Play Their Hearts Out

by George Dohrmann

  The main photo accompanying the feature was of Demetrius holding a basketball while standing on the train tracks that ran through Fontana. To Keller, the photo illustrated how Demetrius was going places; he was on the fast track to the NBA. A cynic might have viewed the photo’s symbolism differently. Keller had put Demetrius in danger’s path. The weight of expectations rushed toward him like a train, threatening to flatten him.

  The grassroots division at Adidas was overjoyed with the article. The coach and player they had invested in had been written about glowingly, and the launch of the Adidas Jr. Phenom Camp was presented as a pioneering endeavor in the push to identify kids at a younger age.

  The camp had been held at Alliant University in San Diego a few months before Greenfeld contacted Keller, and by all accounts Keller accomplished his primary objectives. He proved to Kalish that he could deliver the top eleven- to fourteen-year-old players in the country to an Adidas event, and he made a boatload of money. An estimated 10,000 spectators paid either $25 for a two-day pass or $10 to get into the event for a single day. Violet sold 400 programs at $15 or $10 apiece (the price was lowered the second day). They sold 800 T-shirts at $10 a pop and uncounted drinks and food at concession stands. Advertising from the program and related marketing brought in another $20,000, and the players’ parents or Adidas footed the $395 registration fee for 225 kids. Housing and feeding the kids, renting the gym, and paying coaches to work the event cut into Keller’s profit, but he exceeded his goal of $100,000.

  “Guess where I am right now?” he said a week after the camp. “Driving out of a dealership with Violet’s new SUV. Paid, like, fifty thousand in cash. Life is good.”

  He talked about creating a Jr. Phenom Camp for girls, also to be sponsored by Adidas, the following summer and of improvements he would make to the boys’ camp. “It’s going to be even bigger next year. I’m getting calls already from people who want to come. It’s going to be huge. Just the advertising from the program alone, I think I can get up to forty thousand dollars. I wouldn’t be surprised if I make double what I did this year.”

  Kalish was so impressed by the camp that he gave Keller the title of Director of Youth Grassroots Programs, a two-year extension on his contract, and a raise that brought his annual salary to $70,000. Kalish also signed off on Keller’s proposal to sign other young teams to shoe contracts before Nike or Reebok learned of them. He was given $15,000 per team, but if he could sign them for less—say, $10,000 or $12,000—he could pocket the difference. He traveled the country with a figurative bagful of money and then, after the Sports Illustrated article, with as much clout as any coach in youth basketball.

  Vaccaro learned of Keller’s new role and title nearly a year to the day after he had reneged on their deal. “Between having me at Reebok and Nike, with all the money they have, Adidas is shut out with the top high school players right now,” he said. “You look at the high school teams in Southern California that Adidas had this year, and none of them won a single tournament. Across the country, it is the same. They don’t have any of the top players. That is why Joe might be the single most important person Adidas has right now. He has the best players in that age group. In a way, everything they are trying to do depends on him, on his ability to keep his players and get others from around the country. Joe Keller is all Adidas has right now.”

  Demetrius cut out the Sports Illustrated article and taped it to a wall in his room, placing it next to a recruiting letter from Duke. On a Sunday evening a few days after the article hit newsstands, Demetrius sat on his bed, his back against the wall. The article was above his head, and he kept looking up at it, as if to make sure it was real.

  “A lot of people are going to be watching me now ’cuz of this, huh?” He meant watching him in a good way, noticing his talent. But then, after a few seconds, the smile left his face; he seemed to realize the downside. He picked up a basketball and spun it on his finger.

  “It’s cool. I can handle it.”

  19

  Aaron Moore outside the circle of Team Cal friends

  Mom, why does Coach Joe have to lie?”

  Aaron sat at a table in a Mexican restaurant not far from his home. He waited until Barbara was well into her steak tacos before asking the question.

  “You knew going in to this team that Joe was going to favor Demetrius and that he wasn’t going to tell the truth all the time,” Barbara said.

  “Mom, what kind of excuse is that? He lied to me.”

