Play Their Hearts Out

by George Dohrmann

  In the semifinals, Team Cal faced a team of varsity players from high schools throughout the Inland Empire. It included a six-foot-eleven center who weighed more than 320 pounds and would eventually earn a scholarship to UC Riverside.

  “Coach, he drove to the game,” Terran said after seeing the big teenager walk in from the parking lot.

  Aaron drew the task of guarding him, and despite giving up five inches and more than 140 pounds, he played one of his best games. He banged with him inside, rendering him useless on the offensive end, and Team Cal pulled away for a 55–39 victory.

  Keller said nothing about Aaron’s play afterward, and he again praised the newcomers in front of him. At one point he called Roger “the missing piece,” which a year earlier he had said about Aaron.

  With two hours to kill before the tournament final, Aaron, Demetrius, Roger, and the rest of Team Cal loitered outside the gym. A few of the boys sat on a metal railing near the steel doors. Others leaned against a cement wall that had been painted white. Rome and Terran took turns dribbling a ball Rome had brought out of the gym.

  As they often did during downtime, the boys teased one another. Terran was usually the butt of their jokes. They taunted him about dunks he missed or about how much he sweated. A big kid and a big target, he rarely teased back. But Demetrius had been teasing Aaron more lately (about the light color of his skin, his gangly gait), and Terran, overjoyed at not being singled out, would play Ed McMahon, laughing loudly at Demetrius’s taunts.

  Aaron made certain he would not be singled out this time. He started making fun of Roger’s Texas accent and his physical features. “They gotta do liposuction on your forehead, your head’s so big, nigger,” Aaron said. Roger didn’t react, so Aaron turned to topics beyond the good-natured taunts of young boys.

  “Nigger, all you do all day is cry. You sit around the house and cry, cry like a bitch.”

  No one had ever talked to Roger that way before. He didn’t know whether to hit Aaron or retreat into the gym and to his grandfather, who had driven from Los Angeles and was inside, talking to Rome, Sr.

  “You don’t like being here, so why don’t you go home?” Aaron said. “Go home instead of sitting around my house and crying all day like a little bitch.”

  As he spoke, Aaron paced a few feet in front of Roger, like a stand-up comic during a show. Roger remained in one place, rocking forward and back, his right foot in front of his left. Aaron never looked directly at Roger as he spoke. He looked over him or down at the concrete. But Roger’s eyes never left Aaron.

  “Maybe I will leave, then. I will leave,” he said.

  At one point Roger remarked how fat Aaron’s dog was, but he was not used to tearing another kid down.

  Demetrius stood off the side, enjoying the exchange too much. Rome wanted to do something, but instead he walked a few yards away from the other boys. He climbed on a railing and watched from there, shaking his head as Aaron’s insults got more personal. “This is just wrong,” he whispered. “Why does it have to be like this?”

  As the posturing dragged on for more than ten minutes, Demetrius grew bored and walked in to the gym, Terran at his heels. Roger then showed how much he had learned in his short time with Team Cal.

  “I am no Terran,” he shouted, breaking a long silence. “I am not just going to stand here and take it. Come over here and hit me, then, Aaron. Do something.”

  Aaron was stuck. He didn’t want to fight Roger, and he didn’t want to continue insulting him. But he had come too far to stop. He either had to fight Roger or insult him so strongly that Roger walked away. If Aaron retreated, it would mean he’d backed down, that he was a punk.

  “What about your dad?” Aaron yelled. “He be all retarded and shit, walkin’ all funny.” Aaron then mimicked Roger’s father, walking with his right leg trailing behind him as if it were deadweight. “Your dad’s a fuckin’ retard.”

  Roger, still rocking forward and back, didn’t immediately respond. Both boys were on the verge of tears, but it was more noticeable on Roger. His huge brown eyes gave him away. Aaron did not know that Roger’s father had almost died a few months earlier, how he had collapsed in the family’s living room. He did not know that Roger had begged his mom to let him pray over his father before he was taken to the hospital, believing that if he didn’t, his father was certain to die.

  After a long silence, Roger said in a voice cracking with emotion, “I love my daddy.” He then wiped his nose and his eyes with the back of his arm. “I just thank God every day that he is still walking this earth.”

