The Last Shot Read online

  Soon the last few campers straggle in and a Nike administrator begins to call off the players’ names. One by one they walk, with loose limbs and toes turned inward, into the equipment room to claim their gear. In addition to plane fare, hotel room, and three meals a day served in a private dining hall, the campers receive free basketball uniforms, polo shirts, shorts, socks, and sneakers—all, of course, with the trademark Nike swoosh. Later on, when the players are being assigned to their teams and the administrator gets to Tchaka Shipp, he mangles the name so completely that it sounds like “Chocolate Chip.” Mocking laughter arises from the entire group. Feeling the glare of a hundred pairs of competitive eyes, Tchaka raises his hand in acknowledgment—Yes, that’s me: Mr. Chocolate Chip.

  ***

  Many aspects of Indianapolis life—from the conspicuous absence of homeless people on the street to the suburban arrangement of diagonal parking spaces—have elicited comments from at least some members of this mostly black, mostly inner-city crowd. And the camp’s athletic facilities are no exception. Nike has arranged for the games this week to be played a few blocks from the hotel at the National Institute for Fitness and Sport, a world-class training facility where the NBA’s Indiana Pacers practice during the preseason. “How was your day, gentlemen?” asks an NIFS staff member, opening the door for the players on their first afternoon of competition. Stunned by the lavish surroundings, the players exchange looks and descend in virtual silence through several tiers of chrome and plate glass to a changing room with plush carpeting and polished wood lockers, each accessible by a specially coded magnetic card. Nearby, reporters from across the country have begun to collect around the media clearance center to pick up the latest rosters of the players and to bet among themselves which highly rated stars will embarrass themselves this week and which dark horses may thrive.

  I’m standing outside the locker room, talking to a camp administrator and a few of Tchaka’s teammates, when Tchaka appears in his underwear, holding his uniform in his hand. “Coach. My locker closed on me,” he says helplessly. “You gotta let me in again.” Tchaka’s teammates sigh while Tchaka follows the administrator back into the locker room. Several minutes pass. In the arena next door we can hear a booming voice over the public address system calling players by name to the court where their games are scheduled. Still no sign of Tchaka. Finally, I am dispatched to find him, and I came upon Tchaka peering over his shoulder at his reflection in the locker room mirror, checking to see whether his new bike shorts are sufficiently visible beneath his uniform. He slaps my hand and says, “I’m the man.” Then we rejoin his team and walk down the narrow corridor toward the main arena.

  Most interior spaces are drawn more or less to the same human scale, so when I walk through the arena doors I think at first that I am staring at one basketball court reflected in a series of mirrors, like tables in a small restaurant. But when my eyes adjust to the space, I realize that under this domed roof, vast enough to cover a three-ring circus, Nike officials have arranged for three professional-length courts, ninety-four feet each, installed side by side. Metal grandstands for the college coaches rise behind each court. On the sidelines are team benches, scorers’ tables, water coolers, first-aid stations, and the ubiquitous Nike banners. Circling it all is a quarter-mile track. On the waxy, blond-wood courts themselves are NBA-style baskets; their rims snap back after a player dunks, and they are attached to backboards mounted on hydraulic bases. Most of the teams have already formed lay-up lines, and Tchaka, getting his foot taped by a trainer at the sidelines, watches as each of the players—six-eight, six-nine, six-nine, six-eleven—flies toward the basket, delivering the full menu of dunks: double-pumps, tomahawks, windmills, reverses, 360s. One kid jumps so high he dunks at chest level, causing Tchaka to take in breath involuntarily. From all six baskets come the sounds of jamming—the fearsome ka-thunk of fiberglass and steel undergoing grueling and repeated punishment.