  “But you know from when you started in all this crap—”

  “Mom, Mom, you try to pacify—is that the right word, pacify? You try to pacify the situation and make it okay that Coach lied. You make excuses for him. It’s not okay that he lied.”

  Keller had told Aaron (and all the boys) that the Sports Illustrated article would focus on Team Cal’s victory at Nationals and not Demetrius alone. The more perceptive kids, such as Rome and Justin, quickly saw through the fib. Greenfeld never interviewed them, and the photographer shadowed only Demetrius. They had long ago accepted supporting roles in the Demetrius show, and they had also grown so accustomed to Keller’s lies that they barely registered anymore. Aaron, on the other hand, was different. His happiness hinged entirely on his standing with Keller. If Coach Joe praised him or worked him out individually or took him shopping for a new pair of shoes, he returned home overjoyed. If Keller ripped him in practice or declined to let him tag along on some errand, Aaron ran to his room the minute he got home and didn’t emerge for hours.

  Keller was Aaron’s ally only when it suited Keller. He would promise to pick Aaron up for a one-on-one workout and then wouldn’t show. When Aaron would call him, Keller would rattle off an excuse like “I called to see if you still wanted to go, but no one answered.” Aaron initially believed him—he always did—but then he searched the caller ID on his home phone and didn’t see Keller’s number. Later, when Aaron learned Keller had worked out Demetrius instead, Barbara had to spend hours calming him. Aaron also kept track of the gifts Keller gave Demetrius. If Demetrius showed up at practice wearing the newest Tracy McGrady shoe or the latest Kevin Garnett model, Aaron seethed.

  Keller did not recognize that Aaron’s happiness peaked or plunged because of him, and he was equally oblivious to his role in forming a rift between Aaron and Demetrius.

  In practices in the months after Nationals, Keller pitted Demetrius and Aaron against each other more and more. He let them foul and hack each other, stopping the action only when it looked as if they’d come to blows. If Aaron had a good practice, Keller would be sure to tell Demetrius how impressed he was. When Demetrius starred, Keller would shake his head at Aaron and ask if he liked being mediocre. Keller justified this as needing to push the boys, but he went beyond pushing. When they were alone in the gym at the Rancho Cucamonga Family Sports Center, Keller would tell Aaron, “While you’re working out, D is at home playing video games. That’s why you’re going to the NBA and D will end up at some junior college.” When Aaron lifted weights at a gym in Fontana, Keller would stand over him during bench presses and yell, “One more and D will never be better than you.” Demetrius ignored Keller’s tricks, but Aaron didn’t see them as devices.

  After reading the Sports Illustrated article, Aaron couldn’t let Keller’s deceit pass, couldn’t brush it aside, the way Justin and Rome did, as Coach Joe being Coach Joe. He looked to his mother to help him make sense of it, but Barbara was in no position to give counsel. Keller helped pay the rent and utility bills on her home, and he regularly handed her wads of twenties. Aaron knew that Keller occasionally gave his mother money, but he didn’t know the extent to which she depended on him.

  “You are right. The lying is not okay,” Barbara said at the Mexican restaurant. They had stopped eating. The table that separated them was painted the bright colors of the Mexican flag, and Aaron leaned intently across it, his long neck straining over his plate toward his mom. “But you know that with this situation, that is what to
expect. If you want to be on this team, you have to expect—”

  “Mom, can I talk, please?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I don’t mind the publicity and hype Demetrius gets. Regardless of the situation, whether it was an article about D or an article about me and the team, I would have gone to practice and played just as hard. I would have done the same things I always do. I’m just upset because Coach lied.”

  Barbara paused, and she might have been reviewing her quandary. Should she do what was best for her son, which was to get him away from this two-faced coach, or do what was easiest for her, which was to keep Keller’s money coming?

  “But that is what he is going to do. If you are going to play on his team, you know two things. One, he is going to put Demetrius first and foremost, and second, not everything that comes out of his mouth is the truth.”

  “But, Mom, the ratio is eighty percent to twenty percent, with eighty percent being the lies.”

