Play Their Hearts Out

by George Dohrmann

  Keller had prepared for that question. For days after Merino set up the meeting, Keller turned the numbers over in his head. If Vaccaro wanted to talk money, how much should he ask for? He knew what Barrett got in his deals with Nike and then Adidas, but he wasn’t as established as Barrett. He concluded that if he asked for too much—say, $100,000—Vaccaro might just show him the door. “Fifty thousand a year to cover expenses,” Keller said, and then he listed his product needs, which included hundreds of pairs of shoes and jerseys and other gear.

  “It’s done,” Vaccaro said, so swiftly that it took Keller a few seconds to realize that all his demands had been met.

  As Vaccaro showed Keller and Merino out, he mentioned a delay in signing a contract because Reebok didn’t officially employ him yet. It would take a few weeks for him to put together a formal offer. Keller barely heard him, as he was in a kind of giddy shock. No more begging for Pat Barrett’s scraps. No more having to take on kids just because they had rich parents.

  Finally, he had made it.

  Keller’s landing of a shoe deal would not shake basketball in the way that Vaccaro’s move to Reebok did, but it carried great significance. Until Vaccaro met with Keller, no shoe company had explicitly associated itself with the coach of kids so young. There had been teams—such as the SCA squad that played the first incarnation of the Inland Stars at Riverside Community College in 1996—that appeared to be sponsored by Nike or Adidas, but these were cases when a sponsored coach shifted shoes or money he got for his older team to a younger group. Officially, the targets of the sponsorship had been the high-school-age kids.

  Keller understood the message this sent, but he was too focused on the financial windfall he stood to land to dwell on it. He began looking at homes in nicer areas of the Inland Empire, and he considered purchasing a new car for Violet. He looked into tournaments the team could attend in areas of the country they hadn’t yet visited. Mostly, he reveled in the importance a shoe contract bestowed upon him. No longer would he be known as the dupe who lost Tyson Chandler. He was now a pioneering coach who’d gotten a shoe deal for kids who weren’t even in high school.

  “That shoe deal, it shows you have credibility,” he said. “And the product you get, you can bribe people with. In a way, the product is more important than the money. In this business, with the kids, the product is what matters most.”

  Eager to fill the boys’ closets with new shoes, jerseys, warm-ups, and other Reebok paraphernalia, Keller couldn’t wait until Vaccaro signed his contract so he could then sign his. After a month, he was anxious. After two months, he grew agitated. After three months, he left messages for Vaccaro and spoke with Merino, who assured him that Vaccaro was a man of his word and it was just taking time for him to get settled in his new post.

  “Something is up,” Keller said. “I’ve been screwed before. I know what it feels like.”

  After Vaccaro’s hiring by Reebok became official, he learned two things that altered his plan for building Reebok’s image among the kids of Southern California. First, the timetable for when Reebok wanted their shoes on the feet of some of America’s best young players was sooner rather than later, which flew in the face of his long-term plan of building through the sponsorship of the youthful Inland Stars. Second, Vaccaro realized that the fledging grassroots division at Reebok had signed a sponsorship agreement with a coach in Southern California just before he was hired. That coach had recently been let go by Adidas and, although he did not have any notable players at the time, he was more established than Keller.

  His name: Pat Barrett.

  Vaccaro didn’t particularly want to get into business with Barrett. Former UNLV and Fresno State coach Jerry Tarkanian, a friend of Vaccaro’s, once referred to Barrett as the “biggest whore I ever met” for how he tried to profit from one of his players. Vaccaro thought little of Barrett as a person, but he also knew that he could be useful. Also, breaking Barrett’s contract would cost Reebok money.

  Vaccaro could have sponsored both SCA and the Inland Stars, but as he thought longer about the implications of signing a team of middle school kids to a shoe contract, he decided it was not something he wanted to add to his legacy. He was regularly lampooned for opening the door for the shoe companies, agents, and other profiteers to infiltrate youth basketball, but over time he had found peace with his role. Tennis players, golfers, gymnasts, swimmers—athletes in numerous sports—were courted in the same way Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady, and LeBron James were when they were on the grassroots circuit, and Vaccaro believed those who disparaged basketball stars going pro straight out of high school were hypocritical. “A white tennis player can sign a contract with Nike when she is sixteen and no one says a word, but if a black kid from Compton does it, they say that it is wrong.”

