Play Their Hearts Out

by George Dohrmann

  Keller claimed Cotton asked him for a raise. “He wanted too much money.”

  Demetrius never learned why Cotton stopped working him out. As with Keilon and Olujimi years earlier, Cotton was just suddenly out of his life, and for a time Demetrius wondered if he had done something to piss him off. “Man, people are always leaving me these days,” he said.

  It didn’t stop with Cotton.

  “I resigned,” Mark Soderberg announced at the end of the school year. “It just wasn’t the job I signed up for. If all the kids Joe said were going to be there had come, or if Demetrius was still a hardworking kid who wanted to learn, well, then I would have kept at it. But it just wasn’t the job for me anymore.”

  26

  Roberto Nelson and Bruce Nelson during a visit to Ohio State

  Bruce Nelson stood just off the court in a gym on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara. It was late in the summer, a few weeks before the start of Roberto’s freshman year, and Roberto was playing in an exhibition tournament with the Santa Barbara High varsity team. A man approached Bruce and introduced himself, although no introduction was necessary. Pete Carroll coached the University of Southern California football team, which had won the national championship the season before.

  “Are you his dad?” Carroll said, and he pointed toward Roberto. Carroll had been in the stands a day earlier when Roberto scored more than 30 points against Peninsula High, which counted Carroll’s son among its players.

  “Yeah, that’s my boy,” Bruce answered.

  “How old is he?”

  “He’s just fourteen.”

  Carroll’s jaw dropped. “Really? Fourteen? I’ve never seen a kid that young who was so poised and who could play like that.”

  “What’s amazing,” Bruce said, adopting a chattier tone, “is that he’s a better football player than he is a basketball player.”

  “What position?”

  “Quarterback.”

  “Did you say quarterback?”

  “Yeah. Roberto’s a quarterback. And he’s a better quarterback than he is a basketball player.”

  Carroll thought for a moment. “What school does he go to, again?”

  “Santa Barbara High.”

  Carroll paused, as if making a mental note, and then he shook Bruce’s hand and complimented him one last time on Roberto’s abilities.

  That chance meeting was the first link in a chain of unlikely events, but its immediate effect was to brighten Bruce’s mood, which was no small occurrence. Bruce had large, sad eyes that suited his disposition most days. He was six foot four but walked hunched over and with his head down, as if burdened by the weight of life. He lived in one of the most pristine beach cities in America, a place where, on average, the sun shined 285 days of the year. Yet by looking at him you’d have guessed it rained above his head every day.

  Bruce’s playing and coaching career had not gone as he’d planned, and that fact was the seed of his discontent. A high school star in Columbus, Ohio, he was recruited by Jerry Tarkanian, then the coach at Cal State Long Beach (now Long Beach State), and told to spend a year at Santa Barbara City College before transferring to play for the 49ers. But then Tarkanian left for UNLV, and Bruce ended up playing for a lesser program. He found his calling as coach of the boys’ team at Dos Pueblos High and led that school to the section finals in the 1995–96 season, only his second as coach. Then an influential coach at a rival school in the same district pushed Dos Pueblos to enforce a previously ignored regulation that mandated that every coach be a full-time teacher. Bruce did not have a teaching credential, and losing that job decimated him. His life spiraled downward from there, and a short time later he split with Roberto’s mother. She moved to Hesperia, a desert between the Inland Empire and Las Vegas, and Bruce rented a two-bedroom apartment on Santa Barbara’s west side, where he and Roberto lived like two bachelors: dirty dishes in the sink, a pair of basketball shoes on the kitchen table, unopened mail piled up near the front door.

  Bruce could have worked to get his teaching credential and would certainly have gotten another coaching job at one of the local high schools. But he wallowed in his misfortune, blaming others rather than taking the steps needed to remedy his situation. He hated his night job as a rehabilitation assistant at a facility for the mentally disabled, carrying patients to the bathroom and cleaning up after them; he hated that the best coaching position he could get was as an assistant at Santa Barbara High, earning a measly $3,000 a year; he hated that, while everyone acknowledged his stout basketball mind, no one would make him a head coach again. Waves of sorrow rolled over him, and there were days it seemed Bruce would sink into it and never surface.

