-ups he threw at him, as if they’re rattling around his head again, which is wonderfully done.
Ultimately, this story is one that’s fascinating primarily because of how mundane so much of it is. The implications of the event were so far-reaching and permanent that it’s a struggle to comprehend how pointless and silly the actual event was. Multiple lives and careers were ruined, and one was even lost, all because of two men bickering over cards on a private plane. Like all good documentaries, this one’s a reminder that life is a strange old thing.
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