Haunted By Echoes Of ‘The Last Shot’

In the midst of March Madness - NCAA upsets and overtimes, media hype over the second coming of St. Michael of Jordan, and public outrage over the Oscars’ dissing of “Hoop Dreams” - I read the most maddening of basketball books: “The Last Shot,” by Darcy Frey.

The night I finished it, I awoke at 3 a.m., too haunted to sleep.

Much as “Hoop Dreams” follows two young basketball players over four years in South Side Chicago, “Shot” spends a year with three teenagers on the varsity team at Abraham Lincoln High School in the famed basketball - and illegal drug - hotbed of Coney Island, N.Y.

Frey focuses on the youths’ adult influences: their dedicated coach; the often-smarmy college recruiters who lie to lure them to their schools; and their parents, whose pride is leavened by terror of all that could befall them before college and, please God, the NBA.

But it’s the players who glide into your heart. Like Russell Thomas, who’d be the jock-next-door - if you lived behind six locks and a steel door in a public housing high-rise.

A gifted guard, Russell spends hours perfecting his game, skips lunch to do homework and carries vocabulary flashcards everywhere. He’s described by a tutor as the most dedicated kid she’s seen in 30 years.

Serious Tchaka Shipp, one of the few Lincoln players from an intact home, has the body of a 6-foot-7 Adonis and a gaggle of big-name coaches following him, promising the moon and several suns if he’ll only sign.

Corey Johnson is handsome, clever and dashing - a charmer whose wit might carry him through - if he lived anywhere else.

All three are terrified: of a ‘hood where the drug culture claimed one former Lincoln phenom’s life and got another wounded in cross fire; of neighbors’ burdensome expectations; of the knowledge that not one of the dozen world-class athletes they’ve known made it to a Division One college - or the NBA. Almost no one escaped.

One culprit is the 700 SAT score required by four-year colleges, which seems low until you consider that most Lincoln students suffer from years of terrible schooling and haven’t a clue as to how to take standardized tests.

By the end of the book, I was terrified, too.

And I was obsessed with these kids, just as millions were with William Gates and Arthur Agee, whose lives we glimpsed in “Hoop Dreams.” Were we moved just by the filmmakers’ skill? Or were we also grateful just to be allowed inside homes that the middle class rarely enter, to meet people whom we liked and related to?

People whom, ultimately, we thought we knew.

So much hinges on knowing. Thanks to a badnews-obsessed media and our own laziness, we think we know about the urban poor: Crime, kids without fathers, students too angry to care.

But what, truly, do we know about Tchaka and Corey and Russell, and thousands of smart, hardworking kids who, in all but their poverty, embody the American Dream?

“Unfortunately,” writes Frey, “hard work alone - although preached … as the one sure route to success - does not suffice in these circumstances. … If the NCAA is so concerned about education … (why not) allow … scholarships to players who don’t pass the SATs as long as they stay off the team until the school brings them up to speed … or eliminate freshman eligibility across the board so that every player’s first year would be devoted to schoolwork?”

What about kids - athletes or not - whose educations and home training from kindergarten up are so execrable that only a near-genius could triumph? Aren’t they Americans, too?

Questions like these wouldn’t let me sleep. They lurk, I suspect, in most of us, temporarily submerged by more pressing questions - about our work, families, friends and finances.

Our questions concern those we know, and in knowing, love.

“The Last Shot” and “Hoop Dreams” remind us that there’s a world of people worthy of our questions, our respect, our love.

And we do know them - through our own dear children and loved ones.

I know there is nothing I wouldn’t do for my family, no honest device I wouldn’t employ to protect and support them. Knowing that, can’t I remember those women who love as much, who do all they can, but who lack my education, job and lifelong resources? Can’t I remember their families?

Of course I can - by asking new questions, beginning with “What can I do?” And by insisting on an answer, just as I would if the endangered children were my own. And of course they are.

We are all family, however often we need reminding. To pretend otherwise is madness, during March or any other month.