Carmen had long, wild black hair that she usually hid beneath a baseball cap. She often wore sweatshirts or T-shirts with the team’s logo on them. She talked loudly, was rarely without a Bluetooth headset in one ear, and always seemed to be carrying on three conversations at once. She’d be arranging an audition for Marcus while talking to a trainer about working out with Justin while conferencing with a colleague. She drove Justin from Baldwin Hills to Rancho Cucamonga every day after school, forty-five miles that she covered without complaint, and she often stayed long after practice, tagging along as Keller went to dinner with another parent or insisting she be allowed to sit in on a coaches’ meetings. “How else am I going to know what Joe is up to?” she said. “He is not going to tell me.”
Carmen had been something of a den mother with the Runnin’ Rebels, and she tried to assume the same role on the Inland Stars. She devised a comprehensive academic-support program, which included collecting academic progress reports from the players each semester and creating reference binders for them containing relevant information, such as the NCAA’s requirements for being eligible to compete as a freshman in college. She would review class schedules and advise parents if their son missed an opportunity to take a core requirement early. If a player was struggling in a class, she would help him find a tutor.
It required little effort from Keller, and he green-lighted the arrangement. “Carmen is going to be an academic adviser to the program,” he said. But when it came time to actually implement her ideas, Keller failed to get progress reports for Terran and Demetrius and didn’t push them to comply. He would brag about his new academic-support program to kids and parents he courted but then brush Carmen off when she asked for his help. Eventually she let the program die, although she continued to make annual binders for Justin, which lined a shelf in his bedroom.
Carmen organized tours and informational lectures in the cities the team visited. Before away tournaments, she researched what colleges were nearby so the boys could visit them. You never knew if one day they might be up for a scholarship to one of those schools, she figured. She also told Keller about museums and landmarks worth visiting. “I would tell him about the former slave plantation the boys should see and he would say how great that sounded, but then we’d get there and he’d take the team go-cart racing instead.” She dragged Justin to the colleges and the museums anyway. “I knew what was best for my son, and it wasn’t playing video games in a hotel room all day.”
Keller initially tolerated Carmen, then he just ignored her. She wondered if Keller hated women and was surprised to hear that, like many of the players he would go on to coach, Keller was raised by a hardworking single mom. Diane Keller was twenty and still living with her mother in East Islip, New York, when, in 1970, she gave birth to Joseph Albert Keller. Keller never met his father. He knew his last name, Pellegrino, like the sparkling water, and that he was Italian. Diane told her son that he looked and acted nothing like his father, as if that side of Keller’s DNA had been dormant.
One story Keller enjoyed telling about his mother occurred when he was in the eighth grade. “I had this baseball coach—he was a hell of a coach, but, man, he would rip into you. One game, I did something—I don’t know what it was, but it was probably my fault—and he grabbed me by my jersey and just started cussing me out. I mean, this guy could yell. My mom was over by the snack bar. She was buying some snacks or something, and she saw him and just went crazy. She grabbed this ice chest and carried it over to the field where the coach was and she threw it at him. She threw it onto the field. It was crazy, but I loved it.”
Before Keller’s senior year, Diane followed her older brother to Riverside and got a job at General Dynamics, the defense-industry contractor. Keller continued to live with her even after he graduated from high school, and she regularly attended family events, including the birth of his first son, Joey. She eventually retired and moved to Victorville, a desert town between the Inland Empire and Las Vegas, and Keller saw her less, but they talked on the phone regularly. “I owe her everything,” he would say. “No one could love their mom more than I love mine.”
Given the environment in which he was raised, one would think that Keller would have a fondness for strong-willed single moms. If his favorite story was about the time his mom threw an ice chest at his coach, it was reasonable to believe he could appreciate Carmen’s dedication. But when he said, “The perfect team is a team of all single moms,” he meant moms like Kisha. Carmen was a thorn in his side, always around, always asking questions, always making sure the grassroots machine didn’t devour her son.
