The Last Shot Read online

  And Tchaka’s mood, though it still lags behind his performance, is gradually improving. On the third day, while two new teams take the court, Tchaka sits in the bleachers with his teammate Lawrence Thomas. They pore over their stats, watch the game intermittently, and indulge in the guarded, laconic talk of two strangers suddenly bound together in the same scary but exciting new enterprise.

  “How many dunks you got today?” asks Lawrence.

  “Three,” Tchaka replies. “How many three-pointers you got?”

  “Three.”

  They look up in tandem. On the court, a player drives baseline from right to left and floats up a gorgeous reverse lay-up. A small riot of appreciative hooting erupts among the sidelined players. The coaches remain silent as always, but you can see their heads dropping to locate the shooter’s name on the rosters in their laps: “Dontonio Wingfield . . . 6–8 . . . 235 lbs. . . . tremendous physical specimen.”

  “You got your confidence?” asks Lawrence.

  “I still feel a little jittery,” Tchaka replies, “but, yeah, got mine today. You got yours?”

  “Yeah.”

  At the other end of the court, a lithe forward slashes through midlane traffic and lifts a scoop shot over the outstretched hand of his defender. (“Donta Bright . . . 6–6 . . . 190 lbs. . . . built like a greyhound.”)

  “You the man now,” Lawrence says to Tchaka.

  “You my little point guard,” Tchaka replies, patting Lawrence’s head.

  “We got ourselves a relationship,” Lawrence observes.

  “Partners,” Tchaka agrees.

  They shake hands.

  “’Cause we so far away from home.”

  ***

  “Yup, a lotta horses here,” remarked Tom Sullivan, one of Seton Hall’s assistant coaches, on the first day of camp. Now he and his boss, the Pirates’ head coach, P. J. Carlesimo, take seats in the first row of grandstands to watch one of Tchaka’s games. The week is two-thirds over and Tchaka is playing harder and more intensely than I have ever seen. On a fast break, he trails his new buddy, Lawrence. Lawrence misses the shot, which caroms back toward Tchaka. Tchaka skies for the ball and jams it back in, only to be undercut by another player as he dangles from the rim. Felled like a tree, Tchaka crashes to the floor with a seismic thump, but he bounds back to his feet, smiling and shaking his poor cudgeled wits and trotting downcourt for more.

  Carlesimo and Sullivan exchange admiring, arched-eyebrow looks. Every time they watch one of Tchaka’s games, they glance behind them to see who else may be watching. One day it was Providence coach Rick Barnes and his assistant Fran Fraschilla sitting at one end of the bleachers. (Carlesimo waved to Barnes, then turned back toward the game with a slight grimace.) Today it’s Rollie Massimino of Villanova, up there watching with his assistant. (“Hey, Rollie, what’s up?”)

  With top college conferences like the Big East earning as much as $65 million for a one-year contract with CBS Sports, the pressure on coaches like Carlesimo, Barnes, and Massimino to recruit the top stars at Nike is not significantly less than it is for the players themselves: jobs and livelihoods are on the line for the coaches; success in the NCAA tournament and million-dollar TV contracts are on the line for their schools. Given the intense competition among the recruiters here at Nike, and the widespread suspicion that not all of them follow religiously the NCAA rules governing the recruiting process, it isn’t surprising that collegiality among the coaches often suffers serious injury. At one point, a small-time Division II coach walks toward the Seton Hall duo, then stops and points at Carlesimo’s handbag. “Whaddaya got there?” he asks with a smile.

  “Money,” Carlesimo replies acidly. “I’m going recruiting.” The DII scurries away.

  A few rows behind the Seton Hall staff, Bobby Knight takes a seat next to the TV commentator Dick Vitale, and the two can be heard discussing how shocked, shocked they were to discover that one Big East coach has apparently been offering stereos to recruits.

  Just to their right, a man hoists a video camera onto his shoulder. I watch for a few minutes as he rakes it back and forth across the court, simultaneously dictating a play-by-play into the camera’s mike. Then I realize the equipment is trained on Tchaka. Not recognizing the man, and wondering whether he is a street agent or an “alumni rep,” commonly employed by colleges to bypass NCAA rules governing the conduct of coaches, I introduce myself. He lowers his camera and offers a glacial stare until I back away.

