Play Their Hearts Out Read online

  Copyright © 2010 by George Dohrmann

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dohrmann, George.

  Play their hearts out : a coach, his star recruit, and the youth basketball machine / George Dohrmann.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52316-7

  1. Basketball—United States. 2. Youth league basketball—United States. 3. Keller, Joe. 4. Basketball coaches—United States. 5. Walker, Demetrius. 6. Basketball players—United States. 7. Basketball players—Recruiting— United States. I. Title.

  GV885.D64 2010

  796.3230973—dc22 2010015470

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  v3.1

  For my parents,

  who encouraged and enabled grand pursuits

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: Hunting for Kids

  Part One: A Prized Long-Term Investment Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Two: Starting to Believe Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Three: Assigned a Number Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part Four: The Lucky Ones Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue: Like a Legend

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is the result of more than eight years of reporting, and I witnessed most of the events and conversations depicted. I tried to avoid using material for which I was not present, though in some instances it was central to the narrative and had to be re-created through interviews with those involved. Relying on others to recall past events is an imperfect method of fact-gathering. I was left to trust that they would provide an honest version of what occurred. In cases where differing accounts were offered, I noted that in the text or went with the version relayed by the majority of those present.

  PROLOGUE

  Hunting for Kids

  Joe Keller

  On a clear and warm Sunday afternoon in September of 1996, a basketball game was played in the gym at Riverside Community College in Southern California. No one from the school knew the game was scheduled, and the organizer, twenty-six-year-old Joe Keller, thought he would have to break into the gym and open the doors from the inside. At the last minute, a friend procured a key, but Keller was unable to turn on the scoreboard or the clock, so the score and the time were kept manually. There was no advance advertising of the game, no newspaper articles or Internet postings, yet fans filed in as soon as the doors opened. Estimates vary as to how many people filled the worn bleachers, but the crowd numbered at least 300 and might have been as large as 500, a considerable audience for a game in which none of the participants was older than fourteen.

  Of the two teams playing that day, the Southern California All-Stars (SCA) were by far the most well known. Their coach, Pat Barrett, cut a wide swath in the world of grassroots basketball. Nike paid him more than $100,000 annually to assure that his players were aligned with that brand and gave him another $50,000 in shoes and other gear. His skills as a basketball instructor were limited, but his ability to identify and acquaint himself with the best young basketball players in Southern California was legendary. Given the considerable talent flowing annually from that part of the nation, this made him one of the most powerful figures in basketball, courted by college coaches, NBA scouts, and sports agents. A year earlier, after UCLA won the national title with a team that included several SCA alumni, including Final Four most valuable player Ed O’Bannon, the team’s coach, Jim Harrick, gave Barrett a championship ring. A prominent UCLA booster also donated $200,000 to a nonprofit organization—Values for a Better America—that Barrett controlled.

  Barrett had coached since the mid-1980s and operated teams in various age groups, but the team of seventh- and eighth-graders competing in Riverside that Sunday may have been the most impressive he’d ever assembled. There was Jamal Sampson (who would go on to play for Cal Berkeley and then the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks), Josh Childress (Stanford and then the Atlanta Hawks), Cedric Bozeman (UCLA and the Hawks), and Jamaal Williams (the Washington Huskies). The point guard, Keilon Fortune, was considered the best of the lot, even though he was a year younger than the other players. Two months earlier, SCA had claimed the 13-and-Under Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) national title, fueling talk that Barrett’s assemblage of young stars was among the best ever.

  SCA’s opponent that day, the Inland Stars, was considerably less distinguished, and its coach, Joe Keller, paled in comparison to the mighty Barrett. A full-time welder and a part-time coach, Keller was considerably better at the former than the latter. When he started coaching a few years earlier, he couldn’t even demonstrate a proper defensive stance. In his first season, his team played an SCA squad and lost by almost 100. While Barrett was flush with Nike money, financial stability constantly eluded Keller. He had only recently moved out of an apartment he shared with his mother in Riverside and often asked people he’d just met: “Do you know any rich people who could sponsor my team?”

  Keller’s squad in Riverside that Sunday was not without talent. Forwards Lance and Erik Soderberg—the sons of former Kentucky player Mark Soderberg—were capable players and would go on to earn college scholarships, as would the Inland Stars’ best guard, Josh Dunaj. But they were no match for SCA’s kids, and the swagger of Barrett’s players was unmistakable as they entered the gym in matching Nike sweat suits. Keller’s players—dressed in yellow uniforms he had borrowed from another coach—were already warming up when Barrett and the SCA kids arrived. They stopped and watched as fans streamed down from the bleachers to greet the recently crowned national champions.

