The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White

About this book

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 and black kids from the inner city on a basketball team? The teams season unfolded like a perfectly scripted sports movie: The ragtag group of boys 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. The result is a complex gripping and at times unsettling story. An instant classic of narrative nonfiction 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.