The Last Shot Read online

  The rivalry between Lincoln and Grady is nothing compared with the ill will generated in the summer leagues, where coaches sometimes refuse to shake each other’s hands at tournaments and spare absolutely no expense to win. Last summer one team, after losing two games in a Las Vegas tournament, flew in ringers from New York City. And according to one coach, summer-league teams will even raid each other’s stars with under-the-table payments—$250 for a regular game, $500 for a tournment—which is no small inducement to indigent ghetto kids.

  During the summer season, Tchaka and Corey both avoid the Gauchos and the Riverside Church, preferring the low-key style of the Madison Square Boys Club in Manhattan. (While other teams fly to out-of-state tournaments, the Boys Club coach, Doc Nicelli, loads everyone into his van and takes rural routes the whole way to avoid the highway tolls.) Russell, of course, shuns the summer leagues altogether, preferring his solitary workouts at the Garden. Stephon, however, is a new breed of Lincoln player: he plays with Riverside and the Gauchos. “You go both ways, is that it?” Hartstein said to him one day. “Whoever gives you the most?”

  “You got it,” Stephon replied.

  To his credit, Coach Hartstein tries to keep his distance from this feeding frenzy and to resist the pressure that builds, even on high school coaches, to assemble a winning program at all costs. (“You always hear people complaining about what big heads these kids have,” he observed, rather pointedly, while lunching with the college coaches in Albany last summer. “Well, who gave it to them?”) Considering himself as much a teacher as a coach, Hartstein prefers to work with any player who happens to walk through the door at Lincoln. When Stephon was in the process of narrowing his choices for a high school last spring, Hartstein assiduously kept a low profile and hoped that Lincoln would have the edge simply because Stephon’s older brothers—Eric, Donnie, and Norman—had starred at the school and older friends of Stephon’s, like Russell and Corey, were already there.

  But something about Stephon’s amazing repertoire of skills seems to soften the resolve of even the highest-minded coaches; and Hartstein, it must be said, could not resist making a few subtle advances toward the young player. Though he normally forbids most Lincoln students from watching varsity practice (including the sports reporter for the student newspaper), for the last three years Hartstein welcomed Stephon into the gym with a big hug. And when the team played for the city championship at Madison Square Garden last spring, Hartstein reserved an honorary place for his incoming star on the Lincoln bench. For a time, toward the end of last summer, it looked as though Stephon might go into the Catholic league after all. Stephon had grown wary of Lincoln after two of his brothers, Donnie and Norman, failed to meet the minimum NCAA academic requirements and were forced to attend junior colleges. Vowing not to go that route, Stephon thought he might get better academic preparation at a Catholic school. But then Hartstein made Stephon an offer that would be considered extraordinary in almost any business but this: the forty-two-year-old coach promised the fourteen-year-old player that he’d turn down any college coaching offer over the next four years so that he could personally shepherd Stephon through high school.

  And Hartstein has wasted no time honoring his promise. Ever since the school year began, he has had a private word with Stephon at the end of nearly every day. Other teachers have watched these hallway conferences with a certain distress. As rigorous as he is with most of his players, disciplining them in practice and helping them with their schoolwork, Hartstein has always found it difficult to hold the talented Marbury boys to the same high standard. Stephon’s three older brothers each received preferential treatment: academic courses were dropped for things like fashion design, according to several teachers; excuses were made for cut classes and rowdy behavior. Now it looked as if the coddling was starting all over again. The season hadn’t even begun, and already Hartstein was cornering Stephon’s teachers in the hallways to lobby on his behalf and giving his star player awkward little hugs and the key to the teachers’ bathroom. One day, in order to compete with the generosity of the summer coaches, Hartstein asked Stephon whether he would like free tickets to a Seton Hall game. “If you ever want to go, let me know,” Hartstein told Stephon. “I know P. J. Carlesimo very well.” Seeing the look of interest that crossed Stephon’s face, Hartstein added quickly, “I know Rick Barnes and Rollie Massimino very well too.”