Justin, like all newcomers, experienced an initial rush upon joining the Inland Stars. Routing opponents, winning tournaments, bringing home trophies, that was part of it, but there was also the gear. Each player received what Brunner would have called a care pack: two sets of uniforms and warm-ups, two pairs of shoes (one white and one black), and several T-shirts. The uniforms were better quality than what they’d worn on previous teams, and Justin liked how Keller bought everything extra large, knowing the boys liked baggy shorts and long jerseys.
The schedule of tournaments the team would attend included events in Portland, Arizona, Baltimore, Las Vegas, and Nationals, which in 2003 would be held in Newport News, Virginia. Most 12-and-Under teams didn’t have the funding to make two of those trips.
Joining the Inland Stars felt like stepping under the bright lights. “It’s like going from the [Milwaukee] Bucks to the Lakers,” Justin said. Larger crowds attended their games, more people knew their names, and Keller claimed they were being watched at all times by scouting services, college coaches, and even sports agents. Justin went from simply playing basketball on the Runnin’ Rebels to feeling as if he were playing for his future every time he stepped on the floor.
At a tournament in 2003, the team entered the gym at Chandler (Arizona) High School during halftime of the preceding game. The two teams on the floor were in the middle of halftime warm-ups, and fans stood talking at the base of the bleachers or lined up at a table where a young girl sold snacks. As Demetrius led the team into the gym and up the first set of stands, almost everyone turned to watch. Players on the floor stopped shooting until the Inland Stars were seated, and parents pointed at Demetrius or Xavier, who was the tallest boy at the tournament.
During the tournament’s second day, Billy Donovan, coach of the University of Florida, watched the Inland Stars play before his son’s team, the New York Gauchos, took the floor. Later he told Keller how impressed he was with his squad.
“I’ll take three of your kids right now,” Donovan said, half joking. He pointed to Demetrius, Xavier, and Rome.
Keller called Demetrius over.
“What schools do you like?” Donovan asked him.
“Florida, Coach, of course.” He was smiling; he knew to be diplomatic.
Donovan laughed. “You aren’t just saying that, are you?”
“Of course not, Coach. Florida is one of my favorites.”
“Good to hear,” Donovan said, and he shook Demetrius’s hand.
Justin saw Keller and Demetrius hobnobbing with Donovan, and it made him feel, to borrow one of Keller’s favorite phrases, “big-time.” Just as Coach Joe had said, important people were watching.
Teaming with Demetrius was better than Justin had imagined. Defenses keyed on Demetrius, which led to open jump shots and clear lines to the basket. Demetrius was also egoless and unselfish, focused as much on making the perfect pass as the picturesque shot. But what Justin and the other new players liked most was how they felt around Demetrius. He was so much better than everyone else that he had to be destined for college or the NBA. Teamed with him, they felt unique. Teamed with him, they felt closer to their dreams.
Against the San Diego Golden Stars on the final day of the tournament, Demetrius broke out after a turnover by a San Diego guard and caught the ball around midcourt, with no one between him and the basket. He ran at the hoop from stra
ightaway and then rose up and dunked the ball one-handed. It was the first time he had dunked in a game, and when he landed he didn’t immediately run back on defense. He stood under the basket, a little stunned that he had pulled it off.
Keller quickly called a time-out and ran onto the floor, along with most of the Inland Stars. They crowded around Demetrius, slapping his back and hands. Keller kept rubbing the top of Demetrius’s head.
“How did that feel?” Keller shouted as the mob moved toward the sideline.
Demetrius was confused. “It feels just like any of the other butt-whippings, Coach.”
“No, D, the dunk. How did it feel to dunk in a game?”
“Ooohhhhh. I gotta say, it feels pretty good. I actually thought it would feel even better. Still, it feels pretty good.”
The San Diego players huddled at their end of the court. Their coach lectured them, but they weren’t paying attention. Among them were a few players Keller had scouted and passed on, and they glanced longingly at the joyous display down the sideline. Given the choice, they would have traded places with Justin or Terran or Xavier or any of the Inland Stars. Given the choice, they’d have preferred to be associated with greatness over a 60-point loss every time. Like most children, they saw only the glory. It was up to the parents to see what lurked behind it.
