Play Their Hearts Out

by George Dohrmann

  There are no disclosure rules in grassroots basketball, and thus parents rarely hear about the flameouts. Barrett never talks about Keilon Fortune and Olujimi Mann and the other seemingly surefire stars who flopped under his tutelage. He doesn’t mention the directionless lives they led after they failed to reach the heights he’d promised them, how as adults they continued to ask him for money as they had as teenagers, and how he continued to give them handouts because he didn’t know another way to help them.

  Even if parents were aware of these unhappy endings, it is doubtful they would boycott AAU basketball, because they know how vital it is to their children’s chances of landing a college scholarship. When they first look into placing their kids on a team, parents are confronted with a chicken-or-egg question. It begins with an irrefutable fact agreed upon by everyone: that the majority of American players who go on to play in college and the NBA pass through the grassroots system. Proponents of the system say that pitting talented kids against one another forces them to play the game at a higher level, thus developing them into college and pro players. Critics of the system believe that if you abolished grassroots basketball, the same kids would still get scholarships, because they possess the most talent. The argument can be reduced to this question: Do kids become elite by playing AAU basketball, or are they top players already and AAU coaches just latch on to them?

  For parents, the debate is meaningless. They have no choice but to put their sons into the grassroots machine. They do, however, have a choice on which coach they choose and how much they trust them. One can’t help but wonder if parents would still choose Barrett if they heard the tales of Keilon and Olujimi and other Barrett-led flops like Schea Cotton. Would he remain the most powerful coach in Southern California if, when parents were deciding between him and another coach, they were told the story of Kenny Brunner?

  A stocky guard with bulging calves and a bowlegged gait, Brunner preceded Chandler by three years in the SCA pipeline. His quickness and toughness were unmatched by other lead guards in Southern California at that time, and he became one of the nation’s top prospects. Just as with Chandler, Barrett lured him from another AAU team when he was thirteen and eventually sent him to Compton Dominguez High. “That Nike contract allowed Pat to do a lot of things other programs couldn’t do,” Brunner said. “Every kid wants Nikes. When I was thirteen, he gave me a care pack of shoes. That’s what we called it, a ‘care pack.’ It was five pairs of shoes and all the jerseys and the T-shirts you needed to be the prettiest basketball player.”

  Like Chandler, Brunner had reservations about going to run-down Dominguez High, which is situated in one of the worst areas of Los Angeles. He grew up in Inglewood and wanted to go to Dorsey High with his neighborhood friends. But he was a Nike kid with SCA, and Barrett pushed him to attend a Nike-sponsored high school. From a basketball perspective, Dominguez was good for Brunner. He led the team to state titles in 1996 and 1997 and played in tournaments all over the country. Coupled with his travels with SCA in the spring and summer, he was seen by every major college and landed a scholarship to Georgetown. That should have been reward enough—a full ride to a great school in the Big East Conference—but for Brunner it felt like a step back. When he played for Barrett, he could do whatever he wanted, because the only aim was to keep him happy. Barrett took him on shopping sprees that ended with Brunner owning hundreds of dollars in shoes and clothing. When he needed money for food or to take a girl on a date, he asked Barrett and was never turned away. Barrett bought him a car and gave him gas money; he even paid an insurance deductible when Brunner got into an accident.

  At Georgetown, Brunner had trouble adjusting to playing for tuition only and didn’t respond to authority. To no one’s surprise, he left after a dispute with the coach over playing time. He enrolled at Fresno State but was dismissed after he and another player were famously charged with robbing another student with a samurai sword. Later, he was accused of robbing a junior college coach at gunpoint, though he said he was only demanding money that he was promised. Although he was eventually cleared in both incidents, Brunner never played Division I basketball again.

  Certainly all of Brunner’s misdeeds can’t be blamed on Barrett. But Brunner believes his basketball career was destined for failure the moment Barrett entered his life. “I went for years where I could do whatever I wanted, and then I was supposed to go to college and change? Now I understand why so many kids who played for Pat have left colleges. With Pat, there is no stability, because, if you remember, it started with him taking us off other teams. … If you look at every player—you look at me, you look at Olujimi, the best point guard I’ve ever seen, you look at Schea and Keilon—we were all blue chippers, great, great players. But Pat corrupted our minds. I’m not saying it’s all Pat’s fault, but I’ve been a professional since I was thirteen years old.”