  Then he walked past Aaron and into the gym.

  Rome was the only other player who stayed until the argument’s end. There was no sidekick, no Terran, to congratulate Aaron or make him feel his comments were justified. There was no parent around to explain that the uneasy feeling Aaron had in his stomach was the loss of his virtue.

  Roger found his grandfather standing on the baseline of one of the courts. They spoke for a minute and then approached Keller, who was just hearing about the dispute from Terran.

  “I’m taking Roger home,” his grandfather said. “I’m not going to have him around boys like this.”

  Keller knew from the hurt he saw in Roger’s eyes that there was no point in trying to change their minds. He walked Roger and his grandfather to their car. Neither Aaron nor Demetrius bothered to say goodbye. Only Rome followed them to the door, yelling after them, “Yo, Roger, we cool?” He then flashed Roger two fingers, the peace sign. Roger, looking back as his grandfather led him away, nodded and gave a half smile. He was cool with Rome, but he was going back to Duncanville.

  “Fucking Aaron, that’s about three thousand dollars wasted,” Keller said later. In addition to the airline tickets Keller paid for, he had given $1,000 each to two Dallas-area coaches, more finder’s fees.

  When Keller asked Aaron why he’d done it, Aaron lied and said that Roger had insulted his mother. Barbara said Aaron’s actions were “a defense mechanism.” Aaron was driving Roger away before Roger could abandon him.

  Keller was presented with another theory a week later, while he dined with other coaches at a T.G.I. Friday’s following a day of games. Roger’s name came up, and the coaches consoled Keller for losing a kid with such potential. “Fucking Aaron,” Keller began, and he provided a short version of what occurred. When he finished, I asked if he had considered that Aaron lashed out at Roger because he was worried about his place in Keller’s heart. Roger was a new boy Keller favored, and that threatened Aaron.

  Keller sighed and put his hand to his forehead. He leaned back in his chair and looked upward, still holding his head as if he were checking for a fever. It was rare for Keller to acknowledge a mess he’d created. Sitting at a table covered in a red-and-white-checkered cloth, with a half-empty Corona in front of him, he seemed poised to finally admit the responsibilities he inherited when he courted a fatherly image with the boys. But just as he was about to speak, a young coach at the table blurted out, “Hey, Joe, that’s good. You want them seeing you that way, like a father.”

  Keller gave a half smile and reached for his Corona and let the topic pass.

  20

  Darren Matsubara

  Darren Matsubara entered the gym at Asbury Park Middle School, wearing a black velour sweat suit and spotless white Adidas running shoes, and carrying a black leather man purse. He looked out of place among the working-class parents finding their seats in the wooden stands. His black hair was slicked back à la Pat Riley, and he wore an oversized gold watch. California chic had come to the blue-collar New Jersey shore.

  “Mats,” as he was widely known, was one of Adidas’s most powerful coaches. His AAU outfit, the Elite Basketball Organization (EBO), was based in Fresno, although he was in the process of moving it to Las Vegas. NBA players Carlos Boozer, Robert Swift, and DeShawn Stevenson were alumni, and in 2005 his prized prospects included Robin and Brook Lopez, seven-foot twins headed to Stanford.

 
As he walked briskly across the floor, Mats pulled a tin of Altoids from his pocket. “It’s not a question of how many mints he goes through in a day but how many tins,” Teron Pickett said as he watched Mats walk toward him. When he finished retrieving a mint, Mats snapped the lid closed quickly and stylishly, the way an experienced smoker might snap shut a Zippo. Mats was one of the few prominent AAU coaches who played well the role of a hustler; even when he lied, he came across as trustworthy. Once, after giving me a long-winded response to a question about AAU coaches and agents, Mats sensed that I didn’t believe him and said, “Come on, you thought I was going to tell you the truth?”

  Mats had played college basketball at Cal State Northridge and still regularly scrimmaged against his players, even at the age of thirty-eight. His teams were among the best-coached, and he was known for turning away kids he considered undisciplined. When recruiting a player, Mats often sprang a test on them: He pretended to get lost while driving. “I want to see which kids just sit there and do nothing and which kids jump in and try to figure out where we are and how we can get where we need to go,” Mats said. “What they do under those circumstances tells me what kind of player they are going to be.”