7
Joe Keller yells at Rome Draper while Rome Draper, Sr., and Tom Stengel, Sr., look on.
Less than twenty-four hours before the biggest game of the season, before the hyperbole and hope were exposed as either fact or folly, Keller sat in a booth at an Outback Steakhouse on the outskirts of Baltimore, doing what he always did before monumental games: explaining how his team would probably lose.
Keller was not bound by tradition or routine or superstition. Many of his actions seemed improvised, which could be maddening to those affiliated with the team. He scheduled or canceled practice at the last minute or pulled the team from or entered it in tournaments with only a few days’ notice. “I like to keep people on their toes,” he said, as if even his procrastination and disorganization were planned. The one custom Keller followed with some consistency was to grow nervous and contemplative before a big game and to be less guarded about his fears and hopes. You learned the most about Keller by talking to him before an important game. Mostly, he worried how a loss would derail his dreams.
“We’re going to get killed tomorrow. It won’t even be close,” he said in Baltimore. “We played worse today than I’ve ever seen. Demetrius, I don’t know what the hell is wrong with him. He played like shit today. So did everyone else.” Keller bent forward until his forehead rested on the knotty wood table. “I’m not ordering a steak. I’m going to order a noose so I can hang myself.”
At first, predicting doom came across as Keller’s way of managing expectations. If the team won, if he was proven wrong, the significance of the triumph would make whether or not he predicted it a minor quibble. But if they lost, well, he knew it all along, so it lessened the blow. Also, to be wrong was to appear weak, and Keller couldn’t afford to come across as unknowing—not even on his team’s chances of winning—when his advancement relied so heavily on perception. By the time of the team’s trip to Baltimore in March 2003, his behavior was clearly less about his ego or managing expectations than it was about control—or, rather, his loss of it the moment the boys took the floor. So much of his life was spent building the team, tuning it, but when it came time for his work to be judged, for the boys to come through on a big stage, he had very little say in the matter. The way Keller worked a game—calling every offensive set, setting the defense, always putting new players on the floor—was suited more for football, where a coach’s influence factors in almost every play. Basketball, according to Phil Jackson, the Chicago Bulls’ and Los Angeles Lakers’ coach, is more like jazz, because of its improvisational nature. “If someone drops a note, someone else must step into the vacuum and drive the beat that sustains the team,” he said. That someone could not be the coach, and that caused Keller great stress.
Every time the boys took the court, Keller’s future was in play, and the prospect of a setback—even if it was remote—exposed a vulnerability that he’d otherwise buried. This did not happen prior to games against the Runnin’ Rebels or another team he knew a lot about, as even he couldn’t sell himself on the idea of a loss. But if he knew little about an opponent or, worse, if the opponent had talent, he became almost paralyzed by fear. He couldn’t sleep. He drank more. He treated the boys even more irrationally. “He gets himself all worked up,” Tom said. “But most of the time he doesn’t know what he’s getting worked up about.”
In Baltimore, the source of Keller’s anxiety was clearly defined. The following evening, in the semifinals of a tournament called Bang With the Big Boys, the Inland Stars would face Team Maryland. After Hoosier Hoops had defeated the Inland Stars at the 12-and-Under Nationals, they lost to Team Maryland in the finals, leaving no doubt who was the best team in the country. Before the team left for Baltimore, I’d asked Keller to name the five best sixth-graders in the nation, and he answered without a second of thought: “Deuce, Chad, Leshon, Pe’Shon, and D.” Deuce was, of course, Rolandan Finch of Hoosier Hoops. Chad Wilson was Team Maryland’s lead guard, and Leshon Edwards played for another Baltimore team. Keller’s evaluation of Wilson before the tournament was: “He’s strong, but I don’t know how good he is going to end up being. I’d take Pe’Shon over him, because I think Pe’Shon is going to be taller.” At Outback, when Keller was deciding between a noose and a T-bone, Wilson became “the best guard we’ve ever played against, better than Deuce.” Keller knew next to nothing about what offense Team Maryland ran or what defense the Inland Stars would face. Still, he assertively denounced his team’s chances for a victory. “We won’t win, and we might lose by fifty.”
