Play Their Hearts Out

by George Dohrmann

  From those contrasting images alone, one could have guessed how the game would begin. Team Maryland built leads of 8–2 and then 12–2 and then 16–4, overwhelming the Inland Stars with its energy. It helped that Wilson had come up with a better strategy to contain Demetrius. He asked Murdock to guard him more closely when he didn’t have the ball so as to make him work a little harder to get it. When he did receive a pass, other Maryland defenders shaded toward him but they didn’t rush to double him. It gave the impression that they were ready to help on defense but didn’t leave a man wide open for Demetrius to find with a quick pass. Demetrius drew a second defender to him often, but when he supplied his teammates with a pass that gave them an open look at the basket, they failed to convert. Successive possessions in the second quarter illustrated this. On the first, Demetrius got the ball on the right wing and blew past Murdock, only to find two defenders moving into his path. The closest defender had left Andrew wide open atop the key, and Demetrius bounced him a perfect pass. Andrew caught it and, in one motion, released a 3-pointer that, like so many of his shots, was assumed to be good when it left his hands. But it clacked off the front of the rim, one of six open 3-pointers Andrew missed in the first sixteen minutes. On the following possession, some nifty passing between Terran and Demetrius found Rome clear fourteen feet from the hoop on the baseline. Yet his shot went long, his third miss of the half.

  The Inland Stars trailed 32–24 at the intermission, and if it weren’t for Pe’Shon’s 7 points and solid defense on Wilson, it would have been worse. Trailing by such a large margin was not something with which Keller or any of the boys were familiar. As they exited for the locker room, Demetrius pushed through the door and shouted, “I can’t do it all by myself!” Rome shot him a glance. Justin rolled his eyes. Pe’Shon said, “What does that mean?” and walked toward Demetrius. Rome, Sr., said, “Come on, come on,” and he put his arm around Pe’Shon and turned him away. Later, several players would remark that it was the first time Demetrius didn’t act like a team player.

  Keller walked into the locker room and huddled with Tom off to one side.

  “Joe, we are not going to win if we keep trying to force the ball in to D in the post. They’ve got that figured out.”

  Keller agreed.

  “But we need to get the ball in his hands. Let’s move him to the point. You’ve talked all year about making him the point guard—why not do it now?”

  It wasn’t a bad idea. The Inland Stars’ shooters had proved incapable of making Team Maryland pay for shading and doubling Demetrius. With him handling the ball, he would have more opportunities to drive and get fouled, which would open up the game. There were other options: Pe’Shon was playing well, so was Jordan, but Keller didn’t have enough confidence in either of them to make them the primary offensive option in such a crucial game. Tom’s idea, however, also reeked of desperation. Demetrius was going to make his debut as point guard against the defending national champions? It was akin to moving a wide receiver to quarterback in the middle of the Super Bowl.

  Keller mulled over Tom’s idea for a minute and then turned to his team. “When we come out in the second half, D is going to run the point. He’ll look to drive and get us some easy baskets.”

  By shifting Demetrius to the point, Keller risked highlighting one of his weaknesses: ballhandling. Demetrius knew this and, as they exited the locker room, he whispered to Keller, “Coach Joe, I don’t want to play the point.”

  “D, you’ve got to do it.”

  To start the second half, Demetrius took an inbounds pass from Terran and brought the ball upcourt. His apprehension over his new role was obvious. Rather than burst up the court, as Keller and Tom had envisioned, he gingerly advanced the ball. Team Maryland was sitting back in a zone defense, and as he crossed the half line, he pushed a soft pass in the direction of Rome on the wing. A Team Maryland defender easily stepped in front and stole it and scored. On the next trip, Demetrius looked even less steady. Louis Wilson, like any astute coach, pounced on this. He shouted a few words, and suddenly Chad Wilson and Kendall Marshall ran toward Demetrius. He broke to the left, trying to get around them, but Chad Wilson took advantage of his high dribbling to pluck the ball away and cruise in for yet another uncontested score.

  Demetrius didn’t chase after him. He turned to the bench and screamed, “I told you I didn’t want to play point!”

  Keller wheeled to Tom and yelled, “I told you this was a stupid fucking idea!”