  In 2002, Mats was one of four AAU coaches named in a lawsuit filed in California by an associate of agent Dan Fegan, who represented NBA stars such as Gilbert Arenas, Shawn Marion, and Jason Richardson. In a deposition, the associate talked of payments to grassroots coaches, which he said Fegan labeled “brown-bag payments”: an unspecified amount of cash sent in a FedEx envelope. Mats was also rumored to have received money from the agency SFX and its founder, Arn Tellum, as reciprocity for helping secure Boozer and Stevenson as clients.

  Mats’s connection to sports agents was why Keller had sought him out after signing his Adidas deal. He was looking for a mentor, someone within the Adidas family to offer guidance, and Mats came across as less threatening than the Pumps. By 2005, Mats was a regular at Team Cal’s games, which prompted speculation among the parents that he would look to poach the best Team Cal kids for EBO. “With Mats, you know there is an angle,” Carmen said. “Joe better figure out what it is.”

  Mats’s reason for traveling to New Jersey was twofold. He wanted to see Demetrius and Team Cal play Team Next from New York, which featured six-foot-three guard Lance Stephenson of Brooklyn. Stephenson was the best eighth-grader in New York City, and he had recently been elevated to the spot just below Demetrius in The Hoop Scoop’s rankings. In basketball, as in rap music, there was a running debate about which coast turned out the best talent. East Coast coaches swore their players were tougher and more equipped to jump to college or the NBA because they constantly played against older competition on the playgrounds and in AAU events. West Coasters complained that their kids were slighted only because they didn’t grow up playing in Rucker Park in Harlem or the West 4th Street courts in Greenwich Village known as “the Cage.”

  The drumbeat for Demetrius and Stephenson to duel—and prove which coast had the next superstar—had sounded loudly for more than a year. Keller had invited Team Next to a tournament in California the previous season, and Stephenson’s coach had confirmed with Keller the week of the event. But Team Next never arrived in Los Angeles. A year later, Keller took the fight to Stephenson’s turf, entering his team in the Martin Luther King Classic in Asbury Park.

  Mats also traveled to New Jersey to investigate a concern that had been discussed at length during a recent meeting at Adidas’s offices in Portland that included Kalish and several of the company’s AAU coaches. “Is Joe the guy to take these kids into high school? That is the question everyone was asking,” Mats said. “It’s a difficult transition for some kids. They go from dominating in middle school to struggling against older kids, stronger kids, kids just as talented as them. [Adidas] is worried about whether Joe can help the kids go through that. But I told them at the meeting, ‘I got this one.’ I’m going to look after Joe, put a safety net under him.”

  The safety net included a radical suggestion that Mats presented to Keller just before the team left for New Jersey: He told him to disband Team Cal after the summer and let Demetrius, Rome, Aaron, Roberto, and maybe others play for EBO. That would put some of Adidas’s best young talent with a coach more qualified to develop them as players and one more experienced at keeping poachers from other shoe companies away. It would also free Keller to focus on the Jr. Phenom Camp, which Adidas’s coaches across the country now saw as a potential feeder system for their teams. Mats wasn’t willing to go down and court grade school and middle school prospects, but he saw how it could help Adidas’s teams if Keller continued to do so.

  “Joe, it’s important to have the grassroots program, but I am going to create something else for you,” Mats told Keller. “It’s called ‘Project Seed.’ There is the grassroots, but below grassroots is the Seed. That’s where you are. You are going to be a man of the Seed. We are going to have each division set up and there is going to be continuity, a flow. You be the Seed. You be in that space. You be where it starts.”

  Keller would need to give up coaching, but as the ruler of the Jr. Phenom Camp he would wield substantial power in the industry. He would be the guru parents consulted and AAU and college coaches came to for information on the youngest kids.

  “Joe, you are going to have the influence because you’re before the grassroots,” Mats told him. “Kids are going to ask, ‘Joe, where should I go, this camp or this camp?’ You can advise kids, and you’ll be someone everyone courts.”

  Keller slowly took to the idea. He referred to himself as “the Seed” in an email to Mats and then came up with a plan to franchise the Jr. Phenom Camp. He would sell the rights to regional Jr. Phenom Camps to other AAU coaches, and the best players from those camps would earn a trip to the national Jr. Phenom Camp in San Diego every August.

