THE CYCLONE

By John Skow

Basketball is called the city game, but that's not quite right. The really slick American city game is played by college and high school coaches, sports agents, shoe manufacturers, sportswriters and TV producers. It involves conning kids--mostly poor black kids--into believing that they can grow up to play professional basketball. The fine documentary film Hoop Dreams shows how the game is played with high school basketballers in Chicago, and now Darcy Frey's thoughtful, sharply observed book, The Last Shot (Houghton Mifflin; 230 pages), spells out its consequences for students at Abraham Lincoln High School in the bleak Coney Island section of Brooklyn, New York.

Lincoln High's Railsplitters--Abe's rustic nickname is grotesque in this concrete waste--are city champs coming into the 1991 season. Their best players are returning as seniors: Russell, a guard who emerges, coldly intent, to take over games; Tchaka, a wonderfully athletic 2-m power forward; and Corey, only 1.85 m but spectacularly quick and a great dunker. Coming up in his first year at the school is a supernatural shooter named Stephon. With this sort of talent, the question isn't whether Lincoln will dominate its league again; the question is whether the three seniors, and Stephon when he's older, will win basketball scholarships to Division 1 colleges, the schools that incubate most of the N.B.A. pros.

Frey gets to know Coney Island not as a place with a few old amusement-park rides but as 50 square blocks of high-rises housing poor families and fractions of families. The athletes are the hope of the community, and they are talented enough to play at any college. Everyone knows this, including the big-time coaches who buddy up, winking and promising. For the honor of the neighborhood, Frey makes us feel, to redeem something from all of the drabness, at least one of these guys must make it big. But the odds aren't good. The omens that say so aren't so much the ubiquitous drug dealers but rather the old Lincoln High legends of four, five and 10 years earlier, gifted fellows who never got near the Celts or Lakers.

The players' biggest problem is that Division 1 colleges make at least a pretense of being educational institutions. They require standard test scores that are not high for students who have been prepped for these tests for years, but in educational terms the kids at Lincoln were written off before first grade. Some members of the team try to study enough to make up the difference. Mostly they aren't successful, so they are sidetracked to junior colleges, not hopelessly off the N.B.A. track, but slowly lose confidence and direction. Like the Lincoln High legends before them, they will someday be back home on the sidelines watching a new crop of kids who can make a basketball do card tricks.