The Last Shot Page 3

  Tchaka sees that his teammate has just got a 79—better, for the first time, than himself. “Yeah, Russell!” he cries. “You’re a student-athlete now!” Tchaka reaches forward with his giant hand and gives Russell’s freshly shaved head a congratulatory rub. Corey Johnson, walking down the corridor, observes this ceremony and joins in polishing Russell’s smooth dark orb.

  “What are we doing?” Corey asks with a smile. “Making a wish?”

  “Russell got a seventy-nine!” Tchaka exclaims while Russell rocks from one foot to the other with glad self-consciousness. “Let’s see your report card,” Tchaka says meaningfully, but Corey has taken a step backward and begun shimmying across the corridor, rapping something to himself while several (female) classmates look on. Whether he’s hanging out by the Coney Island courts or around the Lincoln corridor, Corey always cuts a stylish figure. The other day he showed up in school wearing a hoop earring, gold toothcaps, and a floppy suede hat, which made him look like a cross between LL Cool J and Joan Baez. Today he’s back to long jean shorts and an artfully torn T-shirt. I ask him how he’s planning to spend his summer.

  “Oh, I’ll go to the B/C camp with Russell,” Corey replies casually. “But mostly I’ll just stay in shape running on the beach. The sand is good for your legs, helps you keep up your stamina. I tell you, mostly I just want some time to relax.”

  Apparently Corey has gotten a jump on his summer plans, for the word in the corridor today is that he has just relaxed his way to three failed classes and now possesses a 66 average—approximately one failed test away from losing his eligibility to play on the Lincoln team. But Corey doesn’t look overly concerned. In fact, he seems to take a certain pleasure in locking himself into Houdini’s trunk, then reaching into his bag of tricks for the secret key. That, evidently, is one of his specialties, if the story he begins to tell his friends in the corridor now is any indication. During a recent game, it seems, Corey drove the baseline. Two huge defenders converged on him. Corey had already left the ground when this situation developed, so there was nothing for him to do but twist through his outsized opponents, spinning 360 degrees around, and effortlessly roll the ball off his fingertips into the basket. “I don’t know how that happened,” Corey says to all of us with mock sincerity. “There was like five seconds left. I got the ball. I looked at it. It said PLEASE SHOOT ME. So I did.” He shrugs. Russell and Tchaka burst out laughing. Corey keeps a straight face, though his eyes are smiling at the corners.

  “What the hell are you guys so happy about? I haven’t seen anything you’ve done worth getting happy about!” Ah, even Coach Hartstein is in a good mood today. “We gotta have a team meeting,” he announces, walking brusquely past his players into an empty classroom. As a coach, Bobby Hartstein is cast against type, and not merely because he is white and Jewish in a predominantly black, inner-city school. Thin, nervous, with tired eyes, a bushy mustache, and a head of hair that brings to mind a plate of baked ziti, Hartstein speaks in a raspy Brooklyn voice; it is an impressive and versatile instrument, and when the standard, redfaced coach-scream doesn’t yield results, Hartstein drops to a lower register, shrugging his shoulders and turning his palms to the ceiling in a time-honored Yiddish gesture—the miffed uncle who didn’t get invited to the bar mitzvah. “If you’re too scared to play,” he often tells his players before important games, “just let me know. I’m not gonna get mad. Really. Just let me know. I’ll be happy to bench you. What do I care if you end up playing college ball at Yeshiva?” In fact, however, Hartstein—who is also the school’s dean of special education—works ceaselessly on behalf of his players, helping them with their schoolwork, driving them home after practice, and grumbling all the way about “how much of my goddamned time these kids take up.”

  Noisily following their coach into the classroom, Russell, Corey, Tchaka, and their teammates shoehorn themselves into the one-piece desk-and-seat contraptions built over forty years ago for kids half their size. There’s much to discuss: report cards, SAT filing deadlines, everyone’s summer camp schedules. “First of all,” Hartstein begins, “I want to announce that we have a new Mr. High IQ by the name of Russell Thomas, who just got a seventy-nine.” While the team gives him a round of applause, Russell smiles and lowers his forehead to his desk. “With grades like that,” Hartstein goes on, “you deserve your recruiting mail.” This must be welcome news to Russell. College coaches send letters to the Lincoln players care of Hartstein, who locks them away until the players, by getting good report cards and test scores, earn the right to look at them. Last month, after Tchaka came within ten points of a 700 on his first SAT attempt, Hartstein gave him all his recruiting mail; for the past few weeks, Russell has been impatiently awaiting his. “All your mail is in my locker, Russell,” Hartstein says. “In fact, you’re getting too much. It’s starting to annoy me. Come by after the meeting and I’ll give it to you.”

