The Last Shot Read online

  After school let out for the year, I started hanging out with Tchaka in Queens, getting better acquainted with him in anticipation of our joint trip to the Nike camp in early July. We rarely went without company. Because of his height, his good looks, his engaging manner, Tchaka is constantly approached by people—sometimes complete strangers—who ask if he can get them courtside seats to Knicks games, or offer their opinion on where he should play college ball, or merely inquire what the weather is like up there. “Sunny now, but thunderstorms on the way,” Tchaka will say with a pleasant smile. “Better move along—you don’t want to get caught in the rain.” Often the attention his height attracts is less flattering. After a tournament game in upstate New York, Tchaka was strolling with his teammates through a suburban neighborhood when a policeman suddenly materialized from behind a hedge.

  “Looking for trouble?”

  Tchaka and his friends came to a halt. For a moment, Tchaka seemed to inflate with anger, dwarfing the stout policeman, who stood blocking his path. These are the moments that keep Annette Shipp suspended at night between waking and sleep, waiting for the reassuring sound of Tchaka’s key in the door. Tchaka reached forward with his hand. The cop moved toward his nightstick. Tchaka patted the policeman’s shoulder. “Relax, Officer,” he said. “Ree-laax. We’re just going for a walk.”

  “I’ll be watching you,” the cop said with a snarl.

  “And I’ll still be walking,” Tchaka replied. (“And cops wonder why they’re always getting shot,” he muttered to his friends.)

  In the world of high school basketball, which brings black inner-city kids into contact with mainstream white society, some for the very first time, there are so many conflicting expectations about how players will or should behave that some kids, if they don’t simply withdraw in anger, lapse into a confused and watchful silence when dealing with the white adult world. But Tchaka moves easily among the various social circles into which basketball thrusts him: homeboy on the street; inquisitive student in the classroom; promising college recruit looking, as he says publicly, to “use basketball to further my education” but allowing privately that he hopes one day to “bring back the serious loot in the NBA.” Only on the rarest occasions do his wires—so finely tuned to the complex frequencies of race and social class—get crossed, as they did once when he was being interviewed by a sports reporter after a heartbreaking loss. Tchaka was waxing respectful about the skills of his opponent, feeding the writer all the cliches that athletes learn at a remarkably young age to guard against the hazards of candor. “He played a great game . . . You gotta give him credit . . . He kept his poise down the stretch.” Then Tchaka gripped the sides of his head, recalling one particular moment in the game just ended. “You see that last play, right before the buzzer? Word! That nigger was buggin’! He threw a two-handed tomahawk dunk on me. Cocked that sucker all the way to his nuts!” Horrified, Tchaka opened his eyes wide and clapped his hand over his open mouth. “Don’t quote me, okay?”

  ***

  On the day that he and I are scheduled to fly to the Nike camp in Indianapolis, however, Tchaka is not feeling his most self-possessed. He woke early, nervous as a cat, unable to sleep. He watched some college games on tape. He drank a couple glasses of strawberry milk, his favorite meal. Then he tried to pack—without much success, by the looks of things when I arrive around noon. A riot of T-shirts, sweatpants, basketball shorts, socks, sneakers, Walkman, and cassettes covers much of his living room floor. Tchaka stands in the middle of the room, frowning and scratching his brow, as if he were trying to determine who in his right mind could have made such a mess. At his feet sits an empty gym bag.

  We have little time to waste. We’re supposed to arrive at Kennedy Airport in just over an hour, and Tchaka’s friend Steve Walston, who promised to drive us there in his van, isn’t answering the phone. Tchaka inspects the pile at his feet and cautiously removes from it an item that may or may not be a bologna sandwich. All the rest he throws into his gym bag. Then he sprints toward his bedroom, pulling up short at the doorway. “Oh, God.” Massive snowdrifts of dirty laundry obscure most of the floor. Tchaka spots a pair of Nikes he wants in the far corner of the room. But how to reach them? (A pair of snowshoes might help.) He blazes a trail, kicking the laundry under his bed as he goes. Then he stops in his tracks. “I forgot the loot!” he cries. “I can’t go to Nike without the loot. We better get the loot. Now.”

