Play Their Hearts Out Read online

  Demetrius had first dunked a month earlier—Keller had told me about it with the excitement of a father announcing a birth—but the novelty had not worn off. At the end of most practices he tried a few times, with teammates often throwing him alley-oops. He had yet to dunk in a game and converted less than a third of his attempts overall, so there remained some suspense when he lined up. Getting high enough was not the problem—Demetrius had been able to grab the rim since he was nine. The issue was his hands, which were still too small for him to palm the ball consistently. If he missed, it was usually because the ball came loose before he could slam it home.

  After much searching, Demetrius settled on a grip and took a long breath. He held the air in and swished it between his cheeks and, after an exaggerated exhale, he sprang forward. He didn’t dribble the ball, as he didn’t want to jeopardize his grip; he held it in front of him with both hands. He looked odd, like a running back given a basketball rather than a football, but his first four steps were long and graceful. As he neared the basket, he took two smaller steps and then burst upward. As he swung his right arm down, the ball touched the front of the rim just a bit. He was still able to slam it through, but that graze threw him off balance and he landed awkwardly, on one foot and leaning backward, and he had to swing his arms to avoid falling. It made the dunk all the more impressive; he was like a gymnast who’d landed a difficult dismount.

  Most of the Seattle Rotary Select players had stopped to watch him. A few of them slapped hands, as if to congratulate one another for being present when an eleven-year-old dunked. Others covered their mouths or exchanged looks of amazement. In a few minutes their game against the Inland Stars would begin, and they needed to win to advance to the next round of the Nike Invitational, but in that moment they were just giddy fans, awed by Demetrius’s gifts like everyone else.

  The only Seattle player who didn’t stop to admire Demetrius’s dunk was the team’s point guard, Peyton Siva. It was often easy to identify the featured player on a team because of the special status he was awarded during warm-ups: He led the team as it circled the court and directed teammates on what drills to run at a given time. At about five foot two, Siva did not possess great height, but he wore his confidence. He walked with his chest puffed out, a little strut in his step. As Demetrius lined up for his dunk, Siva tooled around the 3-point line, firing up shots, making more than he missed. His teammates rebounded for him, promptly passing the ball back as if that were their only purpose. When they stopped rebounding to watch Demetrius, he yelled, “Hey!” snapping them back on task.

  Siva wore his hair in what Demetrius termed “a Samoan Afro.” It was wild and tall, what a different generation of kids might have likened to Buckwheat’s hair, and was accentuated by a white headband Siva somehow stretched around his globe of hair nearly a foot in diameter. Before the game, his hair was widely discussed by the Inland Stars. They debated how he long he’d grown it and what product he used to style it. “Oh, but you know he can play,” Demetrius counseled. “You don’t wear your hair like that unless you can ball.”

  Siva could indeed ball. He was the best player on what was widely thought of as the top team in the Pacific Northwest. Darryl Hennings, Seattle’s coach, was a veteran of the grassroots scene, having ushered several kids on to college. Like Keller, he had put his team together in the past eighteen months and planned to keep it together through high school.

  Over the previous months, the Inland Stars had routed an assortment of foes all over Southern California. A common thread in all the games was the disparity in talent. They used their superior height and athletic ability to race to a big early lead, and games seemed over before they began. Seattle Rotary Select was the first challenger that at least looked up to the task. Siva’s skill and confidence, combined with the height of his teammates, suggested the possibility of a real battle.

  It was a possibility that existed for all of eleven minutes.

  Early in the second quarter, with the Inland Stars already ahead 31–8, Siva took the inbounds pass after a Demetrius layup and turned upcourt. He took a few steps forward and Keller screamed, “FIRE! FIRE!” and the top two guards in a 2-1-2 press Keller termed “Fist” jumped toward Siva, at which point Keller shouted, “DOUBLE! DOUBLE!” Siva cut to his left but lost his footing and fell down, and the ball bounced away. One of Keller’s guards picked it up and slung a pass to Demetrius for yet another uncontested layup. It was Siva’s third consecutive turnover, and as the Inland Stars reset in Fist, he stayed on the ground near the 3-point line. He wasn’t hurt, but he sat with his head down, wiping his eyes.

