Bibliotech: Darcy Frey's "The Last Shot"

Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 2: Bibilotech, a series of essays about books. In this edition, John Krolik (SportsHubLA, FreeDarko) takes us through an analysis of Darcy Frey's The Last Shot with today's sensibilities. Enjoy.

Darcy Frey's The Last Shot is not about basketball. It can't be. Basketball is a diversion, a game played for the benefit of those playing or, at the highest levels, those watching. The Last Shot is a book about three kids trying to find a better life for themselves, about a world that demands 18-year old kids to find a level of maturity and drive rarely present in adults to simply escape, about greatness and human fallibility, about greed and ignorance and exploitation. But what makes The Last Shot so compelling is that it is about basketball, because in Coney Island, all of those things are encompassed by the game.

Frey spent a year of his life at Coney Island's Lincoln High monitoring the basketball team's three best players: Corey Johnson, Tchaka Shipp, and Russell Thomas, all of them with the talent necessary for a division I scholarship and a ticket to a way out of Coney Island.

The threat that hangs over all of their heads are the academic requirements for a Division I scholarship -- a 70 average in class and a 700 on the SAT. To most people, those requirements seem fairly minimal, but the educational systems in places ruled by basketball like Coney Island makes the requirements analogous to asking a valedictorian to average at least 10 points for his school's varsity team before being allowed admission; it is revealed that some of the characters were not taught the principles of multiplication until high school, and most of the athletes at Nike's "Academic Betterment and Career Development" camp, better known as ABCD camp, read at less than a middle-school level.

For me, The Last Shot is, more than anything else, a way to look at how the athletes we pick apart and marvel at are made, and who they really are beneath what they do on the court. Friday Night Lights, the book The Last Shot is most often compared to, is about a town, but Frey makes his book a personal journey by allowing us to see things how the athletes do, and the book's power comes from juxtaposing the three-dimensional view we get of his characters with the way the rest of the world sees them.

Corey Johnson (6-1 guard, good athlete with explosion ability. First step is nearly unstoppable. Good court vision, with a flair for the dramatic pass. Streaky outside shot) is the least ambitious of the three, the most popular guy at his high school, as gifted with women as he is on the court, an aspiring writer and poet, endlessly creative, a trend-setter, brash, smooth, and confident, seemingly never allowing the pressure to faze him. He sleepwalks through most of his classes and seems to have no hope of passing his SATs, as he is not putting in extra time studying for them and has not even capitalized on his opportunities to take it as many times as he can. He may be the smartest of all the characters in the book; he never goes somewhere he's not supposed to on the court, never at a loss for a witty remark, and constantly writing one piece or another. For most 18-year olds as gifted as Corey, coasting through high school means a stint at a lesser-known liberal arts school or a lower-rung state college, but the stakes are much higher in Coney Island -- the book is filled with images of players who "didn't make it" because of academic requirements and now work at gas stations or on a corner somewhere.

Tchaka Schipp (6-7 forward, great athlete with tremendous strength, speed, and leaping ability. Great motor. Nose for the ball on both ends of the floor. Can dunk in traffic inside, and is willing to trade elbows on the low block. Good help-side defender. Raw offensively; very few back-to-basket moves; handle and range on outside shots are nonexistent. Shorter than most 4s at the college level) is the most gifted of the three; blessed with a body full of raw power and strength, a stable home life in a neighborhood in Brooklyn, and a natural intelligence, he seems destined to make it out, and makes a 700 on his SATs relatively early in his senior year. He picked up the game fairly late -- cycling was his original sport -- but seems determined to make up for lost time on the court (where he attacks the basket with a primal fury often punctuated with a victorious scream after a dunk) and off the court, where he constantly watches tape of college games in order to learn new moves. He's the one most fazed by pressure during games, playing horribly in his first few ABCD games due to nerves, and air-balls a free throw during a summer league game against an all-white team. (Quote from an opposing player's father, who thought Frey was also a parent: "Bet he never practiced a free throw in his life. Just runs up and down the court.") He is constantly attempting to balance a more refined image of himself with the reality of his upbringing; during one post-game interview after a tough loss, he breaks his stoic character and blurts out "Damn, did you see that last dunk? That n****r was buggin'! Cocked that s**t to his nuts! (embarrassed pause) Um, don't quote me on that, okay?" Because of his potential and 700, Tchaka is also the one who experiences the full force of NCAA recruiting; Tchaka is constantly visited by coaches from top schools with promises of playing time, future stardom, an education, and a personal concern. Frey highlights one incident when a coach recruiting Tchaka promised him that he was entering a family, and that if he wasn't in contact with Tchaka 20 years after he stopped playing for him, he'd "kick his ass!" The next year, that very coach accepted the head coaching position at UNLV.