  The loot, it turns out, is $60 that Annette Shipp has pledged to the Tchaka-at-Nike fund. Tchaka climbs into my two-door Toyota, folding his enormous frame into the cramped front seat like a collapsible piece of lawn furniture, and we’re off, heading into downtown Jamaica to meet his mom on this first hot day of summer. “Gonna be a lot of tall guys at Nike,” he says, his knees by his ears. “Lotta big, big guys.” Tchaka dribbles his imaginary ball in the front seat. “Worked on my jump shot yesterday. Sometimes if I don’t shoot, I forget how the ball feels.” Tchaka, facing forward, looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “Got the touch back, though.”

  On our way into town, we drive past the playground where Tchaka often works out. A lot of puny junior high-schoolers play there, and sometimes Tchaka joins their pickup games for the sole purpose of going on wild, uncontested dunk rampages. But yesterday he passed up the cheap thrills, keeping to himself for some last-minute preparation. “I watched games three and four of the Detroit-Lakers series last night,” he tells me. “Watched Georgetown-UNLV this morning. Picked up some good moves.” His face is turned in my direction now, but his eyes have gone vague. “Yup, gonna be a lot a big, big guys out there.”

  Annette Shipp is standing on the corner when we pull up. Like Tchaka, she is as friendly as she is tall, with an easy manner and a fondness for the privileges of motherhood, which include a mock-stern attitude toward a son who never gets into any real trouble. “I was gonna browse in the shops during lunch,” she informs Tchaka as the loot changes hands, “but now I’m completely broke. I don’t know why I even put my money in the bank, since you take it all. You burn a hole in my pocket, boy.” She punches Tchaka on the shoulder. Tchaka, taking advantage of having a stocky, six-foot mother, socks her back. “Are you all ready, precious? Did you clean your room?” she asks. Tchaka assures her everything is in order, but Mrs. Shipp fixes him with a prosecutorial stare. “Or did you just stuff all that crap under your bed?”

  For a moment, Tchaka works up a look of genuine aggrievement, but it takes too much effort in this heat. “I’ll call you when I get out there,” he says with a smile.

  “Not collect, you won’t. Now you behave yourself, okay?” She cranes upward to kiss him goodbye. “And don’t go spending all that money before you leave.”

  Tchaka climbs back into my car. As we pull away from the curb, his mother yells after us, “Now that I’m broke, I think I’ll go straight home and take a look under that bed. ’Cause if that room’s a mess, I’ll just call the airport and tell them to turn the plane right around! Don’t you smile at me, boy—I’m mad!”

  “She’s kidding about checking under the bed,” Tchaka assures me as we drive off. Then he adds, “You better step on it anyway.”

  I follow Tchaka’s instructions, considering that we have less than forty-five minutes before we need to be at the airport. But as I slow for a red light, Tchaka snaps his fingers and gives me an imploring look. “Five minutes, okay?” And before I have come to a complete stop, he lurches from my car into Modell’s Sporting Goods on Jamaica Avenue. A moment later, he’s back with two pairs of spandex bike shorts in his hand and $20 less of the loot in his pocket. “If I’m gonna play with the best,” he says, explaining that he plans to wear them beneath his Nike uniform, “I gotta look my best.”

  We’re back at Tchaka’s house, with less than half an hour to go, when Steve finally arrives. Actually he’s still down the block, but Big Daddy Kane rapping out of his van’s sound system heralds his arrival, shattering the serenity of Tchaka’s street, drowning out
the Mister Softee truck, and bringing one of Tchaka’s neighbors inquisitively to her front door. People see Steve and his full complement of gold tooth caps and figure Tchaka must be falling in with the wrong crowd. And to tell the truth, Tchaka doesn’t usually turn down one of Steve’s invitations to “quit the crib” and go “questing for girls” back in Bed-Stuy, as long as he has the tranquillity of his home in Queens to return to at the end of the long night. But most evenings it’s academic anyway, with Tchaka under house arrest by his mother until he finishes all his homework.

