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Darcy Frey, The Last Shot (1994) In this gripping debut book, Frey—a contributing editor at Harper's and at The New York Times Magazine—follows four all-star high school basketball players from their homes in the Coney Island the projects to the hallways of Abraham Lincoln High School. Beginning in the summer of 1991, Frey spends more than a year with the foursome: senior players Corey, Russell (whose name has been changed) and Tchaka, and incoming freshman (already a neighborhood superstar) Stephon Marbury. In this sensitive account of life in the ghetto and the dream that is high school basketball, Frey documents the brutal and sobering cycle of life these impoverished, talented kids face: the expectations of their families and friends; the pressure of college recruiting, which began for most of them in junior high school; and an education that hardly keeps up its end of the bargain in the dreaded demand for a 700 SAT score, required by the NCAA for a high school player to bypass the junior college league and go straight to a Division I four-year school. These young players are desperate to leave Coney Island and basketball is their ticket out. Frey's anecdotes are often devastating as he exposes the hell these kids wake up to daily (drugs, violence, the cycle of poverty and the neglect of their neighborhood), as well as the corruption of the high school ball "system," with summer leagues, neighborhood scouts and Nike deals where everyone (coaches, parents and recruiters included) looks to use these young players to their own advantage: lavishing the boys with compliments and empty promises, and then abandoning them as soon as grades drop, SAT scores are missed, or a hot, new player enters the scene. The article on which this book is based won a National Magazine Award and the Livingston Award and was collected in The Best American Essays 1994. MORE: Amazon Author profile and interview excerpts from Yale Daily News Stanford review (academic) |
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