  Roberto kept him afloat. “He is the only thing that keeps my heart beating,” Bruce said.

  It was not only Roberto’s prospects as an athlete, not only that people like Pete Carroll praised his ability: It was that Roberto never allowed life’s obstacles to deter him. Roberto never saw gloom, only possibility.

  “Dad, I want to play golf,” he announced one day during his freshman year. He had never played the game, and Bruce didn’t have money to get him a nice set of clubs. Bruce warned him that he might feel out of place, a black teenager on the golf courses of Santa Barbara with his secondhand sticks. “Who cares?” he said. “I want to play.” He would show up at a course, his shorts hanging down to his calves, not another African American in sight, and stroll into the pro shop as if he’d been playing there for years. He got so good so quickly that he eventually made the varsity golf team and got his handicap down to eight.

  Great players just know they are good, and Roberto had that, but his confidence came across as selective blindness, not arrogance. He never accepted the notion that someone could be better than he was or that he might fail. And when he did lose, the defeat didn’t stick with him as long as it did with other kids. It wasn’t that he didn’t care; he just knew there would always be another game to play. He was the only one of the Team Cal kids to play three sports in high school (basketball, golf, and, eventually, football).

  Roberto’s approach to life was so different from his father’s that he would have been forgiven for rebelling. Instead, he pulled Bruce closer, reversing the normal roles of a father and his son. Roberto encouraged Bruce, talking about the brightness of their future, how Bruce would move to wherever he went to college and then, if they were lucky, an NBA city after that. “Just the Two of Us,” a Will Smith remake of the Bill Withers song, was the tune Roberto chose to play whenever his dad called his cell phone. “That’s how it is, you know, just me and my dad,” Roberto explained. “Like the song says, ‘We can make it if we try.’ ”

  Roberto was the only member of Team Cal to star in his first year of high school. The Los Angeles Times wrote about the 21 points he scored, including 17 in the second half, and thirteen rebounds, in a playoff victory over Anaheim Loara. He scored 32 against Ventura High, which would eventually win a section title. Roberto’s teammates were a step up from what surrounded Demetrius at FoHi, but not a big step, and he helped improve the Dons from 13–17 the year before he got there to 18–10. Cal-Hi Sports, the state’s best canvasser of prep athletics, named him the state’s Freshman of the Year.

  Coaches often drop the cliché that a player “makes those around him better.” Identifying the qualities that form that ability can be difficult. Being a strong passer with good vision helps, but there are also intangibles much harder to quantify. Watching Roberto play for Santa Barbara High, you recognized that some kids were just born knowing how to dissect the game to their benefit and to the benefit of those around them. In the years ahead, some of the best players in Southern California, including Renardo Sidney and DeMar DeRozan, would ask Roberto to play on their grassroots teams, and, as in the case of Sidney, their high school teams as well. This was because the whole game just flowed better when you were teamed with Roberto.

  That might have been what Pete Carroll noticed when he watched
Roberto play against his son’s team. Bruce can’t say for certain. They did not speak again, nor does he know precisely what Carroll did with the information that Roberto was a star quarterback. Bruce couldn’t help but think of Carroll, however, when less than a week after their encounter he received the first of several calls from parents and alumni affiliated with St. Bonaventure High in Ventura. St. Bonaventure was a football power; the year before, it had won its fifth section title in six years. More importantly, USC frequently recruited the school’s players and had recently landed two recruiters from there. These parents said they had heard about Roberto’s exploits as a Pop Warner player and called Bruce into the fall and winter, through Roberto’s first basketball season, posing the same question over and over: What would it take to get Roberto to transfer to St. Bonaventure for his sophomore year?

