Play Their Hearts Out Read online

  On a Wednesday afternoon in the same month Kisha learned she was pregnant, Big D and a friend kidnapped another man and stole his car from an Exxon station in the San Fernando Valley. The man’s bullet-riddled body was found later in an alley downtown, and his car had been stripped for parts.

  On March 12, Big D was arrested and charged with murder and kidnapping for the purpose of robbery. It was not his first brush with the law; he had proposed to Kisha while in a California Youth Authority prison. This time, he got five years in prison for kidnapping, avoiding the murder charge for which his friend was convicted.

  Kisha refused to discuss her husband’s crimes; details of his offenses were culled from court and police documents. “There is no reason to talk about all that,” she said whenever asked about Big D’s past. She took the same stance with Demetrius. He did not know that his father missed his birth because he was in jail awaiting trial and did not know that, after he was released in 1993, he was arrested again a year later for robbery and assault with a deadly weapon, for which he was sentenced to four more years.

  Demetrius did remember, however, the final appearance Big D made in their lives. It was 1998, and Big D moved in with them in Fontana after he was released from prison. He took a job at the Ontario Convention Center, doing ballroom setup, and it afforded him lots of free time with his son. Demetrius remembers riding around in Big D’s Monte Carlo, staying up late playing video games with him, and admiring the large tattoos on his arms and chest. On his massive right forearm he had Demetrius Jr. and across the left side of his chest were the words I am thankful for my wife Kisha.

  When Demetrius talked about this period of his life, he often inflated the length of time Big D lived with him, saying it was a year or longer. He spoke in a wistful tone, and you could sense some void had been filled when Big D was around.

  They were actually together less than six months. On July 13, 1998, Big D was caught stealing several compact discs from the Virgin Mega-store in the Ontario Mills mall. Because of his earlier convictions, this small crime was elevated to the charge of petty theft with a prior robbery conviction, which counted as a third offense under California’s Three Strikes law. Nine days before Christmas 1999, Big D got the maximum: twenty-five years to life.

  Kisha never took Demetrius to visit his father at Pleasant Valley State Prison near Fresno, and she never considered replacing Big D with another man. She invited Demetrius’s uncle (Big D’s younger brother) to the house and asked other male relatives to spend time with Demetrius. It helped, but the brightness she saw in her son in those few months when Big D was around slowly dimmed, and so her search for a stabilizing paternal figure for Demetrius continued.

  Six months later, Joe Keller walked into the Carl Johnson Center and into their lives.

  By the third day of the Nike Invitational in Portland, the atmosphere at games was hostile. Opposing coaches and parents criticized Keller and the team before games even began. The coach of the Sacramento Raiders delayed the tip-off of a semifinal because the father of one of the Inland Stars was keeping the official score book. “I’m not saying [the scorekeeper] will cheat, but I don’t trust him,” he said, pointing at Keller.

  The Raiders stayed close in the first half because Demetrius got into foul trouble; they trailed only 27–17 at the break. Keller’s response was to yo-yo his players in and out of the game. At one point he substituted four players on the court in a span of forty seconds and made twenty-eight substitutions in the first half alone. He made twenty-two more in the second half, the most astounding coming with 6:36 left. One of his guards had missed a long 3-pointer and, as usual, Keller erupted. He ran both hands through his hair and then grabbed a player off the bench by his jersey and shoved him toward the scorer’s table. Once in the game, that player promptly threw his first pass out of bounds with the clock reading 6:31. Keller grabbed the player he had just taken out of the game and, before he had even sat down, sent him back to the scorer’s table to reenter the game.

  He pulled a player after only five seconds.

  Demetrius dominated in the second half, and the Inland Stars advanced to the final with a 70–32 victory. Terrance Mitchell, the Raiders’ coach, expressed admiration and disgust when asked about Keller and the Inland Stars. “That’s the most talent I’ve seen on one team. We’ll get to where they are someday. But we’ll do it the fair-and-square route.”

  Before the finals, Keller strode up to the coach of Seattle Ice Vibe and offered to wager $100 on the outcome. The coach passed. “Okay, pizza, then. Let’s bet pizza.” Still, no bet.