  Hennings didn’t wait for the referee to halt the game before walking onto the court. He squatted down next to Siva and put his hand on his shoulder and whispered to him. It took time, but he talked the young boy to his feet, and Siva walked reluctantly toward the end line to receive the ball and try once again to crack Fist. There were still tears rolling down his cheeks as he turned with the ball to shouts of “FIRE! FIRE!” and then “DOUBLE! DOUBLE!”

  “We’ve never lost like that,” Hennings said after the game, a 96–29 drubbing. He was more shocked than angry. “My boys dominate every team where we live. I guess this will have to be a lesson for them on how they need to keep working.” He paused, as if deciding whether to say what was really on his mind. “Look, they’re studs. That coach has put together some real talent. It really helps when you got that number twenty-three. I’ve never seen a kid so big and agile at that age.” He paused again, looking toward where Demetrius stood with his teammates. “If that is his real age.”

  If that is his real age. It was the qualifier that followed much of the praise of Demetrius and the team. People couldn’t believe he was that good and that young. Parents in the stands, coaches on the sidelines, even kids on the court, constantly questioned whether Demetrius was three or four years older than his stated age, and this led to a consensus that trailed the team wherever they went. Fans of opposing teams thought, Were the Inland Stars talented? Yes. Did they play hard? No doubt. Were they cheaters? Probably.

  On the second day of the tournament, parents of the Arizona Wildcats questioned Demetrius’s age from the opening whistle. Then, with the Inland Stars up 83–26 in the fourth quarter, Arizona’s coach turned to Kisha, who sat just above the scorer’s table, and shouted, “No way I would disgrace my son and put him on that team when he is fifteen years old!”

  “He is not fifteen!” Kisha yelled, and she stood up as if she were going to charge him.

  “Kisha, stay there!” Keller ordered.

  She sat down but chanted the date of Demetrius’s birthday over and over.

  Later in the day, during a rout of a Portland team, Demetrius tried to dunk in the third quarter with the Inland Stars ahead by 60.

  “He’s showboating,” a woman yelled from the Portland section.

  Kisha stood up, turned toward the woman, and yelled, “He’s not showboating. But you know what? Now he’s gonna really showboat.” She turned back to the court. “D, showboat on them. Dunk it on them.” She danced and paraphrased a line from the Mystikal song “Shake Ya Ass.” “Show them what you’re working with, son. Show them what you’re working with.”

  Kisha’s anger over those criticisms lingered after games ended, but they affected Keller the most. He took every comment as a personal affront. If Demetrius was too old, his coach was a cheater.

  When told what Hennings said, Keller scanned the gym looking for him, as if he wanted to run up and punch him in the face. “He doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about. He gets his ass whipped so he says I cheat. If he thinks D’s too old, well, that’s just stupid.”

  It was not stupid, however, and Keller’s history with Demetrius bore that out. He would become the truest believer in Demetrius’s potential, but when he’d first spotted him he thought, as many did, that he was too good to be true.

  It was a summer afternoon in 2000, and Demetrius was playing in a rec-league gam
e at the Carl Johnson Center Gymnasium in Rialto. The gym was more of a multipurpose area than a basketball facility; a net was draped down between two courts to keep errant balls from interfering with play. Kisha sat on the metal stands on the wall farthest from the door, watching Demetrius dominate the other nine-year-olds as usual, when a black man in his thirties walked into the gym.

  Ladell Hill had coached at the AAU and high school levels and was famously known as the coach who let his wife sit on the bench during games. She even shouted out plays. Behind his back, Keller and other coaches would call him the most whipped coach in Southern California, but he was an agreeable sort and a good judge of talent and had recently agreed to help Keller evaluate kids for his new team. Earlier, Hill and Keller tried out a boy on one of the courts outside the Johnson Center. As Keller talked with the player’s father, Hill wandered inside to see if there were any promising prospects in the rec games.

