Play Their Hearts Out

by George Dohrmann

  The team arrived in Cocoa Beach riding its success in Portland and at a tournament in Arizona in June. Keller’s confidence should have been at a peak, but he was a ball of nerves at the team’s hotel before the start of pool play. Talking to John Finn about the team’s first game, Keller went on about what Demetrius “needed” to do for the Inland Stars to be victorious.

  “Joe, do you talk to D like that?” John asked.

  Keller didn’t answer.

  “If you talk to D like that, you are really messing with his head.”

  Keller stared at John, genuinely puzzled.

  “Joe, an eleven-year-old kid is not prepared to deal with something like that. Kids perform better when you teach them how to execute, teach them the little things, show them how doing those things will help them win. My experience is that if you put pressure on them, that makes them play bad more often than good.”

  “I don’t tell D those things, so don’t worry,” Keller said, but John didn’t believe him, and rightly so. Before the team left for Nationals, Keller had told Demetrius: “If you don’t take over, we don’t have a chance.”

  The Inland Stars’ performance during pool play helped settle Keller’s nerves. They eased to victories over the Severna Park (Maryland) Green Hornets, 57–31, the Yakima (Washington) All-Valley Elite, 78–20, and the Caroline (Virginia) Foxes, 76–32. The script leading to each victory was the same the team had used in Portland. They pressed teams madly with Fist and used their athleticism to intimidate and score easy baskets. On the rare instances when they set up in a half-court offense, they passed the ball inside to Demetrius, who usually jumped higher than his defender and scored easily. When teams double- or triple-teamed Demetrius, Andrew or Jordan made open 3-point shots.

  As elimination play began, it was more of the same: 56–33 over the Louisiana Panthers, then 44–26 over Municipal Gardens (Indiana) Gold. Nothing from the first few days of the weeklong tournament discounted the notion that the Inland Stars were the best team in the country, yet Keller grew more and more nervous. At the hotel the night before the quarterfinals, he sidled up to John again and said, “If D doesn’t play well tomorrow, we can’t win.”

  It was natural for Keller to be anxious, but John didn’t share his opinion, which he felt was symptomatic of a larger problem. With the exception of Demetrius, Keller had little faith in his players. A good coach trusts that if he puts his kids in a position to win, they will execute as he has taught them. In a way, Keller’s worrying hinted at his insecurity over his skills as an instructor. But it also led to some hurt feelings among the kids. They had lost only one game all year, yet many of them wondered if Coach Joe really believed in them. Keller created more discontent right before Nationals when he added a new guard, Justin Cobbs, to the roster, just under the deadline for him to be eligible. He was a good player, strong and adept at driving to the basket, and the boys liked him, but they bristled at Keller’s claims that he was the “missing piece.”

  The Inland Stars’ quarterfinal opponent, Indianapolis-based Hoosier Hoops, worried Keller on two levels. First, they were talented enough to beat the Inland Stars. But his greater fear was that Demetrius would be outplayed by the Hoops star guard, Rolandan Finch, whom everyone called “Deuce.” Throughout the tournament, opposing players and coaches praised Deuce. He was shorter than Demetrius, about five foot seven, but stockier; he had to weigh 165 pounds. His biceps and calves were well defined, hints that his athletic prowess was the result of hitting puberty earlier than other boys. His arms and legs were also on the short side and, depending on the height of his parents, one could conclude he would never be tall enough to be an elite prospect. Had Keller spotted him at some park in the Inland Empire, he might have passed on him because his upside was debatable. But in Cocoa Beach, enough people talked about Deuce that it threatened the perception that Demetrius was the best player in the country.

  Hoosier Hoops was not a one-man gang. Kevin Bloom, a five-foot-eight forward, could shoot from the outside and play in the post, and six-foot center Stephan Van Treese might have looked like the slow white kids the Inland Stars routinely dominated, but he wasn’t a plodder. He could get off the floor and had range on his jump shot. Hearing Keller talk before the game, it would have been easy to conclude that if Demetrius outplayed Deuce, the Inland Stars would win. But anyone sitting in the stands in the gym during pregame warm-ups could tell that the Hoosier Hoops were as talented as the Inland Stars.

