The Last Shot Page 22

  And a few days after my final conversation with Mr. Marbury, Russell came up to me in the school corridor and told me, haltingly and with great embarrassment, that his mother had ordered him not to speak to me anymore. Apparently, Russell said, she didn’t think it wise for him to spend time with a reporter while his recruiting hung in the balance. Confused by this, and unable to get much of an explanation from Russell, I called Mrs. Thomas that night. She sounded angry—not at me so much as at the diminishing possibilities for her son. “What’s he going to say to you anyway?” she yelled into the phone. “He’s just a poor black boy growing up in a place with a lot of crack and cocaine! Coney Island is like any other place in the world—it’s got people on drugs. Thank God he’s not on drugs. Thank God he wants something else. But what’s he gonna say? That he’s got friends wasting away their lives? You don’t dog nobody. ’Cause you never know when you’re gonna fall! I’m just praying to God that he goes to college and gets his diploma and gets out of here. I want him to have what I never got. Russell is my only son in this world and I’ll do anything in my power to see that he goes the right way. People, they come down to Coney Island and they look at the boardwalk and all the rides and they say, ‘Isn’t that nice?’ And then they see all those buildings behind them and they say, ‘Gee, do people live back there?’ Yeah, well, we live back here. There are people back here. There are lives going on here. Just because we’re black doesn’t mean we’re stupid . . . ”

  ***

  A few nights later, Tchaka is out at Seton Hall to watch a game and meet some of his future teammates. Russell, Stephon, Corey, and I are in my car, making the usual run to Willie’s. For months now, Tchaka has been sitting in the locker room at Lincoln or touring the Big East campuses, watching his future fall into place. The Coney Island guys drive around endlessly in my car, in danger of going nowhere. Stephon announces that he’s going to get an X shaved into the back of his scalp. Russell is considering a center part like Larry Johnson’s. As we approach the barbershop, we pass by a bunch of guys yelling on a street corner. Corey looks at them suspiciously and says, “What are these uglies making so much noise for?” He glances at his friends. “Don’t be wasting time at Willie’s, all right?” he says. When I ask why, he tells me a gang from a nearby project has been roaming lately. Last week a woman was hit by a stray bullet right outside the shop, so they all want to get their cuts and be gone.

  To me, Coney Island’s desolate project walkways and stairwells have always seemed more threatening than the raucous street life here along Flatbush Avenue. And, in fact, not only Tchaka but the two other Lincoln players who live across town have now renounced all visits to Coney Island. But Russell, Corey, and Stephon make it clear to me that as they move through the patchwork of neighborhoods that make up Brooklyn, it matters less how bad an area is than if they find themselves outside their own turf; a group of black teenagers (even celebrity basketball players like themselves, fresh from their victory over Grady) will always be at physical risk on foreign soil. Wherever they go, the three scan the streets to see who may be coming up to them. One of their teammates was shot in the hand a few months ago—caught in crossfire in a Crown Heights playground. After spending seven unattended hours in a hospital emergency room, he has just about lost his ability to shoot the ball. Another classmate was shot at a house party recently; he’s still in intensive care. “Something’s happening, boy, every day, every day,” says Russell.

  As planned, they’re in and out of Willie’s in a flash and happy to be heading home. Driving down Mermaid Avenue, I bring up my last conversation with Mr. Marbury, wondering what the players will think of our exchange. Corey laughs and says, “We got all types in Coney Island—the sane, the insane, and the everything in between. We got room for everyone. But you got to open up a dictionary to find the words for them. That’s for sure.”

  “Nah, he just wants to know what’s in it for him,” Stephon says of his father. “He knows you don’t get something for nothing. He knows if you write about the Marburys you’re gonna make a lotta loot.” Stephon rolls his thumb and forefinger together. “’Cause everybody knows about the Lincoln tradition and wants to read about us.”

  “What you mean?” Corey says. “No one reads books anymore.”

  “Then why is Darcy writing about us?”

  “’Cause he just wants to write,” Corey replies on my behalf. “I know what that’s like.”

  “Then he’s a fool,” Stephon concludes.

