The Last Shot Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  THE SUMMER SEASON

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  BIG-TIME RECRUITING

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Author’s note: This is a work of nonfiction. I have changed the names of Russell Thomas and his mother.

  Copyright © 1994 by Darcy Frey

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Frey, Darcy.

  The last shot: city streets, basketball dreams / Darcy Frey.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-395-59770-6

  I. Basketball—Social aspects—New York (N.Y.) 2. Youth—New York (N.Y.)—Recreation. 3. Abraham Lincoln High School (New York, N.Y.)—Basketball. I. Title.

  GV885.73.N4F74 1994

  796.323'62'0974723—dc20

  94-31545

  CIP

  eISBN 978-0-547-52463-4

  v1.0913

  Portions of this book appeared, in different form, in Harper’s Magazine and Details.

  In memory of my father

  ROBERT FRANKLIN FREY

  Prologue

  RUSSELL THOMAS places the toe of his right sneaker one inch behind the three-point line. Inspecting the basket with a level gaze, he bends twice at the knees, raises the ball to shoot, then suddenly looks around. What is it? Has he spotted me, watching from the opposite end of the playground? No, something else is up. He’s lifting his nose to the wind like a spaniel; he appears to be gauging air currents. Russell waits until the wind settles, bits of trash feathering lightly to the ground. Then he sends a twenty-five-foot jump shot arcing through the soft summer twilight. It drops without a sound through the dead center of the bare iron rim. So does the next one. So does the one after that. Alone in the gathering dusk, Russell begins to work the perimeter against imaginary defenders, unspooling jump shots from all points.

  It’s the summer of 1991, and Russell has just finished his junior year at Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island, New York. Eighteen years old, he stands six feet two, weighs a hundred and eighty pounds, and is the proud owner of a newly shaved scalp and a small goatee. When he practices at this court, everything between his shiny bald top and his jutting, bearded chin goes blank, and he moves over the asphalt as if in a trance—silent, monklike, in a galaxy of his own. Most summer evenings I come by this court to watch Russell and his friends play ball, and I have found few sights quite as stirring as that of Russell’s jumper, tracing a meteor curve in the still, expectant air. But the shot, I realize tonight, is merely the final gesture, the public flourish of a private regimen that brings Russell to this court day and night. Avoiding pickup games, he gets down to work: an hour of three-point shooting, then wind sprints up the fourteen flights in his project stairwell, then back to this court where, much to his friends’ amusement, he shoots one-handers ten feet from the basket while sitting in a chair.

  At this hour Russell usually has the court to himself. Lately New York City has been slogging through one of its enervating heat waves, a string of 95-degree days, and most of Coney Island’s other players won’t come out until after dark, when the thick, humid air begins to stir with night breezes and the court lights come on. But tonight is turning out to be a fine one—cool and foggy. The low, slanting sun sheds a pink light over the silvery Atlantic just a block away, and milky sheets of fog roll off the ocean and drift in tatters along the project walkways. The air smells of sewage and salt water. At the far end of the court, where someone has torn a hole in the chain-link fence, other players climb in and begin warming up.

  “Just do it, right?” I glance to my left, and there is Corey Johnson, smiling mischievously, eyes alight. He nods toward the court—Russell at one end, a group of players stretching out and taking lay-ups at the other—and it does, in fact, resemble a sneaker commercial. “Work hard, play hard, buy yourself a pair of Nikes, young man,” Corey intones. Corey, who is known throughout Coney Island for a variety of talents, practices some deft mimicry, and his rendition of a white, stentorian-voiced TV announcer is easily among his best. “They get you where you want to go, which is out of the ghet-to!” He laughs, we shake hands, and he takes up an observation post by my side.

  I am always pleased, though somewhat surprised, when Corey comes by this court. Corey is Russell’s best friend and one of Lincoln High’s other star juniors. But he specializes in ironic detachment and normally shows up courtside, carrying his Walkman, merely to watch for girls with his handsome, hooded eyes. That may be his intention yet. Tonight he is wearing a fresh white T-shirt, expertly ripped along the back and sleeves to reveal glimpses of his sculpted physique, denim shorts that reach to his knees, and a pair of orange sneakers that go splendidly with his lid—a tan baseball cap with orange piping, which he wears with the bill pointing skyward. From his headphones come the sounds of Color Me Badd, and Corey sings along: I-wanna-sex-you-up . . . He loops his fingers around the chain-link fence and says, “I tell you, Coney Island is like a disease—of the mind. It makes you lazy. You relax too much. ’Cause all you ever see is other guys relaxing.”

  There was a time, of course, when Coney Island inspired among its residents more sanguine remarks—when the neighborhood was home to three world-renowned amusement parks, and its streets were lined with three-story homes, filled to the eaves with Jewish, Irish, and Italian families who proclaimed Coney Island the most welcoming place in America for a newly arrived immigrant—a latter-day Plymouth Rock. Now, however, all but a few scattered rides have been dismantled; most of the cottages and tripledeckers have succumbed to the bulldozers of urban renewal; and in their place the city has erected a vast tract of housing projects, home to Coney Island’s newest arrivals—African-Americans—and packed so densely along a twenty-block stretch that a new skyline has risen at land’s end by the beach and the boardwalk.