  On the opening tip, Demetrius jumped higher than Van Treese and tipped the ball to Andrew, who gave Demetrius a quick return pass, and he sliced through the key for a layup. The Inland Stars quickly set up in Fist, and as the ball was inbounded to Deuce, Andrew and Jordan converged on him.

  Unlike Peyton Siva or the countless other guards who were quickly overwhelmed by the Inland Stars’ pressure defense, Deuce calmly knifed to his left, around Jordan and Andrew, hitting a gear that surprised them. Demetrius tried to rotate over, but Deuce cut across court and blew past him, resulting in a three-on-two advantage that ended with a layup that tied the score.

  A possession later, when it appeared Jordan and Andrew had Deuce pinned to the sideline, he spun out of trouble and snapped a pass crosscourt to an open Van Treese for an easy layup. On the Hoops’ next possession, Andrew and Jordan approached Deuce with more caution, looking to contain rather than trap him, and he just power-dribbled right through them, drawing a foul on Andrew.

  The Inland Stars’ formula of flustering the opposition’s point guard with Fist wasn’t going to work against Deuce. In fact, it was a major liability. Once he broke the press, Deuce didn’t allow the Inland Stars to get set on defense. He went to the hoop and either scored, was fouled, or dished to a teammate for an open shot.

  On offense, the Inland Stars struggled to get the ball to Demetrius in spots where he could score. Bloom and Van Treese double-teamed him, pushing him farther from the basket and denying him the easy layups he was accustomed to getting. In the past, when teams had doubled Demetrius, Andrew and Jordan made them pay by knocking down 3-pointers. But neither of them was quick enough to create their shot off the dribble against Deuce and the Hoops’ other guard.

  The only adjustment Keller made was to scream more and more as the game slowly slipped away, acting, as John put it, “Like an emotional dad too worked up about how badly his son was playing to do what needed to be done to help the team win.”

  In the end, the Inland Stars lost 44–34, although the score was not an adequate indicator of how thoroughly Deuce and the rest of the Hoosier Hoops dominated.

  Back at the hotel later, Keller sequestered himself in his room with Demetrius, and they didn’t join the parents and kids who gathered in the lobby and later at a restaurant to break down what had happened. That group quickly reached a consensus: Keller had been outcoached. Staying in Fist and refusing to consider offensive options other than Demetrius had cost them the game. Not surprisingly, Keller placed the blame elsewhere. His conclusion was, of course, delivered unedited to Demetrius, his partner.

  “I need to get you more help,” he said. “The players around you aren’t good enough.”

  5

  Gary Franklin instructing the Runnin’ Rebels

  After the loss to Hoosier Hoops, Keller returned to California and holed up in his apartment, talking to almost no one about the disappointment at Nationals. His living room was like a hermitage. He sat on the sofa watching television and eating McDonald’s, pondering the grander meaning of the devastation in Cocoa Beach. After a few weeks, he emerged and entered the team into a few local tournaments. The competition at each was mediocre, but that was the point. Keller needed to see his boys dominate again, to create some distance from the memory of what Deuce and the rest of the Hoosier Hoops had done to his team. He was like a struggling Major League Baseball player who gets sent down to the minors: Against lesser pitching, he rediscovers his confidence and then returns to the big leagues with renewed swagger. It took until t
he fall, but eventually Keller’s assuredness returned. “Joe Keller is back. He’s new and improved,” he called to announce. The underpinning of insecurity was unmistakable, but on the surface he was more blustery than ever.

  The “new and improved” Keller included one obvious modification: more vitriol. He had always preferred an us-against-the-world approach, particularly toward opposing coaches. He searched for anything that he could use to hate his counterparts. He would claim he heard secondhand that a coach had questioned Demetrius’s age or had tried to lure away one of his players. He wouldn’t use the information to motivate the team, only himself. If he couldn’t find an insult to stir his fury, he’d make one up. Once, after hearing a positive comment about another coach, Keller searched for a reply for several moments before settling on: “I heard he beats his wife.”

