The Last Shot Page 15
With that, Barnes twirls Tchaka into the arms of his assistant coach. “You know, Tchaka, in Rick’s first year as head coach of the Friars, Providence was picked to finish ninth in the Big East,” says Fraschilla. “Well, the Friars went out and won their first thirteen straight, and they went into the NCAA tourney. We fear nobody. Rick’s attitude is: we’ll play anybody, anytime.”
So this is Providence’s theme: The Little Engine That Could. Tchaka wasn’t a born star, but he made himself into an all-American; Providence may be a Big East underdog, but they’ll fight to the bitter end. “That’s right. I don’t care if I sign Shaquille O’Neal,” declares Barnes. Hearing this, Tchaka allows his right eyebrow a slight elevation. He knows that Barnes would drop to his knees for O’Neal, the LSU star and future NBA sensation. “I’m serious. I’d rather have Marques Bragg,” Barnes says of the journeyman Providence player. “Maybe I’d find a spot for Shaquille, but he’s not gonna take Marques’s position. Our hard workers, they’re the heart and soul of the team.” Barnes makes a pistol with each hand. “There’s a player who plays with Michael Jordan by the name of Scottie Pippen. He didn’t have exposure in college, he didn’t play on TV. But”—Barnes aims both barrels at Tchaka—“he’s great because his heart is bigger than his chest. And you’re that kind of player too.”
“It’s true,” adds Fraschilla. “If one guy we saw last summer epitomizes what Coach Barnes stands for—you know, blue collar, work ethic—it’s you.”
This is not precisely the music to which Tchaka’s heart quickens. Praising him for his proletarian play—by which the coaches usually mean hustling for rebounds and diving for loose balls—is like commending an aspiring slugger for his peerless sacrifice bunts.
“I don’t know if you’ll be a shooter, Tchaka,” Barnes says, losing the rhythm now. “I can’t promise you that. But I like you because you play hard. That’s your best talent. And I won’t promise you you’ll start either, but I give you my word: I’ll give you the chance, and if you get it, it’ll be because you earned it.”
This seems only to confirm Tchaka’s darkest suspicions—that Barnes was planning to use him as a role player, the one who would come off the bench when the stars needed a rest.
“Are you recruiting anyone else at Tchaka’s position?” Coach Hartstein asks, on behalf of his player.
“Just him,” says Barnes.
“Just him?” Hartstein repeats.
“And John Wallace, but he’s a perimeter player.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, we’re looking at Robert Blackwell too.”
“Anyone else?”
“No, that’s it.”
Fraschilla leans forward with one final thought. “We might not be ready to contend for a national championship this year or next,” he says, “but by your junior and senior years, Tchaka, we’ll have it all in place. And I know I sound like a preacher, but I get fired up because I believe in what Coach Barnes is doing. You see, we’re in this for the long haul.” (Long haul, short haul—everything is relative. By next season Fraschilla will have abandoned his Providence post for the head coaching job at Manhattan College.)
Finished with their presentation, Barnes and Fraschilla rise to their feet. Then Barnes pulls from his bag a customdesigned recruiting booklet and presents it to Tchaka. Looking down at the cover, Tchaka sees his own picture under the title: AN ALL AMERICAN BOY. Inside it reads, “Ray Flynn . . . Lenny Wilkens . . . Marques Bragg . . . John Thompson . . . Tchaka Shipp . . . The tradition continues!” Tchaka grins but inspects the booklet like a store clerk examining a questionable fifty-dollar bill; he all but holds it up to the light.
Pleased with how his pitch seems to have gone, Barnes smiles and runs two fingers down the front of his burgundy silk tie. He gathers his recruiting materials and shakes hands all around. Almost as an afterthought, he reaches into his breast pocket for his deck of cards—there’s still time for one more trick. When Barnes pulls out the deck, though, he loses his grip, and all fifty-two cards scatter across the floor. Tchaka peers over the table before Barnes can scoop them up, and sees that each trick card has been stamped with a two of spades. He starts laughing, quietly at first, then with mounting giddiness—happy to have made it through yet another presentation, delighted as well to have caught Barnes at his own game. Tchaka winks at me so that I can enjoy the moment too. But my mind is focused on the events of a half-hour ago, trying to determine how I got pulled so easily into Barnes’s little game, and wondering why I have this peculiar aftertaste from having been cast as a college recruiter for the day.