  As he entered the center, Hill made a beeline for the bleachers where Kisha sat but stopped midway as he caught site of a player on the court, on a team wearing tattered gray jerseys. The boy was about five foot eight but not thick like some young boys that height. He was long and lean, and there was something in the way he moved, without a hint of clumsiness, that struck Hill as odd. That boy’s gotta be too old for this league, Hill thought, and he walked farther down the baseline to get a closer look.

  Arriving at the metal bleachers, Hill watched as the boy leaped high for a rebound and then, without any hesitation, sprinted upcourt with the ball, weaving around defenders. If this boy was indeed only nine or ten—and Hill had his doubts—never before had Hill seen a kid so young move with such speed.

  Keller entered the gym fifteen minutes later, by which point Hill had identified Kisha as the tall player’s mother, confirmed that he was indeed only nine, and begun telling her about the team his friend was forming. As Keller approached the bleachers, he guessed the player Hill was eyeing and before sitting down said loudly, “No way that kid is nine.”

  Kisha was used to people doubting her son’s age, but there was something about the way Keller said it, with such conviction, that bothered her.

  “Yes, he is nine!” she shouted, and she stood up. From her perch three rows up in the stands, she towered over Keller. “I’m his mother. He’s nine. Nine years old.”

  Kisha had gotten in the habit of carrying her son’s birth certificate to games but didn’t have it that day. She wanted to thrust it in the man’s face, show him where it said her son, Demetrius Walker, Jr., was born on September 6, 1990.

  “I’m sorry,” Keller said sheepishly, and he looked to Hill for help.

  Hill talked Kisha into sitting down and then asked where she lived and where Demetrius went to school, anything to get her mind off Keller’s remark. This gave Keller time to size her up. She was tall, just over six feet, with long, muscular arms and an athlete’s build. She wouldn’t have looked out of place lining up to run the 100 meters in the Olympics. Her face resembled that of the boy on the court. She had well-defined cheekbones and an angular chin. She was young, no more than thirty, and wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

  During a break in the game, Demetrius walked over to where his mother sat. His calf muscles weren’t clearly defined—that was what Keller noticed first. He took this to mean that Demetrius’s exceptional speed and leaping ability were athletic gifts, not by-products of reaching puberty early. Demetrius’s potential was not as easy to project as Tyson Chandler’s, whose tremendous height was a giveaway, but Keller, like Hill, felt the boy possessed extraordinary athleticism.

  While watching Demetrius play the second half, Hill and Keller took turns sweet-talking Kisha. They gushed about Demetrius’s ability and talked about the team Keller hoped to build. Kisha was unmoved. Her first impression of the man she would later see as a surrogate father for Demetrius, as the shepherd of his dreams, was that he was trying to con her.

  At the end of the game, Keller offered Kisha one of the business cards he’d recently had printed. On the drive home she showed the card to Demetrius, who said instantly, “I want to play for him.”

  “D, we gotta check him out first. I’m not going to let you play for someone I know nothing about.”

  The following week she called a woman whose son had played grassroots basketball years earlier. The woman told Kisha that she had heard of Keller. “I am not sure, but I think he may be the guy who coached Tyson Chandler.”

  When Kisha informed Keller that Demetrius could play for his team, she added, “I can’t take him to practice or pick him up. I can’t drive him to games or take him home from games. I’ve got to work.” Given Keller’s goals, this was music to his ears. Anything he wanted to do to build a relationship with his precocious star was available to him. After less than two months, Demetrius saw more of Keller each day than of his mother or any of his classmates.

