NYTimes.com Article: Betrayed by the Game

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Betrayed by the Game

February 15, 2004
 By DARCY FREY 



 

New York hoops fans, especially those who follow the game
as it's played on this city's scruffy asphalt courts and
playgrounds, have had much to cheer about this winter, with
Stephon Marbury, the N.B.A. All-Star and local legend,
coming home at 26 as a newly minted Knick and Sebastian
Telfair, a nationally ranked 18-year-old phenom, bringing
glory to his high-school team in Brooklyn. As it happens,
Marbury and Telfair are cousins; Marbury attended Abraham
Lincoln High School, where Telfair is now; and Marbury grew
up in the same high-rise housing project in Coney Island
where Telfair lives. The confluence of their stories has
given rise to much comment not only about their individual
successes, but also about the game's success at delivering
its young players -- predominantly poor and
African-American -- to a better life. 

Earlier this season, when ESPN2 featured the Lincoln team
in its first nationally televised high-school game of the
season, viewers heard the details of Telfair's daily
encounters with his environment: how this high-topped
Horatio Alger rises at 5 a.m., runs wind sprints up the 15
flights of his project stairwell, then gets busy on the
battered playground outside his building shooting 500 jump
shots before going off to school. Meanwhile, Lincoln High
was said to be taking care of the educational component --
''keeping their guys eligible, keeping them doing well in
school as well as playing basketball.'' 

Hard work on the court, dedication in the classroom: it
conjured an image of the projects and the public schools
operating in concert as an effective farm league for
college and the pros. And even if a $105 million contract
like the one Marbury just brought with him to the Knicks
isn't in the cards, surely a player could expect a
four-year college scholarship, a decent job after
graduation, a chance to liberate himself once and for all
from the grinding daily privations of the inner city. 


In 1991, when Marbury was just entering high school, I
spent a year with the Lincoln team, then as now the best in
the New York City public schools, for a book I was writing.
Marbury may have been the one true prodigy among them, but
the team was full of gifted young men who were told each
day -- by the street agents, by the college recruiters, by
the sneaker-company reps who courted their brand loyalty at
their corporate-sponsored summer camps -- that their talent
and tenacity would buy them a one-way ticket out. 

After Marbury, the player who seemed likeliest to succeed
was the team's center, Tchaka Shipp, not only because at 17
he was already 6-foot-8 and 240 pounds -- all elbows on the
boards, with an insatiable appetite for the ball -- but
also because he possessed the sharp, winning manner that
made you think he'd turn his athletic success down the line
into a nice career in coaching or the front office. At the
end of his junior year, Shipp was selected as one of 120
players nationwide to attend the prestigious Nike
all-American camp, where his dominance and energy in the
paint drew the attention of almost every Big East coach. It
was something to watch: P. J. Carlesimo of Seton Hall,
Rollie Massimino of Villanova, Rick Barnes of Providence,
Jim Boeheim of Syracuse all journeying to Coney Island to
promise Shipp playing time and a shot at the pros. 

Eventually Shipp chose Seton Hall, but the moment he
entered the college basketball mill, the dreams he'd
developed for his future began to slip away. Despite
Carlesimo's promises of ample playing time, Shipp soon
discovered that he'd been recruited as a backup player.
Frustrated by his bench-warming role, bridling under what
he calls Carlesimo's ''verbal abuse,'' Shipp, after two
years, transferred to the lower-level University of
California at Irvine, looking for a starting spot. He never
set foot on the Irvine court. One night, after a long day
of practice, Shipp was driving back to campus when he fell
asleep at the wheel. The ensuing wreck left him with myriad
life-threatening injuries to his skull, lungs, leg and
hands. 

