The Last Shot Read online

  I try to alert Tchaka to the volume of peppers he is deploying, but I can’t get his attention.

  “It just doesn’t feel right when you say the name Providence or Villanova. But Seton Hall? Now that brings a smile to my face.”

  Not to mention even more peppers on his pizza.

  “Where you goin’ to college?” he asks himself. “Goin’ to Seton Hall,” he replies. “Word!”

  His pizza is now officially inedible.

  “I can see the headline when I sign: PIRATES GET THEIR SHIPP.” Tchaka laughs, hoists his mountainous slice with two hands, opens wide, and (Don’t do it!) inserts. A pound of gravelly peppers glides down his throat. Not even pizza flambé could get his attention now.

  ***

  Heading toward Thanksgiving, Lincoln High could not have asked for greater success from its varsity basketball team. Even as school administrators are struggling to control a rash of violent encounters in the hallways and a new trend that has seen several Lincoln kids jumped by rival gangs right outside the school building, Tchaka, Russell, Corey, and Stephon are bringing acclaim to their beleaguered school. They are undefeated in all their games and scrimmages so far. They are making headlines in the sports pages of all the New York tabloids with their blistering, fast-break offense. They even earn an invitation to fly to San Diego for the Above the Rim Christmas tournament of the country’s top sixteen high school teams. Lincoln isn’t just winning either; as the team travels by subway to its away games around the city, Tchaka, Russell, Corey, and Stephon are blowing out their opponents by such lopsided scores that opposing coaches often shake their heads after the final buzzer and remark, “Those guys were high school players?”

  Russell seems to be scoring at will; in the team’s first scrimmage he turned in an outrageous 46-point performance, missing only three of twenty-four field-goal attempts, then kept up a 25-point pace for the next several games. The Hoop Scoop ranked him the sixth best player in all of New York City, he earned an honorable mention in Street & Smith’s nationwide basketball roundup, and an influential scouting report dubbed him the “Secretary of Defense” for his smothering play at the opposite end of the court.

  As for Stephon, he is getting his burn, and then some. To no one’s surprise, Hartstein started him in the season’s first game (fifteen points, twelve assists) and every one thereafter. Newsday, under a half-page picture of the Lincoln team holding the smiling young point guard in their arms, announced that “the era of Stephon Marbury” had begun. “The fourth Marbury brother to play at Lincoln—and, possibly, the most talented—Stephon has transformed supreme confidence into out-and-out giddiness,” the article reported. “Asked what he will bring to Lincoln this year, Marbury responded, ‘Another Kenny Anderson.’” Actually Stephon is ahead of his idol’s pace; not even Anderson started as a high school freshman. College scouting reports are already giving Stephon their highest rating. An assistant coach from Providence came down to watch Stephon practice one day, waving discreetly to the freshman—and thereby violating the intent, if not the letter, of NCAA rules designed to protect underclassmen from recruiters. (“It’s never too early to start showing interest,” the coach whispered.) Word of Stephon’s prowess even reached a TV production company, which contacted him about making a commercial, though when the NCAA informed the Marburys that accepting a fee might violate its rules, his father declined. Everyone keeps checking to see if the legendary Marbury bravado will affect Stephon’s game—before the season, even some of his teammates were hoping that an opposing point guard would bust him just once, to lower his ego. But Stephon has not only established himself as a superb floor general, able to marshal all the talent on this team into one brutally effective offensive force; he has become, while the seniors are distracted by their recruiting, the team’s de facto leader. Stephon is working harder than anyone in practice and has no qualms about dressing down his older friends if they don’t match his effort.

  But off the court, it is impossible not to notice how dramatically Tchaka’s fortunes seem to be diverging from those of his Coney Island teammates.