  In February, Bruce received a call from Jon Mack, the school’s athletic director and longtime football coach. He asked the same question as the parents had: What would it take to get Roberto? During that conversation and later, when Bruce visited with Mack at the school, he provided an answer. “I’m a basketball coach, and the only reason I would pull Roberto out of Santa Barbara would be because I got a job as a head coach at another school.” It just so happened, Mack told him, that the St. Bonaventure job was opening up. They discussed what Bruce would need to build a successful basketball program, including the number of scholarships he would have at his disposal. Feeling confident that a deal could be struck, Mack showed Bruce a schedule of the football team’s off-season workouts, and they examined how many practices, if any, Roberto would have to miss while playing in AAU tournaments. Mack said the school would pay for Roberto to attend a summer camp run by former New York Jets quarterback Ken O’Brien. He didn’t mention that Pete Carroll and O’Brien were friendly (Carroll had been O’Brien’s offensive coordinator with the Jets) or that O’Brien had once coached at USC.

  Mack gave Bruce until the end of April to make a decision. A week before that deadline, as Bruce braced to tell Roberto that he would be transferring to St. Bonaventure, he got a call from Jeff Lavender, the basketball coach at Santa Barbara High. He had heard about the overture from St. Bonaventure, he said, and was willing to do whatever was necessary to keep Roberto at Santa Barbara High.

  “Well, you basically have to let us have the program,” Bruce told him. “You can still be part of the program—we don’t want to run you away. I don’t want that perception out there. But I would want more control of the program. We gotta get a style of offense in here that suits the way Roberto plays. Your style doesn’t fit him. Plus, I want my son to learn how to play man-to-man defense. You’re playing zone.”

  Lavender responded: “I’ll do whatever you need.”

  The next day, Santa Barbara High fired its football coach. “When I heard that, I realized Roberto and I were in the middle of something, that things were happening that I didn’t know about,” Bruce said. No one ever told him that the football coach was fired to entice Roberto to stay, but “everyone knew that the coach was one reason Roberto and I decided he wouldn’t play football as a freshman.”

  The following Monday, Bruce informed Mack that he and Roberto were staying put.

  “It was just so crazy, the whole thing,” Bruce said. “But I kept most of it from Roberto. I’d be dealing with this mess and he’d be out on the golf course.”

  Like all the boys of Team Cal, Roberto was a grassroots free agent, available to join any team now that the dream of keeping the boys together under Keller had died. St. Bonaventure’s courtship ended about the time his recruitment by the top AAU teams in Southern California came to a head.

  The highest level of grassroots basketball was Under–17. When kids talked about playing for SCA or EBO or Pump N Run, they meant the Under–17 teams of those programs. It was not unique for a freshman like Roberto to play for an Under–17 team—that is what most of the elite young prospects did—but it wasn’t always the wisest move. Was a prospect better served playing Under–15 or Under–16, giving his body another year to develop? Would he get the minutes he needed on an Under–17 team stacked with older players? Mats and the Pumps and other coaches who had seen Roberto play with Team Cal knew he was good, but now, like Pete Carroll, their jaws dropped when they witnessed his composure and skill. Whereas they might have once seen Roberto as a nice addition to their U-17 teams, he was now a player they could build around, and he became the most coveted young player in Southern California.

  Nike and Adidas were Roberto’s primary suitors. (Intermediates for Pat Barrett called Bruce, pushing SCA and Reebok, but he never got into the running.) Nike waged a steady campaign, led by Don Crenshaw, Nike’s manager of high school basketball, and Mike Lewis, the coach of The Swoosh’s top team in the area, California Hoops. Crenshaw began sending Nike gear to Roberto’s apartment early in his freshman season. Over a six-month period, he shipped him twenty pairs of shoes, three sweat suits, and an untold number of socks, T-shirts, headbands, and hats. Roberto gave the hats to his dad, who quickly compiled an impressive collection. Sometimes the gear would arrive unsolicited; other times, Roberto would see a pair of shoes he liked—perhaps the newest from Michael Jordan’s Jumpman line, or the new Kobe Bryant shoe—and either he or Bruce would call Crenshaw and ask him to ship a pair to Santa Barbara. In his role as Roberto’s personal shoe valet, Crenshaw never failed to come through.

  Adidas’s push came care of the Pumps. One or both of the brothers attended a few of Roberto’s high school games and called regularly. One weekend day, they picked Roberto up and took him to the Adidas outlet store near Ventura and bought him twelve pairs of shoes. They later gifted him with a black leather jacket with the logos of all the NBA teams on it, which retailed for nearly $1,000. They also promised to pay the airfare and lodging for Bruce and Roberto’s mother so they could attend every tournament.

