The Last Shot

One of Sports Illustrated’s “Top 100 Sports Books of All Time”

The 2023 “BEST BASKETBALL GIFT” from The Strategist

A classic of narrative journalism about four inner-city high school basketball prospects trying to make it to the pros, with a new introduction by the author, now in audio for the first time.

The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams is the “revelatory” (New York Times), “deeply empathetic” (New Yorker) true story of four teenagers attempting to escape the cycles of poverty, crime, and despair in 1990s Brooklyn by getting recruited to play college basketball. With poignant intimacy, Darcy Frey chronicles the aspirations of these young men, including the future superstar Stephon Marbury, who are among the most promising players in Coney Island. What they have going for them is athletic talent, grace, and years of dedication. But working against them are woefully inadequate schooling, family circumstances that are often desperate, and the slick, brutal world of college athletic recruitment. Incisively and compassionately written, this is Frey’s award-winning masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, a startling exposé of inner-city life and the big business of college sports. Narrated by JD Jackson (The Nickel Boys).

“[A] revelatory description of how the basketball myth plays out in the public housing projects of New York’s Coney Island, an isolated and impoverished spit of land at the seaward end of Brooklyn…. Vividly describes how the zealous pursuit of hoop glory serves as an inner-city version of the American Dream… [C]ompellingly written, with elegance, economy and just the right amount of outrage.” —Brent Staples, New York Times

“Elegiac.” — Sports Illustrated