  Among the NCAA’s myriad rules regulating the recruiting process is one that allows college coaches to watch—but not speak to—any player during the summer camp season. Last year, when the Nike camp was held in a cramped arena in Princeton, New Jersey, players walking on and off the court were instructed to look the other way so that coaches could not make eye contact with them. Here in Indianapolis, the players have to sit on a bleacher separated from the coaches by yellow police tape. Nevertheless, the coaches have developed ingenious strategies for advertising their presence to the players. The well-known faces—Bobby Knight, John Thompson, Kentucky’s Rick Pitino—simply sit midbleacher and wait for the players to spot them. The less recognizable coaches wear T-shirts with giant school logos and stand up to stretch on a regular basis. Carlesimo and Sullivan have begun sitting just three feet behind Tchaka’s bench. Carlesimo rarely acknowledges me, but Sullivan always chats pleasantly for a minute, then says, “Tell Tchaka we were watching.”

  If a coach and a recruit do come into “unavoidable” contact, according to Rule 13.1.2.3–(e) of the NCAA manual, the two may exchange “normal civility.” Certain coaches give this clause a fairly broad interpretation. Fran Fraschilla of Providence, for example, lingers in public areas—hotels, airport lounges—looking to (as the coaches like to say) “get some bump,” a chance encounter that may allow for an “unavoidable” exchange of pleasantries. A week after the Nike camp, Tchaka was walking down the hall at another basketball camp, complaining to his roommate about the dorm rooms they had been assigned. There was the unavoidable Fraschilla. “How ya doin’?” he asked.

  “All right,” Tchaka replied, “but they got us in a real dump.”

  “Oh, yeah? I’m staying at the Holiday Inn. It’s nice.” Fraschilla laughed nervously, perhaps wondering whether he was going too far. “I got the A.C. turned up, and we got a pool, too.”

  “Got some girls?” asked Tchaka’s roommate.

  “Well, I just called my wife, but I might be able to fix you guys up.” The coach laughed again, then seemed to think better of the whole encounter and backpedaled away from the two players, still laughing, a hand extended by way of apology.

  Throughout the week at Nike, camp administrators advise the players on how to stay out of trouble with the recruiters and scouts who attend the camp at the company’s invitation. One day Edward McDonald, a former assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted several Boston College players for a point-shaving conspiracy in the late 1970s, drops by to give a lunchtime lecture. “Watch out for guys who want to get close to you,” he instructs. “Also, if someone takes you to dinner and makes an illegal offer, you’ve got to get up and leave the table before you take something—either money or a free meal . . . ” Even an innocent association with a disreputable character, the players are warned, could ruin their careers. Witness Anderson Hunt, the only UNLV starter last year not to get drafted, primarily because of published photographs showing him in a Jacuzzi with the reputed gambler Richard (the Fixer) Perry.

  “Basketball players have celebrity status,” another guest speaker tells the players. “There are going to be women in your face”—much cheering from the campers—“oh, yeah, women, charlatans, agents who want an association with you and want a fast buck. You’ll be offered money, cars, and even female students when you’re being recruited.” Another outburst from the audience, and Nike staffers move in from the sides to quiet the group down. “But if you’re caught, I’m telling you: your career is finished.” At the Nike camp, the players are
warned not to use the restroom at the sports arena because one never knows who might suddenly come out from behind a stall or sidle up to them at an adjacent urinal. “Oh, and one last thing,” the players are told as the meeting breaks up. “Don’t make any calls from the arena’s pay phone either. The college coaches hang around there too. All you need before your senior season is to be seen around a coach. Another college coach who wants to recruit you doesn’t like it, calls the NCAA, and you’ll both get investigated. All right, time to get changed into your uniforms. Games begin in half an hour. Now just go out there and have fun.”