  Soon a low but persistent hum, like the sound of tires on a freeway, fills the arena: the college coaches are starting to filter in, chatting with one another; and the players are spying on the coaches, whispering among themselves. Within a few minutes, Tchaka has spotted Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, Indiana’s Bobby Knight, Georgetown’s John Thompson, Seton Hall’s P. J. Carlesimo, Villanova’s Rollie Massimino, as well as a legion of lesser known coaches, most of them with the obligatory uniform: mustache, V-neck sweater, and clipboard poised on polyester knee. Only twice a year do so many top Division I coaches congregate in the same arena: the Nike all-American camp and the Final Four tournament. Later in the summer, the coaching staffs—a head coach and up to three assistants at the bigger schools—will split up to cover as many camps as possible. But it would constitute professional malpractice for them not to show up in unison at Nike today. This, after all, is the official beginning of the NCAA’s summer evaluation period, the finest high school players in the country are about to go head to head, and future NCAA titles may well hinge on which coach watches the competition this week with the most discriminating eye.

  Yesterday, in a practice scrimmage before the arrival of the coaches, Tchaka got his first chance to test the mettle of his competition. Eager to establish himself, as soon as his coach sent him in he began jostling for position against the player guarding him—a lot of intense, meaningless activity, as it turned out, since the kid, a seven-foot sequoia, summarily dismissed Tchaka from the low post with a single forearm shove. On his second trip downcourt, Tchaka, in the confusion of battle, attempted to block a shot by his own teammate—then quickly pulled his hand away, as though he had touched something hot. Happily, no one but his irked teammate seemed to notice. From now on, however, all mistakes go directly into the record book. As Tchaka warms up for his first official game, I can see John McLeod, the head coach at Notre Dame, lean over to his assistant. “Look at the body on that kid! Where’s he from?” McLeod admires Tchaka’s physique until Tchaka misses a few practice shots. “He’s got no outside shot,” the coach says, sounding personally betrayed. Tchaka sends another fifteen-footer clanging off the front rim. “Man, he’s got no outside shot at all.” Shaking his head, McLeod turns his attention to other players.

  Games on all three courts will begin at just about the same time, and the arena grows still with expectation as the refs walk to center court. As soon as the ball goes up, the play is fast and ferociously athletic—a back-and-forth game with no team wasting much of its shot clock. It quickly becomes evident who will dominate during this week of unstructured, run-and-gun ball: the point guards, who are controlling the dribble and often launch three-pointers before making a single pass, and the true Goliaths, six-ten and up, who linger beneath the basket with a claim on anything that doesn’t fall cleanly through the hoop. Tchaka, when he is sent into the game, seems caught in the middle. He lacks the skill to put the ball on the floor and maneuver a path to the basket, and he doesn’t have the confidence yet to shoot from the perimeter. So his teammates aren’t giving him the ball, and when he does come into possession, the pressure to seize the moment seems to have numbed his better instincts. Instead of shooting quickly or making the smart pass, he simply holds the ball or dribbles in place—either of which brings the opposing guards swooping down in a double team to strip him of the ball. Losing possession, Tchaka is beside himself with agitation, looking to the ref for a foul call and muttering, “Shit! Shit!” while the rest of his team sprints to the opposite end of the floor. The next trip downcourt, determined not to hesitate, he makes his move to the basket before he’s got the ball in his grip and drops it into enemy hands. “Damn! Damn!” This could easily turn out to be a painful week of play for Tchaka, and if that is the case, not a lot of fun to watch either.

  But then, in his final minute of play, Tchaka slips out of his self-consciousness and suddenly he is playing as he does in his mind’s eye—stifling his man on defense, deflecting the pass. He’s forced the turnover! Now his point guard picks up the ball, and it’s fa
st-break time—Tchaka and his teammates are all sprinting downcourt with wild looks in their eyes. Tchaka claims the right lane, his favorite spot, and he’s crossing the open terrain with leaping gazelle strides. He calls for the pass and gets it. Yes! Now there’s no one—can this be true?—standing between Tchaka and the basket. It’s almost time for take-off. Two dribbles and he leans hard on the throttle, and now he’s airborne! Here’s sweet redemption—the orange rim zooming toward his eyeballs. Spontaneous regression to a preverbal state: “Aaaargh!” He’s still up there, spiraling from the rim like a mobile as the buzzer sounds, and I’m on my feet, cheering amid a sea of stone-faced coaches busily scratching notes about the players in their programs.