  Vaccaro liked to take stands, but being the first to sponsor a younger team didn’t feel like a stand. It felt like lowering the bar, and he was too old to fight that fight again. It didn’t help that, as he called around to further investigate Keller, he heard mixed reviews about his morals. “Look, we are all in it for the money, but from what I am hearing about Joe, he is so driven by it that it is scary,” Vaccaro said.

  How Keller learned that his Reebok deal was dead would have pleased the kids and parents Keller had discarded over the years. Neither Vaccaro nor Merino called Keller to tell him that Reebok was no longer interested; he was left to assume that from their silence.

  At a tournament in early December, Keller stood on the sidelines watching Demetrius during warm-ups. Kids of all ages lined the court to watch Demetrius finish dunk after dunk. His latest slam involved throwing it off the backboard and dunking it with one hand, and it elicited loud cheers from the young boys around the court. “Look at that,” Keller said. “Sonny won’t work with me. But I know someone is going to put their logo on that kid.”

  Near the end of 2003, the Inland Stars played in a tournament in the San Fernando Valley. Among those in attendance was Dana Pump, who along with his twin brother, David, ran the Pump N Run teams sponsored by Adidas. Dana and David had learned under Vaccaro when he was at Adidas and then branched out into areas even Vaccaro hadn’t tried. They opened a consulting business that universities hired to aid in the search for new coaches and athletic directors, and they partnered with a Southern California ticket broker to help college coaches scalp their Final Four tickets. Most people couldn’t tell David and Dana apart but knew it was good to be their friend, as they seemed to know every coach, player, and parent who mattered. The brothers were keenly aware of their importance, enough so to poke fun at it. Around the time Dana Pump was watching the Inland Stars in the San Fernando Valley, some of the biggest names in college coaching received a Christmas present from the Pumps: bobble-head dolls the twins had made of themselves.

  After one of the Inland Stars’ games, Dana sidled up to Keller and casually mentioned that he had heard about his failed deal with Reebok.

  “Yeah, Sonny did me wrong,” Keller said.

  Dana inquired about some of the Inland Stars, where they were from and how old they were, then suggested that he might be able to help Keller out with some product.

  “I’m done taking gear from other coaches,” Keller said.

  Dana didn’t ask, but Keller stated firmly that he planned to keep the team intact through high school. He assumed Dana was angling to inherit Demetrius and some of the other boys when they got older.

  Keller didn’t know it at the time, but David and Dana Pump’s influence at Adidas was on the rise. Vaccaro’s successor at Adidas, a thirty-something named Daren Kalish, did not know the grassroots landscape as Vaccaro did, and he relied on the Pumps, who were longtime friends, to guide him. Other AAU coaches, such as Darren Matsubara in Northern California and Jimmy Salmon out of New York/New Jersey, also had his ear. They were part of what became known as the Grassroots Basketball Council, a sort of board of directors who guided Adidas’s grassroots vision. It was an unusual setup, as it gave the A
AU coaches more power than they’d ever had, something Vaccaro always cautioned against. “They went from having me, little Caesar, running everything and keeping an eye on all the coaches, to having a parliament, with the coaches monitoring themselves,” Vaccaro said.

  Dana’s scouting of the Inland Stars at the tournament in the San Fernando Valley was at least the second time he’d seen them play, and it confirmed what he’d initially thought: Demetrius was a kid Adidas needed to align with.

  “Joe, I’m having dinner with Daren Kalish a little later,” Dana told Keller. “You should meet him. We should all talk.”

  A few hours later, Keller sat at a long table at Hal’s Bar & Grill in Venice. Among the group were Dana, Kalish, and a few other AAU coaches, including Wallace Prather. Prather was the coach of the Adidas-sponsored Atlanta Celtics, which that year featured Dwight Howard and Josh Smith, both of whom would be picked in the first round of the 2004 NBA draft, with Howard as the number-1 overall selection. Keller was noticeably nervous as he picked at his New York strip steak and sipped a Diet Coke. Kalish, a handsome, light-skinned African American, didn’t pay much attention to Keller during dinner because he sat at the opposite end of the table, but Keller got the sense that Dana had already filled him in about Demetrius and the other talented youngsters Keller controlled.