  He sorted people into two distinct camps. There were “Friends of Joe,” those true believers who never questioned his moves or motives, and “Enemies of Joe,” which included just about everyone else. There were plenty of vultures in the grassroots game, and it was neither unwise nor uncommon for an unsponsored coach to view the populace this way. After all, blind trust had cost him Tyson Chandler. But after Nationals, Keller’s cynicism spiked and his actions reflected this mood. He hinted at tactics that he said he was reluctant to use before but that were now unavoidable. “I’ve got to take care of my family,” he said.

  Prior to Cocoa Beach, Keller had what could be called a professional relationship with Gary Franklin, Sr., the coach of the Los Angeles–based Runnin’ Rebels. Composed of mostly inner-city kids, the Runnin’ Rebels played Keller’s team four times in 2002, and their last two meetings were among the Inland Stars’ toughest games that year. They posed the most prominent challenge to the Inland Stars’ supremacy in California, yet Keller never spoke ill of Gary, Sr. Maybe he recognized that Gary, Sr., was one of the nicest and most virtuous men on the AAU scene. Perhaps they were so different that Keller didn’t know how to attack him. Or maybe being kind to Gary, Sr., served a purpose that had yet to reveal itself. Whatever it was, Gary, Sr., was an abnormality, a threat to Keller’s station who hadn’t yet been moved under the banner of “Enemy of Joe.”

  Unlike Keller, Gary, Sr., had a basketball pedigree. He had been a star guard at Dorsey High in the 1990s and then played basketball and football at Los Angeles Valley College. After two years there, he got a scholarship offer to play football at the University of Idaho but turned it down because he learned that his girlfriend was pregnant with a boy. He took a job as a pest-control technician and worked later for Airborne Express but was never truly at peace with how his athletic dreams had gone unrealized.

  When his son, also named Gary, was five, the boy’s mother “just kind of left.” Gary Sr.’s father had abandoned him at about the same age, and he had no model for how to father little Gary. He got a better job doing marketing for a multimedia company and began to play basketball again, dragging Gary along, making sure the young boy saw how good a point guard his father was even as he approached thirty. But by his own admission he wasn’t a great father. He drank and stayed out too late and was not a commanding influence in his son’s life.

  In 2000, one of Gary Sr.’s close friends from Dorsey High became the preacher at Church of the Harvest International in Los Angeles and talked him into attending a service. His friend preached that day of “being in the world but not of this world,” a sermon that Gary, Sr., felt had been written and packaged specifically for him. “You need to let the world see your light and your walk,” he homilized. “We need to give our young people something to say ‘yes’ to. Always saying ‘no’ this and ‘no’ that to your kids. Give them something to say ‘yes’ to.”

  Later, his friend told Gary, Sr., of a gathering at the Los Angeles Convention Center called ManPower. “You should go,” he said. “And take your son.”

  Gary Sr.’s recollection of ManPower and the sermon by T. D. Jakes, a popular author and preacher based in Dallas, was more vivid than his memory of any touchdown he’d ever scored, any winning basket. “He spoke about the man-child, about how the father is like a shadow. As he was saying things about how fathers have to be careful what they love, because their sons will love it, too, I thought about my own father and how he left my mom and me. I would never leave little Gary, but I also knew I could be a better father. I could love him more and set a better example. All around us, fathers and sons were hugging. With some families, there were three generations of men hugging and crying, and little Gary and I hugged too. It wasn’t the first time we hugged, but it felt like the first real hug.”

  The energy born of Gary Sr.’s spiritual awakening was immense. He became the “shadow” Jakes preached about, and it was rare to see him apart from his son. One of their many shared activities came in 2000 when Gary, Sr., took Gary to Rancho Cienega Park in Los Angeles and signed him up for a ten-year-old team in a basketball league. Before the AAU scene exploded, the best kids played on park teams near their homes. The teams at “Rancho” included kids from Crenshaw, Compton, Dorsey, Baldwin Hills, and, finally, Baldwin Village, a square mile of apartments and condos known as the Jungle. Gary, Sr., had played on a Rancho team when he was a boy, and he considered it a mecca for young basketball talent. Though they lived in Inglewood and there were a number of parks closer to their home, Gary, Sr., believed that if his son could star for a Rancho team he could play anywhere. He offered to help with Gary’s team and was surprised by how much he enjoyed coaching. The next year he took some of the best kids and started the Runnin’ Rebels.

