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The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams, by Darcy Frey
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It ought to be just a game, but basketball on the playgrounds of Coney Island is much more than that — for many young men it represents their only hope of escape from a life of crime, poverty, and despair. In The Last Shot, Darcy Frey chronicles the aspirations of four of the neighborhood’s most promising players. What they have going for them is athletic talent, grace, and years of dedication. But working against them are woefully inadequate schooling, family circumstances that are often desperate, and the slick, brutal world of college athletic recruitment. Incisively and compassionately written, The Last Shot introduces us to unforgettable characters and takes us into their world with an intimacy seldom seen in contemporary journalism. The result is a startling and poignant expose of inner-city life and the big business of college basketball.
- Sales Rank: #150620 in Books
- Published on: 2004-03-03
- Released on: 2004-03-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x .56" w x 5.50" l, .54 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 240 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Coney Island, Brooklyn, once New York City's playground, is now an archetypal ghetto, filled with high-rise housing projects and populated almost exclusively by African Americans. High schoolers there attend Abraham Lincoln High, known all around the East Coast for its outstanding basketball teams, where players see the sport as their way out of second-class citizenship. In his first book, Frey, a contributing editor at Harper's and the New York Times Magazine, has composed a sensitive account of a year in the lives of four exceptional players (three seniors and one freshman), their coach and their families, and he shows that the game can indeed be a means of escape in spite of their school's poor academic reputation. But the way out is fraught with difficulties. For instance, Frey offers devastating anecdotes about dishonest college recruiters and about the NCAA. This excellent book is not only about basketball but about realizing a dream, and its appeal should be very wide.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
For many adolescents on Coney Island, basketball is their only escape from the urban hell of poverty, crime, and drugs. The Last Shot chronicles a group of teenagers playing for one of the best teams in New York, the Abraham Lincoln Secondary School Railsplitters. These young males continually cope with circumstances beyond their control in a society that has failed miserably to provide a safe environment and, more importantly, a good education. The author, who won a National Magazine Award for the story upon which this account is based, also explains how those living in high-risk areas suffered the most when the National Collegiate Athletic Association raised the standards of acceptable SAT scores for athletes. The young men whose stories Frey so poignantly captures exist in a world of "mean streets and basketball dreams." Recommended.
L.R. Little, Penticton P.L., British Columbia
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
James North Chicago Tribune Books Soars toward the basket...a brilliant portrait of what has gone wrong in our cities, and by extension, in our country. -- Review
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Does not stand the test of time 22 years later
By carolina38
Published in 1994, it does not hold up well 22 years later. It was recommended to me as a great story on about college recruiting and bad things about it. But, things have changed so much in terms of technology, television and the culture that it is not current. It probably was good at the time of publication, but now is valuable as a look back to a simpler time in recruiting.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Compelling Read
By Eric Angevine
This is one of the best sports books I've ever read. Darcy Frey embedded himself in the desolate housing projects of Coney Island for two years, to the point where he became the de facto transportation option for the poor kids he was shadowing. He emerged with a document that goes beyond the thrill of sports (though that's here) and delves into society, education, and individual motivation.
This book has been around a while - it was published in 1994 - but it still rings true, despite the references to razor haircuts and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince lyrics. Frey follows one special group of basketball players at Coney Island's Abraham Lincoln High. Power forward Tchaka Shipp, guards Corey Johnson and Russell Thomas, and a playground tag-along (who joins the team as a freshman in the second half of the book) by the name of Stephon Marbury. The double-entendre in the book's title becomes poignant from page one: nobody in the projects wants their last shot on the high school basketball court to be their last shot at a decent life.
The overwhelming basketball talent possessed by this quartet of kids is immediately evident. Any one of them is talented enough to play some level of DI ball. That ability level has been evident at Lincoln High for years, but most players become Prop 48 casualties. So Frey begins to look at the educational system and social culture of the projects that so often help to snatch away the one ray of promise that's dangled in front of young men.
When you read about how difficult it is for inner-city kids to get a meager 700 on their SAT's after years of sub-par schooling, you may not be so quick to judge the academic malfeasance that currently dogs the Memphis program. None of us has ever been faced with the choice to cheat on college eligibility or turn to the drug trade. This book does an excellent job of exploring the shades of grey that lie between coaches, players, businessmen, and the NCAA.
To his credit, after a bitter conversation with Marbury's grasping father, Frey even looks at his own complicity in the game. Would he be there, talking to these kids, if their basketball skills couldn't sell books? So, he tries to do the right thing, and strike a deal to share book revenue with his subjects. But who should come calling to put the kibosh on that? Good ol' uncle NCAA, of course. By paying them to talk, he could further reduce their already miniscule chances of playing DI ball.
For me, the greatest thing about this book was that it put a face on the kids whose names get bandied about on team message boards. To recruiters and fans, they're just pieces of meat until they sign on the dotted line. But in this book, we see four kids from the same place with widely divergent personalities.