Car accidents can happen to anyone, of course, but if your
principal training has been in the manipulation of a
basketball, the damage gets compounded. After months of
intensive physical therapy, Shipp recovered. But he has
never functioned on the court at the same level since. In
1996, he transferred again, this time to an even
lower-level school -- C.W. Post on Long Island -- where he
lost his starting position to continuing problems with
catching and balance. After graduating from Post in 1998,
Shipp tried out for the Salina Rattlers, a semi-pro team in
Kansas, but with a left knee only half as strong as his
right, he failed to make the final cut. 

Shipp's degree was in broadcast communications, but most of
the work he has been able to find has been manual labor --
loading and unloading trucks at J.F.K. airport, building
scaffolding at oil refineries. ''Life is harsh,'' he told
me recently. ''I've decided not to waste any more time on
the game. I'm just working, trying to stay above water.''
Now 29, Shipp lives in Las Vegas with his fiancee and his
2-year-old son, where he does building maintenance,
plumbing and electrical work for $8.50 an hour. 

Corey Johnson never indulged in fantasies of going pro. A
Division I prospect at Lincoln High, he had other goals: to
use basketball to become a writer. Johnson had a great
slashing, ball-to-the-basket game and an impulse toward
creativity in all its forms: tomahawk dunks, poetry,
rapping, singing and dancing in the school talent show. He
also had a woefully inadequate education, and this kid who
dashed off sonnets in the back of a chaotic study hall
couldn't negotiate his way through the complexities of a
standardized test. When he fell 10 points short of a
combined 700 on his SAT -- the N.C.A.A. eligibility
requirement to play Division I ball -- he packed his bags
for a junior college in Texas. There, demoralized by what
he calls the ''meat market'' atmosphere of the ju-co
leagues, unchallenged in the classroom, Johnson failed
several classes, lost his eligibility and dropped out of
school. 

Over the years, living back in Brooklyn, he has managed to
keep alive the dream he first nurtured in high school: he
has just completed a book manuscript of ''inspirational
poetry and memoir,'' which he is hoping to publish.
Meanwhile, he's gone through dozens of jobs -- working for
his father's plumbing business, doing store decorating,
getting occasional work as a model -- and staying at times
just one step ahead of eviction. ''I've been down and out,
living paycheck to paycheck, in need of help,'' said the
29-year-old Johnson, ''but I do have faith things are going
to work out.'' 

And then there was Darryle Flicking, perhaps the team's
finest all-around player, a shooting guard with a deadly
outside shot and harassing moves on defense. Anxious and
sensitive, so desperate to leave Coney Island that he
refused to read his recruiting mail lest it distract him
from his schoolwork, Flicking used to strengthen his
shooting touch by heaving one-handers while sitting in a
chair and would practice his defensive footwork while
holding a 10-pound brick in each hand. He also tried to
compensate for an entire childhood's worth of bad schooling
by carrying vocabulary flashcards in his pocket wherever he
went, in preparation for the dreaded SAT. ''Maybe I might
make the N.B.A.,'' he told me in 1991, ''but to be honest
with you, I'm using basketball to go to a four-year school.
What I really want is to graduate from college, start me a
nice little family and get me a nice little job as a
registered nurse.'' 

In the spring of his senior year, Flicking signed with
Temple University, but on his final SAT attempt, he, too,
failed to pass, Temple withdrew its scholarship offer, and
Flicking, heartbroken, ended up at a junior college near
Los Angeles. There, for the next two years, he became one
of the most electrifying scorers in the ju-co leagues,
averaging 32 points per game and setting the state
community college scoring record with 1,991 career points.
Once again, dozens of Division I coaches came to recruit
him. This time, suspicious of their promises, Flicking
turned down all their offers and accepted a scholarship at
the University of California at Riverside, a Division II
school where he thought he would study better and be sure
to earn his bachelor's degree. 