  Near the end of the meal, Kalish moved to Keller’s end of the table and laid out his philosophy on grassroots programs, which differed from Vaccaro’s. “We don’t care if Demetrius makes it to the NBA like Sonny does. We just care that we can market him now.”

  Dana told a story that Keller had passed on to him. On the first day of a recent tournament, Demetrius wore two Adidas shoes from the same line but different in color.

  “The next day, all these kids on the other teams were doing the same thing,” Keller interjected.

  “That’s the kind of thing we want,” Kalish said. “We want the market on that. We want to be the first ones to do that.”

  After the dinner, Keller had to make amends with Violet, who had waited in the restaurant’s parking lot, along with Jordan and five-month-old Alyssa, for the entirety of the dinner. On the drive back to Fontana, Keller assured her that it had been worth the inconvenience. “Daren wants me to meet him tomorrow at his hotel,” he said. “This could be big.”

  The following morning, Keller met Kalish in a banquet room at the Renaissance Hotel near LAX. Kalish’s approach was more formal than Vaccaro’s. He said Adidas wanted to sign Keller to a shoe deal but presented it as something of a tryout. They would be the youngest of Adidas’s “highlighted teams,” but he emphasized that if Keller was caught doing anything illegal, the contract would be terminated. They agreed on a five-year deal in which Keller would make $60,000 in the first year, with his salary increasing by $10,000 in each subsequent year. At the end of the contract, when Demetrius and the other boys would be entering their senior year in high school, Adidas had the right to match any offer Keller received from another shoe company.

  “Do whatever you want with the money, but just don’t ask for more,” Kalish said.

  When Kalish asked how much money in product he needed, Keller had no idea how to answer. He knew how it worked—Kalish would give him a product code, and when he ordered something from one of Adidas’s many catalogs, the wholesale cost of each item would be deducted from his total—but he didn’t know how to quantify it. “I didn’t know what to say, so I just took what I thought was the most I would need—fifty thousand dollars—and I doubled it,” Keller said. “And Daren didn’t even blink. He just said yes to everything.”

  Kalish said he would send Demetrius a pair of shoes with the team logo on them and said Adidas would like to put the names of Keller’s top five players on their shoes. Keller hesitated, as he felt it would make other players jealous.

  “Just tell the other kids that the players had it done themselves,” Kalish said.

  Kalish agreed to reimburse Keller $8,500 he’d earlier spent on uniforms and also to sponsor eight events (tournaments or camps) he staged. To Keller, that was key. He calculated he could make an additional $200,000 for the year by running Adidas-backed events.

  Keller’s enthusiasm was tempered by his earlier experience with Vaccaro, and he felt more relief than exhilaration. But later that night, Kalish escorted Keller to Pauley Pavilion on UCLA’s campus for the Dream Classic, an annual tournament featuring some of the best high school teams in the country. Before they took their seats, Kalish introduced Keller to Danny Ainge, the Boston Celtics’ general manager, and Denver Nuggets GM Kiki Vandeweghe. Bill Duffy, a prominent NBA agent, talked to Keller for several minutes. Eventually, Keller and Kalish settled into front-row seats at center court. Keller sat there with a wide smile on his face, hardly believing his own rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches story.

  Early in the game, during a break in the action, Keller scanned the crowd in search of more basketball luminaries he could tell Violet about later. Glancing to his left, he recognized an older gentleman sitting in the second row of seats behind the basket. He was seated next to his wife, whom Keller also recognized.

  “It was Sonny,” he said. “I had a better seat than Sonny.”

  12

  Roberto Nelson

  When word of Keller’s Adidas deal spread among the grassroots populace, coaches from around the country called to praise him for being the first to land a shoe contract for kids so young. They asked if he could send them Adidas products and pleaded with him to bring his team to their events. Word leaked that his pact permitted him to give gear to a high school team—presumably the school Demetrius would eventually attend—and several high school coaches placed courting calls. He also heard from more parents like Tom, those willing to pay handsomely for a spot on his team.