  Coaches like Barrett give and give, and some people will see nothing wrong with that. Shoes, nice clothes, a car—Brunner and many SCA players might never have had such things if not for Barrett’s generosity. Barrett also gave them a goal—the NBA—and is it so wrong to give a young life a purpose? Viewed only through a broad lens, the actions of coaches like Barrett can appear reasonable, even altruistic. But from the age of thirteen, Brunner believed unequivocally that he would make the NBA. Barrett, the closest thing he ever had to a father, had told him so. NBA riches became a guarantee, not the reward for sacrifice.

  The greatest crime committed by Barrett and coaches like him is that they bleach the drive out of some of America’s most gifted players by failing to teach them that the foundation for success is a catalog of failures. These coaches’ fates and fortunes are so tightly tied to their players, they never chance them being disappointed or angry or sad, which could prompt a defection to a rival coach. Rather than push their players, rather than make them work to improve, Barrett and his ilk coddle them, and in doing so fail to teach one of the realities of basketball: Those who succeed are usually the hardest workers.

  Eventually, players like Brunner or Mann or Cotton or Fortune either fold at the first sign of real adversity or avoid challenges altogether. They never become better players than they were at the moment when Barrett discovered them, and they drift from the basketball scene. Their legacy becomes the woebegone gym talk of AAU coaches comparing failures. “Kenny Brunner was one of the best point guards I ever saw,” a coach will say. “Too bad he didn’t have his head on straight.” It goes unmentioned how his head got twisted in the first place.

  In 2000, Brunner was playing for a newly formed American Basketball Association franchise in San Diego, clinging to one of the bottom rungs of minor-league basketball. “Please don’t make me look like a misfit,” he said when I asked him to talk about Barrett. He was worn down from all the negative press he’d received, which began after he departed Georgetown (“The biggest mistake of my life”). Sitting in a chair on the sideline of the court at the San Diego Sports Arena, he watched as his teammates warmed up before a game. Among them was Lloyd Daniels, once a streetball legend in New York, nicknamed Swee’Pea. Though he spent a few seasons in the NBA, drug abuse and other missteps prevented Daniels from ever reaching his full potential. He was widely viewed as a player who could have been so much more, and Brunner, only twenty years old when we spoke, had a similar aura hovering over him. He was adrift in the basketball netherworld; after the ABA would come the CBA and the NBDL—all the acronyms except the one that Barrett had promised him long ago.

  When asked how he might have avoided becoming a victim of the grassroots machine, Brunner gave a simple answer: “Help.”

  “When Pat found me, my dad was around but not around. Mom—she was not involved in my basketball activities. Grandma was too old. So I did the whole process by myself.”

  None of the Inland Stars was in Brunner’s predicament, but the level of help they received varied. By 2003, Kisha was at best a peripheral figure in Demetrius’s basketball life. She stopped attend
ing away tournaments and made fewer locals ones as well. When Keller bragged to other coaches, “I make the decisions about Demetrius,” he wasn’t exaggerating. The same was true for Terran Carter. Not long after he defected from the Runnin’ Rebels, he was spending nights at Keller’s apartment or sleeping at Demetrius’s house. The two boys became close—Terran the dutiful sidekick to Demetrius’s bandleader—because of the volume of time Terran spent in the Inland Empire. Rachel Carter lived more than seventy miles away in Chatsworth and had two other children. Leaving Terran with Keller was easier than spending three hours in the car shuttling him back and forth to practice and games. Soon, Keller spoke of directing Terran’s future the same way he did of Demetrius’s. “I’m thinking about holding D and Terran back a year in school,” Keller told me. “They’re young for their class.” When I asked what Kisha and Rachel thought of this, he said, “It only matters what I think.”