  On January 22, Bruce, Roberto, and eight of his high school teammates attended a game between the Los Angeles Clippers and the Golden State Warriors at the Staples Center. Their tickets came care of the Pumps, and they were no ordinary seats. “We had a whole luxury box to ourselves,” Roberto said. That impressed Bruce, as did the Pumps’ promise that Jim Harrick, the former coach at UCLA, Rhode Island, and Georgia, would be Roberto’s coach. “It’s got to be a good thing to have a coach like that working with Roberto,” Bruce said. That was debatable. Harrick had been fired from Georgia after the uncovering of multiple NCAA violations, including academic fraud. Rhode Island and UCLA also ran afoul of the NCAA under his watch, and he left the college game branded as one of the sport’s biggest cheats. No amount of wrongdoing, however, could disqualify him from coaching at the grassroots level.

  The Pumps organized back-to-back practices at Loyola Marymount over one weekend, which included about two dozen players they were considering. Roberto played the first day but told Bruce afterward that he didn’t want to return for day 2. “Too many guards,” he told his dad. The Pumps had a number of backcourt players, including Larry Drew, Jr., and the son of NBA coach Mike Dunleavy.

  It appeared Nike and California Hoops would win by default, but before making a decision, Bruce asked a friend to set up a meeting with Sonny Vaccaro.

  ————

  As with Joe Keller more than two years earlier, the reception Bruce received upon arriving at Vaccaro’s home in Calabasas overwhelmed him. “I’m just honored that you would have me in your home,” he said several times as Vaccaro and Pam showed him around. They took him outside to see the pool and the hummingbirds, and then they sat down in the kitchen for pasta with Italian sausage.

  Bruce referred to Vaccaro as “Mr. Vaccaro,” even though they were not that far apart in age and even after Vaccaro asked him repeatedly to call him “Sonny.” Sonny knew some of the players Bruce grew up with in Columbus, and they also talked about Connie Hawkins, the former ABA and NBA star. Vaccaro had met him when he played for the Pittsburgh Pipers of the ABA; Bruce was introduced t
o Hawkins after he was traded to the Lakers late in his career.

  Vaccaro asked Bruce about his ex-wife and then about Roberto, but not about Roberto’s basketball skills. How was he as a student? What athletes did he admire? What were his interests other than basketball? Bruce looked embarrassed telling Vaccaro that Roberto had recently joined his high school’s golf team.

  “Oh, my goodness, that is wonderful. Pammy, did you hear that? Young Roberto plays golf. How wonderful for him!”

  After lunch, they moved upstairs to Vaccaro’s office and sat side by side on a leather couch underneath the window. Behind Vaccaro’s desk was a portrait of former Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Roberto Clemente.

  “That’s my favorite athlete,” Vaccaro said after Bruce asked him about the picture.

  “Mine too,” Bruce said. “That is who I named my son after.”

  Bruce struggled to formulate his questions on how to best steer Roberto’s career. He lumped several issues together: choosing a team, staying at Santa Barbara High versus moving to a more heralded school close to L.A., and the need for Roberto to play at one of the big shoe-company camps that summer. Vaccaro let him ramble on, then put his hand on his arm and said, “Okay, let’s look at this one at a time. Let’s start with the camps, because everyone knows that is my thing. I’ll say this up front: Roberto’s in my camp right now. I’ve never seen him play, but from what I’ve heard and now meeting you, he has a spot in the ABCD Camp if he wants to go and if you decide that is the best thing for him. And, I think, if he is ready, he should go to one of the camps—if not mine, then the Nike Camp or the Adidas [Superstar] Camp. … What he has to do, and it may not be this year but at some point, he has to make a name for himself at one of the camps. That’s where … see, there, it’s like a bonfire at the camp: You’re good and then all of a sudden you get the attention, and that’s where it’ll explode. It’s not the same as at these tournaments everyone plays in. There are some tournaments—Bob Gibbons’s tournament or the Vegas tournaments—where everyone goes and he will be seen by everyone, but most of these events, even if he goes to twenty a summer, they just don’t matter, because everybody’s not there.