The world of college sports recruiting is a murky one for top prospects, filled with illegitimate agents and sneaker deals and NCAA requirements. Often college is simply a short stop on the road to professional stardom, but even so, top programs will do anything to make sure that Player X is on their team. Double goes for shoe/apparel companies. Tiger Woods is the highest paid athlete in professional sports, not solely because he is an extremely talented golfer, but because Nike, Gatorade, and AT&T, among others, pay him a combined total of around $105 million (Link) simply for advertising their products. Nike is particularly aggressive in signing young athletes. Nike's various summer basketball camps, where free sneakers and college coaches abound, are seen as the ticket to the big time for an aspiring basketball star. It is into this world that the New York City kids of The Last Shot and the massive left tackle of The Blind Side are thrown into by the selective nature of talent.
The Last Shot delves deep into the heart of Brooklyn to Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island. The Lincoln Railsplitters consistently field one of the best high school teams in the nation, mostly made up of poor, African-American kids who have no future outside of basketball. Frey follows four such players for six months in the summer of 1992: Tchaka Shipp, Corey Robinson, Darryl Flicking (name changed to Russell Simmons in the book), and the youngest, only a freshman at the time, Stephon Marbury. For those not acquainted with the NBA, Marbury is now a 2-time All-Star who at one point was one of the best point guards in the game, and who along with Allen Iverson, ushered in a new era of the score-first point guard. Despite this impending stardom, Marbury comes off in the book as a self-possessed hanger-on whose talents far exceed his maturity. The book really focuses on the trials of the three seniors' attempts to make a NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) Division 1 basketball program. The main obstacle is Proposition 48, an NCAA requirement forcing high-schools seniors to score at least 700 (out of 1800) on their SATs to qualify for Division 1.
The story is interesting not just for the enthralling stories and games of the players, but for the sheer shock of how different it is for an inner-city recruit to make it to a high-level college as compared to an athlete from a more prosperous background. While it is nice to think that college athletics should be at least a little bit about academics, the arcane SAT requirements lead to more problems than they're worth. Rather than punishing players for a bad background, the NCAA should make it easier for them to get the education they will receive at a Division 1 school. The three players in the book are kids no different than your average high schooler, and that makes The Last Shot an entertaining read.
(Part 2: The Blind Side coming next week)
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