The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams
Darcy Frey spent a year at Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island reporting on Stephon Marbury, Tchaka Shipp, Corey Johnson, and Russell Thomas, four blue chip players trying to escape the projects through basketball. He captures the SAT tutoring sessions, summer camp showcases, dinner table conversations, and hallway politics that made the difference between a scholarship and a dead end. The reporting is intimate without being sentimental, and Frey is honest about the way coaches, recruiters, and shoe companies use these kids. His portrait of Marbury as a fourteen year old ninth grader already carrying a family on his back is unforgettable. The book began as a Harper's article and grew into one of the most respected sports books of its era.
What you might want to know about The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A year with four high school stars at Coney Island's Lincoln High as college recruiters circle.
Simmons has ranked The Last Shot among his favorite basketball books, praising Frey's reporting on Stephon Marbury as the standard for how to write about the recruiting industry and its human cost.
It is sobering, not hopeless. Frey lets you feel the joy of the game while showing what these kids are up against.
The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams was written by Darcy Frey, published in 1994 by Mariner Books.
The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams is 240 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams takes most readers 4 to 5 hours to finish.
The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.