  The experiment of public housing, which has worked throughout the country to isolate its impoverished and predominantly black tenants from the hearts of their cities, may have succeeded here with even greater efficiency because of Coney Island’s utter remoteness. On this peninsula, at the southern tip of Brooklyn, there are almost no stores, no trees, no police; nothing, in fact, but block after block of gray-cement projects—hulking, prisonlike, and jutting straight into the sea. Most summer nights now, an amorphous unease settles over Coney Island, as apartments become stifling and the streets fall prey to the gangs and drug dealers. Options are limited: to the south is the stiff gray meringue of the Atlantic; to the north, more than ten miles away, one can just make out the Statue of Liberty and the glass-and-steel spires of Manhattan’s financial district. Officially, Coney Island is part of the endless phantasmagoria that is New York City. But on a night like this, as the dealers set up their drug marts in the streets and alleyways, and the sounds of sirens and gunfire keep pace with the darkening sky, it feels like the end of the world.

  Yet even in Coney Island there is a use to which a young man’s talent, ambition, and desire to stay out of harm’s way may be put: there is basketball. Hidden behind the projects are dozens of courts, and every night they fill with restless teenagers, who remain there for hours until
exhaustion or the hoodlums take over. The high school dropouts and the aging players who never made it to college usually show up for a physical game at a barren strip of courts by the water known as Chop-Chop Land, where bruises and minutes played are accrued at a one-to-one ratio. The younger kids congregate for rowdy games at Run-and-Gun Land. The court there is short and the rims are low, so everyone can dunk, and the only pass ever made is the one inbounding the ball. At Run-and-Gun, players stay on the move for another reason: the court sits just below one of the most dreaded projects, where Coney Island’s worst hoodlums sometimes pass a summer evening “getting hectic,” as they say—shooting at each other or tossing batteries and beer bottles onto the court from apartment windows fifteen stories above.

  The neighborhood’s best players—Russell, Corey, and their brethren on the Lincoln varsity—practice a disciplined, team-driven style of basketball at the court where I am standing tonight, which has been dubbed the Garden, after the New York Knicks’ arena. In a neighborhood ravaged by the commerce of drugs, the Garden offers a cherished sanctuary. A few years ago community activists petitioned the housing authority to install night lights. And the players themselves resurfaced the court and put up regulation-height rims that snap back after a player dunks. Russell may be the only kid at the Garden who shoots one-handers from a chair or practices his defensive footwork with a ten-pound brick in each hand, but no one here treats the game as child’s play. Even the dealers and hoodlums refrain from vandalizing the Garden, because in Coney Island the possibility of transcendence through basketball—in this case, an athletic scholarship to a four-year Division I college—is an article of faith.

  Although a pickup game has begun at the basket nearest Corey and me, Russell still commands the other. As the last light drains from the summer sky, he finishes with three-pointers and moves on to baby hooks: fifteen with the left hand, fifteen with the right; miss one and start all over again. It is not too much to say that basketball has saved Russell. The Thomases—Russell, his mother, and his two younger sisters—live in one of the neighborhood’s toughest projects, just a block from this court; and in earlier days Russell often caused his family considerable grief, sometimes leaving home for long stretches to hang out on the streets with his friends. Every teenager does this to some extent, but the custom posed a greater threat in Russell’s case since certain of his friends back then liked to wander over to neighboring Brighton Beach in order to hold up pensioners at gunpoint. But having watched so many of his contemporaries fall into gangs or prison or an early grave, Russell has developed new ambitions for himself. A few months ago, he led the team at Lincoln High to the New York City public school championship, which was played at Madison Square Garden and broadcast citywide on cable TV. For most of his teammates, it was a moment to savor; Russell hardly broke stride to celebrate. Until he wins his college scholarship, sometime in the months ahead, all else in his life seems to dwindle to the vanishing point—everything besides the ball, this basket, and his conviction that, by practicing each day and playing by all the rules, he has set himself on a path that will change his life. “Man, I hate Coney Island,” Russell has told me several times. “Maybe after I finish college I’ll come back to get my mom. But that’s it. I’m leaving. And I’m never coming back.”

  Soon the orange court lights at the Garden come on, displacing the encroaching darkness, and two players on either end of the court climb the fence and sit atop the backboards, hanging nets—a sign that a serious game is about to begin. A few minutes later, a uniformed referee actually shows up to officiate. Suddenly a ferocious grinding noise fills the air. It gets louder and louder, and then a teenage kid riding a Big Wheel careers onto the court. He darts through the playground crowd, leaving a wake of pissed-off players, hops off his ride, and watches it crash kamikaze-style into the fence. “Ah, yes, Stephon Marbury,” Corey remarks dryly. “Future of the neighborhood.”