  So when Stephon concludes his stunning performance during the season’s first practice with a three-pointer off the dribble, wiggling his fingers in Tchaka’s face as the ball slides through the net, Hartstein turns to his two assistant coaches and exults, “Jesus, this kid’s the real thing! Getting Stephon is like trading for an experienced senior point guard just when you need him! Do you realize Stephon could keep us in TV tournaments for the next four years?” There is in the coach’s usually subdued voice something like joy.

  “Stephon may be the real thing, but you’d better watch him right from the start,” warns Gerard Bell, one of Hartstein’s assistants. “Stephon’s got that attitude. When he walked in today, he gave me the Marbury look. I’m telling you now; you better not start him the first game. I don’t want another four years of Norman.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hartstein assures Bell. “Stephon’s gonna be okay. He’s a lot more down to earth than his brothers. He’s seen three of them struggle. He’s not gonna make the same mistakes.”

  “Yeah, well, Donnie saw one brother struggle, Norman saw two, and it didn’t help them,” Bell replies.

  ***

  After practice all the players tumble down the school’s front steps into the cool October air. Tchaka heads south a few blocks toward the subway for the long ride back to Queens. Stephon walks up to me and says, “Take me to Micky D’s. I’m hungry. I could eat three Big Macs. You got any cash?” I’ve already agreed to drive Russell and Corey home, so I tell Stephon that I’ll take him as well. But the idea of being driven around Coney Island in my creaky, two-door Toyota apparently isn’t what Stephon had in mind. “This is your ride?” he says in disbelief as he walks up to my car. “Man, you got to get yourself some new wheels. When I get to college, I’m gonna get me a white Nissan Sentra—that shit is milk!”

  “Just get in the damn car,” Russell says.

  Stephon makes a move toward the front seat, but Russell swiftly intercepts him. “Six-foot-three gets the front,” he commands. “Five-foot-nine goes in back.” Corey wisely stays out of it. He puts his Walkman on, pops the hatch, and climbs in the far back, smiling to himself as if enjoying some private joke.

  Russell is in no mood right now for Stephon’s mouth. In the past few weeks, as Rick Barnes and the other college coaches kept flocking to see Tchaka, new recruiting interest in Russell began to dry up. Not only that, but several schools that had been pursuing Russell in September suddenly backed off. No sooner did Russell make up his mind to sign with Cal-Irvine than its coach, Rod Baker, called Hartstein at school to say he was no longer interested—the guard he thought was leaving had decided to come back. That was that. Then Bob Wenzel, the head coach at Rutgers, who had been expressing his interest in Russell ever since the Empires, dropped by Lincoln—but announced that he would meet only with Tchaka. Finally a Duquesne coach worked Russell into a state of agitated excitement by promising to watch him play at the Garden, but when the big day arrived the coach stood him up. It was hard to know for sure what was going on, but evidently some coaches were convinced that Russell had too far to go to reach 700 on his SATs (coaches somehow learned of his test scores before he’d even had time to show them to his mother), and others kept changing their minds about what sort of player to recruit. This, of course, was precisely what Russell had feared all along. And with each school that courted and then abandoned him he seemed to go through the full cycle of infatuation, falling in love, rejection, and painful recuperation; each time he survived with a little less of the spirit to forge on with the school year. “I don’t know what’s going on,” Russell said
to me before today’s practice. “They were recruiting me, but now they’re not. I haven’t heard from any of them in weeks.”

  ***

  Autumn is arriving quickly this year in Coney Island. For weeks the clouds have come across the water low and gray, and the trees along Ocean Parkway are already bare. As I drive toward McDonald’s with the players in my car, we splash through piles of trash and fallen leaves. “If you crash and I get injured, Coach is gonna kill you,” Stephon advises me from the back seat. “That’ll be four years down the drain.” Then he announces, to no one in particular, “When I go to college, I’m going to Syracuse or Georgia Tech.”

  “How come?” I ask.

  “Because at Syracuse you play in front of thirty-two-thousand, eight-hundred-and-twenty people every home game—it’s crazy-loud in there,” he says, meaning the Syracuse Carrier Dome. “And because Georgia Tech knows how to treat its point guards.” Stephon is no doubt thinking of Kenny Anderson—the player he is most often compared with—who left Georgia Tech after his sophomore year and just signed a five-season, $14.5 million contract with the New Jersey Nets. Anderson’s salary is a figure Stephon knows as precisely as he does the seating capacity of the Carrier Dome.

