Then there is the court known as The Garden. The play here is disciplined, and the vandals keep off. The Garden is the lastplace in Coney Island where there is hope, the possibility of “transcendence through basketball” –a scholarship to a four-year Division I college, with a chance at the pros and, more important, the prospect of getting out of Coney Island for good.
The last shot is a very long one: of the 500,000 boys playing high-school basketball in America, fewer than 1 percent win “D One” scholarships. According to Frey,Lincoln High, where the Coney Island kids go to school, had not produced a Division I player for many years when he spent nine months in 1991-92 tracking four players from the local teams. The group he picked had exceptional talent. One of them, Russell Thomas, is called “Tick Tick” because his jump shot drops in like clockwork. But faced with a college SAT exam, he does what he never does on the court: he panics. Carrying vocabulary flash cards wherever he goes, Russell struggles to get a combined SAT score of 700–the minimum required by the NCAA for Division I players. But his schooling is too poor, the cultural divide is too wide.
This is an achingly good book. a worthy literary companion to “Hoop Dreams,” the new documentary film about a pair of inner-city basketball hopefuls. Frey, who is white, somehow managed to get close to these young black men, who come across all at once as wary, proud. funny and doomed. Frey is withering about the college recruiters who hover around like so many pimps. One coach ends his recruiting letter with the salutation, “Health, Happiness, and Hundred$.” The Greek chorus in this tragedy is the crowd of drug dealers who stand on the sidelines at the Garden, shouting at the most gifted players, “You ain’t going nowhere, sucka!”
