The Last Shot Read online

  Stephon’s advent at Lincoln next month may make the varsity squad the best it has ever been. Although Stephon is a freshman, he arrives with almost as much experience playing organized ball as Russell, Corey, and Tchaka. But looking back on the last few groups of neighborhood players, Disco and Mr. Lou are realizing that—notwithstanding all the promises made by the college coaches who visit the school each year to discuss scholarships and the route out of the ghetto—it’s been years since a Lincoln player from Coney Island made 700 on his SATs, qualifying him to play Division I ball, and actually signed with a top school. Even the best Coney Island players, it seems, have been forced to enroll at two-year junior colleges, as the NCAA requires of players who don’t make 700, before they can go on to Division I colleges. And few of those so-called juco players, now with only two years of eligibility remaining, were later recruited by four-year schools. Many Division I coaches refuse to recruit players once they enter the juco system, considering them damaged goods. So players who don’t go directly from high school to a four-year college often never get to play top NCAA ball or earn their bachelor’s degrees. Meanwhile, families who can afford the $2,500-a-year tuition at a Catholic school, or the Lincoln kids like Tchaka from neighborhoods better than Coney Island, seem to get their 700s and are recruited by all the Division I coaches.

  As Disco and Mr. Lou tell it, the grim list of Coney Island players who fell short of their aspirations is growing all the time. In fact, the genealogy of Stephon’s family, the Marburys, has begun to read like a cautionary tale of all the different ways a player’s hopes can get dashed in this business: After starring at Lincoln five years ago, Eric (Spoon) Marbury, Stephon’s oldest brother, was recruited by the University of Georgia, where he played alongside several future pros; but he failed to graduate before his scholarship ran out and has since returned to Brooklyn, where he works on a construction crew. Donnie (Sky) Marbury, the next son, displayed even greater promise in high school, but he didn’t have a 70 average at Lincoln and had to do time at two junior colleges. After two years, he moved on to Texas A & M, where he led the Southwest Conference in scoring. But he never graduated either, and was passed over in the college draft. Now he’s out in Utah, at yet another college, trying to finish his degree.

  And then came Norman (Jou-Jou) Marbury. If ever Coney Island has produced pro material, it was he. The first public school player in New York to be named all-city three years in a row, Jou-Jou was a dazzler—fast, strong, with a deadly outside shot and the ability, on drives to the basket, to take on the largest foes. He had his pick of top programs and eventually signed with the University of Tennessee, which had assured him that if he chose their school, he could attend for free even if he didn’t make 700 on the SATs; he would simply have to sit out his freshman season, as the NCAA rules require. But in the summer of 1990, just weeks before he was set to leave for Knoxville, Norman took the SATs one last time. His score improved by 90 points, but he still came up 40 points short of a 700. Tennessee broke its promise and withdrew its offer. Norman, Coney Island’s finest product to date, packed his bags for a junior college in Florida. Since then he has played at junior colleges in Texas and Salt Lake City.

  In the long line of stellar players who have come out of the Coney Island projects, Russell, Corey, and Stephon are considered the neighborhood’s next great chance to reverse its fortunes. Given the earlier failures, however, these three players are being watched by Disco, Mr. Lou, and the rest of the neighborhood with a certain skittishness, a growing reluctance to care too deeply. Yet Coney Island does not offer its residents much else on which to hang their pride. So by unspoken agreement the misfortunes of bygone players are chalked up to a lack of will or to plain bad luck, either of which makes possible the continuance of hope. Silk Owens didn’t go pro, it is said in Coney Island, “because that was the year they cut the college draft from three rounds to two.” Others say his wife didn’t want him to go pro. Another player, the explanation goes, had that pro game, went to the hoop both ways, “but he was done in by a shyster agent.”

  Still, the suspicion lingers that something larger and less comprehensible may be at work. Ten years ago the Long Island City projects in Queens produced New York’s best players, until the drug industry and the collapse of that neighborhood into violence, broken families, and ever-deeper poverty put an end to its dynasty. In recent years the torch has been passed to Coney Island, which struggles to avoid a similar fate. “Something’s wrong at Lincoln,” says Mr. Lou. “Too many of our good ballplayers go to jucos. It’s like a pattern.”