***
“Come on, Russell—we’re jetting!” Stephon places his hand against the back of Russell’s bald head and flicks it hard to make the skin sting.
“Damn, Stephon, stop sweating me!” Russell cries, his voice high and strangulated. “Can’t you see I’m talking to my girl?”
“Can’t you see I’m talking to my girl?” Stephon mimics. Russell tries to ignore him. He whispers in Terry’s ear, gives her a kiss, slings his book bag over his shoulder, and marches toward the locker room. The last class bell has rung, bringing rush-hour congestion to the Lincoln corridors. Stephon lingers in the crowd and leans in close to Terry. “You know, when Russell goes to college, I’m next in line.”
Terry is almost as tall as Stephon, and for an instant I think she’s going to hit him. But she says, “You got some mouth,” and simply walks away.
Stephon does not suffer from the usual array of adolescent insecurities, but there’s no reason that he should, given that his arrival at Lincoln last month as the fourth—and arguably most talented Marbury boy—was anticipated throughout the school as if he were Magic Johnson returning from retirement. All the seniors have been awaiting Stephon’s advent at point guard, where, it is hoped, he will flawlessly deliver the ball into their hands for easy baskets. And Bobby Hartstein, who usually gives incoming freshmen a grudging nod at best, has allowed Stephon his choice of team jerseys and has even given the first-year player the combination to his own locker so that Stephon can store his schoolbooks there during practice. Stephon has not exactly been immune to all the hype. In the first week of school, he asked one of his classmates to carry his books; a few days later, a girl in the corridor asked if he was the Stephon Marbury and he replied, “Yeah, but I don’t know you from a can of paint.” And Stephon’s profile will in no way diminish when he takes the court this afternoon during the season’s first official varsity practice. Hopes for this year’s team are running so high around school that a small crowd begins to gather in the gym: students, teachers, other coaches, even a reporter for Newsday who will cover the team almost daily this season.
The players do not disappoint. Corey arrives for practice a few minutes late, but once he’s on the court (wearing a pair of checkered pastel Bermuda shorts), he makes up for lost time—blowing past everyone who tries to guard him, making acrobatic excursions to the hoop, and playfully slapping his opponents’ heads as he goes in for the dunk.
Tchaka, looming above everyone, completely dominates both ends of the court—blocking shots, rebounding, tipping in missed attempts—in essence demanding a cut on all transactions within a three-foot radius of each basket.
As for Russell, he is no longer just a stationary jump shooter, as he was during the summer-camp season. Having worked much of August with Mr. Lou, he is now shooting off the dribble and taking it to the hoop with surprising authority. At one point during today’s practice, Russell drives the lane and goes straight over Corey for an emphatic jam. The whole place goes wild—everybody in the gym is chanting Russell’s name; guys are yelling, “He flushed it good! He threw it on him!” Russell, ignoring the cheers as always, walks over to me and squeezes my shoulder with a serious grip. “See, I told you I would wear nice shoes this year, and I did. I told you I would dunk, and I just did. It’s all part of the plan.”
Hmm.
And then there is Stephon. He is making his official de
but as a high school player today, but he takes the court as he always does—confident, leaning forward on the balls of his feet in happy anticipation, arms jangling at his sides. “Mission day,” he announces with a clap. “Time to get busy.” Within moments he is making quick work of his older competition, stunning the crowded, noisy gym into a reverential silence. Here he is, out by the three-point line. He does a stutter step to freeze the defense, then drives the lane. In midair, he encounters Tchaka’s six-foot-seven-inch presence, so he changes direction, shifts the ball from right hand to left, and sinks a reverse lay-up. Coach Hartstein, getting his first look of the season at Stephon, mutters, “Holy shi—,” not even finishing the thought, because here Stephon is again, off to the left. He drives, sees too many bodies in the paint, and pulls up for a jumper. He is way out of position, his lithe body still floating toward the basket, so he calculates his velocity, takes a little something off the ball, and banks it gently off the glass.