  Demetrius was oddly comfortable around adults. Keller called him an “old soul,” as if he’d been born that way, but his demeanor was polished by years of feigning maturity out of necessity. It began with the older boys who lived near his grandmother’s house in South Central Los Angeles. As a four-year-old hanging around teenagers, kids who cut school and slung drugs, he learned to stay out of the way, keep his mouth shut, and laugh at the right times. It continued when they moved to Fontana. When Demetrius was six, Kisha did what many parents have done in the hopes of a better life for their children: drove away from Los Angeles until she found a neighborhood she could afford. Kisha worked two jobs—at a repossession company during the day and proofing checks for a credit union at night—to afford the single-story house in a middle-class neighborhood. There was no money for babysitters, so from the age of six Demetrius cooked his own dinner, put himself to bed, and got up and off to school on his own. He dreaded coming home to the empty house and would walk from room to room holding a steak knife, turning on every light and stabbing the knife into closets where he thought intruders might hide. “People don’t know that you can handle being alone,” Kisha told him, and he had no choice but to fulfill her faith in him.

  It continued when Demetrius became the first member of the new Inland Stars. He spent day after day with Keller. They went to the gym together, or to dinner, or they just lounged at Keller’s apartment playing marathon sessions of NBA Live on his PlayStation. Whether Demetrius realized it or not, thirty-year-old “Coach Joe” became his best friend.

  It was a stunted childhood, but then again, that had been something of a family tradition.

  Kisha’s mother, Mary Ann Houston, was only seventeen when she gave birth to Kisha in 1969, the same year the Crips street gang was founded. Mary Ann attended Fremont High with the gang’s founder, and several of Kisha’s uncles ultimately joined the Crips. Relatives from another branch of her family were in smaller gangs that coalesced into the Bloods in the early 1970s, becoming the Crips’ primary rival. “I had Crips on one side of me, Bloods on the other, and there I was, always walking in the middle waving a white flag, trying to keep the peace even when I was just a little girl,” Kisha said. So many of her cousins, aunts, and uncles were arrested for a variety of crimes that she became the only family member from a specific generation without a criminal record.

  By the time Kisha enrolled at Crenshaw High as a tenth-grader, she had been supporting herself for years. She worked at May Co., selling women’s accessories, and also behind the counter at McDonald’s; around Christmas she got a part-time job alongside Mary Ann at the post office. What she remembers most about that time of her life was the hours she spent on crowded city buses shuttling between school, home, and her jobs.

  When Kisha was a seventeen-year-old senior, she attended a football game between Locke High and Jefferson High with her cousin, who was a cheerleader at Jefferson. She met a boy who had once been a star running back at the Pop Warner level and who would have played for Locke had he not repeatedly gotten into trouble with the law. He had the same almond-shaped eyes and define
d cheekbones as Kisha, and from the neck up they could have passed for brother and sister. But whereas she was long and lean, he was stocky, about five foot ten, with huge biceps and abnormally wide forearms. After the game, he got Kisha’s phone number from her cousin, and on their first date he took her to the Shakey’s Pizza on La Brea Avenue. He was a year behind Kisha in school but seemed more mature and always had money to pay for dinner or other expenses. He worked occasionally at his father’s heating-repair business but not enough to account for the money he carried. Kisha knew what that meant—“No job but always has money: He’s dealing”—but she liked him, and he became her first real boyfriend. She called him “D” and, later, “Big D.” He called her “Bay,” short for “baby.”

  After graduating from Crenshaw High, Kisha took a job as a fax supervisor at a law firm in downtown Los Angeles and rented an apartment near her mother’s. Big D moved in with her; although she knew he committed crimes, she treated it as a temporary lapse in judgment. “I remember he was very polite with his mom, and I was always told that if a guy really loves his mom, he will look out for you,” she said.

  On New Year’s Day, 1990, she and Big D drove a rented car to Las Vegas and were married at the Candlelight Chapel. They drove home the same day. “We thought, well, we are living together and he loved me and I loved him and that it was the right thing to do.” A month later, she found out she was pregnant.