  “Yeah, and if they don’t get this education thing fixed in the next two or three years, they’ll get nobody from the neighborhood,” adds Disco. “We hope this next group goes D-One, but if they don’t, then forget it.”

  As Disco and Mr. Lou are talking, the heavy air collects around us with a menacing stillness. The sky, which had been neither cloudy nor clear, but bore the indistinct haziness of urban summer afternoons, turns the color of green bottle glass. Suddenly it begins to pour. We run into the O’Dwyer community center to wait it out. The center’s day camp for toddlers is in session, and in the back some older guys are sitting at tables studying for their GED exams. The place is well scrubbed, conspicuously lacking in graffiti, even on the bathroom walls. The ceilings are low, supported by thick pillars, and the windows are covered with an intricate latticework of steel gates. Through the windows we watch the rain coming down in driving sheets, but we’re snug in here, sealed off from the leaking ship.

  Disco is sitting by the front door with some players, arguing about whether his Coney Island teams are, as he remembers it, undefeated over the last ten years for opening day tournament games. Karen Burton, who runs the community center and is known fondly among the players as Miss B, looks up from her desk and cries, “Basketball basketball basketball! All you guys ever talk about is basketball. All you guys ever do is play basketball. Do you ever wonder what it’s like for the kids in Coney Island who don’t play basketball? What are they supposed to do?”

  Disco waves her away. “What do you mean, ‘kids who don’t play ball’! This is Coney Island. Everyone plays ball. Even my three-month-old is dunking Nerf balls.” But his reprise of this line is sounded without its former vigor. “Basketball is all we got,” he says more calmly. “There ain’t nothing else to do in Coney Island.”

  “I know,” says Miss B, turning back to her work. “That’s exactly my point.”

  “You know, the YMCA on Surf Avenue was up for sale a while ago,” Disco says. “The city could have bought that for the community but all they ever do for Coney Island is put up more rims. It’s like they’re trying to appease us.” Miss B, flipping through papers on her desk, doesn’t say anything but she’s nodding. Outside, the rain stops as abruptly as it started, and we walk back over to the Garden. A few players try to disperse the puddles so that they can start a game. The air is just as hot and heavy as it was before.

  BIG-TIME RECRUITING

  Six

  “YOU HAVEN’T been up to see us? Here’s a shot of our arena. Beautiful, isn’t it? That’s a ten-million-dollar building you’re looking at. Every game sold out—a twenty-eight-thousand crowd. In four years you’ll play in front of three-point-five million people. That’s more than most pros! We’re on TV more than any other Big East team. We play in Madison Square Garden four times a year. And we’ve been in the NCAA tournament for the last nine years in a row. Now you’re gonna read in the papers about our kids getting benefits. But I want to assure you, our lawyers are working around the clock and they’ve found no major violations. The headlines say, PLAYERS GET CASH! Shit, I gave twenty dollars’ Christmas money to one player. Big deal. Worst is, we’ll lose a scholarship. But we won’t be out of the NCAA tournament. Maybe we’ll get a one-year probation during your freshman year, but we won’t be out of the tournament. Okay, maybe—maybe—we won’t play in the tournament, but that’s it. Of course, I can’t guarantee it . . . A
nyway, have I mentioned the facilities? We got everything you want: great weight room, great student apartments, and we’ll give you a meal card too—you can get pizza any time of the night. We got eleven thousand students. Fourteen hundred of them are black. Socially, nowhere better. Parties at night in the apartments. And our players—they should run for mayor! Always the most popular guys in town. Four sets of practice gear by Champion. And any model Nike you want. Any questions?”

  Jim Boeheim, coach of the Syracuse Orangemen, pauses for breath. The sudden quiet is jarring, like the one that follows an insistent telephone cut off midring.