It’s not just that Stephon is a great young player; he does things you simply cannot teach in this game. As point guard, setting up plays for his teammates, Stephon always keeps his head up and sees the court as if he had one eye in the usual spot and the other near the ceiling, looking down. He goes up for a jumper and, eyes fixed like radar on the rim, guns the ball inside to a surprised Russell for an easy lay-up. How could he have seen that! Running the fast break with Corey, he picks up his dribble, cradles the ball in the crook of his arm, and whips a diagonal bounce pass through two defenders as effortlessly as if he were lazing by the shore, skipping stones. (“Deliver the pizza, cuz, with pepperoni!” Corey cries on his way to the hoop.) This sort of command one sees only among genuine child prodigies—Itzhak Perlman playing Paganini at the age of five—the ability to perform the easy and difficult passages with the same fluid grace.
Stephon began his study of the game at approximately three years of age. At six, he could shoot and dribble with both hands; a few years later he would show up at halftime during Lincoln games, steal the ball from the ref, and begin tossing in three-pointers with such pinpoint accuracy (“bye-bye birdie,” he would chirp) that the net gave but the slightest shiver. When he reached the advanced age of ten, Disco and Mr. Lou let him captain one of their fourteen-and-under teams. The next year, Stephon scored an astonishing 41 points in a Catholic Youth League championship game, making the New York Daily News for the first of what would turn out to be countless occasions. Even as an eighth-grader, Stephon still looked unimposing—just a scrawny kid whose narrow shoulders could barely support his tank top—and he spent most of his nonplaying time worrying that he’d never grow tall enough to dunk. But his advanced skills and size eleven-and-a-half feet gave an auspicious picture of what he’d be like full grown and strong enough to wreak complete havoc on the court.
***
That college coaches like Boeheim, Massimino, and Barnes would consider no entreaty beneath them in their pursuit of a high school senior like Tchaka was apparent to me by now. What I hadn’t known until Stephon joined his older friends on the Lincoln varsity is that the feverish recruiting of top players actually begins when they are fourteen and in junior high. Stephon may have grown up in one of the city’s most isolated communities, but by the time he was ready to pick a high school last spring, everyone associated with prep basketball throughout the five boroughs had heard of him, and every school within a thirty-mile radius of Coney Island began its recruiting. Catholic schools like Bishop Ford, Tolentine, Bishop Loughlin, Christ the King, Saint Raymond’s, and Xaverian placed their bids—promises of a starting position from some schools, a guaranteed supply of his favorite sneakers from others. One Brooklyn coach presented Stephon with a new uniform and treated him and his father to a series of extravagant dinners. A coach in the Bronx was rumored to have offered cash up front.
And the recruiters arrived not only from the big-time parochial schools. Technically, of course, kids in the New York City public school system must go to their neighborhood zoned schools. But when it comes to talented athletes like Stephon, the PSAL finds so many loopholes in the admissions procedures that public school coaches have begun recruiting eighth-graders the same way the college coaches go after the seniors—by promising them the most playing time, the best chance to win a city title, and the exposure to get recruited to the next level. (“They’ve been after me since I was in fifth grade actually,” Stephon once told me.) The PSAL is now riddled with players crisscrossing the city to play on their favorite teams, others whose grades (and second-grade reading levels) should have rendered them ineligible, as well as nineteen- and twenty-year-old kids who shouldn’t even be in school. One graduating senior, having failed to sign with a good college, managed to get himself reclassified as a high school junior because of poor eyesight, though it didn’t seem to hurt his shooting touch.
Since most of the Coney Island projects fall within its school zone, Lincoln automatically gets a new crop of exceptional athletes every year, which saves Coach Hartstein the trouble of scouring all of Brooklyn’s junior highs for the next great class of players, as certain coaches are known to do. But to maintain its hegemony in the PSAL, Lincoln does have to prevent other high schools from poaching on its turf. Directly across Ocean Parkway from Lincoln, for example, sits William Grady, another powerhouse PSAL team and Lincoln’s chief rival for the pool of talent coming out of the Coney Island projects. Both Lincoln and Grady enlist the aid of coaches and teachers at the so-called feeder schools—the grammar and junior high schools through which the neighborhood kids must pass—in order to steer the best players to their schools.