  It was a smart decision. The Inland Stars went up 7–2 without Demetrius scoring a single point. The Ice Vibe guards could deal with Fist, but once across half-court they found it difficult to score because of the Inland Stars’ height. There were no open lanes to the basket, and Demetrius gobbled up every miss. Ice Vibe’s defense was sound, but they just couldn’t score enough to keep up.

  As the Inland Stars moved further ahead in the second half, Ice Vibe’s coach became more animated. After one of his guards was whistled for a foul, he tore a large silver watch off his wrist and hurled it into the stands. He then walked up the sideline, where the referee signaled the player’s number to the scorekeeper, and slammed his palms on the scorer’s table. The teenage girl operating the scoreboard jumped back in her seat.

  “He smacked the table. You gotta give him a technical,” Keller said to the official.

  “I’ll smack you,” the Ice Vibe coach said.

  “You try and see what happens.”

  The coach took a step toward Keller, but the official got between them. Demetrius echoed the sentiment of everyone when he loudly said, “Come on, let’s just play.”

  There was a sense of relief when the game finally ended with the Inland Stars ahead, 67–31. The players shook hands after the game, but the coaches did not.

  “Typical AAU coaches,” one of the referees commented after the game. As for the play of the Inland Stars: “They play with a lot of intensity, but it’s a controlled intensity. That coach has got control over every one of those kids. And I’ll tell you, that number twenty-three is an amazing athlete.”

  As the ref spoke, Demetrius stood at midcourt, receiving a trophy as the tournament’s most valuable player—having scored 26 points in the final—and Keller was off to the side, talking to a reporter from a local newspaper. “Demetrius is the best player his age in the country,” he said. He spelled Demetrius for the reporter, then added, “We call him ‘Sky Walker.’ You should use that: Sky Walker.”

  3

  Pat Barrett

  At a practice not long after the team returned from its victorious trip to Portland, Keller introduced an inbounds play he dubbed “Red Sea.” It was designed for when the team inbounded the ball on the baseline of an opponent’s end of the court. Three players stood in a line in front of the guard inbounding the ball. After receiving the ball from the official, the guard slapped it with his palm, which was the cue for the three players to sprint either to the left or right. Demetrius was positioned atop the key, and upon hearing the slap he sprinted forward into the space created when his teammates parted to the sides. The guard then lofted the ball toward the rim, and Demetrius was supposed to rise up and dunk it with one hand.

  It was essentially an alley-oop off an inbounds, and Keller did not borrow it from a college or pro program or a coaching guidebook. It was a Joe Keller original, and it was easy to see why others didn’t employ it. It required Demetrius to complete a difficult dunk when he would likely be defended closely and with the strong possibility that even more defenders would obstruct his path to the hoop. The play also left no one to get back on defense to prevent a fast break if Demetrius missed and the rebound went long. It was a boom-or-bust play, with bust being the most likely outcome.

  Keller worked on Red Sea for the entirety of that practice and parts of subsequent workouts. The fathers of a few players were present, some of whom had played
high school basketball. Yet the absurdity of Red Sea, its total departure from what would be considered fundamental basketball, escaped them. When the play worked—and it happened only three or four times against ghost defenders—they slapped hands, celebrating along with Keller, who after one make wrapped Demetrius in a bear hug.

  After the practice, Keller asked me what I thought of Red Sea, and I told him it was a pointless endeavor.

  “You’re stupid. People will go crazy when D slams off an inbounds,” he said.

  It would only work against the weakest of teams, if at all, I said. A well-coached team would surely mark Demetrius too closely and would not be fooled by the three players splitting to the sides and leave the basket unguarded.

  “It doesn’t matter who he does it against, only that he does it. What matters is that people hear how he pulled off a dunk like that.”

  This philosophy of Keller’s was difficult to grasp. He often prioritized the perception of outsiders over matters a coach should consider more important, such as the development of the boys’ fundamentals and their cohesion as teammates. It was as if marketing the boys, particularly Demetrius, was more important than coaching them.

