As the columnist George Will said of the literature of the airplane, the most striking thing about the literature of basketball is that there is so little of it. An overwhelmingly black sport at all levels, basketball is—in the words of the late Pete Axthelm—“the city game.” A nation that has agonized so passionately over racial issues and urban problems might be expected to consider the pastime of young black men in American cities in greater depth, and finally, it seems such an examination has begun.
This winter, two works, Hoop Dreams, a documentary movie produced by Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert, and The Last Shot, a book by Darcy Frey,1 have penetrated the culture of urban basketball. While the movie is far more nuanced than the book, both portray basketball not as a pastime but as a pernicious system, one that encourages impoverished and impressionable young players to cede their lives to the impossible dream of a career in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The beneficiaries of this arrangement are predominantly (but not exclusively) white coaches, agents, and corporate executives. These adults transform the dreams that every playground player harbors into his “last shot.”
Both Hoop Dreams and The Last Shot describe well how an efficient system channels the top basketball players from all over the country to the leading college teams. The process is fairly simple. Unofficial, paid-under-the-table scouts forage the playgrounds of urban America looking for preteen talent. The scouts report their findings to their clients, high-school coaches. The coaches then recruit these players with various incentives, from scholarships (in the case of parochial schools) to guaranteed starting positions and the attention of college scouts.
With most of the best young players on the top high-school teams, college scouts know where to look. If they miss anyone, an independent scout, writing for a newsletter like Hoop Scoop, is sure to find him. After informal recruiting that can last several years, the process intensifies as college coaches scavenge the nation, seeking to sign the player who will change the fortunes of their university. There are numerous summer camps where high-school players showcase their talents for college coaches, of which the Nike camp, sponsored by the sneaker company and officially called the Academic Betterment and Career Development (ABCD) program, is at the apex.
Those who perform best at Nike will be heavily recruited by the prominent college programs that are, in turn, feeders to the NBA. This means that famous college coaches will beg, cajole, and bombard the young ghetto players with letters and phone calls offering four-year scholarships. In order to qualify for this largesse, the high-school player must have accumulated a 2.0 grade-point average and achieved a score of 700 out of a possible 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), or a score of 18 out of a possible 35 on the American College Testing Program (ACT).
The recruiting process, like the entire business of collegiate athletics, is governed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). To ensure that coaches, agents, or boosters do not compromise the amateur status of college athletes, the NCAA has constructed an extraordinary set of rules that includes bans on colorful recruiting brochures, stationery printed in more than two colors, and recruiting tapes longer than three minutes. The NCAA also forbids contact between coaches and players at the camps, although in the event of “unavoidable” contact, Rule 13.1.2.3-(e) of the NCAA manual allows for “normal civility.” So coaches at Nike loiter in public areas seeking unavoidable contact with the young men they will be heavily recruiting in a few weeks.
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Hoop Dreams, the product of nearly five years of filming, shows us this system at work through the lives of two young sensations from Chicago, Arthur Agee and William Gates. Recruited from different parts of Chicago, William and Arthur begin high school together at St. Joseph’s High School, the alma mater of Isiah Thomas.2 The two boys are forced to separate when financial considerations require Arthur to transfer to a public school, Marshall High. William has no more money than Arthur, but his coach arranges for Patricia Weir, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, to fund his remaining three years at St. Joseph’s.
Though the young men pursue separate basketball careers, they share many experiences common to life in the inner city. Arthur’s initially intact family is destroyed by his father, who abandons the household for a life on crack. As the fatherless Agee family slips into grinding poverty, Arthur disintegrates as well. His performance on the court is sub-par, and in his classes he remains on the cusp of failure. He begins to turn around only when his father, having abandoned drugs for religion, returns to the family and gradually begins to resume his proper role. Still, irreparable damage has been done. Arthur’s adolescence is marked by an event all too familiar in the lives of inner-city children: he has himself become a father—specifically, of two children by different women.
The theme of male abandonment is raised in William’s case, too, when it is revealed that his father also left his son at birth. William, however, is determined to be different, and he is given an opportunity when his own daughter is born. He stays with (and eventually marries) the child’s mother and shows constant concern for them both even as his basketball career takes an unexpected nosedive after he suffers a devastating injury. Throughout this physical and emotional trauma William remains an endearing young man, polite, respectful, industrious, eager to help himself and his family.
As two of Chicago’s best high-school players, William and Arthur are offered scholarships to Division I colleges. Arthur, unable to pass his SAT, is relegated to Mineral Area Junior College in Montana, where the only blacks are on the basketball team. William’s struggle with the ACT is painfully documented in the film. Hours and hours of preparation consistently fail to yield the coveted minimum score. Patricia Weir again steps in, enrolling William at no charge in the ACT review course run by Britannica. After numerous attempts, William eventually passes and is able to accept a scholarship to Marquette.
Patricia Weir is not the only adult in Hoop Dreams whose concern for the young players is unrelated to their performance on the court. There is Arthur’s mother, Sheila Agee, who, despite daunting adversity, earns a degree as a nurse’s assistant. A pillar of her community, she serves as a surrogate mother to Arthur’s friend Shannon Johnson, who eventually succumbs nevertheless to a life of drugs and crime. Similarly, the teachers and counselors at Marshall High do everything in their power to help Arthur, though the disappearance of his father renders their efforts futile. Hoop Dreams is particularly good at showing the stubborn constraints on people who are not family members and who try to make a difference in the lives of troubled children.