  Driving along, we pass beneath the elevated train tracks over Stillwell Avenue. There is a lot of commercial activity on this block, catering mostly to the summer crowds who take the subway here on their way to the beach and the amusement park. But once we get past Stillwell, the shops and pedestrians grow scarcer block by block. The train tracks are considered the official start of the Coney Island peninsula; beyond them are the projects, and few store owners will risk doing business out there. The McDonald’s near Stillwell is pretty much the last outpost of franchise food before the streets lose their commercial appeal and plunge into the shadow of the high-rises.

  Elbowing his way to the counter, Stephon orders two Big Macs, two large fries, a chocolate shake, an ice cream sundae, and waits for me to pick up the tab. Russell accepts my offer of a burger and fries. Corey, as always, pays his own way. With our food in hand, we pile back into my car.

  Stephon, hungrily consuming his first burger, wedges himself between the two front seats in order to speak directly into Russell’s ear. “So,” he says, “what are they offering you?”

  Russell angrily snatches his head away and stares out the window; from this spot along Mermaid Avenue, the projects and acres of rubble-strewn lots loom in front of us like an abandoned city, Dresden after the war.

  “You mean you’re just gonna sign?” Stephon goes on. “And then when you get to campus and see all them players driving those nice white Nissan Sentras, what you gonna say to yourself? ‘Oh well, I guess they got them from their mothers’?” Stephon takes another bite of his burger. “That’s just like Tchaka. All these coaches coming around, and he ain’t asking for anything. Not even a guaranteed starting position. That’s crazy! He gonna get to campus and everybody on the team gonna be driving cars except him! He’s gonna be, like, ‘Excuse me but five guys got cars here!’”

  Russell shifts uneasily in the seat beside me. He professes not to care, but in fact Russell hates to hear the stories that have been circulating lately about kids offered inducements to sign with certain colleges or players at other high schools who never study and get “passed along” in their classes; it offends his belief in the meritocracy of basketball. “By the way, Stephon,” he says, “the NCAA does not allow players to get cars.”

  “Ha! You think the NCAA gives a fuck about cars?” Stephon, still with his head next to Russell’s, gives a high, piercing laugh. “Why do you think the best players go where they go? ’Cause the schools promise to take care of them and their families. They say the magic word—money.” Not getting the reaction he desires from Russell, Stephon turns his attention to me. “I’d rather hear ‘no’ than not ask and have some other guy come along and get some. You know what I mean? If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Like if I wasn’t getting my burn”—his playing time—“here at Lincoln? I’d be, like, later for this. I’d be up and out with quickness.”

  Russell has finally had enough. He palms Stephon’s little head with his giant hand and dunks him into the back seat. “Stephon, why don’t you start acting like a freshman, which is what you are.”

  “I ain’t heard Coach say that yet,” comes Stephon’s swift reply.

  ***

  It’s no secret around Lincoln where Stephon gets his head for business. Last summer, when I was at the B/C camp in Gettysburg, I ran into Stephon’s father, Donald Marbury. “You the guy writing about Lincoln?” he asked me one day. “And you haven’t even interviewed Mr. Lincoln Basketball himself?” He shook my hand warmly, and when I told him how much I wanted to speak with him, a sly smile played across his creased and handsome face. “Well, in that case I expect there will be some gratuities for me and my family.” I must have looked surprised, because the smile disappeared and Mr. Marbury snapped angrily, “Oh, come on now! Bobby Hartstein didn’t have a winning season until the Marburys started going there. If it weren’t for me and my boys, Lincoln wouldn’t have any notoriety. It wouldn’t even be worth writing about!”