  Without being told, Pe’Shon returned to the point and tried to calm his teammates. But Team Maryland continued to build on its lead. Midway through the third quarter, Pe’Shon came up with a steal and scored on a driving layup to cut Maryland’s lead to 8, and then Keller inexplicably pulled him from the game, inserting Andrew, who had missed all nine of his shots to that point.

  Tom and Rome, Sr., tried unsuccessfully to convince Keller to put Xavier in the game and rest Demetrius, even if only for a minute or two.

  “Are you crazy?” he yelled. “Man, sit down!”

  On the court, Andrew missed more open shots, and Demetrius played hard on offense but lagged on defense because of fatigue. With the exception of Pe’Shon and Jordan, who led the team with 16 points, every one of the Inland Stars had his worst game of the season. They never got closer than 8 points in the second half and lost 57–45.

  Athletes carry forever the triumphs from their youth. Anyone who has ever competed in team sports can recall with amazing clarity feats that occurred decades earlier. A fastball launched over the fence in the ninth inning. The touchdown pass that won the game. The last-second shot that miraculously found the net. Ask those same athletes about their failures and their recall is often more precise. The missed free throw. The dropped pass. The swing and miss and shameful walk back to the bench. Often, the richness of detail in those stories surpasses those from their triumphs. As E. M. Forster wrote, a win always seems shallow; it is the loss that is so profound and suggests “nasty infinities.”

  The Inland Stars would forever remember the loss to Team Maryland. What they would take with them beyond the sting of defeat depended on Keller, on what he said in those indelible minutes when the boys were most distraught. Standing before them in the locker room, Keller, like his players, had tears in his eyes.

  “I just wish we would have won,” he said, his voice full of regret. “You know, I didn’t tell you guys this, but I missed the birth of my little girl to be here.” He paused and looked down at his feet. “I really wish we would have won. It would have been much better if we had won.”

  10

  Justin Hawkins and Andrew Bock

  No parent was more distressed after the loss at Nationals than Rob. Almost all the boys performed poorly, but Andrew’s struggles stood out. “I’ve just never seen Andrew play that bad before,” Rob said. “I don’t know what happened.”

  Andrew missed twelve shots, including eight from 3-point range, had numerous turnovers, and was incapable of slowing Kendall Marshall. More than anything, his missed 3-pointers in the first half torpedoed the team’s chances. Had he made just one or two, it might have forced Team Maryland to abandon the collapsing defense designed to limit Demetrius, freeing him up to score inside. Andrew’s misses also drained his teammates’ confidence. They were so used to seeing his long shots find the net that, with each miss, the notion that it just wasn’t their night sunk in a little more. For the entirety of the game’s first sixteen minutes, the boys looked for something to spark them, to help them rise up and seize momentum, but each of Andrew’s misses hammered them down a little bit more.

  It would have been easy to chalk Andrew’s performance up to one of those games when nothing goes right, and Rob would eventually come to that conclusion. But at first his concerns ran deeper. Upon returning to California, he adjusted his work schedule so he could spend more time in the gym working Andrew out, attempting to fix whatever it was that had plagued him against Team Maryland. Keller, in contras
t, took Violet, his son Jordan, his new daughter, Alyssa, and Demetrius to Tom’s vacation home on the Colorado River. While Rob and Andrew holed up in a gym for at least three hours a day, shooting 3-pointers and working on ballhandling, Keller and Demetrius raced Sea-Doos; at night they ate barbecue, and Keller drank margaritas under starry skies.

  When practices resumed at the Rancho Cucamonga Family Sports Center in August, the fruits of Andrew’s labor were evident. In one workout I attended, he was the best player on the floor, better even than Demetrius. The release on his shot had become more natural and he could get it off quicker, which made him more effective when guarded closely. He also penetrated with more authority and was less afraid to get his shot blocked or be bounced around by bigger defenders. The boys adopted a word for a shot that looked good upon release: wet. It became the adjective of choice to describe Andrew’s game at that time. When Andrew cast a 3-pointer, chants of “Wet!” emanated from every corner of the gym. “That boy is just wet right now,” Demetrius said. “No one can stop him.”

  Seeing Andrew return to form calmed Rob, as did the fact that Keller didn’t bring in a host of new players in the first few weeks after Nationals. It was usually a tumultuous time as Keller sought to improve the team through new additions. Rob and other parents were pleased with what appeared to be Keller’s measured approach to improving the squad. “Maybe Joe finally realizes he’s better off working with what he’s got,” Rome, Sr., said.