But the relationships and institutions that do not exist in Hoop Dreams tell as much about the Chicago ghetto as those that do. Aside from the church, there are no “mediating institutions” to serve the social needs of the population, no organizations to soften the blows of poverty while also ensuring that the poor are equipped to become functioning members of society. It seems, indeed, that the only connections between the Chicago of Arthur Agee and William Gates and the outside world are basketball scouts and welfare checks. This circumstance, only implied in Hoop Dreams, becomes the gravamen of a social indictment in The Last Shot.
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As with Hoop Dreams, The Last Shot is based upon a reporter’s extensive journey into the culture of inner-city basketball, this time in New York. In his book, Darcy Frey tells the story of four basketball players living in the heart of Brooklyn’s Coney Island and attending Abraham Lincoln High School nearby.
Urban renewal has transformed Coney Island into a mass of high-rise apartment buildings packed with people living in filth and drug-infested corridors. Perhaps the most fitting symbols of this community are the decade-old University of Georgia basketball programs that are passed around like holy relics because they contain a picture of a local boy, Eric “Spoon” Marbury, playing with Dominique Wilkins, now an NBA star. The one oasis is the basketball court, reverentially called “the Garden” (after Madison Square Garden, where the New York Knicks play) and kept in immaculate condition. Young residents of the projects play serious basketball in the Garden, where they are coached by knowledgeable and seasoned locals and are watched by high-school scouts.
Frey concentrates on several veterans of the Garden who play for the Lincoln High team. Their characters are quite different. Freshman Stephon Marbury, the legendary Eric’s brother, is probably the most talented athlete of the bunch; though arrogant, he harbors a sense of tragedy, having witnessed several equally gifted brothers abandon their chance to escape the ghetto for pleasures long forgotten. Senior Corey Johnson, a smart young man with promising intellectual and athletic abilities, uses none of them and ends up a semi-employed unmarried teenage father. Only the team’s center, Tchaka Shipp, who lives in a working-class neighborhood and has nothing but contempt for the residents of Coney Island, passes his SAT with no problem and finds himself in the midst of intense Division I recruiting.
To Frey, Coney Island is in the grip of rapacious companies and individuals who, to make a few dollars, have deliberately created a universe where the only choices for black youths are the NBA (very unlikely) or the streets (almost inevitable). Nike draws special opprobrium. Frey is outraged that the sneaker company expects eventually to profit from the top young players it brings to its camp and the free sneakers it provides to playground and high-school teams. He suggests sarcastically that such behavior “is what American entrepreneurship is all about.”
Statements like these are what earned The Last Shot a rave review by Brent Staples on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. But they also point to the book’s weakness. True, the lives of impressionable young players are full of basketball bankers who promise glory and riches in full knowledge that most of their young charges will end up with only a rapidly depreciating vault of memories. But until Americans stop enjoying college and professional basketball, these people will not go away.
The NCAA cannot control the system, and neither will the scornful pen of Darcy Frey. The real question is: can a young player be helped to acquire the values and the perspective that will allow him to prosper in a different field if as is overwhelmingly likely—he cannot make a career out of basketball?
Perhaps without realizing it, Frey answers this question by telling the story of Russell Thomas, the most endearing subject in his book. Russell, materially as poor as his neighbors, has a strong mother whose sole concern is to steer her son out of the ghetto. A good but not a great player, Russell is tempted by the possibility of a basketball career, but he has a contingency plan:
I’m using basketball to go to a four-year school. What I really want is to graduate from college, start me a nice little family, and get me a nice little job as a registered nurse. But first I got to make sure I get that degree.
It is of course common to hear young basketball prospects talk this way; they are well-trained in the clichés of the trade. But Russell really appears to mean it. Acutely aware of his personal weaknesses, Russell tells his coach to hold his recruiting mail lest it make him too arrogant to study. In the end, after starring at a junior college (he could not accept an offer from Temple University because he failed to score a 700 on the SAT despite intense preparation), Russell receives a barrage of offers. Ultimately, he settles on a small Division II school where basketball will not distract him from his responsibilities as a student.
Russell Thomas is certainly an exception to Frey’s implied rule that, for a playground player, life holds no realistic alternatives to a professional career. But the rule is also contradicted, interestingly enough, by at least some NBA players themselves. Although the best playground players may have more sheer talent than NBA yeomen, the crucial difference is that, in order to get to the NBA, the professional has had to exercise some of the prosaic virtues that facilitate success in any arena: hard work, practice, resolution, sobriety, dedication, and patience.
These virtues must be internalized, and for every NBA player who deviates from them at any opportunity he gets, there is another who orders his life so as consistently to reinforce them. Certainly it is telling that there are more ordained ministers in the NBA than regular churchgoers among the playground players in The Last Shot. Brent Staples’s contention that basketball is the “true and only religion” of Coney Island may be correct, but it is not the true and only religion of the National Basketball Association.
Reflecting on a different topic, the political scientist James Q. Wilson once wrote, “What most need[s] explanation . . . [is] not why some people are criminals but why most people are not.” If analysts of the city game were to focus for a moment on young men like Russell Thomas, they would not be limited to cursing a system that will not significantly alter until human nature itself does. They might even see how and under what circumstances hoop dreams can offer a gateway to something other than a player’s last shot.
1 Houghton-Mifflin, 230 pp., $19.95.
2 Thomas, the point guard on the NBA championship Detroit Pistons in the 1980's, is the best small man ever to play basketball, at least since Bob Cousy.
