THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 8, 1995 TAG: 9501030042
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
THE LAST SHOT
City Streets, Basketball Dreams
DARCY FREY
Houghton Mifflin. 230 pp. $19.95.
DON'T BE FOOLED INTO thinking that The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams is merely for basketball enthusiasts. Although unquestionably it stands with the best writing about the sport - David Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game, John Feinstein's A Season Inside and Pete Axthelm's The City Game - it is actually a book about the dreams we feed our young, the sort of dreams that may do more to poison the spirit than to nourish it.
I'd go so far as to say that Darcy Frey's The Last Shot is the best book I've ever read about amateur basketball in America. It is sensitive and intelligent. Frey clearly loves the game and is capable of pure poetry in his descriptions of jump shots, slam dunks and dribbling magic. But he certainly doesn't romanticize the emotional, social and economic complexities of the sport as we play it for all we are worth on our most blighted city streets.
Basketball is a game that poor urban kids often invest all their hopes in, seeing the playground as leading them to college scholarships and perhaps to the pros. In The Last Shot Frey writes with honesty, compassion and a graceful clarity about four young men at Abraham Lincoln High School in the drug-ridden and violent Coney Island section of Brooklyn. Reading The Last Shot is like experiencing a subtle novel, with enigmatic characters and a thrilling plot. But the book has the added dimension of being a true story, making it an even more powerful and troubling parable of our times.
At first, Frey seemed to assume that he was going to write the story of the black version of the American dream, but he ended up discovering a ``cruel parody of it.'' The four basketball stars from Lincoln High - three seniors and a freshman sensation - are portrayed in all their youthful splendor and their adolescent foolishness. Despite their flaws they are likable young men, and we root for them to succeed, not so much on the court but in their lives.
We want Russell, a desperately intense young man who passionately wants to leave the projects, to get higher than 700 on his SATs. We want Corey to wake up to the serious side of the circumstances around him. We hope that Tchaka's dream, which seems to be working out a bit too perfectly, actually comes to fruition. Stephon, the freshman, is the least winsome of the young men in his arrogance and his apparent Hessian cynicism. But even Stephon, in Frey's balanced reporting and careful prose, is a young man whose environment and family history make his motives and actions understandable.
Basketball is, perhaps, the only true American game, invented on this soil; and now more than ever it seems a reflection of our society's dreams and false promises.
The Last Shot often shows that the game in this country is ``commerce, pure and simple.'' Everyone wants a piece of the best players - fathers, coaches, street agents, shoe companies. The unacknowledged minor league system in basketball begins with the summer camps attended by 10- and 11-year-olds. By the time some of these kids are 12, they are being actively scouted by college coaches, agents and shoe companies. By the time they are in high school, they encounter coaches who are willing to say anything to recruit them. There is unctuous talk about the team as one big family, about the depth of guidance and caring, coming from coaches and assistants who end up leaving the next year for higher pay and bigger shoe contracts.
Amid the moments of athletic achievement and neighborhood fame, these young stars seem unable at times to remember that it is supposed to be just a game. Dramatizing this lack of joy, Frey describes Lincoln's defeat of its archrival Grady at the end of the season: ``A few minutes later, I spot Russell in street clothes, throwing his book bag over his shoulder and heading up the stairs. He has . . . single-handedly won another game. In this case, it is the biggest game of the PSAL season, arguably the finest high school basketball game I have seen this year. Having just driven himself beyond most limits of human performance, he leaves the school building looking exhausted, defeated, like a factory worker at the end of a long shift.''
This reads like a passage out of Dickens, but it's not - it's a story about young men in the city, golden dreams, cruel ironies and all the unwritten rules of the game. MEMO: Michael Pearson teaches journalism and English at Old Dominion
University and is the author of ``Imagined Places: Journeys into
Literary America'' and ``A Place That's Known.'' ILLUSTRATION: Jacket photo by JAMES HAMILTON
Jacket design by MARK CALEB
by CNB