  Russell has been in a particularly foul mood all evening, saying little and leaning into the car heater with his thin winter coat, trying to stay warm; it is, if possible, colder now than it was the other night at his apartment. I mention my recent phone conversation with his mother, wondering whether there’s a chance she will change her mind. But Russell says, “You don’t understand. My mother’s crazy!”

  Stephon pipes in with some advice for me. “Just greet Russell’s mother at the door and hit her with a hundred. She’ll change her mind.” He snickers knowingly. “She’s no different than my father. He wants to make sure he gets some of that loot.”

  At first I think Stephon is missing the point—that Mrs. Thomas’s suspicion of me and her desperation to get Russell out of Coney Island are entirely different from Mr. Marbury’s demand for money. But Corey sees the connection. “Damn,” he says, “your parents must have had a hard life.”

  “Still do,” Stephon replies. “Your father got himself a whole plumbing business. My father and Russell’s mother got nothing.” Stephon looks at me out of the corner of his eye and says, “You’re thinking, What a bunch of niggers. Right?”

  The word hangs in the air. I can’t think of a thing to say. For months I’ve heard them call each other that, but by putting the word in my mouth, Stephon means something far more corrosive by it now.

  “You got to think like a black man,” Stephon goes on. “Got to learn how to say ‘Fuck it, fuck everybody, fuck the whole damn thing.’ Now that’s life in the ghetto.”

  “It’s true!” Russell exclaims, his mood improving for the first time all evening. “My mother is a nigger! She’s a black woman who does not give a damn.”

  So that’s the definition? Someone whose many hard years in an abandoned ghetto have forced her to rely only on herself and have made her suspicious of anyone—Terry, me—who might interfere with her son’s tenuous passage out of poverty? Any white parent who did that would be called overprotective, but no matter. Mr. Marbury supplies another definition: someone in urgent need who strives to protect himself from those who would exploit him and to turn the meager resources at his command into something that might support a family. That, as they say at the Nike all-American camp, is what American entrepreneurship is all about. Except, evidently, in the American ghetto.

  “Man, I’m tired of all this shit!” Stephon slams his hands down hard on his book bag. “Somebody’s got to make it, somebody’s got to go all the way. How come this shit only happens to us Coney Island niggers?” He shakes his head wildly and laughs. “My father and Russell’s mother—yeah, they’re crazy, but it’s about time there was a little something for the niggs.”

  “Something for the niggs!” Russell repeats the line with a hoot. “Yeah, Steph! Time to get outspoken!”

  “You got it,” Stephon says, and laughs again. Then Corey joins in. And they’re all three whooping and slapping their knees—laughing at their parents and, I imagine, at me and at the absurdity of this whole situation.

  The coaches point to kids like Tchaka as proof that the system works. But he is the exception—representative not of the 500,000 or so male high school basketball players in this country, but of the less than 1 percent of them who will win a Division I scholarship. And Tchaka succeeds in this game not because he is the first kid to work hard and play by the rules. Russell, Corey, and Stephon do that. They stay in school—though their school hardly keeps its end of the bargain. They say no to drugs—though it’s the only fully emp
loyed industry around. They don’t get into trouble with the NCAA—though its rules seem designed to foil them, and the coaches who break the rules usually go unpunished.

  Of course none of them is perfect. Russell panics about his SATs and the choices he must make, and has trouble owning up to it. Corey won’t apply himself and kids himself into thinking it won’t matter. Stephon has—what shall we call it?—an attitude that needs some adjustment. But they operate in an environment that forgives none of the inevitable transgressions of adolescence and bestows few second chances.

  Which makes this process of playing for a scholarship not the black version of the American dream, as I had thought eight months earlier, but a cruel parody of it. In the classic parable you begin with nothing and slowly accrue your riches through hard work in a system designed to help those who help themselves. Here, at seventeen years of age, you begin with nothing but one narrow, treacherous path and then run a gauntlet of obstacles that merely reminds you of how little you have: recruiters pass themselves off as father figures, standardized tests humiliate you and reveal the wretchedness of your education, the promise of lucrative NBA contracts reminds you of what it feels like to have nothing in this world.

