The Last Shot Page 14

  “Now, Russell, of course you could go to a school like Rutgers. But consider the fact that they’re only an hour away from Coney Island. The thing about going to school on the West Coast . . . ” Baker looks down at his tasseled loafers, allows himself a moment to collect his thoughts, then looks up at Russell for his closing remarks. “In high school, Russell, you are a certain way either because you want to be, or because others see you that way. And sometimes you just can’t get out of that. But everybody needs a fresh start sometimes. Everybody’s got certain things they want to get away from in their past. In California, Russell, you can get away from that, from all the stuff that brings you down in Coney Island. At Cal-Irvine you can be whoever you really want to be . . . ”

  ***

  After the meeting with Coach Baker, Russell and I walk out to the football field behind Lincoln, a tree-lined expanse of green just a block in from Ocean Parkway, as lovely as it is incongruous in this otherwise barren setting. This is one of the first opportunities I have had to check in with Russell since the school year began, to see how he’s coping with the recruiters. And it’s a perfect day, too, one of those crystalline September afternoons, with fall in the air but the sun pulsing down on the aluminum bleachers where we sit with the last warmth of summer. (Weather like this may ruin Coach Baker’s day out in California, but here in Brooklyn this is as good as it gets.)

  Russell has honored that promise of his, made during the car ride back from the Empires, to assemble a new image for himself. On the first day of school this month he showed up amid the B-boy fashions of the Lincoln corridors wearing penny loafers, just like the college coaches. This little flourish excited about as much comment from Russell’s friends as did his practice of shooting basketballs from a chair. But Russell, evidently as determined in fashion as he is in sports, forged ahead with his plan. The next day, building from the bottom up, he had added pleated pants . . . then a pair of suspenders . . . then a paisley tie. Finally, he topped off the look with a pair of nonprescription wire-rimmed glasses like the ones Tchaka occasionally wears—“because they make you look educated,” he explained that day. “You know, the professor look.”

  Now on the bleachers Russell removes his glasses and polishes the lenses with his tie. “I was impressed with Coach Baker. I felt he was definitely leveling with me,” he says. “But I’m going to wait and see. Hear what they all have to say. Then decide.” He pauses and returns the glasses to the bridge of his nose. “Try not to be pressured, you know. Just take it one day at a time.”

  Although Tchaka is able to retain his poise with the coaches, asking questions and keeping his counsel, after a recruiting session is over it seems to take Russell a little while to locate his own thoughts. “They say it’s the second biggest decision I gotta make in my life—after I pick my wife,” he continues, looking around the field and swatting imaginary flies. “But I’m doing good, I’m handling it.” He finds some gum on the bottom rung of the bleachers, picks it free, rolls it between two fingers, and flips it onto the grass. “It’s normal to be confused, right?” Now he shifts his attention to the elastic of his right sock, performing a series of micro-adjustments to get the folds just right. “That’s only human, isn’t it?” Russell takes one more look around and, finding nothing else to distract him, falls silent.

  Among the coaches recruiting Tchaka this month, many admiring words have been spoken about his strengths, both as a player and as a person. The coaches pursuing Russell seem to dwell on his presumed weaknesses. Like Rod Baker, several of the coaches have referred to Russell’s incident on the roof last year, evidently hoping to suggest that even a high-strung kid like him will find a supportive, nurturing environment at their schools. The head coach from Saint Bonaventure, a small Catholic school in upstate New York, concluded his pitch by telling Russell, “You want to go to a school that’s far enough away from home that you can recreate your personality, so anything you don’t want people to know about you, they won’t know.” The coach from Wichita State built into his routine a little story about one of his players who lost his temper at a party, kicked in a door, and cut his leg to the tune of twenty-five stitches—the moral being not that you shouldn’t kick in doors, but that “socially, it’s not easy being a player.” Fortunately, the coach was quick to add, the matter was settled without the filing of any charges.