  Stephon is barely fourteen, has yet to begin his freshman year at Lincoln High, but is already considered the most gifted young New York City guard since Kenny Anderson came out of the Lefrak City projects in Queens two years ago on his way to becoming the star of the New Jersey Nets. Last summer, as an eighth-grader, Stephon snuck into a basketball camp for high-schoolers and would have been kicked out, except that he played with such consummate brilliance that his stunt was written up in the sports pages of the New York Daily News. Fourteen years old, and his college recruiting has already begun. Coaches send him letters (in violation of NCAA rules), requesting the pleasure of his company during his years of college eligibility; street agents, paid under the table by colleges to bring top players to their programs, are cultivating Stephon; and practically every high school coach in the city heaps him with free gear—sneakers, caps, bags—in an attempt to lure him to his school.

  At first glance, Stephon doesn’t look like the future of anything. He’s diminutive, barely five feet nine, with the rounded forehead and delicate features of an infant. He sports a stylish razor cut and a newly pierced ear, and the huge gold stud seems to tilt his tiny bald head off its axis. Caught somewhere between puberty and superstardom, he walks around with his sneakers untied, the ends of his belt drooping suggestively from his pants, and half a Snickers bar extruding from his mouth. But what on earth is this? Dribbling by himself in a corner of the court, Stephon has raised a ball with one hand directly over his head and threaded it through his legs. From back to front. Without interrupting his dribble. Now he’s doing it with two balls!

  With Stephon here, Corey hands me his Walkman and strolls onto the court. Russell, too, is persuaded to give up his solo regimen and puts his gold chain around my neck for safekeeping. In fact, every star from Lincoln High has come out tonight except the team’s center, Tchaka Shipp, but the game won’t be delayed on his account. Tchaka lives miles away in the more working-class environs of Jamaica, Queens; and although at six feet seven he towers above all his teammates, he has been leery of hanging around the Coney Island courts ever since he came here to play, spent the night at Corey’s apartment, and someone blew up a car right outside Corey’s window. Not long ago Tchaka ventured to the Garden, knowing he’d get the best run in all five boroughs here, but after he surveyed the mangy dogs and ragged street people lingering around the court’s edges, he concluded, “Too many low-life, rowdy-ass Brooklyn niggers. I’m heading back to Queens. Now.”

  Tonight, however, darkness brings only a cool, vaporous sea breeze and nothing to distract the players from their game. Basketball, it is commonly said, is a sport of pure instinct, but the five-on-five contest that begins here is something else. Corey and Stephon are cousins, and Russell is as good as family—the three of them have played together since they were in grade school. They seem to move as if the spontaneous, magical geometry of the game has all been rehearsed in advance. Stephon, the smallest by far, is doing tricks with the ball as though it were dangling from his hand by a string, then gunning it to his older teammates with a series of virtuoso no-look passes: behind-the-back passes, sidearm passes, shovel passes. Corey is lulling defenders with his sleepy eyes, then exploding to the basket, where he casually tosses the ball through the hoop. Russell is sinking twenty-footers as if they were six-inch putts.

  The game has just begun when a crowd starts to form: sidelined players, three deep, waiting their turn. A prostitute trolling for clients. A drunk yelling maniacally, “I played with Jordan, I played with Jabbar. They ain’t shit. And neither are you!” A buffed-out guy in a silk suit and alligator shoes arrives, swigging from a bottle of Courvoisier. An agent? A scout? The crowd gives him elbow room. A couple of teenage mothers with strollers come by. There are many of them in Coney Island; they get significantly less elbow room.

  It’s past midnight now, and the ambient glow of Manhattan’s remote skyscrapers has turned the sky a metallic blue. Standing courtside, we can see only the darkened outlines of the projects, looming in every direction, and the shirtless players streaking back and fo
rth, drenched in orange light. Now and then the ref steps out from the darkness onto center court and his official stripes glow incongruously beneath the court lights as the Doppler wail of police sirens drifts in from the nearby streets. Corey, sprinting downcourt, calls out, “Homeboy! Homeboy!” Standing under his own basket, Stephon lets fly with a long, improbable pass that Corey, running full speed, somehow manages to catch and dunk in one balletic leap. The game is called on account of total pandemonium: players and spectators are screaming and staggering around the court—knees buckling, heads held in astonishment. Even Mr. Courvoisier loses his cool. Stephon laughs and points to the rim, still shuddering from its run-in with Corey’s fists. “Yo, cuz!” he yells. “Make it bleed!” Then he raises his arms jubilantly and dances a little jig, rendered momentarily insane by the sheer, giddy pleasure of playing this game to perfection.

  THE SUMMER SEASON

  One

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL is a massive yellow brick building of ornate stonework and steel-gated windows at the end of Ocean Parkway, a stately, tree-lined boulevard about a mile from the Coney Island projects. Built in 1930, in the grand style of public architecture, Lincoln once counted itself among the top academic high schools in New York, its student body filled with the sons and daughters of the immigrants who had arrived in the neighborhood at the turn of this century. But as Coney Island has deteriorated over the years, so has Lincoln High. Directly across Ocean Parkway from the school are Brighton Beach and several other Jewish neighborhoods; but the kids from those areas are often sent elsewhere for their education, as Lincoln has become, little by little, a ghetto school for the projects.