  On balance, it seems to me, Tchaka has acquitted himself fairly well on this, his first day of competition. And, with small variations, this is how he continues to play during these early games—making some mistakes, then showing flashes of his potential. But when I join him on the sidelines after his third outing, he refuses even to look at me. While his team huddles, he sits on the bench, balling and unballing his fists. Amid the postgame flurry of lockers banging open and shut, players’ voices echoing off the tile shower walls, and the sound of rolled-up towels making contact with bare skin—thwack!—Tchaka dresses in silence. He walks back to the hotel alone, cursing himself like a lunatic while his shorts ride lower and lower on his hips. Things go on like this until dinnertime, at which point Tchaka selects an empty table and spends most of the meal methodically picking the à la king off his chicken, then leaving the whole glutinous mess uneaten on his plate. Laughter from other precincts drifts over, and eventually Tchaka’s table begins to fill with some kids who seem to have enjoyed a better start to their week of camp. Tchaka won’t look up, even as a spirited discussion commences all around him:

  —Here’s my secret: you got to be a ball hog at this camp. ’Cause if you ain’t, somebody else is.

  —Man, as soon as them niggers touch the ball, they’re pullin’.

  —You hoopin’? I’m hoopin’ next game, shooting every time I touch the ball.

  —I eat this apple pie? Guaranteed to hit my threes. You eat your pie? Guaranteed to dunk.

  —Who’s that nigger dunked from the foul line wearing L.A. Gear?

  —I saw that. He threw it on him.

  —You get dunked on yet?

  —Not in public!

  —Everybody gonna get dunked on at some point this week.

  —It’s part of the game.

  —Yeah, that’s just a fact of life.

  “Not me,” Tchaka growls. “No one’s gonna dunk on me.” All eyes turn toward him. But Tchaka has nothing more he wants to share with the group. Moments later he picks up his tray and walks away.

  ***

  Officially, the Nike camp is known as the ABCD program. The acronym stands for Academic Betterment and Career Development, and the players must take math and English classes from nine to twelve each morning and attend a lunchtime lecture by a guest speaker before the games begin in the afternoon. Speaking in the auditorium of the University Place Hotel, Frank Dubois, a Nike administrator, explains during the first of the daily lectures, “We don’t like to call this a camp. It’s an academic program to get you guys ready for college.” In the world of high school basketball—in which the concept of the student-athlete often seems to rely primarily on its hyphen—such distinctions are crucial. Although every camper here has the potential to play at one of the nation’s top college programs, if past statistics are any guide most of them will arrive at school with no idea how to take lecture notes, read a college text, use a library, or write a research paper. Scrambling from the start of freshman year to keep pace with their classmates, the players so will then be called upon to spend an average of twenty hours a week in practice, another fifteen traveling to games. Fewer than half of them will graduate in even five years.

  This particular group of Nike athletes looks to be in similar peril. Early in the week, all the players were tested on math and reading comprehension. A few days later, the results were in. “Are there any TV cameras in here?” asks a Nike staffer. “No? Good.” Then he announces that of the 120 campers, twenty-three read at the ninth-grade level or above; some read at the third-grade level. (Tchaka tested reasonably well, but he clowned around enough so that his peers would never suspect.) The daily lectures are given over to cautionary tales, like the one about a twenty-two-year-old college star who ignored his academic problems until, ordering dinner at a restaurant for himself and his girlfriend, it was discovered that he couldn’t read the menu. The players are asked, “Your bachelor of athletics will be over by the time you’re twenty-one. Then what will you do?” And: “Do you think God put you on this earth just to play basketball?”