  We debated the issue often, most notably after the team’s first game of the Nike Invitational in Portland. Their scheduled opponent had canceled at the last minute, so the Inland Stars were pitted against a fill-in local team, West Sylvan, which had no business being in the tournament. None of its players was taller than five foot seven, and all but one were white. They looked like the Orange County kids that Keller’s bunch routinely intimidated and routed.

  In the game’s first eighty seconds, the Inland Stars scored 15 points, all off turnovers created by Fist, and at the end of the first quarter they led 28–0. I expected Keller to back out of Fist in the second quarter and slow the game down, but he kept the press on, and by halftime the score was 57–4. Surely, I thought, he would sit Demetrius and the other starters in the second half and call off the press. But Demetrius and the rest of the first unit trotted out after halftime and immediately lined up in Fist. Keller continued to implore his kids with shouts of “FIRE! FIRE!” and “DOUBLE! DOUBLE!” and the lead grew to 95–4. Keller finally sat Demetrius to start the fourth quarter, but his second unit—boys all more talented than the West Sylvan kids—continued with Fist. When the final buzzer sounded, the scoreboard read: Inland Stars 116, West Sylvan 13.

  Never before had I seen a team so thoroughly humiliated, and it made me sick. Particularly upsetting was Keller’s decision to reinsert Demetrius into the game with two minutes left, after he got word that the loud cheers emanating from the lower court came after the center for a team from Sacramento had dunked. Not to be upstaged, he ordered Demetrius to stand at half-court—a tactic known as cherry-picking—hoping he’d get a breakaway. Mercifully, Demetrius never got the chance to put one final stake in the hearts of the West Sylvan players.

  When they left the floor at game’s end, many of the West Sylvan kids were on the verge of tears. Coach Paul Walter went to each boy and offered encouraging words, but what could he say? I was reminded of something Amir Kermani, who ran the Orange County Shooting Stars, said about Keller: “Joe sets out not just to beat you but to break your will. If he gets up by fifty, he’s still trapping and pressing and wants to beat you by a hundred. He wants a team to leave the game thinking, If we have to play the Inland Stars again, we’ve got no chance. He wants to break you. And he wants to let every other team out there know that if you play him, he’s going to break your kids too.”

  Later that evening, Keller and I sat at the bar of our hotel near the Portland airport, and when asked why he ran up the score against a clearly hapless team, he indignantly slammed down his Corona.

  “It’s not my job to keep the score close. Don’t blame me. Blame their coach.”

  For the next hour I explained the values of compassion and humility to Keller while he tried to make me realize that none of that applied to the grassroots game. Winning by 30 was not the same as winning by 103, he said. For a coach to rise up, he had to convince people that he had put together a special team, and there was nothing special about a 30-point victory. Though he couldn’t articulate it clearly, Keller seemed to be saying that every game was a judgment and an opportunity to show he had elite players. He also made it clear that the feelings of the children, whether they were on the winning side or among the losers, didn’t matter. There was no room for moral victories with the stakes so high. The world was too cutthroat for him to be worrying about the feelings of players who weren’t “mentally tough.” When I started to suggest that no eleven-year-old was truly mentally tough, he cut me off. “Demetrius is.”

  At one point he turned his chair toward me and said, “Look, this is the big time. I can’t be worrying about how a kid feels when Demetrius dunks on him.”

  My instinct was to vehemently condemn everything Keller had said, yet he made at least one salient point: Before judging his actions, you first had to understand the world in which he operated.

  When Keller returned to coaching, he had no illusions of supplanting Pat Barrett as Southern California’s AAU kingpin. Other prominent coaches in the area, such as twins David and Dana Pump in the San Fernando Valley and Elvert “Kool-Aid” Perry in Riverside, were also out of reach. Like Barrett, they had shoe-company sponsorship and were so entrenched in their territories that they had de facto control over any talented high-school-age player who emerged from there. “They’re big-time and I’m not,” Keller said of the discrepancy between him and the others, “and I’ve got to find a way to become big-time.”

