The experiment was dreamed up by two fathers, one white,
one black. What
would happen, they wondered, if they mixed
white players from an elite Seattle
private school - famous
for alums such as Microsoft's Bill Gates - and black
kids from
the inner city on a basketball team? Wouldn't exposure to privilege
give the black kids a chance at better opportunities? Wouldn't
it open the eyes
of the white kids to a different side of
life?
The 1986 season would be the laboratory. Out in
the real world, hip-hop was
going mainstream, Larry Bird and
Magic Johnson ruled the NBA, and Ronald Reagan
was president.
In Seattle, the team's season unfolded like a perfectly
scripted sports movie: the ragtag group of boys became friends
and gelled
together to win the league championship. The
experiment was deemed a
success.
But was it? How
did crossing lines of class, race, and wealth affect the
lives
of these ten boys? Two decades later, Doug Merlino, who played on
the
team, returned to find his teammates. His search ranges
from a prison cell to a
hedge fund office, street corners to a
shack in rural Oregon, a Pentecostal
church to the records of
a brutal murder. The result is a complex, gripping,
and, at
times, unsettling story.
An instant classic in the vein of
Michael
Apted's
Up series,
The Hustle tells the
stories of ten teammates
set before a background of sweeping
social and economic change, capturing the
ways race, money, and
opportunity shape our lives. A tale both personal and
public,
The Hustle is the story a disparate group of men finding - or
not
finding - a place in America
Part history text, part sociological study, part memoir, The Hustle
is more than just a book about basketball. ... It's a book that you have
to read.
, and many other publciations. He previously lived in Budapest after
leaving Seattle. He now lives in New York with his wife.
