The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams

If you think playing the game is the only business in this sport, read this book. For players and coaches both, violating the NCAA recruiting rules is easier than it seems. This book tells how the coaches will say that they're there for the players then bolt on them for a better offer. It takes you in the high school basketball life through Tchaka Shipp, Russell Thomas(Darryl Flicking), Corey Johnson, and freshmen Stephon Marbury. Author Darcy Frey explains how no matter how great a basketball player you may be, passing the SATs is the first priority to getting recruited by a Division 1 school.

This documentary is a great depiction of the rough life lived by inner-city basketball stars that sometime make neighborhood legends. Lives like this create stories of how "He was going to the NBA, until he got involved with the wrong crowd" or "He had a scholarship, until his grades ruined him." The Last Shot is a book about the struggle of landing a Division 1 College Basketball Scholarship. The book takes place at Lincoln High School in Coney Island, which is known for its great basketball program. In Coney Island basketball is life and the only thing that could portray that lifestyle better than this book would be to live in Coney Island. Overall this book was a well written documentary, so well written it reads like a novel. The book is written with such clarity you can tell Darcy Frey actually got to know these High School basketball stars very well. A college scholarship is the only way out of the Coney Island Projects, making basketball glory the inner-city American Dream. I would recommend this book to anyone ever interested in anything having to do with Prep sports or Inner-City success stories, or not so successful stories.

The book is non-fiction, Corey, Stephon, Shipp are real life names, but the "Russel Simmons" (the book's central character) name was used by the author instead of Darryl Flicking (the real life Lincoln shooting guard). Flicking's mother refused to give the author permission to use her son's name (this was a money - NCAA rules issue just like Marbury's father's blackmail request of the author). Flicking was truly a great high school ball player, not just skill wise, but athletically he was a rockhard 200lb 6'3" man-child. Last year, after great success as a college player in California, Flicking was run over and killed by a train. Flicking's shot at immortality was ruined, only people who watched him play for Lincoln and in that small California college will ever know how great he was. RIP Darryl Flicking

This book made me mad! Not at Darcy Frey, who writes a great book, but at the combined effects of wretched public schools, which pass along students able neither to read, write nor do sums; and at the NCAA's patronizing and exploitative treatment of "student" atheletes. "Last Shot" tells of four star black basketball players on the Lincoln High School (Coney Island) team. Despite horrible poverty, housing projects overrun by drugs and violence, ans a school system which cannot keep them safe (let alone educate), these young men are good kids. They are kept alive, and their hopes fed, by a combination of (1) amazing basketball skills; (2) a coach and mentors who believe in them; and (3) the dream of a NCAA Division I scholarship leading into the big time. Unfortunately, only one makes it, and he just barely. The other three cannot meet the Proposition 48 requirement of 700 SAT scores (even though their high school grades are good), and lose their shot at a Division I scholarship. Juxtaposed against these hopeful young men, who do everything that is asked of them but are finally betrayed by abysmal schooling, are the Division I recruiters, many of them well-known coaches. They give new meaning to the word "smarmy." They are corrupted by the system. Darcy's title "Last Shot" has a (quite intentional) double meaning. He refers first to the excitement of a well-played game, when victor and vanquished hang in the balance. More troubling, he acknowledges that, for each of these boys, the chance to escape the ghetto through a basketball scholarship has become his "last shot" at a successful (or safe) life. To mix metaphors, what angers me about the situation Frey describes -- in fact makes me so mad I will have trouble watching the NCAA Tournament this year -- is that these young men have received a raw deal. It's not right!

The writer follows several players, including a budding high school freshman named Stephon Marbury through a year of heights and falls in the Coney Island Project. This book takes a good hard look at big college recruiting, the myriad of camps and summer leagues for players, and the pressure that the world is putting on even our youngest athletes. Never far from the surface is the brutal poverty and crime of the New York projects. The writing is vivid in describing people and places. The dialouge is real and intense. I found myself unable to put the book down at times because I wanted to know what was going to happen next. Includes an epilouge to tell you what happened in the years after high school to the boys that the book follows. A great book. Well-written and thought-provoking