  “Any questions?”

  Tchaka, sitting across the table from Boeheim in the coaches’ locker room at Lincoln High, remains silent. Arms folded in front of him, chin tucked into his chest, he watches Boeheim through his eyebrows—actually studies the coach’s face—as though he might be called on someday to remember all its features for a police sketch. Ten days ago Tchaka finished his final summer camp appearance. This week he begins his senior year of high school. Already head coaches from Villanova, Seton Hall, Providence, Boston College, University of Miami, Florida State, Rutgers, Wichita State, and many other schools have requested audiences with Tchaka in order to convince him that his future will be best served by his spending the next four years in their company. The ones Tchaka has met with so far have offered him scholarships, extolled their athletic programs, hinted that they will make him a college star. But Tchaka, connoisseur of the game that he is, knows enough players who signed at top programs with similar dreams of making the pros—and then spent four years languishing on the bench—to believe that he now confronts, as the coaches often say, “one of life’s no-lose propositions.” No, from now until November 15, the earliest date on which high school seniors are allowed to sign with colleges, Tchaka must do what he does now: sit in this cramped, airless room and listen to the recruiters, hoping that his excellent radar will steer him toward those coaches he can trust with his future, away from those he should avoid.

  “You know, Providence has got sophomores and juniors at your position. But a freshman’s gonna play at Syracuse,” Jim Boeheim is saying. “Normally it would be the other way around—you’d have to wait your turn at Syracuse. But with Billy Owens leaving early for the pros, we need another forward.” The coach leans back in his chair and hooks his thumbs in his belt loops. He waits for Tchaka to ask a question, but none is forthcoming. “I think it’s a great situation for you,” Boeheim says, filling in the silence. “And the earlier you sign, the better.”

  A guaranteed starting postion in his freshman year—this is an unprecedented opportunity. And look where Owens is going: third pick in the college draft, soon to sign a contract worth $2.8 million a year with the Golden State Warriors. Tchaka has every Syracuse game from last season on tape. He has always admired the freedom they give their big men; Boeheim even let Owens, his power forward, dribble the ball upcourt on occasion. (Tchaka is a power forward.) But can Boeheim be believed? On the street, the coach has a reputation for “recruiting over”—that is, signing a player but giving his starting spot to a better athlete if one comes along. It is tempting for Tchaka to think Boeheim would never do that to him. Still, someone in this room runs a program currently under investigation by the NCAA, and it isn’t Tchaka. Boeheim’s thumbs are still hooked in his pants. The coach waits for some reaction from the recruit. Tchaka meets his gaze but says nothing.

  ***

  The school year has begun without the usual, easygoing transition period that Lincoln’s teachers and administrators always hope will linger at least through the first warm weeks of September. With summer still in the air, classroom doors are left open to cool down the rooms, and some students take full advantage—walking in and out of class, throwing projectiles through doorways at friends in the hall. One kid spends a large portion of his English class doing push-ups—his legs in the hallway, his head bobbing up and down behind the back row of desks.

  This year Lincoln will have eight security guards roaming the hallways with their walkie-talkies and a police officer patrolling the school entrance at dismissal time. One freshman wasted no time getting into the spirit of things; in the first week of school he punched the cop in the face. “Three arrests. Very auspicious,” says one veteran teacher to his colleagues in the faculty cafeteria. Conversation there has already reverted to the usual topic—whether this year’s kids are as bad as last year’s or worse. “Remember the good old days?” says the vet. “When three student arrests wasn’t considered a quiet day on the job? This is—what?—my eighteenth year at Lincoln? I must be an excitement junkie.”

