The Last Shot Read online

  In this context, “stringy-haired niggers” sounds like barely disguised code for the disdain, even fear, with which Tchaka views some blacks from the projects; and certain of the Coney Island players readily return the insult, suggesting that the more middle-class players like Tchaka can’t play the game the way they do in Coney Island.

  “Yo, nigger, what position you gonna play in college?” Stephon asked Tchaka after his Seton Hall trip. The two were getting dressed across the aisle from each other in the Lincoln locker room.

  “Forward,” Tchaka replied.

  “Power forward?” Stephon said with mock incredulity.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “But you’re only six-six,” said the five-nine Stephon.

  “Six-seven, nigger.” Tchaka slammed his locker shut.

  “You know power forwards got to dribble and shoot,” Stephon said, his voice richly condescending. “You been working on that?” Stephon handed Tchaka a paper cup and suggested that Tchaka dispose of it for him.

  Tchaka, stuck with the damned cup in his hand, was speechless for a moment. Then he exploded, “You’re a freshman, man! What the hell is wrong with you!”

  “I can’t wait till you go to college,” Stephon said with a sneer. “You’ll be carrying luggage.” The teammates finished dressing in silence, then they headed home to their separate neighborhoods and their very separate lives.

  Most nights when Tchaka arrived in Queens, he came home to an answering machine full of messages from the coaches (“Do you miss me?” Rick Barnes asked) and a stack of mail. One day, Tchaka received letters from all the players on the Villanova team (“Tchaka—Hope to see you in a Wildcat uniform soon!”). Meanwhile reporters at the New York Daily News, Newsday, the Providence Journal-Bulletin, and Newark, New Jersey’s Ledger Star were calling Coach Hartstein at school, looking for a scoop on where Tchaka would sign. The Villanova assistant coach John Olive even called me at home one night. “Have you heard anything?” he asked. “Did Tchaka say anything about his Seton Hall visit?” I demurred, but the coach pressed on. “I hear Tchaka wasn’t in school today. What’s his mood been like?” The more I dodged, the more frantic Coach Olive became. “Does Tchaka seem up? What’s your gut say? If you had a gun to your head, where would you say he’s going to sign?”

  From the moment his Seton Hall tour ended, I knew Tchaka was no longer in doubt. For months he refused to get distracted from the things he most wanted to hear and simply waited until a coach finally hit upon them. As the NCAA’s early signing deadline approached, the recruiting hysteria grew more intense, but Tchaka remained the calm center of the storm.

  “I just want to get it over with,” he says one evening at his house in Queens. “I just want it to end so I can go to sleep. Everyone’s been telling me not to let all the recruiting go to my head. I’m surprised, with the things everybody says to me, my head’s not a lot bigger.” An expression of serenity settles over his face. “But I don’t really listen to the coaches. They never tell you the truth. They all say how good you are, even when you know you’re not playing well. But like Magic Johnson says in his video, ‘Never be satisfied with your game.’ That’s the way I feel. I’m only satisfied with twenty points, twenty rebounds, no turnovers, and catching all my passes.”

  As he speaks, Tchaka sits on the edge of his bed, his back straight as a rod and his hands cupping his knees. He looks as proper as an altar boy, and his words sound like a recitation. But I see that he is actually still with pensiveness, his gaze directed toward the far shore of his thoughts. “Sometimes I try to think what my dad would tell me about all this—the coaches, the recruiting,” he says. “He played basketball for Brooklyn College, you know; was even on TV a couple of times. So he knows what it’s like.” Tchaka doesn’t stir from his straight-backed position; he is almost in a kind of reverie. “My father and I used to play together, back when I just played basketball to play. You know—for the fun. Not like I do now—for the scholarship and stuff. He would talk to me. And I think that’s what he would tell me now—to just keep calm about it and not sweat it so much. Just, you know, play the game.”