Russell Thomas (6-2 guard, Ben Gordon-type scorer. Beautiful outside shot, which he can hit with confidence off the dribble or running off screens. Able to get to the basket. Ferocious defender, gives his man 40 minutes of hell. Concerns about what position he would play at the next level; lack of explosiveness is also an issue.)  Thomas, whose real name is Darryl Flicking but had it changed for the book, is the most intriguing of the three. The book begins with one of his solitary workouts in the Coney Island court semi-jokingly referred to as "The Garden." He shoots over and over, moving to different spots with mechanical precision. Then he gets out a chair, sits in it, and swishes one-handers. Occasionally he will put a brick in each of his hands and practice defensive slides. He is the most relentless of the three, the one whose drive seems to be right out of the tall tales we have made Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Kobe Bryant into; he never showboats, defends his man with religious zeal, spends his lunch period studying for his SATs, and immediately sets to his homework when he comes home. He is obsessive, insecure, and unpredictable; his coach calls the monitoring of his daily moods "the Russell watch." He nearly killed himself the year before Frey arrived after he hit his girlfriend, fearing that the incident would go on his record and scare away Division I schools; he had to be talked down from the top of a high-rise building. He has a kind of singular vision on his goals; he promises to wear a tie and wingtips to school and dunk during a game at the beginning of the year, and follows through with both. He gets a serious girlfriend during his senior year, and goes from telling Frey that he loves her and will someday marry her to regaling Corey with boastful stories about his coldness towards her. The recruiting process feeds on his insecurities; during a summer league game, two scouts reveal that they have labeled him a "choker" as he steps to the line for two crucial free throws, UC Irvine withdraws their scholarship offer just as he was about to sign there based on concerns over his SAT scores, is clearly driven crazy by the attention lavished on Tchaka, and he finally decides to sign with Temple, sight unseen; when pressed about his decision by Corey, he snaps "because I'm sick of all this f*****g recruiting, okay?!"

Seen 17 years after its events occurred, The Last Shot reveals that the three players' only choice was failure. Corey's lackadaisical approach cost him his 700, and he ended up going to junior college and missing the NBA, although he still dreams of becoming a writer. Tchaka accepted a scholarship and the promise of playing time at Seton Hall, only to be buried on the bench and mentally broken by noted douchebag P.J. Carlesimo, leading to him to transfer to UC Irvine in hopes of a starting spot, but he got in a car accident, rendering him unable to play basketball at the same level ever again; he now does plumbing work for $8.50 an hour. Russell didn't make his 700, but kept his determination, became one of the most prolific scorers in junior college, and eventually got his degree, but his intensity proved to be his downfall; he was involved in an incident of domestic abuse with his wife, attempted to find God, and ended up living homeless separated from his wife and child in California; at 26 years old, he was hit by an Amtrak train and instantly killed. Many believe he threw himself in front of it.

The book does contain a fourth player, less involved in the central events of the book than the other three, a tiny freshman phenom of a point guard and basketball savant, with blazing speed, a yo-yo handle, otherworldly court vision, and a deadly shot. He is the most cocky and the most jaded of the four, always flapping his mouth and even deriding Tchaka's abilities to his face. He had not one, not two, but three older brothers show promise in high school but ultimately fail to make their 700 and end up in some sort of juco purgatory, and the experience has clearly impacted his family; his father approaches Frey directly and asks him how much he's going to be paid for Frey's book, having seen too often how young players are chewed up and spit out by those looking to profit off them and left with nothing. Unlike the other three, the freshman is shameless about hitting up Frey for meals at McDonald's and soda money, and is clear about his intentions to get his from college recruiters, admonishing the other three for not asking for any illegal gifts; he dreams of getting hooked up with a white Nissan Sentra, which are, in his own words, "milk." But he also benefits from his loss of innocence -- he vows that he won't turn out like his brothers, and puts in hours with tutors every day so that he can live up to that vow. He turns out to be the book's lone success story, propelled out of Coney Island by immense talent and confidence and a drive forged by the crushing failure that had preceded him. His name? Stephon Marbury.

Like my boss says, THIS IS A LEAGUE OF STARS. And the NBA's stars often walk a blessed path, especially since The Man From Farregut showed us that the young can lead a team to salvation. Nowadays, the great ones have been hand-chosen from before they hit middle school; they get put on AAU teams, play high-level rec-leagues during the year, go to ABCD camp, and go to big-time basketball factories like Oak Hill and play other basketball factories in games that are broadcast on ESPN bear only a passing resemblance to high school basketball. But the game does not reside in those chosen few. It resides in places like Coney Island, in courts like the Garden where kids play 5-on-5 and execute offensive sets until the sun is a memory, where the sidelines are littered with the hollow entities of those whose sacrifice was demanded by the game so that the chosen few may emerge, in behind-the-back passes and crossovers that exist for their own poetry, where the game is not an escape from reality but the only reality permissible, in stories of players only seen by human eyes like Spoon and Chocolate and Ju-Ju and The Goat. Few stars are born in places like Coney Island, but all of them live there, and Coney Island likewise is in every star; the ghosts of Marbury and Isiah and Jordan haunt the courts and fueling the dreams of the game's footsoldiers, putting up shots in hopes that they may be The Next, with the vast majority failing and paving the way for the one who will someday come. For Russell, Tchaka, and Corey, the game was their life; what they did on the court was the sole truth on which a lie about their realities was built. The truth of the game is in Coney Island, but the truth isn't always what you want to hear.

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