January 10, 1992
BASKETBALL; Another Marbury Hits Nothing but Net
By HARVEY ARATON
Oh, how Dexter Wooten wanted to rip the cast from his right arm, slip quickly into a red Lafayette uniform and take a shot at the baby-faced kid with the hop in his feet and the rhythm to his dribble. If only he could magically heal for this one afternoon, for this trip to the lair of the best team in New York City.
"Let me at him," Wooten said, figdeting on the bench, his eyes fixed on Lincoln's 14-year-old Stephon Marbury, already being hailed as the next Kenny Anderson. "I could stop him."
The cast, holding together an arm with a bullet in it, would stay on. Wooten, Lafayette's missing-piece point guard, would get no shot at Marbury. Marbury, taking charge of a Lincoln team loaded with major college-bound seniors, would play all 32 minutes, out-steady Wooten's replacements and make the shots to deny Lafayette what would have been the upset of the New York high school season. Freshman Thrives on Pressure
"I like the pressure," the freshman would say after scoring 8 of his team's last 10 points in a 58-55 thriller that continued a season of heartbreak for Lafayette and left its coach, Ira Levine, mumbling to himself about eight missed free throws and a third maddening Brooklyn Division I regular-season defeat.
"We don't believe in ourselves," Levine decided, while, downstairs in the locker room, frustrated senior guard Phil Washington talked of quitting the team. And center Antonio Carrasquillo lamented the shot he missed that would have put Lafayette ahead with 40 seconds to go. Hot-shooting forward Tony Rexha angrily asked himself how he could take a 2-point shot when his team was losing by 3 as the game was ending.
Levine finally decided he would dwell on the positive, his team again proving that it is the best opponent in Brooklyn Division I. "Did you see that jump shot the Marbury kid made off the dribble?" Levine said, shaking his head in awe.
He had to admit that Bobby Hartstein had another great one.
When all the bids had finally been made, when coaches from Catholic schools had finished promising full scholarships and free rides to school, Marbury could not tell himself a lie. Abraham Lincoln High on the Belt Parkway side of Ocean Parkway was the school to which he was destined to go. And Hartstein, the Lincoln coach, had won a high school version of a few-holds-barred recruiting war by wooing the big star from Intermediate School 238. Sought by Catholic Schools
"A couple of the Catholic schools really wanted me, but I think they knew all along that I'd be coming here," Marbury said. "It seems like yesterday that I was a little kid coming to the games, wishing I could play for Lincoln. This is home."
Marbury's three older brothers -- Eric, Don and Norman -- all starred for Lincoln, as had numerous cousins over the last decade. Hartstein estimated the number of dribbling Marburys from Coney Island to have played for him at Lincoln to be "something like 14," with this season's team including five of the Coney Island cousins.
Under Hartstein, a family tradition was begun and a Brooklyn Division I power was born. Defending city champion, Final Four finisher since 1985, Lincoln has become the model city basketball school. "Schools say they have basketball teams, we like to say we have a basketball program," said Hartstein, a 41-year-old Lincoln dean of special education.
"Team, program, whatever," said Levine. "Bobby does a real nice job, but it hasn't hurt to have gotten all those Marburys."
One day, Levine hopes, Lafayette might start a pipeline from some basketball-rich neighborhood. Maybe he would one day coach legitimate Division I college talent like Lincoln's 6-foot-7-inch senior Tchaka Shipp, who will play next year for Seton Hall.
Had Lafayette's season not been marred by unpredictability and tragedy, Levine believes he would be contending for his first city title. But one of the Frenchies' players, Curtis Cumberbatch, died last summer in a gun accident. Wooten was shot three times by another juvenile in a street fight in November. Within a week of the Wooten shooting, Levine's best returning big man, 6-5 Timothy Weston, moved upstate.
"They say it runs in cycles," said Levine, whose team is 3-3 in Division I. "I'm still waiting for mine."
The coming of Marbury IV means Lincoln won't be suffering for at least three more years. At 5-10, 140 pounds, he is the first freshman to start for Hartstein. It is not because the coach has no one else.
"Along with Kenny Anderson and Pearl Washington, he's one of the best freshman point guards I've ever seen," said Tom Konchalski, a respected college scout.
Brother Eric played at the University of Georgia, brother Don at Texas A&M and brother Norman is at San Jacinto, a junior college in Texas. But where Stephon was going to be this year was a tossup, according to Hartstein, who said he "heard things" all summer, as Catholic schools attempted to lure Marbury with the perks of private school education. Competing for Coney Islanders
At least one other coach in Brooklyn Division I said there would have been great irony had that occurred. This coach contended that Lincoln and Grady High, a vocational high school and Lincoln's archrival a few bounce passes across Ocean Parkway, have been competing for Coney Island's best players -- in effect recruiting -- for years.
"You can't be successful like those two schools have been without doing it," the coach said. "It's not like it's against the rules, but some of us just can't bring ourselves to keep going into junior high schools to talk to 13- and 14-year-olds."
Grady, which won the city title two years ago and twice beat Lincoln during the 1990-91 regular season before losing in the playoffs, is coached by Jack Ringel, who was one of two assistants to Mark Reiner at Lincoln in the early 1980's. Reiner's other assistant was Hartstein.
"Bobby and I go back," Ringel said, adding that, as of now, they do not speak. "It's personal, nothing to do with basketball." Another coach said the feud between Hartstein and Ringel was over Derrick Brown, who transferred last September to Grady from Prospect Heights, and was cleared by the P.S.A.L., to the dismay of the division's coaches, to play this season. A Couple of Promises
With the self-assurance of a Big East coach, Hartstein said, "I only promised Stephon that he wear No. 3, which his brothers wore, and I would be here with him for the entire time.
"If I told you that we don't recruit, people would tell you that I'm crazy. But the truth is that we get a lot of kids who want to come here because it's a good school. It's what city ball used to be like. I'm no hero. There are just a lot of people around the program who make it work."
Such a person is 66-year-old Tony Grittani, who lies in a coma, across the street from Lincoln in Coney Island Hospital, where he has been since he collapsed during the national anthem of a Lincoln football game on Nov. 16.
Grittani, known as Mr. Lincoln, graduated from the school in 1942. He has been a fixture at Lincoln sporting events, the student-athletes' best friend.
"Mr. Grittani has been like a second father to me," said Stephon Marbury said, .
That was one perk, he said, no school could match.
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you grow some damn nice plants...and have a bewildering variety growing to boot!!