  Talking about his father makes Tchaka uncharacteristically shy, for suddenly he leaps from the bed and climbs on a chair and staples back a poster of Larry Johnson that keeps drooping from the wall. But he jumps down just as quickly and signals me—“Yo, c’mere”—to follow him into the living room. He stands in front of a small, framed photograph that looks to be a picture of himself at about the age of ten. “Who’s that?” he asks me.

  “You, of course.”

  “Looks just like me, right?” Tchaka removes the frame from the wall to allow me a closer look. “That’s my dad when he was a kid.” The resemblance between Tchaka and his young father is extraordinary. “My mother says, since he looked exactly like me then, it means I’m gonna grow up to look exactly like him.” Tchaka seems pleased at the prospect. He returns the picture to its hook, squaring it with his thumb and forefinger.

  Just then his mother walks through the door. “Hello, Precious,” she says, giving Tchaka a kiss. “And how are you, Precious,” she says, kissing me as well. She drops her bag in the middle of the floor, walks immediately into the kitchen, fills a pot with hot water, and sits down on the living room couch to soak her feet. “I believe this job will kill me,” she announces operatically. “Yes, it will! It will strike me right down in the prime of my life!” Then she resumes her normal speaking voice to add, “’Cause it sure ain’t makin’ me rich.” She sighs and props her head on a pillow and explains that she has received some alarming news. Her landlady wants to sell the nicely maintained, one-story house the Shipps are renting, and unless the family can come up with a $6000 down payment within a year to buy it themselves, they will have to find somewhere else to live—back in Bed-Stuy, for example, or the projects.

  “I’m very anxious right now because, even with Tracie helping me out, I’m the main supporter and I don’t have the money,” she says while Tchaka takes a seat at the dining room table, clicks on the TV, and watches a Nike commercial featuring Charles Barkley. “And one of the biggest securities in Tchaka’s life right now is this home. There’s no riffraff on the streets around here. It’s quiet, peaceful. If he didn’t have this, he’d go crazy. So we have just got to find a way to keep it.” Mrs. Shipp looks at her son for a long moment; he’s oblivious of what she’s been saying, watching Sir Charles and shoveling dry cereal into his mouth. She smiles. “But now, with the Seton Hall scholarship, at least I can go to sleep each night knowing he’s going to get a marvelous education, he’ll be in a good environment, and he will grow up to be the excellent young man his father and I always knew he would be. He’s really in the time of his life right now.” She leans back on the couch and sighs, this time less with fatigue than with relief. “So we have a lot of financial problems. We struggle. But when I look at Tchaka, I realize we are also blessed.” This, truly, is what one hopes ior Tchaka and all his teammates—not necessarily that they will become big college stars, where the coaches will continue to lie to them and the players will be lucky to finish their four college years with a diploma in hand, but that basketball will help them get an education in order that they might do something else with their lives besides play ball.

  Mrs. Shipp clears her throat. “Tchaka, dear?” she says to her son, speaking now in a girlish, importunate voice. “After you graduate from Seton Hall, dear? And you make all that money in the pros, dear? Will you share it with your hard-working and devoted mother?”

  Tchaka looks up from the TV, walks over to the couch, and begins shadow boxing, watching his reflection in the mirror above his mother’s head. “Nope,” he replies. “I’ll buy me some Nikes.”

  “I mean it,” Mrs. Shipp says sternly. “Will you share it with your mother?”

  Tchaka frowns. “I already told you, no. That dust is mine.”

  “You won’t? You’re gonna be in the NBA and we’re gonna be in a shelter?”


  “Ma, that’s a stupid question,” Tchaka says, exasperated. “Of course I’ll share it with you. What you think I’m gonna do?”

  Mrs. Shipp smiles and sighs again and splashes her feet around in the pot. Tchaka starts throwing punches at the living room cabinet.

  “Tchaka, dear?” Mrs. Shipp begins again. Tchaka shoots her a look. “Will you let me be your manager?”

  “Ma, don’t start with that.”

  “But you’re gonna need someone to help you manage all that money.”

  “I’ll manage it myself.”