  Suddenly, the door to Trade’s room swings open and Trade emerges, looking annoyed. “What’s with all the jungle bungle music?” she yells. “Steve here?” She watches as Tchaka pulls off his sweatpants and throws on a new pair of cotton basketball jams. “Oh, Tchaka, look at them—they’re all wrinkled! Give them to me. I’ll iron them while you finish packing.”

  “Nah, I like them this way—so no one knows they’re new.”

  “Suit yourself, but you better hurry up. You’ve only got a half-hour.”

  Tchaka throws his sweats on again, grabs his bag, and is almost out the door when he says, “Where’s my New Jack City tape? I can’t go without that tape.” But he doesn’t fetch it. He catches sight of himself in the living room mirror and stands there, admiring. “I’m killin’!”

  “Tchaka, let’s go!” Tracie yells, dragging her brother through the doorway by his wrist.

  In the street, Tchaka greets Steve but regards the van warily, as if he would ride in it to his own execution. “I can’t go to Nike like this. Hold on. Better put my UNLV cap on.” He runs back inside.

  Steve, who has been standing proprietarily next to his van, now takes a step toward Tracie. “Does the Pretty Young Thang wanna come for a ride to the airport?”

  “Yeah, I’ll come along,” Tracie says, backpedaling. “But how ’bout you stop calling me that?”

  Steve’s van is idling in the street like a Sherman tank, belching exhaust. We wait for Tchaka. We wait some more. The Shipps live right by Kennedy Airport, but this is cutting it close. Tracie checks her watch: twenty minutes and counting. Has Tchaka stolen away through his bedroom window, waiting for us to go on without him? But no, here he is with his cap and no more forgotten items, ducking with a fugitive look into the front seat of the van. Tracie and I climb in back.

  A mile from Kennedy, fifteen minutes until we’re due at the airport, we run into midday gridlock. Each time the van lurches to a halt, Tchaka drums his fingers impatiently on the dashboard. Finally he rolls down his window, leans out, and, making a pistol with his hand, screams at the driver stopped in front of us: “Move yo’ ass or lose it!”

  “Tchaka, it’s a red light!” Tracie says. “What do you want him to do?” But Tchaka fixes the driver’s head in his crosshairs and—bam!—blows it straight off. Tracie reaches over the front seat and strokes her brother’s head. “Relax, Tchaka, you’re gonna make your flight. And Tchaka?” She takes his head in both hands and turns it so that she can look him in the eye. “You’re gonna do just fine out there.”

  ***

  Certain elements of high school basketball never seem to change, no matter where the game is played: the long wooden fold-out bleachers packed with screaming fans, cheerleaders chanting their rhythmic babble, late-afternoon sunlight slanting through the high gym windows and illuminating the yellowish columns of dust. And the singular sounds of a gym—the shouts and whistles, the squeak of sneakers, the resolute tom-tom beat of the bouncing ball that can send you in one Proustian instant right back into short pants. But the game is also changing in ways that have rendered it almost unrecognizable, now that the enormous interest generated by college basketball during the 1980s has begun to trickle down to the high school level. Gone are the yellow school buses bringing teams to the big game across town. Today the best high school teams play national schedules and Christmas tournaments in Vegas, and the top players compete in the McDonald’s All-American Slam Jam game broadcast each year on ESPN. Once a team is nationally ranked—USA Today runs a list, the “Super 25,” of the best high school programs—the players can expect complimentary sneakers from the shoe companies looking to recruit future superstars and possible TV pitchmen, while the high school coaches receive annual stipends for keeping their players shod with the proper brand.

