The Last Shot Read online

  The neighborhood’s most revered freelance coach is a longtime Coney Island resident named Robert Williams. Most weekdays around six o’clock his tall, lanky frame comes into view a couple of blocks from the Garden. He often wears a pair of dark blue overalls and a threadbare baseball cap, and he trudges with heavy steps across the vacant lots, the neighborhood dogs barking at his heels. At Mermaid Avenue, the traffic slows his march, and he pauses at the corner to remove his cap and wipe the sweat from his forehead. Then he arranges a cheerful expression on his face, climbs through the hole in the Garden fence, and greets the assembled players, all of whom call him (though no one can ever remember why) Mr. Lou.

  During the day, Mr. Lou does maintenance work at a local nursing home. His second job begins at dusk when he sits down on the Garden asphalt, both legs stretched in front of him and his arms propped behind, as if he were sunning himself on a dock. I have heard players refer to Mr. Lou affectionately as “the old man who’s dope.” In fact, he is not yet fifty, but his beard is flecked with gray; his measured speech, amid the hip-hop cadences of the street, sounds full of gravity; and the expression in his eyes as he watches the youthful players often takes on an inscrutable sadness. In this neighborhood of teenage mothers and absent fathers, he seems like the wise Buddha himself set down for meditation at center court.

  One evening in late August, Mr. Lou comes by the Garden at his usual time to observe Russell, Corey, and some other players in a half-court practice. The season when the cool sea breezes of early summer offered relief to the players is just a memory. Now it’s hot—God, is it hot. Even by eight o’clock, the 90-degree heat hasn’t broken, and the soggy, membranous air doesn’t stir. Last week the temperature climbed so high in Coney Island that the street alongside the Garden cracked right open, like a volcano. No one expects city repair crews to fill in the crater for months, so people have begun using it as a Dumpster—chairs, tires, bags of trash are piling up, and the stray dogs and occasional sea gulls nose around, searching for food. Even in this tropical weather the players come out each night. But in the aquarium light of dusk, in the heat waves shimmering above the Garden asphalt, they move languidly through the resistant air, as if they were playing their game under water.

  Mr. Lou is pleased that Corey is making one of his rare Garden appearances tonight and hopes he can persuade the elusive player to work on his outside shot. “Corey had a beautiful jumper, but he’s given it up,” Mr. Lou says to me as we search without luck for a patch of cool asphalt. “I have no idea why. That kid’s a mystery.” Russell, on the other hand, openly hungers for the attention of his coaches, especially Mr. Lou, whom he listens to with his brow furrowed in concentration. It was Mr. Lou who suggested a few months ago that Russell practice shooting from a chair, and after that bit of advice, unorthodox though it may have been, Russell began drilling his stationary jump shot every time. But whenever Russell shoots off the dribble, some glitch in his mechanics causes a misfire, so he’s asked Mr. Lou to come out this evening to render a diagnosis.

  Mr. Lou watches Russell in motion for a couple of minutes, head cocked to one side as if he might actually hear the defect. Finally he says, “Yup, you should be housing that.” The instant Mr. Lou speaks, the game stops and all the players turn inquiringly in his direction. “Squaring up. That’s your problem. You’re not squaring up.” Mr. Lou holds both index fingers in the air to diagram the position Russell’s body should take when he leaves the ground. Russell looks at him without comprehension. “You’re staggering around like a drunk, Russell. When you come off that pick and get the ball, don’t weave all over the place like a wino. You got to go straight up. Straight up. Try it now. Remember: straight up.” Mr. Lou claps his hands twice, and the players, lulled by his hypnotic counsel, jolt back to life. The game resumes. Mr. Lou inclines his head toward mine. “Now’s the perfect time of day for this,” he whispers. “In the evening, in this heat, they’re dog tired, and that’s just about the only time they’ll listen.”

  As the players run through their paces, Mr. Lou calls out in a spirited baritone, “Fight through that pick! . . . C’mon, you ever heard of boxing out? . . . Don’t be intimidated! . . . Where’s your defensive rotation? . . . That’s just about the laziest pass I ever did see . . . Move without the ball, damnit!” Russell does just that. He comes off a high pick, catches a crosscourt pass, takes two dribbles, and plants his right foot, hard, on the blacktop. When he jumps this time, his body rises straight up. “Cash. Count it,” Mr. Lou announces before Russell has released the ball. As it spins through the net, players on both teams give Russell a hand.