  “You’ll need a responsible adult.”

  “What you think I’ll be when I get all that money?” Now Tchaka begins jumping up and down, palming the ceiling. The basketball trophies on the windowsill shake, and the water at Mrs. Shipp’s feet laps over the edge of the pot.

  “But you’re going to need someone to help you invest it,” Mrs. Shipp says.

  Still jumping, Tchaka speaks in staccato bursts, as if someone is pounding on his chest. “I’ll . . . just . . . take . . . a . . . course . . . in . . . money . . . management.” He stops hopping. “Either that or I’ll keep my money in a safe under my bed,” he says reasonably. “When I need to deposit, I’ll deposit. When I need to withdraw, I’ll withdraw.”

  Mrs. Shipp shakes her head. “I think you’ll need an expert like me.” She fluffs the pillow behind her head. “And I only charge ten percent.”

  “Ma! What you so hype about?”

  “I ain’t hype. You hype,” she answers.

  “No, you hype!” he yells back.

  “No, you hype!”

  The two of them stare at each other fiercely, waiting for the other to smile.

  “Tchaka, dear?”

  “What now!”

  “Get your mother a glass of water.”

  ***

  A few nights later, Russell invites me over to his apartment after practice. He still has a few more chances to pass his SATs, but time is running out. And as he continues to struggle with the test, most of the Division I coaches who came to see him in the fall have given up and moved on to other players. That’s when the junior colleges, smelling a potential Prop 48 casualty, begin to send out their grim invitations. “We’re all hoping you make 700s on your SATs. Let’s assume you don’t. Come to the sunny Southwest,” writes the coach of a community college in Texas, the largest and most competitive junior-college league.

  “Man, I hope everything works out,” Russell says as we drive down Surf Avenue toward his project. “I hope everything works out like it’s supposed to.” Deep down, though, he seems to have realized that it doesn’t matter how he plays this season or whether he continues to get good grades or stays away from the neighborhood drug dealers or dresses for success or dunks in public—all those items on his long list of “Things to Do to Get My Scholarship.” Unless he gets 700 very soon, in the coaches’ eyes he will remain easily exchangeable for a player with better test scores.

  Coney Island never looks quite so forlorn as it does just before Christmas. The Cyclone and Wonder Wheel have been shuttered for the winter; the boardwalk is littered with broken glass and crack vials. Certain of the neighborhood’s urban beach activities continue—guys combing the sand for loose change with their metal detectors and car owners attending to their batteries with solar-powered rechargers. But for the most part the neighborhood is more deserted than ever. Just behind the boardwalk and the amusement park, where the projects rise up, the cold weather has swept the streets clean of everyone but the most hardened criminals. Garbage drifts down empty alleyways like tumbleweed. At night, Christmas lights blink on and off from the top floors of the projects, semaphoring into the ocean darkness, but few people are around to receive the holiday message.

  This is my first visit to Russell’s home, and as he and I walk into the lobby of his building, he says, his eyes cast down in weariness and shame, “Welcome to the old ghetto.” Russell’s building is identical in design with the one in which Corey and Stephon live just a block away—fourteen stories of weathered brick sheltering pissy stairwells and dim hallways. I have always assumed it was no better or worse than theirs. But Russell assures me that looks are deceiving. The way he peers around the elevator door before entering makes me believe him.

  Upstairs, his family’s apartment is oppressively small: a living room, kitchenette, bathroom with walls of peeling brown paint, and two bedrooms. His mother has one; Russell and his two younger sisters, using bunk beds and a cot, share the other. Tonight the temperature outside has dropped to 13 degrees, and with the apartment radiators offering little help, Russell’s mother, even in her absence, is heating the place by warming a small brick on the top of the stove. From the top floors of all these projects you can see straight to the amusement park and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. But the vast, unobstructed views serve mostly as reminders of the punitive conditions in which the Thomases and everyone else in this neighborhood live, locked fearfully away behind their steel apartment doors.

