The Hustle

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