  In most urban centers, the shoe companies sponsored one or two coaches. In Southern California, the number was higher because of the concentration of talent, with around a dozen or more coaches paid as “consultants” by Nike or Adidas. The ratio of unsponsored coaches to sponsored coaches might be 20:1 in a hotbed like Los Angeles, which produces more Division I talent than any other metropolitan area, or it could be higher. There is simply no way of knowing. The AAU, Basketball Congress International (BCI), Youth Basketball of America (YBOA), and the United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA) all register teams, but simply adding up their totals does not reveal the number of coaches operating across the country. There are an untold number of coaches who don’t try to qualify their team for the national championships and thus never register with any organization.

  There may be thousands of coaches, but the difference between the haves and have-nots is stark. On a map highlighting the percentage of the market controlled by the coaches in Southern California, Barrett and the Pumps would be identified by huge black dots blanketing all but a small portion of their regions. So many of the elite kids—those who will one day play for UCLA or Duke or some other top-tier program—are on their teams that the market share for the unsponsored coaches, even though they greatly outnumber their counterparts, would barely register. On the map, the unaffiliated coaches would be tiny red dots out on the periphery.

  Keller was the quintessential red dot, and like all red dots, he dreamed of landing a shoe deal. But the landscape of the grassroots-basketball market worked against him. The power and the money were concentrated with the sponsored coaches, who, while they didn’t collude, watched one another closely and employed the same tactics to dismantle the competition. It was a market dominated by just a few operators, an oligopoly, and Keller was out on what economists call the “competitive fringe.” The barriers for entry into the market were almost insurmountable. Nike and Adidas didn’t want to add coaches to their stables; they wanted the top kids to be with the coaches they already backed. The better Keller got at finding elite kids, the bigger a target he would become.

  Barrett and the Pumps all had different styles, but the model for how they enticed players was largely the same. After identifying a special prospect, they offered free shoes, free travel to tournaments all over the country, and a chance to team up with the most heralded playe
rs. With parents, they talked of the “exposure” their son would need to land a college scholarship and how that exposure could come only from playing for a sponsored coach. They put a question to parents: Do you want to risk your son’s future by letting him play for someone else? They rattled off the names of former players who had received college scholarships and sometimes had one of them call to support the coach’s candidacy.

  To Keller, the notion that a player had to be with a sponsored coach to be seen was absurd. “Would Tyson Chandler still have made the NBA if I’d kept coaching him?” Keller asked. “Of course. He was seven fucking feet tall.” He also lamented the dubious marketing Barrett and others used to prop up their importance. For example, Barrett counted Baron Davis, who starred at UCLA and in the NBA with the Golden State Warriors, as an SCA product. But if you asked Davis, he would say his AAU coach was the unaffiliated Thaddeus McGrew. Yet because Davis played for Barrett in a few tournaments, Barrett claimed him. Parents never took the time to confirm these boasts because, as Keller put it, “If you’re with Nike or Adidas, parents think you are legit no matter what bullshit you come up with.”

  This was maddening to Keller. He could recruit harder and coach better, but, in the end, his paradox remained the same: Without a shoe deal, it would be difficult to recruit and keep top players. And without great players, he would never get a shoe deal.

  So Keller chose a tactic deeply rooted in the history of grassroots basketball. In 1978, John “Sonny” Vaccaro, who hosted an all-star game in his hometown of Pittsburgh called the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic, had approached Nike founder Phil Knight and proposed to help him break Converse’s stranglehold on the basketball-shoe market. Vaccaro convinced Knight that, through his connections with college coaches, he could get the best collegiate players (and subsequently their fans) to wear Nikes. Vaccaro first signed a good friend, Jerry Tarkanian at UNLV, and then Lefty Driesell at Maryland, paying them to put their players in Nikes at a time when Converse was offering only free shoes and the occasional junket to Europe for speaking engagements. Vaccaro is best known for convincing Nike to sign then North Carolina sophomore Michael Jordan to a sponsorship contract in 1984, minting him as the foremost judge of an elite player’s marketability, but it wasn’t until a year later, at the 1985 Final Four in Lexington, Kentucky, that Nike’s move into basketball was complete. Players for all four schools—Villanova, Memphis State, St. John’s, and Georgetown—wore Nikes. “It was a seminal moment,” Vaccaro said. “We had taken control of the market.”