  Basketball games are often framed as battles between coaches, as if the players on the floor are chess pieces easily manipulated by the men on the sidelines. At the youth level, this is an especially foolish line of thought. Kids make mistakes. They act unpredictably. Coaching them requires an understanding of their fallibility. The biggest influence Keller and Barrett would have on the outcome of the game would come long before it began, in the procurement of players: The coach who assembled the most talent would likely win. Barrett had few peers in that regard, least of all Keller. If a bookie had set odds on the game, SCA would have been favored by at least 20, and it wouldn’t have surprised anyone if Barrett’s collection of future NBA players whipped the Inland Stars by more than 50.

  But Keller would not have scheduled the game had he not believed in his team’s chances. In the days before, he boldly predicted victory and became convinced that the game would be his defining moment as a coach. The reason for his optimism became apparent to the SCA players as they shed their sweat suits
and began their pregame routine. Glancing toward the Inland Stars’ end of the court, they saw the players that had long been part of Keller’s team, but amid them was a boy they had never seen before. He was the tallest player in the gym, nearly six foot five, with impossibly long arms and a nimbleness unseen in a player so tall for his age. They watched as he executed a layup, jumping so high that it was clear he could dunk every time if he wanted. In a bit of showmanship scarcely seen from a player so young, he repeatedly surged upward toward the basket and, just as everyone anticipated him slamming the ball home, merely dropped it through the rim. He was letting the crowd and the SCA players—most of whom could not yet palm a basketball—know that dunking came so easily to him that he’d grown bored with it.

  Questions about this boy spread quickly around the gym. Who was he? Where had he come from? Was he really the same age as the other players? Answers emerged slowly, passed from one person to the next in hushed tones. Keller had unearthed him after hearing rumors of a prodigal talent on the blacktops of San Bernardino. He had never played for an AAU team before. And, yes, he was only thirteen years old. His mere presence infused the game with an unexpected gravity. A boy of that size and obvious ability gave Keller’s squad a puncher’s chance. For the first time anyone could remember, a local team posed a threat to Pat Barrett and his Southern California All-Stars.

  When the tall boy lined up against Sampson for the opening tip, the one advantage the Inland Stars had was obvious. Keller’s center was several inches taller than Sampson, and his arms seemed twice as long. When the official tossed the ball skyward, the boy reached it at such a high point that Sampson appeared hopeless. He then sprinted upcourt, took a pass in the lane—catching the ball high above the reach of any of the SCA players—and flipped in a layup over Childress. On the sideline, Keller grinned and said to himself: “The rout is on.”

  No videotape of the game exists. The only stat sheet was lost. Keller does not remember the final score or how many points the tall boy scored, but he recalls never before seeing a more dominant performance by a player. The young boy swatted shots back at SCA guards brave enough to drive to the basket. He seemingly grabbed every rebound and scored at will. After Keller’s team raced to an early 10-point lead, one of Barrett’s assistant coaches was ejected for yelling at the officials. When the lead increased to 20 points with eight minutes left, Barrett was ejected too. Keller told the officials: “Let him stay. I don’t want him to use that as an excuse for why he lost.” Near the end of the game, Barrett sat down on the bench and put his hands on his knees, no longer wanting to watch the action on the floor. When Keller saw this, a feeling of immense satisfaction washed over him. With one game he’d gone from a coaching nobody to the guy who beat Pat Barrett.

  At the final whistle, Keller ran onto the court and celebrated with his players; a few poured tiny cups of Gatorade on his head. The two teams never shook hands, and the SCA players quickly left the gym. Barrett was still shouting at the officials as he followed his players out the door. Keller had thought Barrett would be gracious in defeat, but it didn’t dampen Keller’s mood. “We beat the best team in the country,” he told anyone willing to listen. Later that night, he told his wife that he thought his life was about to change.

  A few days passed before Keller’s premonition came true. Barrett called him and made a surprising proposition: He wanted to merge the best of the Inland Stars with SCA. The team would be called the Southern California All-Stars and be funded by Barrett, but Keller would be its coach. To Keller, this seemed like a sweet deal and he quickly agreed. He was short on money and coaching experience, and Barrett had both. He envisioned Barrett as something like a mentor, ushering him into a coaching career. He hoped Barrett would call his contacts at Nike and tell them about Keller and his talented new star. But Keller was naïve about the culture of grassroots basketball and how Barrett had built his youth-basketball empire. His life was indeed about to change, but not how he imagined.

  I met Keller four years later, a few weeks before Christmas 2000. We met at an unremarkable brewpub just off Interstate 15 in San Bernardino. I was seated at a wide oval table watching a Los Angeles Lakers game on one of the restaurant’s dozen televisions when Keller walked in. He wore jeans and a loose sweatshirt, and when I stood up to shake his hand, he ignored me and sat across the table and to my left, farther away than I expected. The mutual acquaintance who arranged our meeting had mentioned that Keller was afraid to talk with a writer from Sports Illustrated, and in that moment I felt that his paranoia had been undersold.

