The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White
The Hustle was my first book and a true labor of love. The seeds were planted in the 1980s. For a few years, I went to an elite private school in Seattle. When I was in the eighth grade, the father of one of my basketball teammates joined with the coach of an African American team from Seattle’s Central Area. We formed a joint team, played in a select league, and went on to win the state championship. The two organizers then worked to get all of my black teammates into various private schools in Seattle.
I saw them at football and basketball games throughout high school, but gradually lost touch. I was shocked when, during the summer after my freshman year, one of my black teammates was on the front page of the newspaper. He’d been murdered and left by the side of the road. The headline read: “What Went Wrong? Tyrell Johnson was Young, Black, Male — and Murdered.” The article detailed his involvement with our team. There was no explanation for his murder.
I never got it out of my mind, and, finally, in 2002, I began the first of many trips back to Seattle to find my former teammates, starting a research and writing process that took eight years. I found that my youthful friends had grown up to include a hedge fund manager, a prosecutor, a drug dealer, a Pentecostal preacher and schoolteacher, a winemaker, a city employee, and a winemaker. More than that, I found in our story a reflection of the long-running racial and economic divides of the United States.
Winner of 2011 Washington State Book Award for Biography/Memoir
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Reviews:
“Mindful of the lessons of Du Bois, Dr. King, and others, Doug Merlino shatters post-race fantasies and bears witness to immigrant and African-American struggles, past and present, and weaves them into a captivating, unsentimental and sometimes tragic story of dreams realized, deferred and/or destroyed.”—Nigel Hatton, University of California, Merced
“The Hustle somewhat resembles the great documentary series Seven Up, which provides now-and-then profiles of kids shaped by the English class system. Only here, both race and class come into play. Most interesting and affecting about the book are Merlino’s conversations with former teammates—resumed, as it were, after a 15-year gap.”—Seattle Weekly
“You know those rare books that hold your rapt attention, the ones that you keep reading until the sun comes up? Doug Merlino’s The Hustle is such a book. Part history text, part sociological study, part memoir, The Hustle is more than just a book about basketball. It’s a book about America. It’s a book about the country’s past and present. It’s a book that you have to read.”—SLAM Magazine
“By reminding readers that questions of race and social mobility are at bottom really questions about what kind of people are granted what sort of life opportunities, The Hustle allows us to see our often recursive and overheated debates over such questions play out on a personal, frequently tragic scale.”—Bookforum
“The book digs deeply, compassionately and intelligently into [race in America].”—TrueHoop, ESPN.com
“A provocative and candid commentary on the history of class, race, and wealth in Seattle and in America.”—Seatown Sports
“A captivating memoir that sees racial and class divides in intimate personal terms, but with no easy pieties or excuses, no righteous indignation or blame.”—Crosscut.com
“Anyone concerned with improving the U.S. educational system must read this book, which brilliantly highlights the problems and possibilities facing schools and students. At the same time, Doug Merlino also tells a broader story of race in America that vividly brings ten boys, and the men they became, to life. The Hustle is a wonderful reading experience.”—Robert L. Bernstein, founder, Human Rights Watch; former president, Random House
“Working on an apparently small canvas, Doug Merlino has managed to look widely and deeply into race and class, idealism and dead-end despair in America. This unusual combination of sensitive memoir and incisive reporting tells us a great deal about the nation we are and the one we dream of. A fascinating and haunting book.”—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost and Bury the Chains
“As a boy, Doug Merlino was part of something special: A championship basketball team that drew players from both sides of Seattle’s racial divide. The Hustle is his elegant, absorbing account of what became of his ex-teammates, and how their lives were inevitably affected by the color of their skin. It is impossible to read this book and not be deeply moved.” —Brendan I. Koerner, author of Now the Hell Will Start
“[Merlino] paints a timeline vividly, in fact and circumstance, to unveil twists and turns, sadness and joy, conscience and tragedy . . . A great read.” —Douglas Morrison, The Novel Road blog
“Merlino skillfully weaves the personal biographies with the biography of a city that relegated blacks to neighborhoods that were segregated and poor, to the margins of economic life, to public schools that were overcrowded and underfunded. The book’s precise focus enables troubling considerations of the role of race and class in America.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A very thoughtful, perceptive, and moving chronicle of the journey from adolescence to manhood.”—Booklist
“Expecting a conventional basketball book? Look elsewhere. Although the central focus is ten members of a biracial boys basketball team, freelance journalist Merlino, in his first book, is writing about race relations and the changing socioeconomic experiences and expectations of five black and five white kids who came together in 1986 to form an Amateur Athletic Union basketball team in Seattle. The book provides remarkable insight into the fortunes and misfortunes of the ten kids who shared a court but never a dream. For Merlino, who was on the team, the titular hustle is the drive to achieve in today’s competitive economy. Readers will witness the omnipresent racial divide in Seattle and the nation, in the workplace, and in a secondary school setting. The chapter on Seattle’s Lakeside School, a private K-12 institution, is compelling reading for today’s parents and educators. The former teammates whom Merlino traced up to the present include a prosecutor, a financial manager, a preacher/teacher, a writer, a street hustler—and a murder victim. This book, both memoir and social analysis, is an essential read as a recent social history and personal story of America.”—Boyd Childress, Auburn University Libraries, Alabama, Library Journal