  But while riding Sea-Doos and sipping margaritas, Keller had plotted the best way to rid the team of several players he saw as superfluous. At the time, the roster consisted of fourteen players, including some who didn’t make the trip to Nationals and others who never got off the bench. Keller considered the ideal roster size to be ten kids, and it was easy to see who the favored ten were: Pe’Shon, Andrew, Jordan, Justin, Tommy, and Darius in the backcourt; Rome, Demetrius, Terran, and Xavier in the frontcourt. It appeared Keller needed to trim the roster by only four, but in discussions with me after he returned from Tom’s river house, he said he wanted to cut seven or eight boys. “I need a couple extra spots to get some missing pieces,” he explained.

  If Keller held to that plan, he would need to cut at least a few players who had been major contributors. Rome, Sr., might have interpreted Keller’s inaction in the first few weeks of practice as a vote of confidence in the existing players, but it was merely a pause while he figured out how to remove kids while subjecting himself to the least amount of wrath.

  There was precedent for how he should have proceeded. Shortly after he found Demetrius and started the Inland Stars, Keller had added a shooting guard named Casey James to the team. Casey was white, which made him unique among the kids Keller took on, but his father, Dennis Dickens, had played briefly for the San Diego Rockets, (which would become the NBA’s Houston Rockets), and Keller was intrigued by a good pedigree. Casey’s role on the Inland Stars was clearly defined from the start: He camped out at the 3-point line and, when Demetrius or another player got double-teamed, they kicked it out to Casey for the open 3-pointer. At the end of the season, Dennis approached Keller at the team banquet and asked what he thought about Casey playing another year. “I have a couple really good new guys coming in,” Keller told him. “The best thing, to me, would be for Casey to play for someone else next season, on a team where he would be the primary scorer. It would help him get confidence in other parts of his game.” Dennis didn’t like to hear that his son could be replaced so easily, but he appreciated Keller’s honesty. Whenever Casey or Dennis saw Keller after that, they exchanged handshakes and hugs.

  Keller should have learned a lesson from that experience: Deal with kids and their parents honestly, and a parting can go smoothly. It is never easy to tell a parent that other kids are more talented, but better to be forthright. That’s particularly true in the small community of AAU basketball. Casey might get stronger, might develop other aspects of his game. Keller might one day want him back. “A kid you don’t like now might grow a few inches and then you’ll really like him,” Keller said. “You don’t want to burn any bridges.”

  But he did burn bridges. Casey’s departure was the last one he handled so diplomatically, Dennis the last parent he treated with respect.

  In early September, Keller announced he was splitting the Inland Stars into two teams, the “Black” and “Silver” squads. The best kids would make up the Black (or “A” team), while the others were on the Silver. “If a kid performs well enough on the Silver team, he will move up to the Black team,” he explained to parents. “And no kid’s spot is safe. If Demetrius isn’t playing well, I’ll send him down to the Silver team in a second.” That was, of course, a load of crap. Keller hoped that some parents wouldn’t stand for their kids being demoted and would leave in protest. To increase the probability of discontent, he picked to head the team a young, clueless coach who had been hounding him for a job.

  Demetrius, Rome, Andrew, Jordan, Terran, Justin, and a few other notables made up the Black team, while an assortment of recent additions and others such as Tommy, LaBradford Franklin, and Kendall Williams, a talented young guard, were on the Silver. Two players left instantly, and Kendall and LaBradford, who had been on and off the roster for years, depending on Keller’s mood, departed a few months later after starring for the Silver team but never getting promoted. Having served its purpose, the Silver team was quietly folded.

  For his next move, Keller used a silent veto to kick Xavier off the team. He stopped calling Terrance Mitchell, Xavier’s former AAU coach on the Sacramento Raiders, to arrange for Xavier to come to practice or games. As for his promise of shoes and uniforms for Terrance’s younger team: “I never got my gear,” Terrance said. “Joe did me wrong.” When asked why Xavier would be released when the Inland Stars were thin up front, Keller said, “That kid moves like a truck. He’s not worth the airfare.”