  ***

  From time to time this week, I look into the stands and spot a heavyset man with narrow eyes and dark hair in middle-aged retreat. He always wears a pastel Nike sports shirt and a sated look, as though he’s been feasting his eyes on the proceedings and has just now got his fill. Each time I glance at him, a college coach, a high school player, a high school coach, or a reporter is standing one bleacher step below him, paying his respects. The man receives his visitors without taking his eyes off the court. Then he offers his hand a second time, indicating that the visitor consider taking his leave. One day I ask Tchaka who he is, and Tchaka informs me, “That’s Sonny Vaccaro, you idiot. He the man!”

  I should have known. If it weren’t for Vaccaro, none of us would be here in Indianapolis—nor, most likely, would Nike be the pre-eminent sneaker company in the United States today, with more than $400 million in sales of basketball shoes and apparel alone. Vaccaro has done more to influence basketball than just about anyone who doesn’t actually play the game. While other sneaker companies have gone the traditional route, simply advertising their wares, Vaccaro discovered a brand-new way to penetrate the sneaker market. With Nike’s multimillion-dollar sports marketing budget, he began signing up almost a hundred of college basketball’s top coaches, including Seton Hall’s P. J. Carlesimo, Georgetown’s John Thompson, Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, and Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, to exclusive six-figure endorsement contracts. (To lure Krzyzewski away from Adidas, Nike paid him a million-dollar signing bonus, plus $375,000 a year.) Ostensibly, the coaches are paid to offer product advice. But Nike is less interested in discovering what the coaches may think of their new cushioned sole than in encouraging them to keep Nike sneakers on the most talented and visible feet in the business—the college stars who influence schoolyard fashion and may also graduate to become the next great Nike endorsers: the David Robinsons, Charles Barkleys, and Michael Jordans of the future.

  The ABCD camp is an extension of this marketing strategy. It costs the company an estimated $200,000 to stage the camp each year. But it’s an investment, allowing the long arms of Nike to reach ever deeper into the heart of the game, bringing the best high school players into the Nike fold. Many of the 120 players here this week have a long and intimate relationship with Nike, whether they know it or not. At Lincoln, for example, Tchaka receives his sneakers from Nike. Tchaka’s association with his summer team, the Madison Square Boys Club, also earns him a pair of free Nikes. There are probably another two hundred kids in the country with Tchaka’s potential, but he is here this week, not they, in part because he comes from a Nike high school program, plays with a Nike summer-league team, and has conveyed some interest in going to a Nike college (Syracuse and Seton Hall). Shoe company officials insist that Nike has no influence over where its campers eventually sign, and they bridle at the suggestion that the camp may be construed as a farm league for Nike prospects. But even as camp officials are lecturing players on how to avoid exploitative college recruiters, Nike is bestowing on its campers an astonishing largess—sneakers, shirts, shorts, meals, airfare, hotel room—that would be considered a blatantly illegal inducement if it came from a college coach. But, no matter. As the commentator Dick Vitale put it in a speech to the campers this week, assuming that the way to a player’s heart is through his feet, “Remember: Nike’s good to you, you’re good to Nike, and that’s what American entrepreneurship is all about.” (Vitale himself is on the Nike payroll.)

  By week’s end, some of the players are beginning to fit the pieces together. On the camp’s final day Tchaka and I sit down for lunch at a table just as another player holds forth to his colleagues. “Sure they put us up in this plush hotel,” he says, “and they give us $120 sneakers, but that’s nothing.” The player lowers his voice, and the other campers lean forward. “Ever wonder why you see Billy Owens’s father here this week? He’s Sonny’s money man. And what sneakers you think Billy’s gonna wear when he leaves Syracuse and plays next year in the NBA? And how much money you think Nike’s gonna make from that?” The players exchange looks. “That’s right. Nike makes plenty of money off of us, just like the colleges. Look at Patrick Ewing. He put Georgetown on the map. You hear about Georgetown before that? They made $30 million during his four years. They gave him a $15,000 scholarship—maybe $20,000—but that’s an $80,000 investment on a $30 million return.” No one even lifts a fork. “Nike’s got the same strategy. A hundred and twenty dollar sneakers and we’re theirs for life. We are the game, and we gotta know our business . . . ” And suddenly the dam bursts and all these kids—most of them poor, some of them just a few years away from their first million—begin talking, comparing notes, trading anecdotes about guys they knew in high school who arrived at college with rusted-out cars and were soon driving black Corvettes, and other friends who were “taken care of” in subtler ways.