  Gary, Sr., was six feet tall, with a dark complexion and a mustache he trimmed thin. He was built like a snowman, with a round face, head, and waist. He and his son shared some physical attributes—dark skin, huge cheeks dotted with dimples—but had contrasting demeanors. Gary, Jr., was talkative and a bit of a jokester. Gary, Sr., was reserved, grumbling out words as if he were reluctant to part with them. Only when he discussed one of his passions—such as basketball or his faith—did he speak clearly. His calm manner stood out in the grassroots world. He didn’t yell. He talked about school and God as much as basketball. He spent entire practices preaching the fundamentals. At Rancho, the coach that Gary, Sr., had assisted told the players that only guards should dribble and shoot from the outside and that big men must stay close to the basket. Gary, Sr., watched college and NBA games endlessly and knew the game was changing: Kids had to be multifaceted. At the Runnin’ Rebels’ first practice, Gary, Sr., announced that everyone would work on their ballhandling and outside shooting and learn to play multiple positions.

  Gary Sr.’s most talented player was a skinny forward named Jordan Hamilton, who had immense talent but a bad temper: He would sometimes punch opposing kids in the stomach or arm if they fouled him. Gary, Sr., spent hours trying to change his ways, and for a while it worked, but Hamilton’s outbursts resumed and so Gary, Sr., let him leave for another team. A willingness to part with gifted players if they threatened the cohesiveness of his team was yet another trait that separated Gary, Sr., from other grassroots coaches.

  The Runnin’ Rebels core included Gary, Jr., and Justin Hawkins, a shooting guard from Baldwin Hills, and Terran Carter, a bulky kid who lived in the San Fernando Valley. Justin had a questionable outside shot when he joined the Runnin’ Rebels. Terran had bad hands and was reluctant to use his strength against similar-size players. Under Gary Sr.’s guidance, they got better and smarter. Practices in the gym at Manual Arts High School were unique if only because of how Gary, Sr., took the time to explain how each exercise would make the players better. After one session, Justin returned home and told his mother, “Coach Gary just makes us think through everything.”

  Not long after the team’s inception, the Runnin’ Rebels played the Inland Stars in a tournament in the San Fernando Valley. Demetrius dominated, and the Inland Stars won by more than 30. Terran was stronger and wider than Demetrius, but he backed away rather than challenge Demetriu
s’s shots. Fist gave Gary and Justin problems, and Keller seemed to send in wave after wave of long and athletic kids. “The boys were intimidated,” Gary, Sr., said. “You can’t win when you’re scared.”

  The starkest contrast between Keller and Gary, Sr., was in how they assigned blame. After the loss, Gary, Sr., concluded that he hadn’t put his players in a position to win. He paid $1,600 and went on a two-week tour with a team through Central America, playing with the team but also mentoring under the coach. He volunteered as an assistant on a Pro-Am team based in Los Angeles and headed by a former college coach. He went to coaching clinics, including one at Long Beach State, and joined the Positive Coaching Alliance, a nonprofit that conducted workshops on positive coaching and goal-setting. Gary, Sr., adopted a philosophy rare among AAU coaches: It is not hard to motivate kids to score, as they will naturally give maximum effort when success is measured in points scored, but truly successful teams make stopping the opposition their foremost objective. He hammered this message home practice after practice, drill after drill. His lessons did not differ greatly from what Keller or another coach would teach, but he was more successful at getting the boys to buy into his plan.

  Justin exemplified how effective a player can be when he is totally committed on defense. He cut off passes, always kept his man in front of him, and contested every shot. He was rarely the team’s leading scorer, but so many of his teammates’ baskets came as a result of balls he stole or tipped that his influence on the game was unmistakable. It was the little things that made him so effective: He always had his hands up, stayed in a low defensive stance, and didn’t reach unnecessarily for balls that might put him off balance. He also was wise beyond his years in his knowledge of how physical he could be without drawing the referee’s attention. To the uneducated eye, Terran’s size or Gary’s quickness might have looked like the reason the Runnin’ Rebels won most games. But their mastering of the fundamentals and effort on defense were what set them apart.