  Jou-Jou, Silk, Chocolate, Spoon, Spice, Ice, Goose, Tiny, T, Stretch, Space, Sky: all of them great Coney Island players, a few surviving all right, but most of them waiting vainly for a second chance, hanging out in the neighborhood, or dead. And here come Russell, Corey, and Stephon in my car, riding down Mermaid toward the projects in the bone chill and gloom of this dark December night, still laughing about “the niggs,” hoping for the best, and knowing that in this particular game failure is commonplace, like a shrug, and heartbreak the order of the day.

  Epilogue

  IN THE SPRING of his senior year, Russell Thomas signed with Philadelphia’s Temple University, whose team has regularly been among the nation’s top twenty. But on his final SAT attempt, his score went down, Temple withdrew its scholarship offer, and Russell ended up at a junior college near Los Angeles. There, for the next two years, Russell became one of the most electrifying scorers in the junior college leagues, averaging 32 points per game and breaking his school’s career-scoring record. Once again, dozens of Division I coaches came to recruit him. This time, wary of their promises, Russell turned down all their offers and accepted a scholarship at a four-year Division II school in a quiet West Coast community, where he thought he would study better and be sure to earn his bachelor’s degree. He has not been back to Coney Island.

  Corey Johnson fell short of a 700 on his SATs by ten points. He went to a junior college in Texas. In his second semester, Corey became a father, failed several classes, lost his eligibility, and returned to New York City. Now, he takes occasional college classes, does some modeling, and works part-time for his father’s plumbing business.

  Tchaka Shipp spent two frustrating years playing for the Seton Hall Pirates. Despite having been promised ample playing time, Tchaka languished on the bench, averaging 3 points and 3 rebounds in thirteen minutes of action per game. After Coach P. J. Carlesimo recruited a new class of front-court players, Tchaka transferred to the lower-level University of California at Irvine, looking for a starting spot. He will have two years of eligibility remaining, but according to NCAA rules must sit out one full season before playing basketball again.

  All hopes now rest on Stephon Marbury, who began his senior year at Lincoln in the fall of 1994. Five inches taller and dunking with ease, Stephon dominates the PSAL, where he averages 26 points, 8 assists, and 4 steals per game. He was named a Parade All-American and played on the U.S. Junior Olympic team in Argentina. Widely considered the finest high school point guard in the nation, he has an 85 average at Lincoln and hopes to sign early, most likely with Syracuse or Georgia Tech. But as of the summer of 1994, he was still working to pass his SATs.

  Willie Johnson lost his business when some local drug dealers, whom he was trying to evict from his barbershop building, set fire to the shop and burned it down. He now cuts hair at a friend’s shop in Staten Island.

  And at the Garden, Disco and Mr. Lou continue to run their tournament and have organized nighttime shooting drills for the neighborhood’s schoolchildren—eight years old and up—to prepare them for the road ahead.

  Acknowledgments

  I could never have written this book without the help of Corey Johnson, Stephon Marbury, Tchaka Shipp, and Russell Thomas, who for almost a year welcomed me into their lives with warmth and enthusiasm; I am greatly indebted to them. I would also like to express my gratitude to the coaching staff at Abraham Lincoln High School and to the many former players and basketball aficionados in Coney Island who showed me around the neighborhood and shared its lore.

  Many friends and colleagues also helped during this project. Pamela Kogut was immeasurably generous with her inspiration and support. Ilena Silverman, my editor at Harper’s Magazine, lent her heart and soul to this book as if it were her own. Paul LeVine and Jake Lamar read several drafts and tirelessly gave of their wisdom, guidance, and friendship. Michael Pollan, Gerald Marzorati, and Lewis Lapham, also of Harper’s, offered shrewd editorial counsel. Joseph Nocera gave an incisive reading of an early draft. Frances Apt copyedited the manuscript with great care. John Hassan provided expert fact checking. My agent, Flip Brophy, never lost faith, even when my own faith wavered. Eric Friedman was a devoted friend. My mother and sister were encouraging throughout. And I owe a special debt to my book editor, Richard Todd, who set me to it and saw me through it—with grace and good humor all the way.

  About the Author

  DARCY FREY is a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine and the New York Times Magazine. He lives in New York City.