  Rob and Rome, Sr., were more involved and knew most of what happened with their sons, but they possessed a naïveté perilous in the grassroots game. This manifested itself most obviously in how they trusted that Keller would always do right by their boys simply because they had been with the team since its inception. After Pe’Shon, Justin, and Darius joined the team, I assumed the men would be concerned that their sons’ playing time would be cut. In fact, I didn’t see how it wouldn’t be cut. Yet Rob said, “We’ve been with Joe since the beginning. He wouldn’t treat us like that.”

  John Finn was more suspicious of Keller and, for a while, was the only father who possessed what most would consider a healthy dose of skepticism. But John was more obsessed than the others with how to best position his son to get a college scholarship, and that was his blind spot. If convinced that something was in the best interest of Jordan’s future, he would endure a lot to stay the course. It was John, after all, who so believed in Keller’s initial salesmanship that he moved his family from Orange County to the Inland Empire to be closer to the team’s base.

  While not exactly exposed in the way that Kenny Brunner had been, Demetrius, Terran, Rome, Andrew, and Jordan appeared, at the least, to be in harm’s way if the hopes their parents had for Keller turned out to be misplaced. Hope that he would be a good father figure, hope that he would be loyal to the kids he started with, hope that he held the key to a college scholarship—so many futures riding on a man who to that point had accomplished little more than the printing of a flyer full of falsities.

  The one player who seemed safely insulated from the dangers of the grassroots machine, who would remain unscathed should Keller turn out to be more harmful than he initially appeared, was Justin Hawkins. The difference between him and the other boys was how his mother, Carmen, handled Keller. Much of what she did was just responsible parenting. She attended every game and practice, always questioned Keller’s plans for the team, and monitored who he brought around the boys. But there was shrewdness to her approach. After Justin had been on the team less than six months, I asked Carmen what she thought about playing for Keller. She responded flatly: “Joe is going to use my son to get what he wants, and I’m going use Joe to get what Justin wants.”

  When Keller recruited Justin to the Inland Stars, he no doubt thought Carmen would be another Kisha, another single mom who’d see him as a respite from the overwhelming grind of life, who would essentially turn her child over to him. To an outsider, Carmen fit the image of the burdened inner-city mother. She had too many kids (two) and too few fathers (zero) around to help her raise them. When she began vigorously pursing a college basketball scholarship for Justin, her oldest, she was easily reducible to a cliché: the African American mom hoping basketball gets her son (and her) out of the ghetto.

  But Carmen was no overburdened mother. She was a Georgetown-educated litigator for the Los Angeles City Attorney, an ambitious overachiever going back to when she was a little girl growing up in Compton, where she drummed up jobs around her neighborhood—cutting lawns, washing cars, running errands for the elderly—to earn extra money. She would accompany her mom to bowling alleys and sell her scorekeeping skills to opposing teams for sixty cents a game. If a player got three strikes in a row, she got a bonus, usually a milk shake or a soda. In high school at Long Beach Poly, she took so many college courses taught by professors from nearby Cal State Long Beach (now Long Beach State) that she graduated in 1973 with almost enough credits to qualify as a college sophomore. True to her nature, she also played basketball and volleyball, ran track, and was a member of the Black Student Union, the World Friendship Club, the student council, and the Polyettes, one of the school’s cheerleading squads. She left Poly with a 3.5 grade point average and a full scholarship to the University of California at Santa Cruz, a considerable achievement considering she worked at the May Co. in Lakewood until 10:00 p.m. almost every day.

  UCSC was less than ten years old and, with about 3,000 students, smaller than Poly the year Carmen enrolled. By her count, the school had fewer than 100 black students, but she didn’t feel isolated. Santa Cruz was a progressive place—something of a satellite stage for the counterculture revolution based in San Francisco—and she found several mentors, including J. Herman Blake, the dean of her college. “UCSC gave the appearance of being this liberal arts, laid-back, Earth Shoe–wearing kind of environment. But the professors there were East Coast, Ivy League–educated. So even though they were walking around with a beard down to their knees and in sandals, you had to remember that they were smart.”