  Barbara didn’t respond. She was done defending Keller’s indefensible acts.

  Keller’s lie about the focus of the Sports Illustrated article came at a time when Aaron was more fragile than usual. After Nationals, Tommy had invited Aaron to his family’s vacation home on the Colorado River. Aaron did not know it when he agreed to go, but Tom, Sr., had decided Tommy would not be returning to Team Cal. He had asked Keller what it would cost to reserve a roster spot for Tommy for another twelve months, and Keller answered, “Fifty thousand dollars.” Tom had forked out more than $40,000 over the previous year, yet Tommy hardly played the last half of the schedule and not at all in the final three games at Nationals. He was done opening his wallet to Keller for so little return on his investment.

  Tom hooked up with another father whose son had played briefly on Team Cal, and they discussed creating a squad of their own. It was worth doing, they determined, if they could assemble enough talent to compete with Team Cal. Keller had already picked through the best eighth-graders in Southern California, so the best approach was to steal one of Keller’s kids, weakening Team Cal and strengthening their roster at the same time.

  “You should hear what Joe says about you behind your back,” Tom told Aaron once he had him at the river house. “He calls you soft and weak and a baby. He said that you don’t have the talent to make it.”

  For three days, Tom and the other father repeated every putdown Keller made about his sensitive center. They didn’t need to embellish; Keller savaged every player except Demetrius.

  “I hate Coach,” Aaron told Barbara when he returned from the river. He repeated everything Tom and the other father told him. “I don’t want to play for Coach Joe anymore.”

  At that time and again the day after their conversation at the Mexican restaurant, Barbara let Aaron know whose side she was on.

  “If you leave Joe, you’re not going to play for anyone,” she told him. “It’s Joe or nothing.”

  When Aaron first joined Team Cal, he was one of the most popular boys. Before Keller held him back in school, he spent several months in the eighth grade, and that made him the envy of his younger teammates. But after a few months, the other boys made excuses not to room with him on the road and stopped inviting him to the movies or trips to the Ontario Mills mall. “He’s always talking stuff, you know, putting people down,” said Rome, who by the start of 2005 was one of the few boys still inviting Aaron to sleep over. “He wasn’t like that before, but he’s been doing it a lot lately, and no one wants to hang out with him.”

  During a tournament the previous spring, Aaron and Terran got into an argument in a hotel room that would have led to punches had hotel security not heard yelling and interceded. Following that incident, Demetrius severed relations with Aaron, avoiding him outside of practices and games. “Now I just try to not talk to him at all,” he said.

  In the wake of the article in Sports Illustrated, Demetrius began to divide people into two groups: those he felt showed him the proper amount of respect and those, like Aaron, who did not. It was eerily similar to Keller’s “Friends of Joe” and “Enemies of Joe” approach. When Demetrius met other top thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds at the Jr. Phenom Camp, some became fast friends. Those included Dexter Strickland (ranked number 9 by The Hoop Scoop) in New Jersey and Leshon Edwards (number 3) in Maryland. “With Dexter and Leshon, it’s, like, I know you are real and I respect your game,” Demetrius said. “Everyone among the best guys I respect, except Aaron. That’s because he doesn’t respect me.”

  Aaron’s disrespect, Demetrius said, manifested itself in comments such as “You’re not all you’re hyped up to be” or “You’re the same player you were a year ago.” Aaron claimed Demetrius insulted him as much or more, but the other boys backed Demetrius, and Aaron became the team’s pariah. During downtime on road trips, when the players were dropped off at a mall and Demetrius led the pack from store to store, Aaron would linger far behind or walk with an adult chaperoning. If he was spotted with a teammate, it was usually Roberto, whose relationship with Demetrius had been poisoned by Keller, or Rome, who was too compassionate to treat anyone as an outcast.

  The rift between Demetrius and Aaron wasn’t noticeable on the court unless you looked closely. In one game, Aaron leaned into a huddle during a time-out and put his arms around Demetrius and another player, and Demetrius shrank at his touch. “I wanted to turn and say to him, ‘Get your hands off me,’ ” Demetrius said afterward. “But I can’t do that, because we’re a team and I can’t bring that onto the court.”