Big man Shipp struggles with his game despite having made his SAT score early on. When he puts them both together just in time for ABCD camp, his future comes into sharp focus. Thomas (not his real name) works obsessively on his game, and it shows. All he wants is an education to build on, but he can't seem to get over that SAT hump. Johnson loves to write and fool around, and not pay attention to the work he needs to put in. Marbury? He's been recruited since he was 13, but he's seen each of his older brothers try and fail to make a living playing ball. He, obviously, becomes the book's big success story. An appended afterword tells what became of all four since the book was written.
This book is hard to put down once you've started. My copy got doused with water at my son's soccer game, but I kept turning those damp, warped pages just the same, eager to find out what would happen. I could have looked it all up online, but the story was told in such a compelling fashion that I had no desire to cheat.
Marco and I have sacrificed a lot of our potential summer audience because we both hate recruiting talk with a passion. This book will give you a clear inside look at why that unsavory underworld is so important to all parties involved, and also why it is broken to the point of being heartbreaking.
This book is a classic. If you need a beach read this summer, I highly recommend it.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Beauty and Sadness, Basketball and Life
By William
Not a lot of books had made me cry and in my extensive non-fiction book reading, I've read some horrific things. But sometimes the event of something horrible like rejection, failure and even death, is not enough to stir an emotional response. Sometimes the character that experiences one or many of those things is, even with full textual explanation, too far removed from the reader to be appreciated on a human level. In a biography of, say, George Clooney, can you really, actually, feel connected to a man so far removed from you?
The Last Shot manages to not only provide a deep connection with its `characters' but makes me realize how, frankly, easy my life is. I'm not one to flaunt the luxuries of my life but I realize how lucky I am. . .and I suppose that is half of Mr. Darcy's point in writing The Last Shot. The book takes place in Coney Island and centers around four talented but troubled basketball players that attend Lincoln high school. Three of them, Tchaka, Russell, and Corey, are entering their senior year and are beginning the stressful process of college recruitment. The fourth, a young, wiley freshman named Stephon Marbury, is making a name for himself. . .and awaits four long years of trials and tribulations and the ability to finally make it to the next level (something his three brothers almost did, but couldn't).
Frey manages to stay as neutral as possible during his eight months with the players but, as he discovers first hand and brilliantly displays with his writing, we start to get connected to the characters (though the book takes place in the early 90s and some of the fates, like Marbury's, are obviously well known by now) and start to feel both trapped by their environment and equally seduced/repulsed by the NCAA and the college system. Much like the film Hoop Dreams, which I will be reviewing later on the site, the point of the project was initially basketball. . .but turned into the soul and essence of humanity. In the end, basketball becomes as trivial as it should be: a sport that is a joy to play and watch but not the end all be all of existence. However, in Coney Island, and for many families, changing that distinction isn't an option.
Frey is an invested observer and isn't approaching the work as if it is a objective report. He is there in the harsh, dangerous settings and is playing narrator/overlord to the men and, for the most part, letting them play their part without his input. But what is so unique about the book is that, at some point, Frey begins to realize he is, just by being around second-hand, starting to play a part in the boy's lives and effecting them in ways that wouldn't be if he wasn't around. And by book's end, he starts to put aside journalistic integrity and actually reach out to lead the player's down a path that will be beneficial to them. This isn't so his book can create drama. . .but so he can save the people he (and the readers) have learned to love.
The most fascinating case is Russell. The most talented of the senior players (Marbury is the best overall player of any of the boys), Russell is a few brain cells away from crazy. He is immensely intelligent and has a work ethic matched by hardly anyone in his zip code. Yet he dips into periods of odd social behavior that has, in its most trivial moments, led him to act odd in public and, at its most serious, caused him to threaten suicide. He is fragile and one suspects in any other neighborhood, the kinks could be worked out. But Russell is a ticking time bomb and as his college recruitment days go up and down, so do his moods. We, as invested observers, and the author can't help but try to reach out. . .and by the time you reach the `12 Years Later' afterward, though I won't tell you what happens, you're heart will be literally ripped out of your chest and stomped on with abandon. Like I said, few books have made me cry. . .I literally had to put the book down in mid-sentence and had to look up at the sky and ask `why'. It was that moving. . .and sad.
Tchaka, whose height, and not his inferior skills in comparison to Russell, seemingly grant him the dream the other players work so hard for (with little results) and this adds to both Russell's depression and the oppressive claustrophobia that starts to infect the book. Coney Island always feels dangerous due to the drugs and gangbangers but as the stakes get higher, even for the author, the surroundings begin to get grim. At one point, you feel like the author and the player's lives are in danger and the corners of every block get more dangerous. And as the author starts to get excluded from access due to jealousies and fear, the author, and therefore the reader, start to get placed in the dark. . .and it is uncomfortable. I started getting a sick feeling in my stomach towards the end. . .like something bad was going to happen.
The book is captivating from beginning to end but for different reasons. The author's (and player's) innocence is beautiful to watch in the beginning. It's all about the game and how great it is. But then things turn darker and darker as basketball becomes a twisted cousin of the joy it is perceived as in the beginning and as we watch the boys become men and experience hardships beyond anything I can imagine, we also see an author go through immense changes as well. Frey probably represents the common white middle-class man like myself so his initial joy at doing this project leads to shocking revelations and a darkness often unseen when placed behind the televised games and `glory'. If you want a book that will shake you a bit. . .read this. I highly recommend it but prepared to be sad.
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