  Academic discipline is presented as the sensible alternative to the delusions of celebrity, wealth, and stardom in the NBA. Nike instructors offer practical lessons in concentration, note taking, time management, and the most effective way to take multiple choice tests. In some ways, the players receive better teaching and more individual attention than most of them have ever seen in high school. Some players couldn’t care less, trading tips on the best way to sleep in class with their eyes open. Midway through the week, one teacher leaves the room for a drink of water and his class uses its newly acquired time-management skills to move the clock ahead twenty minutes. Among other kids, however, a quiet transformation takes place. One tough New York kid with whom Tchaka has become friendly (he of the hitched pant leg and sour expression) has relaxed within days of leaving the city. Here at Nike he is meeting lots of thoughtful, sweet-tempered kids who can also wreak havoc on the court, which forces him to question long-held assumptions linking basketball prowess with thuggery. By midweek Tchaka’s friend is carrying his teacher’s bag to class and has written an essay about how in New York he sometimes sneaks into his high school library so that his friends won’t see. (Toward the end of the week, unhappily, he receives the news that one of his best friends has been shot and killed on a Brooklyn street. The process goes into reverse: the pant leg is rehitched, the cap turns backward, and by the time he lands at Kennedy he is stealing doughnuts from airport vendors.)

  But despite the attention to academics and all the talk among the Nike staff of “doing what’s right for the kids,” a certain cognitive dissonance becomes apparent to many of the players. If this is a fresh-air camp for disadvantaged innercity youth, why are there so many solemn-faced coaches, scouting services, Hoop Scoop reporters, and ESPN camera crews recording their every move? And if playing professional ball is a pipe dream, why, one kid wonders aloud, was that guest speaker from Nike just introduced to the players as “the man you can sign your endorsement contract with when you make it to the NBA”?

  From the time the campers first arrived, they have been told, on an almost hourly basis, to concentrate on the academics and, as for the basketball, “just go out there and have fun.” But the measure of these kids’ athletic ability is being taken constantly, all week and in dozens of different ways. As the competition progresses, the media center churns out daily stat sheets that break down every element of the kids’ play. (Like the NBA all-star game, no one cares who wins or loses; the college coaches can’t even see the scoreboard from where they sit.) In addition to precise measurements of height, weight, and body fat, every player is put through a battery of tests to gauge his quickness on the forty-yard dash, vertical reach, hang time, arm span, and strength of grip. (The camp swears the information is kept confidential, but who knows?) The official Nike roster, produced for the benefit of the visiting coaches, includes the Nike selection committee’s appraisal, often minutely observed. A forward from the Bronx possesses “the best first step of any player.” A small forward from Florida has a “velvety, accurate shooting touch to 22 feet.” Frankness outweighs diplomacy: a Florida forward, according to the roster, “needs to lose 15–20 pounds to improve his stamina.” A seven-foot junior “appears to lack motivat
ion,” in the estimation of the Nike shoe company. “His coach proclaims him the best big man ever in Chicago. We have our doubts.” For his part, Tchaka is called a “budding young power player” and “a warrior on the block.” Given the general whiteness of the coaches and the overwhelming blackness of the players, whose every physical attribute is being scrutinized, certain analogies are inevitably drawn. The one that appears as a headline this week in the Indianapolis News is among the more charitable: CAMP RESEMBLES STATE FAIR CATTLE EXHIBITION.

  ***

  By midweek, Tchaka is beginning to hit his stride. Realizing his teammates are never going to run a set play for him, he is finding other ways to get the ball in his hands: blocking shots, boxing out for rebounds, fearlessly hurling himself to the floor for loose balls. Whenever a teammate misses on a fast break, Tchaka is right there with a put-back. He still makes mistakes that set his teammates’ eyeballs rolling, like playfully slapping his point guard’s ass as he dribbles, knocking the ball into an opponent’s hands. But they are mistakes now of enthusiasm rather than of tentativeness. And his play in the open court gives him enough confidence that when he does get the ball in the half-court offense, he no longer flails or hesitates—he locates his defender, then passes or shoots with dispatch and a surprising new confidence to his moves. “Watch the pick!” he yells to his teammates on defense, and calls out, “My fault, my fault,” whenever his own man gets by him for a basket. Tchaka still wishes he were playing a more freewheeling game—executing spin moves and turnaround jumpers like those he sees all around him. Except for his dunks, his moments with the ball come without much glamour or instant gratification. But he’s beginning to stand out for the coaches, who comment on his quickness, his enthusiasm, and the little things—his defensive rotations and outlet passes—that reveal how well Coach Hartstein has taught him the game.