  But now, hearing that it’s his for the asking, Russell looks up suddenly. “No, Coach, don’t give it to me!” he cries.

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause I’ll stop working hard in class!”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Russell, with a pained look, shakes his head. “I won’t mean to stop, but I will.” Russell may act in inexplicable ways at times, but his constant quest for athletic and academic betterment makes him a joy to coach.

  “Okay, suit yourself.” Hartstein shrugs and turns his attention to Corey. “Now Corey—hey, Corey! Where the hell is Corey going?” Corey has just sauntered out into the hallway to meet some girls. “This kid fails three classes and he’s still screwing around. Corey!”

  “Just talkin’ to my fans,” Corey says, calmly rejoining the group.

  “This kid is special,” Hartstein announces to the team, as if Corey were still in the hallway. “He’s extremely bright, but he’s lazy. Russell—what did you say to me about Corey?”

  “Corey’s crazy-smart, Coach. He just don’t use it.”

  “He uses it,” Tchaka interjects, raising an eyebrow and running his gold neck chain through his mouth. “Just not in the classroom.”

  “All right, all right,” says Hartstein, moving on to more salutary matters. “The good news, Corey, is you can still avoid spending your summer in summer school.” Another round of applause, and Corey looks on with a bemused expression. “The bad news is, not by much. All right, on to topic number one.”

  “What’s that, Coach?”

  Hartstein is fishing for something inside his gym bag. “Topic number one is . . . ” He can’t find what he’s looking for. “And I know you’re all gonna be pleased when you see it . . . ” The players lean forward. “Ah, here it is.” Hartstein holds up a sheet of paper. “Our very own design for . . . championship team jackets!”

  The players begin to clap and hoot. Above the din, Hartstein tries to explain that he commissioned a Lincoln art student to invent a logo to be stitched on the back of each team member’s jacket. The student came up with an elaborate design—a cartoon figure perched on a rim, his head shaped like a basketball, and a leering grin on his face. “These are gonna be beautiful,” Hartstein says, sounding like a man feigning enthusiasm, though he is in fact as pleased as can be. “Nobody in the city is going to have anything like this. Now, about this angry expression. I think we can probably ask the kid to do another version—” But the players have begun to clap rhythmically, drowning out their coach and approving the design by spontaneous voice vote. “Oh, c’mon, it doesn’t even look like he’s smiling!” Hartstein protests.

  “No, that’s the way we want it,” Russell insists. “Looks like Tchaka driving the lane: aaaargh!”

  “You sure you guys want the mouth on the side like this? You sure you want him scowling?”

  “Yeah!”

  “It’s fly!”

  “It’s hype!”

  “Word!”

  “Damn. I gotta walk around with some guy with a stupid grin on my jacket? Okay, it’s up to
you. You’re the champs. It’s just that I figured somebody in this room had taste, but . . . I guess not.” Hartstein executes one final shrug, as prelude to his closing remarks. “Now listen up. The next few months may be the most important of your life. If you have any pride, you oughtta bust your ass for the next few weeks in class. Work hard there and on your game, and you can turn a decent college into a good one. A good one into a great one. Tchaka, Russell, Corey—you should all go to Division One schools. I promise you: all the hard work you do this summer will pay off. That’s what separates the guys who make it from the ones who don’t. This is not fun and games. If you just run up and down all summer in the parks, then two years from now you’ll still be in the playground. And it doesn’t matter to me. Honestly, I really don’t care. You won’t be the first to blow it; you won’t be the last. I’ve seen a million kids . . . ”

  Hartstein goes on like this for a while—telling his players how little he expects of them because he knows how much they expect of themselves. Questioning his players’ commitment is Hartstein’s best motivational tool, his ace in the hole. Pride on this team, he knows, is rarely in short supply, though he can never predict the moments it may surface. It was there, of course, in the locker room before their games last season, as Tchaka, Corey, Russell, and their teammates crowded toward the door for their big entrance, shuffling themselves into some precise but obscure order that only they understood. (“They think they’re the Rockettes,” Hartstein once observed.) But to the coach’s surprise, it also appeared after the team lost the New York State championship to a team that boasted a 29–0 record during the regular season but featured two players who were rumored to have missed forty classes or more, and one who had been released recently from jail for stabbing another student. “Just shows what kind of a program we’re from,” Russell announced, looking up from his vocabulary flash cards on the bus ride back to Brooklyn, and his teammates all agreed.