  I was in Southern California, reporting on a story about Tyson Chandler, then an eighteen-year-old senior at Compton Dominguez High School, as he prepared to jump straight from high school to the National Basketball Association. The story was intended to expose the myriad of people (coaches, agents, relatives, friends) trying to align themselves with Chandler, which included Barrett. He had allegedly bought Chandler a Cadillac Escalade, moved Chandler’s family from San Bernardino to a house closer to Barrett’s in Orange County, and taken him on shopping sprees for clothes and shoes that often exceeded $5,000. If Chandler met a girl at an out-of-state tournament that he wanted to see again, Barrett bought her an airline ticket to California.

  I had been told that Keller was Chandler’s first AAU coach, until Barrett lured him to SCA and pushed Keller out of the picture. I was hoping Keller would give me some dirt on Barrett, but when I asked about him, he said only: “He is a powerful man in basketball.” When I inquired why Barrett, not Keller, was coaching Chandler now, Keller got a pained look on his face. “Talking about that will only come back to hurt me.” A frustrating argument followed. I suggested that if Keller hated Barrett, as I suspected, exposing his misdeeds in Sports Illustrated might put him out of business. Keller insisted that nothing I could write would ever push Barrett out of youth basketball and so tattling on him would bring Keller nothing but harm.

  Keller was thirty when we met. He was two inches taller than me, about five foot ten, with wide shoulders but pale, skinny legs. He looked as if he’d been into weight lifting at one time but had stopped. A sparse goatee couldn’t hide the acne scars on his face or detract from his two most striking features—deep-set blue eyes and a flattop haircut that seemed suited for a younger man. A narrow scar on the left side of his forehead ran into his hairline, making it seem as if his barber had tried to manufacture a part.

  I didn’t think much of Keller. For all his paranoia, he could be dismissive and arrogant. He asked when I thought Chandler would be selected in the NBA draft that June. I said somewhere in the top 15. “That’s ridiculous. You don’t know anything,” Keller snapped. “He’s top five, maybe top two.” I spent an hour alternating between assuaging Keller’s mistrust and enduring his insults before he consented to tell me the story of how he found Chandler.

  During an Inland Stars practice in the spring of 1996, Keller was criticizing his players for not being tough enough, when one kid said almost matter-of-factly, “Then why don’t you get that tall kid from San Bernardino?” Keller questioned the player, who knew nothing about the mysterious kid, not even his name. Keller called schools in the area, finally finding a teacher at Arrowview Middle School who thought he knew the boy and came up with a possible first name, Tyson, but nothing else.

  Keller spent weeks cruising the roughest neighborhoods of San Bernardino, searching for the boy. He finally got a tip that led him to a low-slung house in one of the poorest areas of the city. During the 1990s, many African American families had fled inner-city homes in Los Angeles for nicer neighborhoods in the Inland Empire, the common name for the sunbaked cities of Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. But as Keller walked up a dirt driveway to the front door, he thought this family would have been better off staying in the ghetto. The house was originally painted white but was now gray. A falling chain-link fence surrounded a dirt-and-grass yard, which framed a porch of broken concrete. The neighboring houses were in the same shape
or worse. Keller was a little afraid of what awaited him behind the front door, but then a lanky kid standing about six foot five answered. At first, Keller thought this was the older brother of the kid he had heard about, but the boy assured him that he was indeed just finishing the seventh grade.

  “My God,” Keller said, and for a moment he couldn’t speak. He finally uttered, “Can you dribble or run or anything?”

  “Yeah, I can dunk,” the boy said.

  Keller’s mood softened as he told me the story and described how unbeatable his team became with Chandler. “And I can coach too,” Keller added, a statement that seemed to be a criticism of other youth coaches. It felt like an opening to ask again about Barrett.

  “So then why would Tyson want to go play for Pat Barrett?”

  Keller frowned and shook his head, as if to say he wouldn’t be tricked that easily. A short time later he said he had to get home to his wife and he left.

  When the article, titled “School for Scandal,” was published a few weeks later, I remember being greatly disappointed that it didn’t cause more of a stir. There were rumors that Nike cut ties with Barrett because of it, but then I heard he signed a contract with Adidas. I had always known the world of youth basketball was an unregulated subculture where men like Barrett could get away with almost anything in their pursuit of talented kids, but I assumed that if a coach’s dirty dealings were unveiled, the shoe companies and players would distance themselves.

  Keller’s ultimate contribution to the story was an insipid twelve-word quote, but I still called him after the article was published. I wanted to get his reaction to the unsavory moves by Barrett that I described, including selling Chandler to various agents. “That stuff from me was the best part of the story,” Keller said when I reached him at his home. He wasn’t joking. As for Barrett, he said, “Pat called me and said that since that article, he’s had more parents calling him, wanting their kids to play for him, than ever before. That article helped Pat a lot.”