Contributing to Keller’s worries was the Inland Stars’ performance in the first game of the tournament. They had defeated the Mitchellville (Maryland) Trail Blazers, a group of white kids with a distinct size disadvantage, by only three points. There was a simple explanation for the poor showing: jet lag. The boys had not arrived at their hotel until after 10:00 p.m. EST on Thursday night, and because of the time change some weren’t able to fall asleep until after midnight. To make a 9:00 a.m. tip-off Friday morning, they woke at 7:00 a.m. (which felt like 4:00 a.m.). During warm-ups, they looked like sleepwalkers. “Poor Rome,” his mother, Sharon, said just before tip-off. “I don’t think he even knows what day it is.” Their performance in an afternoon game seemed to confirm this theory. After a round of naps back at the hotel, they shredded Florida Gulf Coast 53–28. Justin and Pe’Shon limited Kenny Boynton, Florida’s star guard, to only 4 points, and Demetrius scored 14 in the first half when the Inland Stars pulled away. That should have calmed Keller’s nerves, but at a team meeting back at the hotel on Friday evening, he focused only on the first game. “We fly across the country for the biggest tournament of the year, and you guys come out and play like shit,” he said. He stood next to a kitchenette in his hotel room, looking back toward the door and the boys, who were strewn on the floor and still in their warm-ups. Tom and Rome, Sr., stood to Keller’s left, nodding at his criticisms. “Why the hell did we fly out here, then? So you could embarrass yourselves?”
Team meetings always dragged on too long. A “short” meeting was thirty minutes. Most lasted at least an hour. Keller’s speeches were rambling, repetitious outbursts, followed by more of the same from his assistant coaches. A sampling of Keller’s remarks during the meeting in Baltimore, which lasted forty-two minutes: “If you don’t take this shit seriously, you are going nowhere in life. … Terran, you have become D’s little sidekick, and you need to make sure he is in line and D needs to make sure you are in line. That’s what being teammates is all about. … If I or Coach Rome or Coach Tom say something and I catch you looking the other way or rolling your eyes, I will sit you the whole damn game. I don’t care who it is. … Don�
��t be staying up all night playing NBA Live. I want everyone in bed by eleven p.m. … When I was a young guy, I got mixed up with the wrong girl and had a kid and got into trouble. That’s the shit you guys have to avoid. … Who here doesn’t have money for food? Terran? How the hell do you not have money? I gave you forty dollars yesterday. … Rome, I love you. You bust your ass and never complain. As long as I am a coach, you are welcome on my team. … Shit, it stinks in here. Who took their shoes off? Justin, put your damn shoes back on!”
Tom spoke after Keller. In a soft voice, he asked the boys to stay focused and play “their game,” boilerplate stuff. He then turned to Demetrius, who was seated below the window next to the door, and without naming him said loudly, “Tomorrow I don’t want to see or hear any of you complaining to the officials. The more you talk to them, the less fouls they are going to call for us. Keep your mouth shut and play.” He took a step farther into the middle of the room, puffed out his chest, and leaned over Demetrius. “You know, real men don’t complain. Grow some hair on your balls and be men. If you are not going to start acting like men, you might as well get a slit down there.”
Keller cussed at the boys every day, but this was more graphic. The players looked at one another, wondering how to react. Justin pulled the front of his sweatshirt over his face to cover his smile. Little Rome looked up at his father, who was as startled by Tom’s words as any of the boys were. Tom was dead serious, but the boys were holding back laughter. Finally, Rome, Sr., said, “Tom, come on, man,” and the boys erupted. Demetrius screamed, “Ha!” and rolled onto his side and Terran piled on top of him. Keller even smiled. But once the laughter subsided, he quickly put the team back on point.
Play Their Hearts Out Page 11