  If matters of pride receive special emphasis on this team, it may be because—no matter how sought-after they are by the college coaches or how promising their futures—until the day they pack their bags and leave Coney Island for good, the Lincoln players will live in one of the city’s most neglected neighborhoods and operate under a cloud of suspicion wherever they go. At least since the 1982 PSAL playoffs, when an off-duty security guard chased a knife-wielding fan directly onto the court and put a gun to his head while the crowd and players ran, screaming, for the exits, anyone playing in or watching a postseason PSAL game is frisked at the gym door by guards with metal detectors. And then there is that ritual of basketball in the urban public schools: the pregame passeggiata of the neighborhood’s drug dealers. During warm-ups in certain gyms, the steel doors will swing open, and slowly, conspicuously, daring the security guards to stop them, the dealers will make their entrance, signaling to friends in the bleachers while strolling around the court draped in leather, fur, and several pounds of gold.

  Lincoln and almost two thirds of the city’s two hundred other public high schools now restrict most games to home fans in order to prevent riots among rival schools and appearances by unsavory characters. Still, despite these precautions, some college coaches write off Lincoln completely, assuming the players are too rowdy and uncoachable, and stand a slim chance of meeting the NCAA’s eligibility requirements. If they want to recruit in New York City, they’ll go to the parochial schools, which offer safer environments and better academic preparation. And no college coach relishes the thought of making home recruiting visits in the Coney Island projects, walking up darkened, drug-infested stairwells yelling, as some have been known to do, “Coach! I’m a coach! Don’t hurt me!”

  The widespread expectation that they will behave like thugs and hoodlums is not lost on the Lincoln players. Two years ago, when the team arrived at its hotel for a Christmas tournament in Las Vegas, they found themselves in exile, separated by several floors from the parochial and suburban school players and the hotel’s other guests. It was the same story in Philadelphia—although a week after that trip Hartstein received a sheepish letter from the tournament director explaining that he never thought players from a Brooklyn public high school could be such gentlemen, and when would they like to come back?

  Just a few days ago I had occasion to witness some of the attitudes directed at the Lincoln players when I went to a Manhattan gym to watch Tchaka play with an independent summer-league team, which happens to be all black, against a group of white players visiting from New Jersey. Though he had five inches on the white team’s tallest player, Tchaka was struggling to find his game and, as a result, was committing his usual sins of eagerness—traveling, charging, goaltending. Every time the whistle blew on one of Tchaka’s transgressions, the crowd let up a carnival cheer. Tchaka hung in there, slapping the ref’s ass good-naturedly whenever the offical made a call on him. But the mood in the bleachers, filled predominantly with the relatives of the white players, soon turned ugly. Whenever Tchaka took one step too many on his route to a crushing jam, hecklers would call for a technical, yelling, “This ain’t the NBA!” which seemed a euphemism for the resentment many white players feel toward blacks with overwhelming talent, since the NBA is 80 percent black and just about the only arena in which whites are seriously in danger of losing their jobs to blacks. Next to me in the stands sat the father of a New Jersey player who was getting dunked on every time Tchaka charged downcourt. “This monster’s still in high school?” said the aggrieved father, assuming that I was related to one of the white New Jersey players. “What is he, a sixth-year student?” Toward the end of the game, Tchaka went to the foul line for two shots. By this time, the crowd was all but pelting him with rotten tomatoes. When Tchaka air-balled the first one, the crowd gave him an ovation. “Probably never practiced a foul shot in his life—just runs up and down in the parks,” the father observed. Tchaka glanced at me, his expression shot through with panic. Would his hard-won skills desert him now, when he needed them not only for the purposes of this game, but also to put one in the face of the hostile crowd? Tchaka locked his eyes on the rim. The next shot, thank God, sailed defiantly through the net.

