Word: lincolnisms
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...legal and rhetorical overemphasis on race in the past generation (busing, affirmative action, quotas, punitive political correctness) has ended by compounding the oldest American melodrama. What should have been, at most, a temporary tactic (like Lincoln getting Congress to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War) has become a permanent installation of bad principle -- a way of life...
...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; $19.95), spells out its consequences for students at Abraham Lincoln High School in the bleak Coney Island section of Brooklyn...
...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 6-ft. 7-in. power forward; and Corey, only 6 ft. 1 in. but spectacularly quick and a great dunker. Coming up as a freshman 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...
...honor of the neighborhood, Frey makes us feel, to redeem something from the miles of 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...
...players' biggest problem is that Division 1 colleges make at least a pretense of being educational institutions. They require sat scores of 700 for entrance. This isn't high if you've 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...