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The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams by Darcy Frey
Book Summary InformationAuthor: Darcy Frey Edition: Paperback Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 2004-03-03 ISBN: 0618446710 Number of pages: 240 Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball DreamsBook Review: Compelling Read Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball DreamsIt 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.
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