  Corey is still writing verse, and writing it well. The other day he showed me a poem about life in Coney Island that ended, “A place meant for happiness, sweet love and care—/ Something any human desires to share. / Yet it seems to haunt instead of praise / The foundation and center of our bitter days.” Corey is amazingly prolific, often dashing off a new poem for every girl he meets. But having merged his twin passions—writing and romance—he rarely leaves time for his homework. He does the assignments he likes, ignores the rest, and, though he never causes trouble in class or makes excuses for his bad grades—especially during first-period classes, which is a telltale sign that he’s not struggling with the work, just sleeping late—his average remains just above 65. Three times Corey told Coach Hartstein he was taking the SATs, and never did. “That’s just his style,” Russell explained the other day. “He don’t care about nothing till the last minute; then he be flippin’.” But already several Division I coaches have identified Corey as a gifted player whose grades, if he doesn’t pull them out of the fire right away, will be his undoing.

  Meanwhile Stephon, despite his supreme self-confidence on the court, often seems oppressed by the pressure put on him not only to succeed in his own right, but to redeem his entire family. Disappointment over the careeers of Eric, Donnie, and Norman has never dissipated in Coney Island; sometimes when I stand around the Lincoln corridors, I hear talk about nothing but how “Spoon, Sky, and Jou-Jou should have all gone big time. Why didn’t it work out for any of them?” Even the school custodian stops Stephon in the hallway after practice one day to advise him, “Work hard, okay? Don’t fuck up like your brothers.”

  The day that happens, Stephon asks me for a lift into downtown Brooklyn so that he can catch the subway to Manhattan for a Knicks game. Heading northward on Ocean Parkway, we climb steadily up Brooklyn’s socioeconomic ladder, from the Coney Island projects at one end through several bustling Hassidic neighborhoods and on into Park Slope, a middle-class neighborhood of tree-lined streets and well-kept brownstones. Watching the affluent world slide by our window, Stephon grows quiet for a while, playing absently with his earring. When he speaks again, it is in a quiet, contemplative voice I have never heard from him before. “You know, when I was a little kid, I wanted to do everything exactly like my older brothers, even the stupid things. I wanted to be just like them—Norman especially.” Stephon gives a small, hard laugh, as if looking back over the span of many years. “But that isn’t true anymore. I want to take a different route than he did. I’m gonna pass my SATs and go to a four-year school and make it all the way. Everybody’s always saying I’m just like Jou-Jou, but that’s not fair. I’m not like Jou-Jou. I’m nothing like him. Not about this, anyway.” Stephon shakes his head—angry at the comparison and saddened that it has become something to disavow. “I still think Norman could get recruited to a Division One school and then maybe go pro in the hardship draft. Well, I don’t know. But it’s true what people say: Norman didn’t do anything his freshman year at Lincoln. He just went to class and went to sleep. He woke up in his sophomore year, but his freshman year really hurt him. I’m working hard right now.” Stephon seems to know already that part of what success will require of him is the strength to separate from his family, forge a different path in life—a painful prospect at any age, but especially so at fourteen, when he should be worrying about nothing more consequential than whether he will grow tall enough in the next year or two to dunk.

  Stephon is showing incredible determination in his classes, just as he does on the court. He spends hours on the phone at night with his math tutor, and he even turned down Coach Hartstein’s recent offer to transfer him to an easier math class, where his grade would no doubt improve. Unfortunately, hard work alone—although it is preached endlessly to the players as the one sure route to success—does not suffice in these circumstances. Despite Stephon’s efforts, hi
s English teachers notice that his book reports rarely include a complete sentence or period or capital letter—not a good omen for the verbal portion of the SATs. And his math teacher spots huge gaps in his basic understanding that must be caught now, before they get any worse.

  The same thing is happening with Russell. He still studies each and every night for the SATs, and he scores reasonably well on practice exams. Coach Hartstein even got him a private tutor and a scholarship to a Stanley Kaplan class. But there is so much riding on this test—all Russell’s dreams of making it to a four-year school—and he has acquired such poor fundamental skills over the years, that when test day arrives, Russell’s concentration vanishes. He does something he never does on the court: he panics. And then he forgets all he has recently learned, which shakes his enduring faith that hard work can indeed win the day. “I know I can pass that test. I just get so nervous,” he said the other day. “I took it again last weekend. I think I came through. But I don’t know. At this point, I just don’t give a fuck.”

