logo

43 pages 1 hour read

Paul Volponi

The Final Four

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2012

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Themes

Teams Versus Individuals

Basketball is played by a team of individuals. The five members of the team on the court must come together to beat their rivals, working as a single unit to achieve results. However, the difference between the team and the individual components becomes a key theme in The Final Four. McBride embodies the individual. He puts himself first in everything he does, including placing his hand above all the others in the pre-game ritual and staying alone on the court at the end of the second overtime. He cannot trust others because he feels the world has let him down, whether in life or in the game. His individualism is born from a desperate desire to save the ones he loves from a life of poverty. He embraces this responsibility and believes that he alone can solve the issue. McBride embodies the idea of the individual, but even he cannot succeed without the rest of his team.

The idea of the team is represented by Bacic. He may be the star player for the Trojans, but everything he does is in service of the group. He places the importance of the team above everything. This means that Bacic behaves very differently from McBride. He passes when he could shoot, he accepts the coach’s authority, and he provides warm friendship to his teammates, encouraging them in a positive way even when they make mistakes. He acts in a way that McBride cannot understand because both men conceive of the idea of the individual in a different way. Bacic understands that his team succeeds because of their unity. He accepts the responsibility of being a leader on the team by putting the team first. Bacic melds the team rather than dragging it forward.

McBride eventually learns the importance of teamwork. He helps his team to succeed and appreciates MJ for taking a shot even though he could have passed to McBride. Then, in the final, an emotionally and physically exhausted McBride is unable to drag his team to success. After the tournament, he gets a tattoo commemorating the Spartans. They did not win the tournament, but the lessons he learned about the difference between the team and the individual have a profound effect on him. The tattoo shows that he values the team as much as he values the memory of his dead sister. He comes to understand that the team is the foundation that allows him to succeed.

Exploitation in College Sports

The college sports system prevents athletes from receiving any financial or material reward for their work other than a scholarship to the school they represent. They cannot receive sponsorship money, gifts, or other donations. The exploitation of college athletes is a theme in the book, and McBride is an outspoken critic of this system. He does not understand why the schools can use the athletes to make money, often amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, while the athletes cannot receive any benefits themselves. He compares this system to “slavery.” College basketball may have turned McBride into a star, and it may allow him to earn money in the future, but he refuses to accept exploitation of any kind. His criticism becomes a big story in the media.

McBride is the most outspoken character on the theme of exploitation, but he is not alone. The other characters agree with him, including players, coaches, and media personalities. MJ does not agree with McBride on anything, but he praises McBride’s public statements. The coaches benefit from the system, but they admit in an interview that it may not be fair. Even the television announcers admit that they agree with McBride, but perhaps not to quite the same degree or using the same language. Everyone in the college basketball system acknowledges that exploitation exists, but they rarely criticize the arrangement in the stark terms used by McBride.

All of the constituent parts of the machine are aware of the unfairness, but they cannot bring themselves not to be involved. The criticism of the college system is strong throughout the book, but no one ever considers not taking part. Every critic, even McBride, continues to operate within the exploitative system. MJ’s essay on the social order of street basketball acknowledges the existence of people who walked away from the system or were ruined by it. This acknowledgement hints at the people who rejected the college basketball system and were made to suffer as a result.

The system exploits people and gives them no choice but to take part in it. The fiercest critics of exploitation are part of the same exploitative system. There seems to be no escape and no way to resolve the inherent flaws in an exploitative system, other than to not take part. The athletes, the coaches, and the media personalities can either accept the exploitation or leave. As they can see no other option, the exploitation is allowed to continue.

Escaping Poverty

The characters in The Final Four are very different, but a common theme among them is their desire to escape poverty. None of the four main characters are from wealthy backgrounds. McBride has set his sights on the millions offered by professional sports to help lift his family out of the crushing poverty that he blames for his sister’s death. Bacic uses basketball to get an education that will allow him to remain in America and not return to a country that has been ravaged by war. Rice is from a more modest background, and he refuses to accept money or gifts, so he works hard to pay for an engagement ring. MJ is not as poor as McBride, but he is also not wealthy. He knows that he will not be a professional basketball player, but he welcomes the opportunity and the college education the sport provides as it will help him avoid poverty in the future. The young men are all keenly aware of their relationship to wealth, particularly as they do not have much for themselves and the college system prevents them from earning what they feel they deserve.

Escaping poverty is a dangerous game. McBride’s talent on the court offers him an escape, but it also makes him a target. Agents, sponsors, and other people circle around him like vultures, while his sister is killed by a random act of violence when she tries to help a friend. Coach Barker warns McBride about people who seek to exploit him while at the same time recruiting him to be a part of an exploitative college basketball system. This warning shows how those who try to escape poverty become targets for greedy, cynical people. McBride has to worry not only about money but also about people who want to steal from him or endanger his career. His escape and his struggle are not played out only on the court but in every moment of his life.

Poverty exists beyond the four main characters. The Boyce family explains how they and thousands of others were affected by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. They lost everything and experienced terrible conditions in the aftermath of the storm. Their experience is a reminder that a person’s fortunes can change in a flash and random chance can take away any good fortune. Escaping poverty is only part of the problem when larger structural issues can fail so many people. So many of the characters are affected by poverty that they share a mutual understanding of the desperate lengths people go to in order to avoid poverty. A desire to escape poverty and to avoid returning to poverty unifies the characters and becomes a common theme they can all understand.

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text