  After Santa Cruz, she studied international law at Georgetown and was offered a job at the Justice Department before she graduated. “But then Carter lost and Reagan came in and rescinded the offer.” She returned to Los Angeles and did probate and family law for a sole practitioner, but after a few years she tired of hustling for clients and not having health insurance. She took a job as a litigator for the city and bought a flat-roofed house in Baldwin Hills. It overlooked the Jungle, the apartments near Rancho Cienega Park, but had three bedrooms and a pool and, on a clear day, she could see the skyscrapers downtown.

  Carmen was thirty-five years old and financially stable when, in 1990, she gave birth to Justin. She dated his father for a year and they were engaged briefly, but they broke up just before Justin was born. He was also a lawyer and tangentially involved with his son early on, but then he moved to Atlanta. Two years later, Carmen had Marcus by a different man. “Being older when I had the boys and being economically independent, I looked at the world differently,” she said.

  Her style of parenting was much like her approach to school or work: Do the research; stay organized; work harder than everyone else. When Marcus said he wanted to be an actor, she signed him up for every summer theater workshop that would take him and enrolled him in acting classes in Beverly Hills. He ultimately landed a small part in Akeelah and the Bee and appeared in a few commercials. When nine-year-old Justin said he wanted to be the next Magic Johnson, Carmen signed him up for camps and trainers and, once she realized that the best players were on AAU teams, she placed him on Triple Threat.

  Carmen moved Justin from Triple Threat to Basketball Mathematics to the Runnin’ Rebels to Keller’s team. Some coaches and other parents were put off by her directness, but they’d have been wise to listen to her. Like any good lawyer, she did her research before exposing Justin to the grassroots game. Carmen knew that in the year before Justin joined the Inland Stars, AAU basketball was under scrutiny after Myron Piggie, a Nike-funded coach based in Kansas City, Missouri, was sentenced to thirty-seven months in prison for wire fraud and other crimes. His case received widespread media attention because it was revealed during the federal investigation that he had paid Corey Maggette, Kareem Rush, and Korleone Young (all future NBA players) to play for his grassroots team. He also had earlier been indicted for dealing crack cocaine, which Nike officials claimed to have had no knowledge of when they gave him a lucrative sponsorship deal. Carmen was also aware that the development of basketball players in the country had b
ecome a charged issue. In September 2002, the United States placed sixth at the FIBA World Championships, its worst finish in a major international event. A few months earlier, a record seventeen foreigners, including the number-1 overall pick, were selected in the NBA draft. Those developments prompted discussion about the health of basketball in this country, with some of the sport’s power brokers claiming it was in decline. If you believed the naysayers, the sport was on the brink of ruin, an American institution like General Motors or Ford that might soon be pushed into irrelevance by overseas competitors.

  NBA commissioner David Stern laid some of the blame on the grassroots game. There was a systematic problem with how we developed young basketball players, he said. Unsavory individuals concerned only with making money preyed on kids and failed to teach them fundamental basketball. As a result, the players who would come to wear the red, white, and blue were less prepared than their predecessors to meet challengers from abroad, and many talented kids never made it to the NBA or were so corrupted when they got there that they never reached their full potential. “There is something totally wrong with the developmental system for young players,” Stern said. “There is something out of whack that these world-class athletes get exploited or exposed all the way up.” Stern cited street runners, summer teams, summer camps, and the apparel companies as the exploiters. “It’s a whole industry and everyone knows who the kids are. They’re out there doing things for them, giving them things. … They ultimately get to us, but by that time … they are developed in their ways.”

  It was hard to believe that the root of all American-hoops evil was a coach like Joe Keller, that a former welder and car-alarm installer living in a tired apartment complex in the Inland Empire was what ailed basketball, but Carmen took note. At the very least, she understood that landing a spot on a team like the Inland Stars or SCA didn’t guarantee success. She might not have known the story of Kenny Brunner, but she understood the factors that led to his downfall. “Parents assume these coaches will do right by them,” she said. “They should assume the opposite.”