  Any chance of repairing their relationship ended early in 2005 outside the Ontario Mills mall. Demetrius had called Rome to ask him to go to a movie, and because Aaron was already with Rome, he got invited too. After the movie they cruised the mall, then ended up outside, waiting for Rome’s mom to pick them up. Aaron claimed Demetrius dogged him about his basketball skills in front of a group of kids, including some older girls. Demetrius said the opposite was true: Aaron clowned him. The boys would have come to blows had Rome not come between them.

  When Rome talked about the incident days later, the smile that was forever present on his face disappeared. “It was real bad,” he said. “Real, real bad. And it was Aaron who started it.”

  Keller never envisioned the Jr. Phenom Camp as a recruiting tool for Team Cal, but once all 225 kids were in the same gym, he couldn’t help but put together a wish list. At the top was Roger Franklin, the nimble forward from Texas Select. Keller envisioned inserting the six-foot-four Roger alongside Aaron and Terran on Team Cal’s front line and moving Demetrius to shooting guard. Shortly after the camp, Keller traveled to Duncanville, Texas, and sat down with Roger and his parents in the living room of their home.

  “Your son can be in the NBA in five years,” he told them.

  Roger’s father recently had surgery to remove a brain tumor and had trouble speaking. He had also lost partial use of one leg, which dragged behind him as he walked. Roger’s mother did most of the talking, and she questioned Keller’s claims that he was a close friend of Texas Tech coach Bobby Knight and could guarantee Roger would get a score of at least 1200 on his SATs if he moved to California. Keller left Duncanville without a commitment, but he eventually convinced Roger’s mother to send her son to California for what was termed a “trial period.” Roger’s grandfather lived in Los Angeles; if anything went wrong, Roger was only a little more than an hour away from family. If Roger didn’t like it, Keller promised he would put him on a plane back to Texas.

  A mere two days after Roger arrived in Fontana, Keller complained about having to house him. “The kid is a handful,” he said. “He’s driving me crazy. He’s crying all the time.”

  Violet was more sympathetic. “He’s just real homesick. This is the first time he’s been away from his family.”

  Roger’s father flew to the Inland Empire for a weeklong visit, but it helped little; Roger cried even harder in the days after he left. Keller theorized that if he put Roger in a house with another
player, he might stop pining for his parents back in Duncanville. It was a premise with merit, but Keller’s choice of host family astounded everyone.

  “Aaron and Barbara?” Soderberg said when told of Keller’s decision. He was no longer an assistant coach for Team Cal, but he kept in touch with Aaron. “Those two have enough of their own issues. They don’t need any more to deal with.”

  Roger’s first tournament with the team was at Rialto High. The early games were against mediocre foes, but in the quarterfinals, against a team of kids already in high school, Roger made two 3-pointers during a second-half run, including one deep shot from the right side over two defenders. His long arms also made him a force as a rebounder and a defender.

  “Is Roger real or what?” Keller said after the game. “It’s like I said: Not only does he look like Chris Webber, but he plays like him too.” Keller also gushed over G. J. Vilarino, a point guard he added to the team whose family had just moved from Dallas to Phoenix. Gary had fractured his arm playing football and would be out for months, necessitating the addition of another point guard. G.J. was a different player than Gary, more of a smooth shooter and facilitator than a dribble-drive scorer, but he had played with a team in Texas a grade older and was unflappable. To get him, Keller promised G.J.’s father, Gerry, that he would secure G.J. an invitation to the Adidas Superstar Camp the following summer, a rare honor for a player not yet in high school. Keller also paid a $1,000 “finder’s fee” to the coach in Dallas who made the introduction.

  As Keller fawned over Roger and G.J., Aaron stood a few feet away, hearing every word, biting his fingernails. “Coach Joe, did you see me block that kid’s shot in the first half?” he said at one point, but Keller pretended not to hear him.