  I had been warned that dealing with Mr. Marbury might have its complications. Years ago, when he first began showing up at Lincoln to watch his son Eric play, he would stand at the sidelines yelling at Hartstein, “Put my son in! That’s why you’re losing!” So the school’s athletic director started assigning a teacher to sit next to Mr. Marbury in the bleachers in order to prevent him from cursing at the ref; he was sometimes one obscenity shy of drawing a technical foul. Whatever predisposition Mr. Marbury showed for angry outbursts, however, has only grown over the years, as Eric, then Donnie, and finally Norman tried to make it—if not to the NBA, then at least through graduation day at a four-year school—only to fall short of those aspirations. Now Mr. Marbury was down to his last basketball-playing son, and whether it came from his belief in Stephon’s marketability or his fear of being haunted by yet another set of abandoned dreams, Mr. Marbury seemed ready to cash in now. “Unfortunately, my first three boys didn’t reach the ultimate plateau, but I got another chance with Stephon,” he said to me in Pennsylvania. “He might be the first Lincoln player to go high Division One, you know. And if you want information about that, I expect that you will have the money to pay for it.”

  Warned or not, I didn’t actually expect Mr. Marbury to ask me for hard cash, and all I could think to say at the time was that most journalists considered it unethical to pay people for information; deals like that would cast doubt on the credibility of their reporting. Mr. Marbury shrugged dismissively. “I’m not like all them other Coney Island guys—too stupid to know the value of what they’re sitting on.” He tapped his brow. “This is a business—ain’t nothing but. And if I don’t receive satisfaction, I will take my business somewhere else. I always say, a wise man has his wisdom to protect him. A fool has his God.” A hostile silence fell between us, and we quickly parted company.

  Toward the end of the summer, I ran into Mr. Marbury again. Once more I asked to interview him, and again he stated his terms: I was free to write about Stephon, but if I wanted the Marburys’ exclusive story, I was going to have to make him an offer. “You think Patrick Ewing or Michael Jordan gave away their stories for nothing?” he scoffed. “Maybe I should get a ghostwriter and tell my own story. That’s my share of the glory, you know.” Again I raised my concern about paying people for their cooperation. This time Mr. Marbury started laughing at me. “Is that right!” he said, smirking and folding his arms across his chest. “I guess that’s why I saw you buying all that stuff for Corey and Russell.” I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said, his eyes enlarging. “At the Seven-Eleven in Gettysburg: I saw you buying them slushies!” He leaned toward me, his voice bitterly sarcastic. “And now I suppose you want me to think you did it because you’re just a nice guy. Oh, come on!”


  So that was it: Mr. Marbury had confused me with a college coach and the occasional snacks I bought the players with those under-the-table deals he had read so much about.

  The coaches who recruited the Marbury boys over the years have said that Donald Marbury “just won’t stop dining out on his sons’ talent,” that he “thinks he knows the game better than he does,” and if he keeps it up he will “get himself into trouble with the NCAA.” As for Stephon, the coaches are starting to complain that he’s just like his father—a player looking to “get over,” to take advantage of any situation. In certain circles, the Marburys are considered the avatars of all that is most unseemly about high school basketball. “They’ve been taught that you rape ’em, you get whatever you can, “lamented one summer-league coach (who tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit Stephon for his own team). “Everybody wants a deal. No one plays for the love of the game anymore.” At the time Mr. Marbury and I had our confrontation about the slushies, I couldn’t have agreed more.

  But now, having spent several months with Stephon, I am beginning to wonder how he and his father are supposed to act. The entire basketball establishment has been trying to buy Stephon for years: summer-league teams like the Gauchos pay his way to tournaments around the country (last summer found him as far away as Arizona); street agents take Stephon into the Knicks’ and Nets’ locker rooms for chats with the pros; basketball camps give him a bountiful supply of T-shirts, trophies, sneakers, bags, and caps; and coaches on every level constantly lay on hands, hoping to win his affection. (This, of course, is just a reprise of how the coaches treated Stephon’s brothers—until they encountered academic difficulties, at which point the coaches abruptly withdrew their affection and largess.) And lately, in the coaches’ efforts to appropriate Stephon, they have been trying to buy his father. Last year a summer coach for whom Stephon occasionally played found Mr. Marbury some parttime work; and the reason I ran into him at the B/C camp last summer is that administrators, hoping to enroll Stephon, had given his father a summer coaching job. So when Stephon tells Russell that coaches “take care of the players and their families,” he knows whereof he speaks.