  Keller targeted Darius next. Though he considered him a talented player, Keller had tired of his parents’ gripes about playing time. A parting seemed mutually beneficial, but Keller still chose deception over honesty. Before a tournament in September, Keller told Darius that he would start at point guard in the opening game but then left him on the bench for that contest and for most of the weekend.

  “That was it. I left,” Darius said. “I was just tired of all Keller’s lies. I wouldn’t play for Keller anymore, even if I didn’t have a team. Keller doesn’t care about anybody but … Demetrius.”

  Keller didn’t wish for or orchestrate the next departure. Unbeknownst to anyone, Bill Howard, Pe’Shon’s father, had spoken to Louis Wilson, Team Maryland’s coach, at Nationals. Wilson told Bill that Pe’shon, not Demetrius, was the Inland Stars’ best player. “He has that East Coast toughness,” Wilson said, and he hinted that if Pe’Shon played for him, he would be featured more. Emboldened by Wilson’s words, Bill called Keller and named his terms: Commit to Pe’Shon as your starting point guard for the season and pay all our travel costs, or we’ll leave the Inland Stars for Team Maryland. Keller could have afforded the added expense of getting Bill and Pe’Shon to tournaments, but he wasn’t going to let Bill dictate his actions at a time when he was looking to thin the roster. A few months later, Bill moved to Maryland so Pe’Shon could play for a coach “who believed in him.”

  After Pe’Shon left, the roster seemed thin enough. At the guard spots, Keller had Justin, Jordan, Andrew, and Tommy. In the frontcourt he had Rome, Terran, and Demetrius. He needed to add more size up front and possibly another strong guard, but the rest of the players appeared likely to return for another year. Yet Keller insisted that he needed to make one more cut. He lamented the team’s abundance of “slow guards who can shoot.” He named Tommy, of course, but he also singled out Andrew.

  Judging those two players merely on ability was an easy call: Tommy had to go. During the practices in early August when Andrew shone, Tommy struggled. In one session, Andrew hounded Tommy on defense, making it difficult for him to
even get the ball across half-court. Rob attended most of those practices and came away convinced that Andrew would be the Inland Stars’ starting point guard once again. Keller, however, seemed to be watching a different set of practices. “Andrew looks slow. He hasn’t gotten any faster since he first joined the team.” As for Tommy: “I think he’s getting better. He’s never going to be a big player for us, but he’s getting better.” When his assessment was questioned, he barked, “Who knows more about basketball, you or me?”

  Keller could fall in love with a kid at first glance, and he could lose faith in a player’s ability just as quickly. Only six months earlier, at the tournament in Baltimore, Keller and the coach of the Severna Park Green Hornets were watching their teams warm up when the Severna Park coach pointed to Andrew and said, “That one and Demetrius. That’s your bread and butter right there.” Keller agreed, calling Andrew his second-best player. But after watching him struggle against Kendall Marshall at Nationals, Keller questioned whether Andrew should even be on the team.

  “Can I afford to take up two spots on slow guards?” Keller said. His real dilemma seemed to be: Could he keep a slowish guard on the roster whose dad wasn’t lining his pockets? Tom had already promised to increase his support of the team to $30,000 in exchange for a spot for Tommy another season. Pared down, Keller’s choice was: Andrew, the better player, or Tommy, his cash cow.

  Rob was oblivious to the fragility of his son’s position, and for good reason. Had he been told that Keller was considering cutting Andrew in favor of Tommy, he would have laughed. Not only was Andrew better, but Tom and Tommy had been with the team for only a year, whereas Rob and Andrew were among the “core” that Keller often praised. Rob ran practices when Keller couldn’t, and Lisa made sure boys without rides arrived at workouts and games on time. In the last year, Rob had taken on even more responsibility, running a team of younger players Keller thought had potential. Rob assumed this bought him some loyalty, and he also presumed that if Keller had doubts about Andrew, he would come to him and discuss them. But Keller wasn’t the same person from three years before or even a season earlier. The guy whose straightforward approach had earned the respect of Dennis Dickens and Casey had given way to a person with no allegiances, save the one Darius so shrewdly pointed out—to Demetrius. If he was willing to miss the birth of his daughter to try to win Nationals, why would he feel obligated to a player he no longer deemed vital to the mission?