  When Tchaka scored 700 on his second SAT attempt last June, I assumed at the time that his teammates would soon follow. Since then, however, I have learned how unusual is Tchaka’s academic success—not only among his current teammates, but among all those Lincoln players over the years who aspired to four-year colleges. Tchaka, in fact, has set a number of unusual records at Lincoln. He is the first player ever to meet his college-eligibility requirements in his junior year of high school. He is the first player in sound enough academic shape to get his recruiting mail from Coach Hartstein before the end of his junior year. He is the first Lincoln player ever to attract, at one time or another, the interest of all the schools in the Big East conference. And he will soon become the first player in the school’s long history to sign with a college in the fall of his senior year; most have waited until the following spring, hoping their grades and test scores would improve, and, when they didn’t, have signed on with a junior college.

  Sports psychologists and guidance counselors who work with inner-city athletes often talk about an essential triangle in a player’s life formed by his family, his neighborhood, and his schooling. The rule is that a player can triumph over one weak point in that triangle, maybe two, but almost never all three. Tchaka has at least the first two in his favor—stability at home and in his neighborhood. Russell, Corey, and Stephon, however, all come from families that can’t seem to escape their tenancy in the Coney Island projects. The neighborhood itself—with its armies of drug dealers and unwed teenage mothers—may be the least stable place in New York City in which to grow up. And now, as they face the hurdle of the SATs, it seems that years of bad schooling are coming back to haunt these athletes just when they need their educations the most. This may handicap them throughout their lives; on the immediate level, it means that while Tchaka is being taken on personal tours of the arenas and locker rooms of the Big East, Russell and Corey have yet to go on a single campus recruiting visit, and their prospects of doing so look increasingly grim.

  ***

  The NCAA and the college basketball industry have done much soul searching in recent years over the SAT requirement, as well they should. The NCAA instituted the 700 threshold, known as Proposition 48, in 1986, after coming under pressure to show its commitment to education as well as to athletics. But the requirement has proved to be an insurmountable obstacle to thousands of black players like Russell, Corey, and Stephon with poor educations and no experience in taking standardized tests. Of the players who have gone to junior colleges since the rule was instituted (they are known as Prop 48 casualties), 9 percent are white, 91 percent black. Some critics have suggested that if the NCAA is so concerned about the education of its student-athletes, it should allow a college to award scholarships to players who don’t pass the SATs, as long as they stay off the team until the school brings them up to speed in the classroom. Or the NCAA might eliminate freshman eligibility across the board so that every player’s first year in college would be devoted entirely to schoolwork. Or it could deny a school its coveted Division I status if its players didn’t graduate. Then, the argument goes, instead of punishing educationally disadvantaged kids like the Coney Island players, the rules would punish the colleges with a weak commitment to academics. At the very least the NCAA could examine indications of a player’s scholastic potential besides standardized tests—high school transcripts, say, or attendance records. But so far the NCAA has yet to embrace any options that might compel colleges to educate their players, only ones that flaunt the organization’s lofty commitment to academics while they actually prevent many hard-working but poorly schooled athletes from getting a college education. Russell’s school average of over 80, his practice of sitting in the first row of class and asking provocative questions, the estimation of his remedial math teacher that he works harder than any student she has had in thirty years—all of these things speak volumes about Russell’s determination to succeed on the college level, but unless he gets a 700, they alone will get him nowhere.