  Mr. Lou grew up in Coney Island and attended Lincoln High, where he played football in the early sixties. He went on to play in the semipro league, but a leg injury prematurely ended his athletic career. A dozen years ago, he began coaching the basketball players at the Garden. “You’ll hear a lot of trash talk about kids like these,” he says softly so that the players won’t hear. “But I’ve learned that as long as you work with them and show them you care, they care. They all want to learn the game, go to college, make something of their lives. I tell them, one bad injury can tear up your whole career, but no one can take away your brain. And they listen because it’s the truth, and around here the kids don’t hear the truth a lot.”

  In his counseling endeavors, Mr. Lou has picked up a sidekick of sorts, another freelance coach named David Reed, who goes by the nom de court of Disco Dave. At twenty-nine, Disco still has the thick arms and shoulders that powered his playground game, but his belly is beginning to slacken from a gourmand’s appreciation of all foods artificial. During the day Disco works at the community center next to the Garden. After hours he picks up a bag or two of Cheese Doodles at the bodega on Mermaid and tours the neighborhood courts, gathering fresh evidence for his argument that the Coney Island projects breed the finest basketball players in all of New York City.

  “I can watch a ten-year-old walk across the court and know instantly whether he’s got the Coney Island game,” Disco declares one evening as we cruise through the Garden, then Run-and-Gun Land, then Chop-Chop Land so that I might have the opportunity to judge for myself how indisputably right he is. “And if you don’t got game, take your smack out of Coney Island! Because we only got room for the best. All the great Brooklyn players came up here—Jou-Jou, Silk, Spoon, Spice, Tiny . . . ” Disco is feeling the rhythm now, talking and eating with gusto. “When Coney Island takes its game to other neighborhoods—Bed-Stuy, Red Hook, Brownsville—it’s M-One. We ice ’em every time. Now it’s getting out of hand. We always wanted other teams to fear us, but shit, now they see us coming and they give up. They just walk away!” Disco gestures grandly; Cheese Doodles fly across the court. “Now that’s a damn shame,” he says with real feeling. “Oh, well. What was I saying? Yeah, what you got to understand is, Coney Island never had big men. Most of our guys—Corey, Russell, Stephon—are guards. But we play fast and physical, and when you get hit, you don’t cry. It’s a pass-down thing: all the younger guys watch the older players and borrow from their game. And we got another ten years of great players on the way up, kids with an abundance of talent and that winning Coney Island attitude.” Finished with his snack, Disco balls up the cellophane bag and cans it into an open trash barrel. His eyes light up with renewed fervor. “Damn,” he cries, “I got a three-month-old son—he’s already dunkin’ Nerf balls!”

  During the summer, Disco and Mr. Lou coach eight separate teams—360 Coney Island kids in all—divided into three divisions: Bantams (ages fourteen and under), Juniors (fifteen to seventeen), and Seniors (eighteen to twenty-one). Practices are held at the Garden three times a week, on a mandatory basis. For years Disco and Mr. Lou worked exclusively with players from the six white brick buildings that make up the O’Dwyer Houses next to the Garden. Families in O’Dwyer, which have only eight apartments on each floor, tend for the most part to be small and stable, with at least one parent who works, and interested above all
in keeping the peace in this relatively tranquil corner of the neighborhood. Tenant meetings at the O’Dwyer community center draw large, emotional crowds; and the project’s kids go there to hang out, shoot pool, and watch college games on TV. O’Dwyer residents, knowing the resolve it takes to keep the more sordid aspects of the neighborhood at bay, have posted a sign in the doorway of the community center. “A MESSAGE TO DRUG DEALERS,” it reads. “Stay out of public housing. We won’t let you destroy our home and our kids. NEVER!!”

