The Last Shot Read online

  “I love taking showers,” Steve declares. “Ya smell good, ya look good.”

  “One hand washes the other”—Maurice has a proverb for everything—“both hands wash the face.”

  “You know,” Russell says. “That pasta server downstairs was cute. I think I’ll go find out what she’s doing tonight.”

  “Yeah, Russell!” everyone cries.

  Russell has been standing in the on-deck circle, and now it’s his turn to step up to the mirror. “Tchaka, can you see this zit?” he asks.

  “Nah, you’re fine.”

  “No, I think you can definitely see it. Stand over there. Can you see it now?”

  “The zit is fine!”

  Russell puts on a clean white sweatshirt. “How ’bout this speck of dirt on the sleeve?” he asks. There is much imitation of the squeak that registers in Russell’s voice when he speaks in earnest, but Russell won’t be shamed out of a thorough pre-date examination of zits, specks, and other assorted imperfections. “I can’t get it out. Can you see it from over there?”

  “Yo, just chill, Russell! Chill, chill, chill!”

  “I’m chill, I’m chill!” Russell says, his voice rising up the scale.

  The time for deep perusal is over, and Tchaka, Steve, Maurice, and Robert all stream noisily out the door and down the stairs, leaving Russell and me alone in the room. He’s still examining his sleeve; I can tell he’s going to ask me about it. But he gives it up and smiles—maybe for the first time all weekend. “You think that pasta server will go out with me tonight?” Russell asks. (I do; she will.) He grabs his new baseball cap and puts it on sideways. “I’m fly,” he says. “I’m a fly guy.” Then he runs outside to catch up with his roving friends.

  ***

  This is how Russell happens to arrive at the foul line with seven tenths of a second to go in his team’s game against Western. For three quarters, New York City has played with its usual bruising intensity, but by the start of the fourth quarter, Western begins to apply the press, and once again the New Yorkers are getting unhinged. Normally Tchaka, Maurice, Steve, and Robert play with aggressiveness, but for some reason they all stop attacking the basket today, which is the only way to make a pressing team pay for its sins.

  Then, as he has done all weekend, Russell takes matters into his own hands. From everywhere on the floor and whenever he touches the ball, Russell shoots. This is the sort of behavior that can annoy a teammate. Robert, having complimented Russell on his shot that first day, grew noticeably irritated the next day as he looked at the stats and read, “Thomas: Shot attempts: 50.” But when you sink all your shots in quick succession, as Russell does now—a dazzling, multiradial barrage, like a billiard player on a streak—it tends to silence your critics. Russell pours in something like 10 points in the final minutes. But with less than five seconds to go, New York City is still down, 87 to 83. And even as Russell heaves up his final three-point attempt from deep behind the line, the crowd is already cheering a Western victory. But just after the ball falls through the hoop yet again, bringing New York to within one, a whistle blows. A Western player has committed the sport’s one unforgivable sin: with less than a second to go in a game that should be history, he fouls Russell away from the ball, sending New York’s best marksman to the line for two shots: one to tie, one to win.

  So which Russell Thomas will show up at the foul line now? The one who steals out of locker rooms and boycotts team meetings, and sometimes dissolves altogether in the face of the college-recruiting pressure; or the player who has taken a risk simply by showing up this weekend and has played each game with the kind of fortitude and resolve that all great deeds require? Perhaps the coach of the Western team is wondering this too, for just as Russell walks to the line and the other players gather beneath the basket . . . the coach calls a time-out. This is standard procedure in college and the NBA, the idea being that a sixty-second interval may throw the player off his rhythm and give him time to choke. But there is something gratuitous about it here, in a summer tournament that is, at bottom, an exhibition staged for the benefit of the kids.

  Russell’s team troops toward its bench, Russell following two steps behind. Then, as the New York team forms its huddle, Russell does an odd thing: with the game hanging in the balance, he breaks from the group and wanders to the opposite end of the bench, where he picks up his new baseball cap. Evidently it still needs breaking in, for Russell begins working the bill—lovingly, scientifically—to give it the proper curve. As he does so, the atmosphere in the gym suddenly shifts, as it does in any crowded locale when something of unusual interest—a celebrity, or a man having a heart attack—is discovered in its midst. The babble of a dozen conversations ends in a hush; heads turn to the one spot. Even some of Russell’s teammates stand with mouths agape as Russell, about to shoot the most important foul shots in his young life, becomes raptly engaged with his baseball cap. For several long moments much of the arena is transfixed by the sight and by the mystery of it too. Is this a display of anxiety that bodes ill for the task at hand? Or is Russell concentrating so fiercely that he has shut out everything that usually distracts him—the crowd, the coaches, all his worries about his future?