  Sometimes, as I watched Tchaka, Russell, and Corey during my first months with the team, I felt that I had caught up with them at a crucial juncture in their lives. Sports has a way of doing that, of compressing life’s many unremarkable days into something heightened and exalted, of kindling hope and auguring great deeds. One feels this around young athletes of all kinds because of the rhythm of winning and losing and the dramatic foreshortening of their careers. But one feels it especially around athletes from neighborhoods like Coney Island, where today they live in projects so menacing that even some of the Lincoln social workers won’t make home visits anymore; and tomorrow they may be, if not highly paid professionals, then in all likelihood the first members of their families ever to graduate from a four-year college, the first to find decent employment, the first to take their long-denied place in the mainstream American economy—the game of basketball giving them perhaps their last best chance to do so.

  Now as Coach Hartstein concludes his speech, and the team meeting breaks up, and the players get ready for their season of summer ball, the talk turns, as it often does at such moments, to the NBA’s college draft. Lately, Newsday has been featuring a number of stories about college players like Kenny Anderson, who is about to leave Georgia Tech after his sophomore year, sign a multimillion-dollar NBA contract, and buy his mother a nice big house. “Just think, Russell, a few more years and we could be pros,” Tchaka says, giving his teammate’s back a hearty thump. “Kenny did it.” Out of the classroom they file, three in a row, in a flak burst of noise and movement, as Hartstein stands by the door, discreetly handing out bus fare home to the players he knows to be most in need. Never in their lives would they be in possession of so little and on the brink of so much.

  Two

  TCHAKA and his family live on a quiet, dead-end block of one-story red brick ho
mes in the black, working-class neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens. Tchaka, his older sister, Tracie, and his mother, Annette, moved there from Bedford-Stuyvesant a year ago, after Mrs. Shipp, walking home from a neighbor’s house, happened to witness the execution, gangland-style, of two drug dealers on her own front stoop. This was horrifying, and the limits of what the family could bear, but it was by no means unusual. During their years in Bed-Stuy the Shipps often woke at three A.M. to the sound of machine gun fire and shattering glass from the street below, and they grew expert at rolling swiftly beneath their beds, where they would remain, hearts in their throats, until the shooting stopped. Tchaka himself was assaulted one afternoon in Bed-Stuy by a gang of twenty hoodlums. Hopped up and well armed, they caught him just as he was leaving basketball practice and took an immediate interest in his new Reeboks. Unwilling to part with them, Tchaka fled. The hoodlums opened fire down the street. Tchaka heard bullets whizzing past him and braced himself for the impact of one to his spine, but the shooting abruptly ceased. As he rounded a corner, he saw that the parked car of a fearsome neighborhood drug dealer had been hit. When the outraged dealer stood up (he was behind it, polishing his fender), the gang members respectfully held their fire. After a while, Tchaka’s mother began to wish her son—this vessel of all her hopes—had never grown so tall. Being six feet seven once helped to ward off trouble; now, in the era of semiautomatics, it merely presented shooters with a larger target.

  The Shipps’ exodus to Jamaica did not come without sacrifice. Mrs. Shipp, widowed six years before, when her husband died of pneumonia, works long hours as a secretary at a nearby community college in order to meet the rent, more than twice what the family paid in Bed-Stuy. Tracie, a twenty-four-year-old social worker, dreams of living alone but has agreed to stay at home for the time being, contributing half her salary to family expenses. And Tchaka now lives so far from Lincoln High that he must take three subways and a bus, beginning the hour-and-a-half trip at six A.M., when he is often the only rider on the train. But no one in the Shipp household complains; these are considered light taxes to pay in order to avoid Bed-Stuy or the Coney Island projects. “Out there it’s a real jungle,” Mrs. Shipp once said to me. “All the young boys are so hyped up—with guns, drugs, gold jewelry, fast cars, loud music, hanging out on corners with their pants down to their knees. Sometimes I see a bit of the street in Tchaka. I tell him, ‘Don’t bring the street in my house! I don’t like the street in the street!’” She laughed, time and distance from those horrific Bed-Stuy days having given her the ability to do so. “But that’s just Tchaka fooling around, or being so street that no one bothers him. Deep down he hates all the riffraff as much as me.”