  Lincoln’s faculty does its best to maintain the academic standards of fifty years ago, when the school was considered a jewel in the Board of Education’s crown and it graduated, among others, students like Joseph Heller, Arthur Miller, and three Nobel laureates in physics. In recent years, however, as the population of black and Hispanic students at Lincoln has grown past 50 percent, the school crossed the line that leads, in school districts everywhere, to white flight, reduced funding, lower SAT scores, and diminished faculty morale. At the same time, the city’s beleaguered Board of Ed, desperate to keep the best students in the public school system, allowed the top Brooklyn high schools—Edward R. Murrow, Midwood, and Brooklyn Tech—to recruit the brightest kids from across the borough. The school-choice movement has put New York’s public schools at war, and the traditional neighborhood schools like Lincoln, forced to accept all students who live within their zone, are losing the fight.

  One day I took an informal hallway poll; I asked about twenty students where they had placed Lincoln on the list they were required to make as eighth-graders of the high schools they wished to attend. Lincoln never made it above fourth place; for most students, unable to secure a place anywhere else, it was the last choice. Just about the only students who enroll at Lincoln now as their predecessors once did—with the conviction that it will serve their future well—are its athletes. But as the list of Coney Island players who failed to qualify academically for Division I ball continues to grow, so too does the bitterness felt by many athletes and their families toward Lincoln High. This is the school, after all, to which Coney Island has always entrusted its finest talents, where a player is supposed to get his best shot at escaping the neighborhood. “Let’s get this straight,” Disco said to me a few weeks ago. “Lincoln didn’t make Coney Island. Coney Island made Lincoln.”

  On the annual parent-faculty day in the fall, I finally met Russell’s mother, Joyce Thomas. Tall and thin like her son, Mrs. Thomas seems to share all of Russell’s extraordinary determination but not his debilitating self-doubt. From classroom to classroom she moved that day, meeting Russell’s teachers and listening with a broad, proud smile as they praised her son for being one of the school’s most dedicated students. After Mrs. Thomas was done, I offered her a lift back to her building in Coney Island. As we drove down Neptune Avenue toward the projects, each block more remote and less populated than the last, it occurred to me that Lincoln and its mostly white faculty offered Mrs. Thomas just about her only regular contact with the municipal powers that, through subsidized housing and other forms of public assistance, govern much of her family’s life. If so, her experience with the school had not made her feel as though she and her family were enjoying the best the city had to offer. In my car, the polite demeanor with which she had greeted her son’s teachers slipped away, revealing a startling candor. “Russell will make it through Lincoln. He will graduate. And he will go on to college. You can count on that,” she declared, her resolute voice cutting through the sounds of traffic. “I am very proud of him for what he is doing. What child his age do you know is home by six, sits up every night at his kitchen table, and does his homework? What child his age do you know says, ‘Ma, I got to go to sleep now, ’cause I got to get up soon and get myself to school’?” I could feel Mrs. Thomas watching me as I drove. Then she dropped her voice almost to
a whisper, all the more commanding for its sudden hush. “You think it’s easy raising three kids alone in a neighborhood like this? Well, it’s not. Russell is helping me to show his two sisters the way out. But when it’s their turn to go to high school, I will make sure they do just a little bit better than Lincoln. You understand me?” She paused and waited for me to nod. “Both of them have the ability to do a little bit better than this.”

  ***

  As Lincoln’s academic program has worsened over the years, what little renown the school gets now comes almost exclusively from its athletic teams. Everyone at Lincoln seems to understand the dilemma, which is why—though administrators often bemoan Lincoln’s reputation as the city’s preeminent “jock school”—no one objects when, for example, funds earmarked for instructional repairs are diverted by the athletic department to fix backboards and football helmets. No one complains when a star athlete who scored 70 on a math test gets another 10 points on the house, as a helpful boost to his recruiting chances. And each September, when the college basketball coaches begin arriving—a parade of men in paisley and pinstripes, huge attaché cases, and gleaming gold NCAA rings—even the new principal comes down to the gym to soak in some of the glory. And this year’s basketball players seem to be luring the most celebrated coaches ever—Jim Boeheim of Syracuse, P. J. Carlesimo of Seton Hall, Rollie Massimino of Villanova, and Rick Barnes of Providence, to name just a few. “Four Division One players in one year,” Coach Hartstein keeps repeating. “That’s got to be a record.”