  The buzzer sounds, ending the time-out. Russell looks up, as if stirred from a reverie, and carefully places his cap on a chair. From one side of the bench, his teammates walk diagonally toward the basket to resume their positions at the rebound line. From the other side, Russell heads the opposite way toward the foul line. Just as he and his teammates are about to converge, Russell slows, as if at a curb to let the traffic pass. Then he sets himself at the foul line. The ref hands him the ball. Russell bounces it five times. Tchaka walks over to him and gives him those words of advice, to which Russell says nothing in return. And then, without further ado and still giving no clue as to whether he is calm or terrified, Russell tosses in both foul shots to win the game.

  As befits the moment, euphoria breaks out among the New York City squad. Tchaka, Maurice, Steve, and Robert jump for joy, punching the air, slapping Russell all over. Hartstein bounds to his feet, yelling, “That’s my kid! The one who just won the game on the foul line? That’s my kid!” Several college coaches smile with the satisfaction of having watched a great game, their instincts as fans awakened in them after long hibernation. In his long march toward a college scholarship, Russell has just passed an important milestone. And this is how he salutes himself: he retrieves his cap, picks some lint from the bill, and shuffles off alone while his teammates continue to celebrate on his behalf.

  ***

  On Sunday morning, in front of a thin crowd, New York loses the championship game to Central and takes the silver medal. Once again my car doubles as a compression chamber as I drive the loose-limbed boys back to Brooklyn. Halfway down the New York State Thruway, I pull into a rest area so that we can get some drinks and stretch ourselves. When I return from the men’s room, I see Russell off by the side of the road, toes up against the white line. What the hell is he up to now? I join him and find him already worrying about the next few weeks of his summer. He will take a summer school course at Lincoln to get some extra credits, he tells me. He will continue to study each night for his SATs. “I’m also planning a new image for myself when the school year starts,” he says in his enigmatic fashion. “And you know what else? I’m gonna dunk this year too.” For years, I knew, Russell had earned a reputation in Coney Island for “playing white”—taking a lay-up when he could have dunked, that sort of thing. “No one thinks I can dunk ’cause I never dunked in public,” he says. “But between you and me, I dunk in the park all the time—when no one’s looking.” I am tempted to ask him whether this is some sort of riddle: Is a dunk really a dunk if no one is around to see it? But Russell isn’t smiling; he’s looking straight ahead, squinting through the road dust kicked up by the passing cars. “I’m gonna dunk this year,” he says grimly, giving me to understand that dunking—like everything else he has accomplished this weekend
—is merely an item that must be checked off on his list of “Things to Do to Get My Scholarship.” “Trust me on this one,” he says again. “I’m gonna dunk.” And after having watched him for the last four days, I do.

  Four

  “THE CROWD was hyped to my surprise, as I looked in the gym with my own two eyes. The game had started with a lot of funk. Two minutes later, there goes a dunk. A push, a shove, a foul, a score; the crowd was yelling out, ‘More more more!’ Tension grew fast; the game got rough. A war of the best and all that stuff. A shot went up; my man grabbed the pill. Slowly I caught it as the fans yelled, ‘Chill!’ But as the gym got silent without a sound, everyone watched as I threw it down!”

  Corey looked up from his three-ring binder, his mellifluous voice still sounding in the air. “You liked that, didn’t you.” He grinned at me. “I wrote that in about ten minutes.” Corey was sitting in the back row of an empty classroom at Lincoln High wearing a purple linen sports jacket with narrow lapels over a snowy white T-shirt. Against the gray classroom walls, he stood out like a peacock in a vacant lot. The team’s mandatory study hall had just ended, and throughout the period I had been watching Corey. For a kid whose lousy grades always kept alive the threat of ineligibility, Corey never seemed to waste a minute of study hall. All hell might be breaking loose—players firing spitballs at each other or jumping from desk to desk—but Corey always sat in the last row in his finery, bent over his desk, hard at work. One day I asked him what he had been able to accomplish amid such havoc and he read me “I Threw It Down,” his latest creation. “I’m going to be a writer,” he said, stacking his books and heading to the locker room for practice. “You know—creative writing, poetry, free-associative stuff.” He shrugged. “I just play ball to take up time.”

  Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Corey approaches basketball in the same way he does poetry and fashion—as an occasion for self-expression. I remember the first day I spent any time with him. I had gone to Queens to watch him and Tchaka play with the Madison Square Boys Club in a summer tournament. Driving back to Coney Island afterward, we got stuck in a traffic jam during the hottest part of the day. Tchaka, nursing a thirty-two-ounce bottle of Coke in the front seat, grew snappish and tense in the withering heat; but Corey stretched out in the back and began a monologue about the game. “Felt good today . . . Guess I had my flying license with me . . . Man, those guys fouled me so much it felt like they were playing a game of cards on my back . . . What did they do—pick that ref up at a local bar? . . . You didn’t catch that last dunk of mine? I guess your eyes were too slow.” Corey kept up such a steady flow of one-liners that Tchaka was soon doubled over with laughter and the related complication of having his Coke stream out his nose.

  “You know why basketball is so great?” Corey said to me on another occasion. “’Cause there’s just no limit to what you can do. Everything goes.” I wasn’t certain what he was getting at until I saw him later that day at practice. Inspired by the crowd of students and teachers that sometimes showed up to watch, Corey drove toward the basket and went airborne in the customary fashion—bellowing and slamming the ball violently between his hands. But instead of jamming it, Corey rolled the ball daintily off his fingertips into the hoop—a dunk in the ironic mode. “Jesus, did you see Corey lift off?” said one spectator. “Whatever he’s wearing, I want a pair.” Corey overheard this remark and said, “You like that? Stay right there. More to come.” And there was. “Do the three-sixty!” someone yelled from the bleachers, and Corey blanched: “The three-sixty? I’ll kill myself. But okay.” And he performed a gorgeous, gyrating dunk. “Statue of Liberty!” came the next request, and Corey took off near the foul line, soared toward the basket, and then—legs split, arm extended, ball held high like a torch—threw down a thunderous, backboard-rattling jam.

  At a time in life when most teenagers seek to imitate the behavior of their peers, Corey is constantly initiating his own trends. He often arrives for practice as unconventionally attired as he is in the classroom—a yellow sweatshirt with the sleeves and collar scissored away or standard-issue sweatpants rolled halfway up his thighs like Huck Finn. Then, while his teammates warm up with a few laps around the gym, Corey will run backward or stand at center court doing tricks with a jump rope. When the team runs wind sprints on the tree-lined outdoor track, Corey will gladly volunteer for the outside lane so that he can run his hands luxuriously through the canopy of leaves above his head. Corey usually remains alone in these diversions, and happily so, but one time a few years ago he did encourage all his teammates to show up at practice just like him—without socks. The memory of Coach Hartstein’s stunned reaction still gives him enormous pleasure. Corey’s eyes bulge in perfect imitation of Hartstein in extremis: “Goddamnit, guys! Where the hell are your socks?”

  ***

  Corey relies on his good humor and even temperament to see him through many of life’s travails, like getting fouled so hard on the way to the hoop that he lands on his head (“Hey,” he says, still supine and clutching his skull, “does it get any better than this?”) or the sound of gunfire just outside his project (“In Coney Island, it’s always the Fourth of July”). And it appears to be in evidence when he arrives by bus with Russell at the B/C All-Stars camp in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The sight of so many players and coaches crammed into the gym at Gettysburg College turns Russell’s stomach, but Corey says, “Walk in the park. This should be a walk in the park.”

  B/C is not an exclusive, invitational affair like Nike, nor a tournament requiring try-outs like the Empires. B/C is a purely profit-making enterprise: anyone who can afford the camp’s $300 fee is welcome to put on a numbered jersey and play for four days. And with the help of talented players like Corey and Russell, whom the camp lures with a half-price offer, B/C is able to attract scores of Division I coaches and, in turn, hundreds of less talented campers who want to play in front of those coaches, though they don’t stand a chance of getting recruited and are charged the camp’s full fee.

