The Last Shot by Darcy Frey

Author:Darcy Frey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

BIG-TIME RECRUITING

Six

“YOU HAVEN’T been up to see us? Here’s a shot of our arena. Beautiful, isn’t it? That’s a ten-million-dollar building you’re looking at. Every game sold out—a twenty-eight-thousand crowd. In four years you’ll play in front of three-point-five million people. That’s more than most pros! We’re on TV more than any other Big East team. We play in Madison Square Garden four times a year. And we’ve been in the NCAA tournament for the last nine years in a row. Now you’re gonna read in the papers about our kids getting benefits. But I want to assure you, our lawyers are working around the clock and they’ve found no major violations. The headlines say, PLAYERS GET CASH! Shit, I gave twenty dollars’ Christmas money to one player. Big deal. Worst is, we’ll lose a scholarship. But we won’t be out of the NCAA tournament. Maybe we’ll get a one-year probation during your freshman year, but we won’t be out of the tournament. Okay, maybe—maybe—we won’t play in the tournament, but that’s it. Of course, I can’t guarantee it . . . Anyway, have I mentioned the facilities? We got everything you want: great weight room, great student apartments, and we’ll give you a meal card too—you can get pizza any time of the night. We got eleven thousand students. Fourteen hundred of them are black. Socially, nowhere better. Parties at night in the apartments. And our players—they should run for mayor! Always the most popular guys in town. Four sets of practice gear by Champion. And any model Nike you want. Any questions?”

Jim Boeheim, coach of the Syracuse Orangemen, pauses for breath. The sudden quiet is jarring, like the one that follows an insistent telephone cut off midring.

“Any questions?”

Tchaka, sitting across the table from Boeheim in the coaches’ locker room at Lincoln High, remains silent. Arms folded in front of him, chin tucked into his chest, he watches Boeheim through his eyebrows—actually studies the coach’s face—as though he might be called on someday to remember all its features for a police sketch. Ten days ago Tchaka finished his final summer camp appearance. This week he begins his senior year of high school. Already head coaches from Villanova, Seton Hall, Providence, Boston College, University of Miami, Florida State, Rutgers, Wichita State, and many other schools have requested audiences with Tchaka in order to convince him that his future will be best served by his spending the next four years in their company. The ones Tchaka has met with so far have offered him scholarships, extolled their athletic programs, hinted that they will make him a college star. But Tchaka, connoisseur of the game that he is, knows enough players who signed at top programs with similar dreams of making the pros—and then spent four years languishing on the bench—to believe that he now confronts, as the coaches often say, “one of life’s no-lose propositions.” No, from now until November 15, the earliest date on which high school seniors are allowed

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