  I notice that Russell is wearing a new ring on his finger and I ask whether it’s a present from Terry; perhaps this means they’re back on track. But Russell doesn’t answer me. Instead he says, “Want to see some pictures of Terry and me?” He pulls out a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings about himself and the Lincoln team. Stuffed in the back are a pile of loose snapshots. “We been together a long time,” he says wistfully as he looks through the photos and passes them to me one by one. “All those days last summer—picnics, all the stuff we used to do.” He lingers over one shot of Terry and him. “Maybe someday—way, way off in the future—we’ll get married.” Russell and I are still looking at the photos when he hears a key in the front door. Hastily, he grabs the pictures from my hand and shoves them back in the scrapbook, snapping it shut just as his mother walks in.

  “You come home right after practice?” she asks anxiously. Russell nods, and she smiles in my direction. “Russell thinks I’m overprotective, but I have to know where he’s at. If he’s at practice or at Willie’s, okay. But just hanging out on the street? No!” She drops a bag of groceries on the kitchen table and lets out a long sigh. The neighborhood’s one decent supermarket is fifteen blocks away; any time she needs more than a few items from the store, she has to take a car service there and back. “This is a hard neighborhood. Wicked, nothing but drugs out there,” says Mrs. Thomas, removing her coat. “Most of Russell’s friends are wasting their lives. You’ve got to have a strong and powerful will not to go in that direction.”

  Joyce Thomas, I know from my one previous meeting with her, certainly has that. Now she gets to work in her small apartment, unpacking groceries and heating up some baked ziti on the top of her stove. Suddenly a burst of what sounds like machine gun fire erupts outside, scaring me half to death, but Mrs. Thomas doesn’t react in any way. “You gotta always watch who you’re hanging out with around here,” she says warily. “’Cause even if you’re doing nothing wrong, you’ll end up getting blamed too. I always tell Russell, it takes that much”—she spreads two fingers an inch apart—“to get into trouble, and that much”—now two hands shoulder width apart—“to get out of it.” She looks over to her son, but he has vanished from the living room. “So far Russell’s okay.” She raps twice on her kitchen table. “So far.” I start to say something, but Mrs. Thomas cuts me off. “When Russell messes up, I knock him out. I do. I tell him, ‘Don’t you dog me, boy; I’m all you got!’” She is looking at me with great force in her eyes, and I quickly get the feeling that there’s more going on here than I yet comprehend. “I don’t care how big Russell is or how much ball he plays,” she says, still staring at me. “I’ll put a ball in his head!”

  Soon Russell reappears, this time with his Walkman on and a strange, stricken look on his face. He starts to sing aloud to a slow love song coming from his Walkman, though all we can hear, of course, is Russell’s sad crooning.

  Suddenly Mrs. Thomas takes in a breath. Looking at Russell, she
says, “Did you do it?” Russell keeps on singing, so Mrs. Thomas walks over to him, picks up his hand, and examines the ring. “Terry gave it back to you?”

  He slides the headphones around his neck. “I took it back,” he says. His voice is clotted.

  “How did it go?” his mother asks.

  Russell can’t think of anything to say. And I’m wondering, When did all this happen?

  At last Russell murmurs, “She was real sad.”

  Mrs. Thomas doesn’t stir. The apartment is quiet except for the refrigerator’s hum. A few moments pass. Russell has begun to turn inward, and the next words he utters seem to reach us from a great distance. “She was crying, hanging on to my leg, saying, ‘Don’t go, don’t go.’”

  “Now don’t you worry about Terry,” Mrs. Thomas says matter-of-factly. “She’ll be all right. There are plenty of other Russell Thomases out there. You just watch out for yourself.”

  “I’m real sad, too,” he says quickly, and I can see him struggling not to cry.

  “Don’t be. How long were you together—five, six months? That’s not so hard to get over.” Mrs. Thomas turns briskly toward her groceries and continues to unpack. Russell stands stock-still in the middle of the living room, staring at his feet.