  Besides their desire for exposure, Corey and Russell also attend B/C every summer in the hope of escaping the Coney Island streets and the New York heat. But the camp this year doesn’t offer much relief. Someone has just estimated the gym temperature at about 95 degrees, so four standing fans have been brought in and stationed at the corners. It’s no use, though, not with so many bodies warming the place. This year an astonishing four hundred players have arrived from up and down the East Coast, dreaming of Division I scholarships, and camp administrators have them jammed together in two small gyms—sixty players running back and forth on six side-by-side courts, and another couple of hundred campers standing on the sidelines, waiting their turn.

  Players arrive by bus, change in the hallway, and begin playing moments later. (Corey is still pulling on his jersey when someone passes him the ball.) And because the courts are so close together, no one can tell where the out-of-bounds lines are, nor distinguish one referee’s whistle from another. Players on adjacent courts keep colliding and tripping over guys on the sidelines. In the first day, so many players suffer injuries that the camp turns the college weight room into a first-aid station: kids, pale with dehydration, lie on the bench presses clutching water bottles. A row of campers hold ice packs to their knees, swollen from six games a day played on floors that simulate concrete. A camp staffer stands at the door practicing triage: “Okay, guys, get your ice and move to the back.” On the sidelines, the coaches stand only a few feet behind the players, and not all of them worry about NCAA rules barring contact between coach and player during the camp season; the recruiting is going on right here, spilling through the gym’s steel doors onto the parking lot. Every time I walk out there to get some air, I see a coach or two backing players up against their car doors, leaning amorously toward the recruits. It resembles a local pickup scene, except in this case the lust to score is more intense.

  B/C is one of dozens of privately run basketball camps throughout the
country. Every summer, there is a move to clean up the camp scene, which everyone agrees is a mess, but no one knows precisely what to do about it. Because school isn’t in session, the Board of Education can’t look out for players like Russell and Corey when they go off to camp; and because the players are not yet in college, the NCAA has little jurisdiction over what happens to them, except to prohibit its own coaches from speaking to the players. That leaves the kids in the hands of the summer camp directors, who do not represent the most reform-minded element of the high school basketball business. On one end are the shoe companies like Nike, dispensing their brand-name sneakers with something other than charity in mind. On the other end are the private camps like B/C, charging players exorbitant fees while opening the doors to any recruiter, scout, or street agent who happens to come along. Recently the NCAA threatened to shut down all private enterprises and create its own set of regional summer basketball camps. If that occurs, however, camps like B/C will most certainly launch a restraint-of-trade lawsuit. In a business in which everyone is hungering for a piece of these kids, why should the NCAA possess the only hunting license? In the meantime, if you’ve got dreams of getting recruited to college, a camp like B/C is the place to go.

  With such a congestion of bodies in the Gettysburg College gym, it takes me some time to locate Russell and Corey, but when I do I can see immediately why the camp considers them such a draw. I watch Russell’s game for twenty minutes, and for twenty minutes he doesn’t miss a shot. The coaches are crowding along the sidelines, watching. But this doesn’t seem to cheer him any more than it did at the Empires. Each time he sinks a shot, he runs downcourt casting furtive glances at the sidelines, trying to determine whether his favorite schools are represented in the crowd.

  Corey, too, has drawn a sizable group of coaches. He doesn’t have Russell’s finely honed skills nor Tchaka’s height, so the coaches interested in him are more likely to be from Bowling Green, Fordham, and Saint Peter’s than from the Big East or the Atlantic 10. Nevertheless, Corey tries to make up in style and speed what his game sometimes lacks in substance. At six feet one, Corey is so fast he doesn’t even bother to fake; he just wastes his man on the first step and springs into the air as if coming off a trampoline. Corey is one of the most unselfish players I have seen, and for a while at B/C he seems content just setting the table for his teammates. But what a way to set the table. Corey drives downcourt with such swashbuckling abandon that his teammates stand and gape while his passes slip through their fingers or bounce off their heads. So Corey starts taking it to the hoop each time himself, yelling to his own teammates, “Get out my way!” The kid guarding Corey can’t figure out how to stop him in any legally defensible manner, so he grabs hold of Corey’s jersey, going along for the ride. At camps like these, the slow-footed players all want to take on the New York City stars, and the refs don’t seem to care unless blood is drawn. So Corey, mugged each time he ventures into the paint, finishes his plays by turning toward the official with one eyebrow raised and his hands up by his shoulders, seeking restitution.