  For his part, Tchaka listens more than he speaks. Talking about the business end of this game always makes him nervous. “Besides,” he says, “my theory is, you start to worry about all of that stuff and then you do something to impress all the coaches. That’s when you really embarrass yourself and you know they’re scratching your name off their list.”

  All week Tchaka has been putting his theory to the test, methodically assembling his game, piece by piece, until, by the time we walk toward our gate at Indianapolis airport for the return flight to New York, he can look at the other players sprawled around the waiting area (no longer misreading their sullen looks) and say, with a big grin, “You know, I think I can play with these guys.”

  With that statement Tchaka officially becomes the last person in the entire camp to realize this. Everyone else has been witnessing one of the great underdog stories of the summer season. Throughout the week, coaches at almost all the Big East schools told me they were ready to offer Tchaka scholarships then and there. The Hoop Scoop was calling him over to the sidelines to tell him that he was now one of the nation’s premier players and to ask him where he was thinking of signing. When Tchaka went over to pay his respects to Sonny Vaccaro, also inquiring politely why his summer team hadn’t received its Nikes, Vaccaro didn’t look at him, but he did promise to find out what was causing the delay. (Tchaka had his new kicks by the start of the school year.)

  But having hit the big time, Tchaka will not be left alone, not from now until the day in November when he chooses his school. For the rest of the summer, coaches will follow Tchaka everywhere, going to his games and practices and living in Holiday Inns up and down the East Coast to display their devotion to him; and calling Bobby Hartstein so frequently that the high school coach—whose interest in telecommunications is so scant that he prides himself on not knowing how much it costs to call Manhattan from a Brooklyn pay phone—will go out and buy an answering machine to screen his calls. Toward the end of the summer, Tchaka will even receive a series of anonymous telephone calls telling him to sign with a Nike college.

  When Tchaka first arrived in Indianapolis at the beginning of the week, walking off the airplane with his six-seven frame and Michelangelo muscles, a stranger strode purposefully in his direction and, standing at least a foot below him, reached up and shook his hand. The man seemed pleased to have made Tchaka’s acquaintance; he looked like a man who brings his son to the casino just for the fun of it and discovers the kid can count cards. His face was alive to possibility. He handed Tchaka his telephone n
umber on a slip of paper. Tchaka stared at it without understanding what possible use he could make of it. “Maybe you can use me someday,” the man said, with something more than charitable feeling. “If you do, now you know: I’m the man to call.” By the end of the week, Tchaka had established himself as someone who would get a lot more telephone numbers and offers to be of service, usually of an unspecified nature. Tchaka would simply file them away in a shoebox in his bedroom and play by all the rules. But after his week at the Nike camp he would no longer have the slightest doubt about what they meant.

  Three

  IN ALMOST ALL sporting events, a moment arises in which the physical prowess of the athlete—that magical, princely quality for which he is adored—is suddenly rendered useless, for the great challenge he faces is a purely mental one. That’s when things start to get interesting. Does the pitcher, hoping to prevent the base runner from stealing second, hurl his fastball, though the batter may connect? Or does he try to whiff the batter with a curve, though the runner may advance? Can the golfer properly calculate the slope of the green to sink the twelve-foot putt? In hockey . . . well, forget hockey. But basketball—now there’s a sport with a fine moment of psychological suspense. Basketball, of course, has the foul shot.

  What could be easier than this—the old two-handed set shot, executed with no one guarding you, while you take all the time you need? Foul shots are also called, for self-evident reasons, “free throws”; the foul line is sometimes referred to, for poetic purposes, as “the charity stripe.” The most consistent NBA players make their foul shots 90 percent of the time. I have heard of high school coaches who demanded that their players hit a hundred of them each day in practice, wearing a blindfold.