  Eight blocks, but a world away, is the neighborhood’s other large project, the huge mud-colored buildings of the Carey Gardens Houses. With up to fifteen apartments on each floor, Carey Gardens shelters many large, young, and often transient families on welfare. The chaotic conditions there, in which parents often move in and out leaving children to fend for themselves, have created fertile ground for no the drug trade. Dealers enjoy hegemony of the project’s dimly lit hallways and stairwells, and I have met Carey Gardens players who leave their apartments only for games, passing swiftly and with furtive looks through the project courtyard on their way to safer ground. Known as Drug Discount Land, the courtyard is a shadeless strip of walkways teeming with dealers, customers, and occasionally undercover cops, all maintaining a tense surveillance of one another.

  For years, a deep hostility prevailed among O’Dwyer, Carey Gardens, and the other large projects in Coney Island. Dealers and players make up the principal social groups among young men in the neighborhood, and mimicking the territorial disputes of gang members, players from one block rarely spoke to those from another, and would never be caught at a rival project’s court. But basketball helped to demilitarize the neighborhood. As the drug trade grew worse, distinctions of occupation—do you play or do you deal?—began to outweigh those of geography—are you from O’Dwyer or Carey Gardens? Suspiciously at first, players started meeting for games halfway between the projects in the neutral territory of Run-and-Gun Land. Then, several years ago, Mr. Lou started the O’Dwyer Tournament at the Garden, which quickly became Coney Island’s premier competitive event. The tournament ran all summer, with each project fielding a “house crew,” and for the first time Carey Gardens players would travel the eight blocks to compete with O’Dwyer kids on their home turf. Sensing a breakthrough in project relations, Disco and Mr. Lou then combined Coney Island’s best players into an all-star team and took it to the city’s other big tournaments: High Energy, Malcolm X, Soul-in-the-Hole, Citywide. “Now any one of my ballplayers can walk to another block and he’ll find a fellow brother,” Disco says. “Corey can dunk on someone down at Carey Gardens just like he can at the Garden—it’s cool.” (Corey, Russell, and Stephon all live in the Mermaid Houses, which, in the neighborhood’s social stratification, are considered safer than Carey Gardens but are not nearly as well kept as O’Dwyer.)

  Few people who spend time with Disco and Mr. Lou don’t at some point profess amazement at the program these coaches have assembled in this neglected neighborhood. At the start of one tournament game not long ago, a player dunked the ball and the ref’s whistle fell right out of his mouth as he stared at the rim with his jaw gone slack. “Dunk that ball again,” the ref said. The player did, and again the ref stared upward, incredulous that a neighborhood with gaping, unrepaired craters in the street would also have professional-style, spring-loaded rims that snap back after a player dunks. “You got snap backs?” the ref said. “In a playground?”

  “Collegiate three thousands,” Disco answered coolly.

  “Ain’t you worried someone’s gonna rip them off?”

  “Hell, no, this is Coney Island! And you’ll notice”—here Disco abandoned his post on the sidelines and took the ref by the elbow, as though he would sell him the property—“this court is forty-six feet wide, just four feet narrower than the pros’.” He looked at Mr. Lou. “How wide is West Fourth?” he asked, referring to the famous Greenwich Village playground.

  Mr. Lou turned the question over in his mind. “Thirty, thirty-five feet,” he said finally.

  “There you go.” Disco spread his hands wide, pleased by this new addition to his growing body of evidence.

  ***

  Disco and Mr. Lou often speak with sorrow of other black, inner-city neighborhoods around the country, like the ones in Chicago, where drug dealers swagger up at neighborhood tournaments to recruit players straight off the court. Coney Island’s devotion to basketball, they hope, will prevent that from happening here. “As long as we got the kids at the Garden, they’re okay,” Mr. Lou says.

  But now that the camp season is over, and Russell, Corey, and the other players are all back in Coney Island, there’s not much else to occupy them as the summer ebbs away, one infernally hot day after another, but to play basketball or sit around on the court benches sweating and talking about playing basketball. In past years, players often spent the last weeks of summer working at the local Burger King and Toys R Us. But few stores are hiring these days, and New York’s fiscal problems have brought a suspension of most summer-job programs. Some Coney Islanders, knowing where they stand among New York’s priorities, have begun joking mordantly that City Hall may soon shut off their streetlights to save electricity, and everyone will have to walk around the neighborhood with a candle.