  Russell knows all too well his reputation as a “head case” and a player with “social problems,” as Tchaka and some others are quick to say around Lincoln. And he is, undeniably, one tightly wound kid. But in some ways Russell’s anxiety, which used to puzzle me no end, is beginning to seem a fitting response to the pressures of all the recruiting—by the summer camps and the scouting newsletters and the college coaches who show up at Lincoln, appraising, coaxing, negotiating, and, for all Russell knows, making promises they will never keep. It was, after all, Russell’s fear of not getting recruited, as much as it was the actual fight with his girlfriend, that drove him to the edge of the roof that day.

  In the popular imagination, being courted by all these college coaches is supposed to be a dangerously intoxicating experience. “Don’t let it go to your head,” everyone warned Russell before whispering cautionary tales about perks and promises, violations of NCAA rule, the lavishing of attention that turns poor ghetto kids into grasping pre-professionals. But in fact Russell finds little pleasure in being asked, at only eighteen years of age, to make the most important decision of his life, when he has nothing to fall back on if it doesn’t work out right. Unlike Tchaka, Russell worries less about not getting good playing time in college than he does about finishing his college career with neither a degree nor any decent job prospects or, even worse, getting no scholarship offer at all—any of which would leave him like so many of his friends, stranded for the rest of his days in the Coney Island projects. And though Russell recognizes how fruitless it is to let his mind spiral into obsessive agonizing—which coaches are calling, which scholarship offers are genuine, which colleges will look after him properly when he gets to campus—now that the recruiters are here in the flesh, he seems more agitated than ever, restless with a set of emotions he can’t even begin to identify.

  “You know, I used to say that I couldn’t wait to be a senior,” Russell says to me now. “But to be honest, I got to worry about classes, the season, the newspapers, the recruiting.” He shakes his head. “But my biggest concern is the SATs. That’s a lot of pressure.” This year Russell continues his extraordinary study habits—skipping his lunch period to do his homework and carrying around his vocabulary flash cards wherever he goes. By dint of tremendous effort in class, he has brought his average up to 80, still the highest on the team. But he is, I can see now, fighting an uphill battle. Russell had trouble admitting it to Tchaka earlier today, but the first time he took the SATs he actually received not a 690, but a combined score somewhere in the mid-500s.

  Getting a 700—the eligibility requirement for Division I ball—did not strike me at first as a rigorous standard. But the national average for college-bound seniors, it turns out, is only about 800. And after becoming better acquainted with the quality of the Lincoln players’ schooling and the environment in which they live, I am less surprised that they may not know a synonym for panache or how to make the most of what they do know; they’ve never been told, for example, to avoid guessing and answer only the questions they are sure of—the kind of test-taking tip suburban kids learn on their first day in a $600 Stanley Kaplan review course. Russell, after all, is struggling to answer reading-comprehension and algebra questions on the SATs when his schooling over the years has been so uniformly bad that he had never, until recently, finished a book or learned the fundamentals of multiplication. And the repeated frustrations of this test—the first of its kind he has ever taken in his life—are making him doubt the conviction that gave him such pleasure just a few months ago: namely, that he wasn’t dumb; he just had never been properly taught how to learn. “How come it’s
always the guys who don’t study who get their seven hundreds?” he says to me on the bleachers. “Tchaka and them guys sleep through the SATs and pass it, and seems like the guys who work hard always get screwed.” He lets out a long sigh. “But, oh well.”

  The brilliant afternoon sun is still high in the sky, and from across the football field the chants and cries of cheerleading practice travel toward us with perfect clarity, as if over open water. Russell shades his eyes with his hands and watches a tumble of cartwheels. “It’s nice out here, isn’t it?” he says. “All the trees and everything? Out where I live there’s nothing but total corruption and evilness, drugs and stolen cars. All my friends be selling drugs, getting arrested, shot at. In Coney Island, man, someone dies, it’s like ‘So what?’” Russell watches the cheerleaders with a vacant look. Then he says, “You heard what happened to Chocolate, right?”

  I have. Of all the great Coney Island players whom basketball failed to deliver to a better life, David (Chocolate) Harris suffered the cruelest end. Chocolate was a teammate of Russell and Corey’s, but he dropped out of Lincoln a few years ago and fell under the sway of the neighborhood’s gang culture, eventually becoming a small-time drug dealer himself. Last summer the police found him in an abandoned lot, his sweatshirt hood pulled over his head and a bullet hole in his skull. He was seventeen years old. Some of his friends and former teammates memorialized him by writing, on the tongues of their sneakers, CHOCOLATE: R.I.P.