  “I love it,” Mats told Keller, but he reminded him that it wouldn’t work if Keller tried to steal the kids who attended his camp, as he did with Roger Franklin. “You need to be bigger than that, and that means not having a team. You want to be the next Sonny. Well, you can be. You can be the Sonny of grade-school kids. But you’ve got to remember: Sonny has never coached a team in his life. His thing is bigger than coaching, bigger than a team.”

  At Asbury Park Middle School on Friday, Keller’s focus was on getting Team Cal through to the finals, to the showdown with Lance Stephenson. They routed their first opponent, the C. J. Hawks, 92–24. The Hawks had once been a New Jersey power, producing NBA players Rodrick Rhodes and Luther Wright, but since the founding of the Tim Thomas Playaz, the Hawks had fallen on hard times. Thomas was one of several NBA players who funded AAU programs, and he sometimes attended their games, which contributed to the feeling among kids that the jump from grassroots to the NBA was a short one.

  In their second game on Friday night, Team Cal defeated an undersized local team called the Hurricanes coached by Dan Calandrillo, who played at Seton Hall and was the Big East Conference Player of the Year in 1982. Before the tournament, when he saw the draw, Calandrillo called an old friend: UCLA coach Ben Howland. “He knew all about them and told me all the things Number Twenty-three could do,” Calandrillo said. Despite the tip, the Hurricanes lost 113–47, with Aaron scoring 27 and Demetrius 26.

  On Saturday, Team Cal met the Lloyd Daniels Rebels from New Jersey. In the five years since I’d interviewed Kenny Brunner, his teammate with that ABA team, former New York playground legend Lloyd “Swee’Pea” Daniels, had retired from basketball and remade himself as an AAU coach. A former drug addict who once was shot three times in the chest and who sparked an NCAA investigation at UNLV—despite never playing a game there—because of his ties to a man twice convicted for sports bribery, Daniels was now guiding the basketball youth of the Garden State.

  Daniels was six foot seven, his New York accent heavy, his voice hoarse. I never thought a coach could be more demonstrative on the sidelines than Keller was, but Daniels topped him. Whe
n his team opened in a full-court press, he pulled his sweatpants up above his knees to make it easier for him to crouch and then got into a defensive stance like his players. He was wearing a bright red-and-blue sweat suit from the 2004 NBA All-Star game, and he was such a massive man that his sliding up and down the sideline detracted from the game. He also carried a white towel at all times. It served the practical purpose of soaking up the sweat running down from his bald head, but he also waved it when he got excited.

  It often seemed as if Keller forgot that there was a crowd watching him; how else could an adult act as he did? Daniels, on the other hand, was well aware that he was onstage and used it to his advantage. If the referee made a dubious call against one of his players, Daniels didn’t yell at him; he turned and raised his hands to the crowd and shouted, “Did you see that?” When his cheering section expressed the proper level of outrage, he turned back to the game and, after getting the referee’s attention, pointed into the crowd, as if to say, See? Even they think you made a mistake. This was another difference between East Coast and West Coast basketball: Keller worked the refs; Daniels worked the crowd.

  As a basketball tactician, Daniels was superior to Keller in every way. “Look at all the coaches I’ve had—Tark, Larry Brown, John Calipari. Some of what they know had to rub off,” he said. Daniels made that remark while at dinner with Keller the night before the game, after Keller predicted that Team Cal would win by 50 and Demetrius and Aaron would combine for at least 10 dunks. Daniels said his boys would lose by less than 20. He had scouted Team Cal the day before against the Hurricanes; he told Keller, “I know how to play you.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Keller scoffed, and although they didn’t wager any money, their reputations were on the line.

  Daniels put four good 3-point shooters on the floor to start the game. This prevented Keller from sitting back in a zone, and it also made the bigger lineup he favored—with Aaron, Craig, and Terran along the front line—a defensive liability. In the opening minutes, the players guarded by Craig and Terran made open 3-pointers because Craig and Terran were too slow to get out and contest the shots. By the time Keller recognized the problem, the Rebels led 16–12.