  “Everyone wants to be my friend,” Keller said. “And I’ve got to admit, I’m feeling pretty cocky and arrogant right now.”

  On January 21, three UPS trucks stopped at the Citrus Grove Apartments and delivered eighty-four boxes. Every inch of Keller’s apartment—save a path from the door to the bathroom—was quickly filled, and Keller and Violet were forced to stack boxes on the stairs outside. The following day, UPS dropped off another fifty boxes.

  Keller played Santa Claus, giving each player no fewer than four pairs of basketball shoes—two pairs of the Promodel 2Gs, the A3 Superstar Ultras, and the T-MAC 3s—each pair costing more than $100 retail. He also handed out as many sweatbands, headbands, socks, T-shirts, sweatshirts, practice shorts, and shooting shirts as they wanted, which they stuffed into an Adidas travel bag, sling bag, and backpack. The grassroots executives at Adidas sent special packages for Demetrius, including the first pair of Promodels with the team’s logo, then a pair of T-MAC 3.5s, which he got before they were even in stores. Later, when he wanted extra-long black socks, the soccer rep at Adidas procured several pairs for him.

  When the team returned to Portland in February for that year’s Nike Invitational, grassroots executives for The Swoosh took note of the team’s new sponsorship. A man approached Keller and asked for Demetrius’s shoe size. A week later, ten pairs of shoes from Michael Jordan’s Jumpman line arrived at Keller’s house with a note for Demetrius that read: “Best of luck in the future.”

  Some coaches might have worried that such special treatment would isolate Demetrius from his teammates or cause a rift, but not Keller. “D is the reason we got the shoe deal. Why shouldn’t he get more?”

  The other boys grumbled about it, but for the most part they understood that it wasn’t Justin’s defense or Terran’s rebounding or Jordan’s outside shot that Adidas had invested in, and they were just happy to get the gear they did. Most attended different middle schools, which gave them a limelight all their own when they were away from the team. Each boy walked onto campus wearing a black Adidas sweat suit, a royal-blue Adidas hat tilted high on his head, his books in a black-and-gray Adidas backpack sagging low on his back, and, most importantly, spotless Promodels o
r T-MACs on his feet, never the same pair as the day before.

  When the boys entered a gym en masse, the new gear amplified their ability to intimidate. Wearing identical blue warm-ups, matching shoes (save Demetrius), with sling bags on their backs, they looked like a professional team. When they stripped down to uniforms that cost $250 apiece, opposing players stopped to admire them. Keller also came across as more qualified after he dropped his usual shorts and T-shirts in favor of tan slacks and a blue or black Adidas golf shirt that matched his Adidas running shoes. He insisted that Violet and the kids wear Adidas gear to games as well, even little Alyssa, who favored a tiny hot-pink Adidas sweat suit.

  The design of the new uniforms marked a significant shift in Keller’s marketing of the team. Gone was the familiar Inland Stars script across the front, replaced by Team Cal spelled out in jagged lettering. Keller had concluded that the team had outgrown its old name. It was too localized, ill fitting a team with national aspirations. It also had associations with SCA because of Keller’s earlier dealings with Barrett. A new name would be clean ground on which Keller could build his own empire, unencumbered by the past. The home uniforms were white with blue lettering, the away jerseys blue with white script. Both sets had the Adidas logo on the left shoulder, and on one leg of the shorts was the new team logo: a basketball with an outline of the state of California inside.

  “We’re the best team in California, so we should be called Team Cal,” Demetrius said. “We don’t got just Inland kids, we got kids from L.A. and other places, so it makes sense. Plus, it’s just tighter. Team Cal. That’s tight.”

  With the $60,000 in salary Adidas paid him plus Tom’s contributions, Keller could have realized some of his ambitions, such as a nicer car or a bigger apartment. To his credit, he earmarked a portion of it to fix the problem he would never admit the team had: his coaching. He used some of the money to hire fifty-four-year-old Mark Soderberg as an assistant coach.