Falling Short

Because a significant part of the plot focuses on Isaac’s love of basketball and Marco’s quest to make the school basketball team, the game plays a central role in the story. Cisneros uses basketball to convey lessons about more than just a single sport, however; the game of basketball functions as a symbol of the many challenges that people face in life, including the novel’s protagonists.

When Marco first decides to try out for the team, he believes that learning basketball will be easy. However, he finds that academic ability does not necessarily translate to a different skill set like learning to play ball. Marco works very hard to get better at basketball, despite not having much natural athletic talent, supporting the story’s thematic exploration of The Importance of Resilience and Perseverance. The game is more complex than it looks, and ultimately Marco makes more progress when his best friend, Isaac, becomes his teacher. This underscores the importance of The Role of Friendship in Overcoming Challenges.

Isaac’s dedication to the sport characterizes him as hardworking and more capable than he realizes. Although he reductively claims that basketball is all he is good at, as he broadens out his goals to include academics, it is clear that he can also be hardworking and capable in other areas of his life. The personal skills he has learned through basketball help him persevere in getting Marco’s difficult math homework done in Chapters 29 and 30, for instance, and show him the path toward succeeding academically: “My old basketball coach used to say that practice makes perfect, […] “I need to apply that to schoolwork, too” (253). Through basketball, the boys learn important lessons about overcoming life’s challenges: As Marco explains in Chapter 46, it “isn’t about winning or losing” (251), it’s about working hard and helping others to do the same. In the final chapter told from Isaac’s perspective, Isaac says that he will not give up on improving his grades, now that he knows “how much life is like a game of basketball” (285). In this way, basketball symbolizes the dedication and perseverance the boys possess in the face of challenges. Although Marco does not ultimately choose to continue playing the game, his experience teaches him important lessons about staying true to himself and his interests and resisting outside expectations of what he should pursue. Similarly, Isaac learns that the abilities he already possesses as a strong athlete can allow him to succeed in other contexts, including places where he previously felt inadequate. Despite the friend’s different strong suits at the novel’s start, basketball symbolizes integral lessons for both boys.