  “No one really knows how Chocolate died, you know,” Russell says. His voice has no volume. “I heard like three different stories—that his girlfriend’s old boyfriend shot him. Then I heard that he tried to rob someone and they pulled a gun. And then I heard that it was one of his friends shot him. But as soon as the cops found out he was a dealer, they just closed the book.” Russell is still looking off into the distance. “Things happen so fast. Man, life goes by so fast.”

  Once again Russell starts to busy himself, this time by rearranging the gear in his gym bag: sneakers, towel, basketball. Something bothers him, though, and he keeps going back to it, searchingly, like a tongue to a broken tooth. “You know, I look at all these players from Coney Island, like Silk and Jou-Jou. They’re way better than me, and look what happened to them. Jou-Jou lost his scholarship to Tennessee when he didn’t pass his SATs; Silk never graduated from Rhode Island . . . ” Russell runs his hand over his scalp. “This recruiting business, man, it’s scary—something always messes you up. But Coach Baker,” he adds, “for some reason he made me feel comfortable and secure, like he’ll take good care of me, like I’m part of the family.”

  During the time I’ve spent with Russell so far, he has almost never mentioned his own family. Even after my car ride with his mother I know very little about his home life, only that his father, a construction worker, moved away when Russell was extremely young, leaving his mother to raise him and his two younger sisters. It’s only speculation, of course, but I can’t help wondering if it isn’t even more difficult for Russell to resist the high-powered coaches who are recruiting him this month because he has lived most of his life without a father and, at the same time, has sought desperately to avoid the pattern set by almost all the other grown men in his neighborhood, except perhaps for Willie Johnson, Disco, and Mr. Lou.

  Just at that moment Russell’s new girlfriend, Terry, comes into view across the football field. She waves to us and starts walking toward the bleachers. “Now that girl is smart!” Russell exclaims. “She got an eighty-eight average in school—she makes me look bad!” A cloud has just shifted in Russell’s mood and the sun has reappeared. “She got a nice family too. Her mother’s a teacher. Her father’s a principal. One of her aunts is a nun! They even got their own house, over in Flatbush.” Terry is the first woman Russell has been serious about since his fight with his old girlfriend last year, and the two have been inseparable from their first date together, going to movies and picnics and romantic strolls along the boardwalk. Every time Russell is delayed at practice, he dispatches one of the varsity managers to locate Terry and insist that she wait for him. Given the disappointments over fellow players like Silk and Jou-Jou, and the deaths of friends like Chocolate, it must come as a great relief for Russell to have found someone from a stable family and a relatively safe neighborhood (the Flatbush section of Brooklyn is one of the borough’s few decent black middle-class areas), not to mention someone as pretty and levelheaded as Terry.

  On the whole, Russell’s friends are thrilled to see him involved with her, noticing right away the calming effect she seems to have on him. Terry’s friends wonder whether she’s lost her mind. But despite their warnings, Terry has stuck by Russell, accepting the ring he gave her not long ago as a token of his affection, even helping him with his schoolwork. And recently Russell announced to his teammates that he would wear a small pink patch (Terry’s favorite color) on his uniform this season. “People say we’re young, it can’t be that serious. But I love Terry, I really do,” Russell says, zipping up his gym bag. “She’s a junior, you know, so after I leave for college next year she’ll still have another year at Lincoln. But she won’t see nobody here when I’m gone. I really think in my heart that Terry and me will end up together. Like two birds who fly apart and somehow, many months later, fly back together again.” Russell smiles, and the expression looks foreign on a face so often lined with worry. “A girl like Terry don’t come along every day, you know,” he says, giving me a little nudge in the ribs. “One of these days, I’m gonna marry that girl.”