  The NCAA’s rulebook governing the recruiting process goes on for forty-four pages and includes, in addition to Proposition 48, such arcana as the prohibition of recruiting tapes and multicolored brochures. The college coaches often say that if you don’t break any rules, it’s probably by accident; or, alternatively, if you use common sense, you’re sure to get yourself into trouble. Of course, the coaches have their own reasons for condemning the NCAA rules—principally, that recruiting would be a lot easier if there were no rules—but on grounds of sheer capriciousness, it’s hard to disagree with them. After I tagged along on Tchaka’s visit to Seton Hall, apparently the NCAA’s Kansas City headquarters faxed a notice to several other Big East schools that were recruiting him, instructing their coaches to bar me from accompanying Tchaka on any further campus visits. The spokeswoman I reached in Kansas City explained that the NCAA’s ruling was made to protect Tchaka’s interests: my presence on campus could be construed as an unfair recruiting advantage for one of the schools. I couldn’t quite follow that argument and wondered whether the ruling couldn’t also be construed as an advantage for the NCAA, which would be spared the embarrassment of having its excessive recruiting rituals so closely observed by a reporter. The NCAA, after all, serves two functions at once: to police the recruiters and to minimize the bad publicity that recruiting violations inevitably bring to the college game.

  That was not my only run-in with the NCAA. After my several conversations with Donald Marbury, I decided to draw up a contract stipulating that all the players’ families would share in whatever profit this book might make. At that point, however, the NCAA informed me that any arrangement I might make with the Lincoln players would violate their status as amateur athletes and jeopardize their eligibility to play NCAA ball.

  Those two decisions—the one preventing me from observing Tchaka’s campus visits, the other prohibiting my financial arrangement with the players—seem to encapsulate perfectly the corrupt theology of the NCAA. Purportedly, the NCAA maintains its strict standards of amateurism because it believes that a college scholarship is compensation enough for a player and that college sports should be treated as one more extracurricular activity, like playing tuba in the marching band. But if having a big-time college basketball program is really as tangential to a school’s fortunes as the marching band or the fencing team, one wonders why the NCAA allows its basketball coaches to recruit their so-called amateur athletes by inviting them to campus, treating them to the finest restaurants, taking them to the best parties, and ushering them to courtside seats at the local pro franchises—all those subtle inducements I would have witnessed had the NCAA not banned me from visiting the other Big East campuses with Tchaka. And, given how many perks the NCAA does permit, I can’t help thinking that it found my arrangement with the Lincoln players objectionable only because contractual deals like the one Mr. Marbury was demanding would do away with subtle inducements altogether and reveal college athletics fo
r what it really is: commerce, pure and simple. Once that happens, however—once the whole business is measured in dollars and cents—it may seem considerably less defensible that poor black kids like Stephon should, for the price of a college scholarship and a few giveaways on campus, generate millions in ticket sales and TV contracts for the universities that recruit them simply because the NCAA and its member schools have a huge financial incentive in maintaining antiquated notions of the amateur athlete. (Even the Olympics are now filled with highly paid professionals and product endorsers.) The real issue, of course, is much simpler. Should college athletes receive a regular stipend for services rendered on the court? But addressing that question would also mean acknowledging the enormous inequity between these richly endowed colleges and their mostly impoverished players. So, instead, the NCAA investigates Syracuse for allegedly handing out twenty-dollar Christmas bonuses and deliberates over the use or misuse of muticolored stationery during the recruiting process.

  ***

  After Russell took the SATs last weekend for what must be the fourth time, Terry was planning to treat him to a celebratory dinner at a restaurant in her neighborhood. So as the players and I walk down the school steps after practice on the following Monday, I ask Russell whether he had a good time on his date.

  “I dissed her good!” he roars. “You should have seen it. Tell him, Corey.” Corey, walking next to Russell, doesn’t say anything, so Russell goes on. “She came up to me all nice and sweet, and I said, ‘Get out of my sight, Terry! Don’t bother me no more!’”

  I am stunned by this development. The last I had heard, Russell and Terry were doing great; in fact, she had asked him to draw up a hst of colleges he was considering so that she could think about joining him when she graduated next year. (“Now I got to stay alive,” Russell had said, “so I can be with Terry.”) And the last time I saw the two of them together, Terry was sitting on Russell’s lap in study hall, affectionately feeding him a bagel bite by bite.