"I tell you, Coney Island is like a disease - of the mind. It makes you lazy. You relax too much. 'Cause all you ever see is other guys relaxing.''
- Corey Johnson, Abraham Lincoln High basketball player

There was a time, of course, when Coney Island inspired among its residents more sanguine remarks - when the neighborhood was home to three world-renowned amusement parks, and its streets were lined with three-story homes, filled to the eaves with Jewish, Irish, and Italian families who proclaimed Coney Island the most welcoming place in America for a newly arrived immigrant - a latter-day Plymouth Rock.

Now, however, all but a few scattered rides have been dismantled; most of the cottages and triple-deckers have succumbed to the bulldozers of urban renewal; and in their place the city has erected a vast tract of housing projects, home to Coney Island's newest arrivals - African-Americans - and packed so densely along a 20-block stretch that a new skyline has risen at land's end by the beach and the boardwalk.

The experiment of public housing, which has worked throughout the country to isolate its impoverished and predominantly black tenants from the hearts of their cities, may have succeeded here with even greater efficiency because of Coney Island's utter remoteness. On this peninsula, at the southern tip of Brooklyn, there are almost no stores, no trees, no police; nothing, in fact, but block after block of gray-cement projects - hulking, prisonlike, and jutting straight into the sea.

Most summer nights now, an amorphous unease settles over Coney Island, as apartments become stifling and the streets fall prey to the gangs and drug dealers. Options are limited: to the south is the stiff gray meringue of the Atlantic; to the north, more than 10 miles away, one can just make out the Statue of Liberty and the glass-and-steel spires of Manhattan's financial district. Officially, Coney Island is part of the endless phantasmagoria that is New York City. But on a night like this, as the dealers set up their drug marts in the streets and alleyways, and the sounds of sirens and gunfire keep pace with the darkening sky, it feels like the end of the world.

Yet even in Coney Island there is a use to which a young man's talent, ambition and desire to stay out of harm's way may be put: there is basketball. Hidden behind the projects are dozens of courts, and every night they fill with restless teen-agers, who remain there for hours until exhaustion or the hoodlums take over.

The high school dropouts and the aging players who never made it to college usually show up for a physical game at a barren strip of courts by the water known as Chop-Chop Land, where bruises and minutes played are accrued at a one-to-one ratio. The younger kids congregate for rowdy games at Run-and-Gun Land. The court there is short and the rims are low, so everyone can dunk, and the only pass ever made is the one inbounding the ball. At Run-and-Gun, players stay on the move for another reason: the court sits just below one of the most dreaded projects, where Coney Island's worst hoodlums sometimes pass a summer evening ``getting hectic,'' as they say - shooting at each other or tossing batteries and beer bottles onto the court from apartment windows fifteen stories above.

The neighborhood's best players - Russell, Corey and their brethren on the Lincoln varsity - practice a disciplined, team-driven style of basketball at the court where I am standing tonight, which has been dubbed the Garden, after the New York Knicks' arena. In a neighborhood ravaged by the commerce of drugs, the Garden offers a cherished sanctuary.

A few years ago community activists petitioned the housing authority to install night lights. And the players themselves resurfaced the court and put up regulation-height rims that snap back after a player dunks. Russell may be the only kid at the Garden who shoots one-handers from a chair or practices his defensive footwork with a 10-pound brick in each hand, but no one here treats the game as child's play. Even the dealers and hoodlums refrain from vandalizing the Garden, because in Coney Island the possibility of transcendence through basketball - in this case, an athletic scholarship to a four-year Division I college - is an article of faith.

Although a pickup game has begun at the basket nearest Corey and me, Russell still commands the other. As the last light drains from the summer sky, he finishes with three-pointers and moves on to baby hooks: 15 with the left hand, 15 with the right; miss one and start all over again. It is not too much to say that basketball has saved Russell.

The Thomases - Russell, his mother and his two younger sisters - live in one of the neighborhood's toughest projects, just a block from this court; and in earlier days Russell often caused his family considerable grief, sometimes leaving home for long stretches to hang out on the streets with his friends.

Every teen-ager does this to some extent, but the custom posed a greater threat in Russell's case since certain of his friends back then liked to wander over to neighboring Brighton Beach in order to hold up pensioners at gunpoint. But having watched so many of his contemporaries fall into gangs or prison or an early grave, Russell has developed new ambitions for himself. A few months ago, he led the team at Lincoln High to the New York City public school championship, which was played at Madison Square Garden and broadcast citywide on cable TV. For most of his teammates, it was a moment to savor; Russell hardly broke stride to celebrate.

Until he wins his college scholarship, sometime in the months ahead, all else in his life seems to dwindle to the vanishing point - everything besides the ball, this basket, and his conviction that, by practicing each day and playing by all the rules, he has set himself on a path that will change his life. ``Man, I hate Coney Island,'' Russell has told me several times. ``Maybe after I finish college I'll come back to get my mom. But that's it. I'm leaving. And I'm never coming back.''

Soon the orange court lights at the Garden come on, displacing the encroaching darkness, and two players on either end of the court climb the fence and sit atop the backboards, hanging nets - a sign that a serious game is about to begin. A few minutes later, a uniformed referee actually shows up to officiate. Suddenly a ferocious grinding noise fills the air. It gets louder and louder, and then a teen-age kid riding a Big Wheel careers onto the court. He darts through the playground crowd, leaving a wake of -------off players, hops off his ride, and watches it crash kamikaze-style into the fence. ``Ah, yes, Stephon Marbury,'' Corey remarks dryly.

``Future of the neighborhood.''

Stephon is barely 14, has yet to begin his freshman year at Lincoln High, but is already considered the most gifted young New York City guard since Kenny Anderson came out of the Lefrak City projects in Queens two years ago on his way to becoming the star of the New Jersey Nets. Last summer, as an eighth-grader, Stephon snuck into a basketball camp for high-schoolers and would have been kicked out, except that he played with such consummate brilliance that his stunt was written up in the sports pages of the New York Daily News.

Fourteen years old, and his college recruiting has already begun. Coaches send him letters (in violation of NCAA rules), requesting the pleasure of his company during his years of college eligibility; street agents, paid under the table by colleges to bring top players to their programs, are cultivating Stephon; and practically every high school coach in the city heaps him with free gear - sneakers, caps, bags - in an attempt to lure him to his school.

At first glance, Stephon doesn't look like the future of anything. He's diminutive, barely five feet nine, with the rounded forehead and delicate features of an infant.

He sports a stylish razor cut and a newly pierced ear, and the huge gold stud seems to tilt his tiny bald head off its axis. Caught somewhere between puberty and superstardom, he walks around with his sneakers untied, the ends of his belt drooping suggestively from his pants, and half a Snickers bar extruding from his mouth. But what on earth is this? Dribbling by himself in a corner of the court, Stephon has raised a ball with one hand directly over his head and threaded it through his legs. From back to front. Without interrupting his dribble. Now he's doing it with two balls! ...