  And despite their athletic skills, and the crowds of coaches who watched them all summer, most of the players have returned to Coney Island completely broke and have found no legitimate options for making money besides hawking sodas on the boardwalk. It’s hard work, lugging a case of Cokes from the nearest supermarket a mile away, then selling them one by one as the brutal summer sun hangs like a surgeon’s lamp in the afternoon sky. For their trouble the players often get a summons from the police. Meanwhile, the drug business directly across Surf Avenue seems as brisk as ever and appears to draw less official attention. Later in the evenings, when the athletes start their workouts at the Garden, the dealers often gather at the sidelines to jeer—“You ain’t goin’ nowhere, sucka!” being one of their favorite taunts.

  Normally the Coney Island tournament hits its stride in the last weeks of August, but this year’s games are a meager reminder of better days. Even here at O’Dwyer there’s too much drug dealing in the lot next to the Garden, and the players are wearying of the constant battles for turf. This year Disco can’t even find any local stores to sponsor teams or help defray the cost of trophies and uniforms. “Remember when we used to have a thousand people come out to watch?” Disco muses. “We had to take down the fence ’cause people couldn’t see? And we’d close off the street? Yeah, those games, those games . . . ” I’m expecting Disco to launch into one of his prize monologues, but even he seems wrung out by the heat, and his voice drifts off.

  On the walkway next to the Garden, a couple of college-age guys, one still in playing shape, the other going soft in the middle, walk by, kicking an empty beer can. When they played together at Lincoln a few years ago, everyone in Coney Island predicted they would be the ones to go all the way—maybe not the NBA, but at least the European league, where a first-year player takes home at least $75,000 a year. The thin one is now at his second junior college, still hoping a four-year school will sign him; he comes back to Coney Island in the summer to drive a cab and show off his playground moves at the Garden. The other one failed to graduate from Lincoln and has never left the neighborhood. Even with his current paunch, he’s got an amazing game and comes out every afternoon to fool with the younger kids. But the air of lively expectation he used to wear like a plume is gone; he’s given up. “Those were the guys who broke our hearts,” Disco says.

  I look to Mr. Lou, expecting him to temper his partner’s remark, but he says, “It’s true. They were probably the top two guards on the East Coast. I was very personally hurt that they never went anywhere. It was a real blow to the community.” Everyone is silent with his own thoughts. A sea gull wheels in a great arc high above our heads, and from out in New York Harbor a fog horn groans, reminding m
e once again just where on the map we are. Then Mr. Lou, summoning his optimism, says, “We’re hoping this new crew of players will be the ones who go to high Division-One schools. By the end of the summer, Russell’s gonna have the complete package on the court and a damn near eighty average in school; he’s the most impressive young man in the neighborhood. Corey should go D-One, too, if he’d just practice his goddamned outside shot. And Stephon—well, Stephon’s got the whole package. If you say, ‘Stephon, we need points,’ no matter how big a guy is, you get points. If you need assists, you get assists.”

  Stephon Marbury, who will join Russell, Corey, and Tchaka on the Lincoln varsity when he arrives as a freshman next month, has been tearing up the camps this summer. I hadn’t seen him play since that midnight game at the Garden, but I caught up with him one afternoon at the B/C camp in Pennsylvania, where administrators, following the rules and not their own eyes, had put him in with the fourteen-and-under group. Having played for years with his older friends at the Garden, Stephon was just toying with the youngsters in the junior division. All afternoon he would stand at the perimeter, doing a little stutter step—the top half of his body rocking forward while his feet stayed in place. When his defender backed off, Stephon dumped a three-pointer on him. When he was guarded tight, Stephon drove with ease to the basket. Soon his opponents were mobbing him with a double- and triple-team, but Stephon dribbled out of the thicket of limbs with a joyful expression and his gold chain doing loop-the-loops around his neck. Even the officials eventually got confused: Stephon has such a great handle, does so many tricks with the ball as he dribbles, that a couple of times the refs blew the whistle on him without actually knowing which rule he was supposed to have broken.