Flicking did graduate, earning a degree in sociology in
1996. But many of the emotional problems he struggled with
in adolescence continued to haunt him. While he was still
in college, Flicking married, and within a year he was
arrested on charges of striking his wife. Two years later,
he pleaded guilty in a separate incident to spousal abuse.
After college, he started attending church regularly and
enrolled briefly at the Claremont School of Theology,
before dropping out and beginning to minister to the
homeless in Riverside. Over the next few years, Flicking
lost touch not only with his wife and young son in
California, but also with friends and family back in Coney
Island. Without a home or job, he began traveling the
Southern California coast, collecting aluminum cans for
redemption, helping other homeless men and women and living
in tents and cardboard shelters. In January 1999, in an
incident that many of his friends say they believe was
intentional, he was walking along some train tracks next to
the beach in San Clemente, listening to his Walkman, when
he was struck from behind by an Amtrak passenger train. He
was thrown 75 feet and died instantly. He was 26. 


Of course, it's impossible to control the experiment -- to
factor out individual strengths and weaknesses that have
undoubtedly shaped these young lives. You could argue that
Shipp, Johnson and Flicking were no worse off than their
friends who didn't play ball, that they merely suffered the
disadvantages of poor people the world over -- the terrible
narrowing of possibility so early in life; existences so
fragile that all of life's cruelties, not to mention the
self-destructive impulses that afflict us all, hit with
extraordinary force. 

The question is whether basketball, instead of
strengthening their immunity to misfortune, only weakened
it further. When they were in high school, Shipp, Johnson
and Flicking had the boundless energy that comes from the
expectation of great things. Twelve years later, Johnson
could hardly find words to express the exploitation he'd
experienced in the ju-co leagues, or the dissonance he felt
when, broke and facing eviction, he rode around Coney
Island one day in Stephon Marbury's limousine. Shipp,
meanwhile, was laughing at his naive belief that the
college coaches would have his best interests at heart, and
wincing at the memory of watching his Seton Hall teammates
take their places in the pros while he hobbled around on
busted knees. 

And basketball, instead of widening their horizons, seems
only to have narrowed them further. In the wake of his
accident, Shipp kept returning to the game until -- having
slid from top-ranked Seton Hall to second-rate C.W. Post to
third-rate semi-pro ball in Kansas -- he finally abandoned
the sport altogether. Flicking, too, was full of regret. In
a letter to The Press-Enterprise, a newspaper in Riverside,
published not long before he died, Flicking wrote: ''While
I was still playing basketball, I was miserable. The
pressure of living up to people's expectations of going to
the pros was unbearable. When I stopped playing basketball,
I found myself excluded by others. I was portrayed only as
an athlete, nothing else.'' 

Even Johnson, the most freethinking, iconoclastic kid to
put on a Lincoln uniform in years, rues the way the game
encouraged him to betray his ''real self,'' his ''writing
self,'' as he puts it, because of the social pressures to
play ball. ''Growing up in the projects, all you ever heard
about was the fast money you could make dealing drugs or in
sports. The options were so limited. I used to tell people
I wanted to be a writer. They'd look at me, like, 'You
can't be serious!' Now I think about it all the time,
especially late at night: what would have happened if I'd
gotten as much support and encouragement for my writing as
I got for playing ball? Would it be as much of a struggle
for me today?'' 

Each year, 500,000 or so young men play high-school
basketball in this country. Each year, less than 1 percent
of them get a Division I scholarship. The bitter
disappointments of players like Shipp, Johnson and Flicking
are the norm, but you wouldn't know it from reading the
sports pages or from tuning in to ESPN. There, the myth of
basketball as the Great Way Out continues to thrive,
uncomplicated by the stories of the young men who never
made it. Those players are quickly forgotten, left to show
up at the playgrounds where they curl their fingers around
the chain-link fencing and peer at their younger selves out
there on the asphalt, wondering what happened to them at
such a tender age in their lives. 




Darcy Frey, a frequent contributor to the magazine, is the
author of ''The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball
Dreams,'' which is being reissued this month in an updated
version. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/magazine/15GAME.html?ex=1077717049&ei=1&en=8696607d61ee491f


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