  Terry is still a good fifty yards away. Suddenly Russell puts his hand on my arm. “You know what happened to me last year, with that business on the roof?” he says. This is the first time Russell himself has mentioned the incident to me; perhaps the comforting sight of Terry’s approach has given him the presence to bring it up. “I really thought my career was shattered when that happened. People were always saying, ‘Yo, you better watch out, or Russell’s gonna start acting crazy again!’ But you know, I see now it was good for me.” He nods. “I been through certain things other teenagers haven’t. I learned that part of success is failure, having hard times smack you in the face, having to go without having.” Still gripping my arm, Russell looks me in the eye and says, “I’m gonna get my seven hundred and go Division One. Trust me. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve come too far, worked too hard already.”

  Terry is almost upon us now. Russell licks his fingertips and cleans a smudge off the top of his loafer. “Nothing’s gonna stop me,” he says, still smiling and rising to his feet. “Nothing.” Then he takes a precautionary, pre-date whiff of each armpit and, finding the results tolerable, shakes my hand and runs off to meet his girl.

  Seven

  RICK BARNES does not have a monogrammed briefcase like the other college coaches. He does, however, have a deck of cards. Standing in front of Tchaka, the Providence coach riffles the deck one way—looks like the usual fifty-two. Then he riffles it the other way—hey, they’re all the two of spades! With a flourish, Barnes places a ball of paper under one of three cups, mixes up the cups, then asks Tchaka to guess which cup covers the ball. There it is—gone! And what is this? A quarter hiding behind Tchaka’s ear!

  If Massimino &. Son presented themselves like estate lawyers promising Tchaka a share of the family fortune, Barnes, standing in the coaches’ locker room at Lincoln High, looks like some sort of graduate-student magic act. He is a good-looking man in his late thirties, with a soft Southern accent and sparkling blue eyes. From head to toe he is freshly pressed, not a wrinkle in sight, except maybe near the eyes, which turn down at the corners and give him an expression of perpetual merriment. Apparently card tricks are not the only thing he has up his sleeve. As all of us—Barnes, his assistant Fran Fraschilla, Tchaka, Coach Hartstein, and I—take seats around the table, Barnes looks at me and says, “So. You’ve been sitting in on all these recruiting meetings, haven’t you? What have you learned
so far?”

  What?

  “Go on. Why don’t you show us what you’ve learned? You play the college recruiter. I’ll watch. What are you going to say to Tchaka?”

  Well, this is a novel strategy. Quite the way to charm Tchaka. And, given how many coaches have preceded Barnes, a shrewd way indeed for the Providence coach to separate himself from the pack, to show Tchaka how absurd he considers all this recruiting, even as he goes ahead and recruits the player. However, there must be some way for me to avoid this. I look at Tchaka. Will he toss me a life preserver? No, he’s already turned his chair in my direction, grinning expectantly. The NCAA, perhaps? They’ve got rules for everything; surely one exists to prohibit role-playing during the recruiting process. But the time for stalling is up. I must begin.

  I tell Tchaka that he’s a young man with great prospects. I predict that with him—and I don’t say this to everyone—the sky will truly be the limit. But he needs to go to a place that will help him actualize his potential, because the next four years of his life may dictate the next forty. “Now I’m not going to promise you a starting position, Tchaka, but I am going to promise you the chance to earn it. Because that’s what this game is all about—working hard, achieving results, making yourself the very best basketball player you can be. Because a person can overcome any obstacles if they want it enough . . . ”

  I’ve got the music going nicely—Tchaka and I are beginning to waltz to the melody of my sweet, empty promises—when Barnes casually elbows me aside and starts dancing with Tchaka himself. “He’s kidding about it, but what he says is absolutely true,” the coach begins. “This game is about hard work. And if you don’t want to work hard, don’t come to Providence, Tchaka. I’m serious. If it means me being tough, I’ll be tough. Hard work is the only way to win.” Barnes is stepping lively now; Tchaka has awarded him his complete attention, and I’m back where I belong, watching the couple from the edge of the dance floor. “For instance, we make our players get up for breakfast at eight o’clock,” Barnes continues, “even if their first class isn’t until ten-thirty. Because I don’t like guys running out the door at ten-twenty with their shirts unbuttoned and looking like a mess. Impressions are important. That’s why I want you. You work hard. You play hard.”