  For the most part, the money and glamour go to the parochial schools, which ensure themselves a steady talent flow by fielding several teams—varsity, junior varsity, and freshman—all coached by full-time staffs. In New York and many other cities the Catholic leagues also siphon off the best public school players by offering a safer environment, better academic preparation, and travel budgets for out-oftown tournaments. One year Saint Raymond’s, a parochial school in the Bronx, took its players to Hawaii, San Diego, and Anchorage.

  The Lincoln players, though they remain outside the parochial school system because of its prohibitive tuition fees and also because of Coney Island’s geographical remove, get swept up by hoop hysteria as soon as the school year ends. During July and August, all the best public and parochial school players barnstorm the East Coast with the independent summer-league teams and make appearances before the college coaches and scouts at the summer camps. There, before a player’s senior year, the recruiting begins in earnest while newsletters like The Hoop Scoop and Big East Briefs offer play-by-plays, venturing early predictions about where the stars may sign in the fall. “Arkansas is in tight” with one blue-chipper, The Hoop Scoop reports, “but the word is Indiana may be the leader.” Of another player: “We understand that the mother really likes Florida State.”

  And the frenzy reaches its peak each summer at the Nike all-American camp. There are scores of basketball camps across the country competing for the top high school talent, but Nike is one of the only invitational, tuition-free camps. A committee of professional scouts selects 120 players—twenty-four at each position—and groups them into twelve teams, so that every game throughout the week becomes an all-star spectacle. The camp brings together players from inner-city neighborhoods in New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles; kids from the rural South who may never have been to a city (let alone on a plane) before; and often a small minority of white players who are the reigning spot shooters in their state but may have done most of their practicing in suburban driveways.

  Tchaka earned his invitation to Nike when Bob Gibbons, a professional scout, saw him in a Virginia tournament last spring, where Tchaka played, arguably, the best ball of his young life. Nevertheless, he was selected less for his ability than for his potential—his height and his athletic build—or “the Big P,” in the coaches’ argot. He arrives at Nike rated 95th out of the 120 players, and his Lincoln average of 10 points per game is tied for the lowest in the camp. Ever since we left New York, Tchaka has been tormenting himself with visions of his own spectacular failure, culminating with his gloomy assessment as our plane touches down in Indianapolis: “If I don’t play well this week, I’ll end up at junior college in Iowa.”

  Most of Tchaka’s competition has beaten us to the hotel by the time we arrive. The lobby of the University Place Hotel—Kiwanis country most days of the week—has been seized by an occupying army of stunningly tall black teenagers. They are lounging on the couches, lining the stairs, leaning against potted plants. On each side of the corridor connecting the lobby with a concourse of fast-food shops, players are sitting on the floor, stretching out their legs cramped from hours in flight. Each time a hotel guest approaches, casting uneasy glances at this gauntlet of dark limbs, the legs separate in synchronicity to let them by.

  Tchaka scans the crowd and recognizes a dozen or so faces from New York tournament games, as well as another handful that appear to be from back home, given the signature New York look: cap turned backward, one pant leg hitched above the calf, and a punkish expression that wears well on the city’s streets. But the majority are strangers whose feats on the court he has only read about in The Hoop
Scoop and elsewhere. Talk among them is minimal. Pressing their cheeks against the heels of their hands, they watch Tchaka and the other late arrrivals through half-closed lids. When a marquee player arrives—Jason Kidd, the Oakland point guard, or Rod Rhodes, swingman from Jersey City (the nation’s number-one- and two-ranked players in the summer of 1991)—I can see the apprehension ripple across the lobby, like wind over water. “This camp can make you or break you,” one player whispers to his neighbor. But Tchaka doesn’t catch the remark, nor recognize how evenly distributed is the anxiety in this room. Confusing the players’ sullen looks for emblems of their self-confidence, Tchaka takes a seat in the corner where he can inspect the whole assemblage. It’s hard to figure out who plays which position, because even the guards look like grown men, but as Tchaka feared there are a lot of big, big guys: by his count more than thirty over six feet eight, including four seven-footers. When he thinks no one is looking, he quietly drops his head into his hands.