Hanging out at the Garden last summer with Disco and Mr. Lou, I also discovered that both Lincoln and Grady send unofficial representatives into the neighborhood to troll for players, just as the college coaches do. Grady’s recruiter is Derrick (Jock) McMahon, a tall, heavyset black man who lingers around the Coney Island courts warning kids that if they go to Lincoln, they’ll never score 700 on their SATs and make it to a Division I school. Like the college recruiters, Jock does not easily part with the animus he feels toward those kids who chose the competition. When Jock ran into Tchaka at a camp last summer, he stood there scrutinizing the player with his arms folded across his chest. “You may have played at Nike,” Jock told him, “but you’re still corny”—that being the latest term on the street for hopelessly uncool. “I don’t know why you even play. You’re never gonna get the ball.” (“Guys like Jock are why I can’t wait to get out of New York,” Tchaka remarked later. “He’s the type of guy who says, ‘You’re not going anywhere.’ Then he sees you on TV and says, ‘Hey, I know him!’”) Lincoln’s principal recruiter is the varsity trainer, Tony Grittani, an affable man who can always be counted on to have a few treats—free tickets to Lincoln basketball games and such—to hand out to the neighborhood players. It was Grittani who, three years earlier, spotted Russell playing at the Garden and persuaded him to enroll at Lincoln.
Grady, which is a vocational school, can legitimately enroll players from anywhere in New York City as long as they attend in order to take technical classes not offered at other schools. One does begin to wonder, though, when kids who have spent three years at an academic high school get into an argument with their basketball coach and abruptly transfer to Grady, avowing a sudden passion for the organized study of automotive repair. Enrolling players from outside the neighborhood is considerably more difficult for a zoned school like Lincoln, although ways have been devised there too. In recent years, Lincoln has established two special “magnet” programs—Pre-veterinarian Animal Science and the Institute for Professions in the Sciences—in order to compete with Midwood, Murrow, and Brooklyn Tech for the borough’s brightest students. The programs are also used to bring in kids with an aptitude for slam-dunking a basketball. Tchaka, for example, then living in Bed-Stuy, was brought onto the Lincoln varsity by Grittani, the school’s transfers-and-eligibility wizard, who walked him through the admissions procedures as an out-of-di
strict student in animal science.
Perhaps the most cut-throat recruiting on any level—high school or college—actually goes on in the summer leagues among the privately sponsored basketball clubs, the highest profile of which are the South Bronx Gauchos and the team affiliated with the Riverside Church in Manhattan. Bestowing on its mostly impoverished players the official and highly coveted Gauchos jackets, shorts, and athletic bags, Gauchos’ coaches select upwards of five hundred kids, ages four to nineteen, warehousing them into a farm-league system of teams (Pee Wees, Biddies, Midgets, Juniors, and Seniors) that will keep the organization flush with talent for years. Like recruiters on every level, summer-league coaches talk endlessly about “doing it for the kids,” about how “academics comes first around here,” about how the bond they form with their players lasts for years. “They know I’m not out to steer them the wrong way or for personal gain,” one coach said to me—an odd remark indeed, since we were talking at the time about something I assumed to be completely unrelated: why inner-city kids seem to prefer Nike over other sneaker brands. But just as the thief will inexplicably return to the scene of the crime, the summer coaches can’t stop themselves from raising the issue of self-interest. For they too receive stipends from Nike in exchange for keeping their players wearing the famous swoosh; and they too are courted by the top college coaches, who never lose sight of the ways a summer-league coach may influence which college one of his players will ultimately attend. Perhaps more than anyone else in this business, the summer coaches ride on the coattails of the city’s great players, forming their resumes by “how many pros I’ve produced over the years,” as one coach said to me in a rare moment of candor.