Play Their Hearts Out

by George Dohrmann

The Lucky Ones

  28

  Aaron Moore playing for Dominguez High in 2007

  About the time the grassroots world anointed Demetrius one of its biggest flops, he received a phone call from Aaron Moore.

  They had not spoken in almost a year, since Aaron chastised Demetrius for refusing to play hurt in Team Cal’s final game, and time had not dulled their enmity, at least not on Demetrius’s end.

  “Why you calling me?” Demetrius said after Aaron identified himself.

  “I thought maybe it would be cool to talk,” Aaron said. There was a tinge of wanting in his voice, and that confused Demetrius.

  “Why would I want to talk to someone who keeps starting rumors about me? I hear all the time how you’re talking shit about me.”

  “Whatever, nigger, you are hardly on my mind,” Aaron said, now on the defensive.

  “If I’m hardly on your mind, why you calling me?”

  “I was talking to a friend and he said I should call you and see what’s up.”

  “I got nothing to talk to you about.”

  “All right, then, nigger.”

  “All right.”

  That exchange troubled Demetrius for days. Why had Aaron thought it was okay to call him? What did he really want to talk about? He regretted not letting Aaron say a little more, to discover what he was after. Demetrius eventually concluded that Aaron had probably called to gloat, and that wouldn’t have been out of character. Aaron continued to compare himself to Demetrius long after they stopped being teammates. Hearing about Demetrius’s struggles as a freshman and at the Superstar Camp pleased him. He also obsessed over the rankings, and seeing Demetrius fall into the 200s validated the point he’d long argued: Demetrius was all hype.

  But Aaron didn’t call to revel in Demetrius’s failings. After a year of high school and a summer of grassroots basketball, much of the talk about former Team Cal players was on Demetrius’s flameout, and rightly so. His failing got the attention of the youth-basketball populace in a way rarely seen before. But Aaron was also one of the nation’s elite young players, and his basketball future was in peril as well. Like Demetrius, he struggled adjusting to high school basketball. Russell Otis, Dominguez’s coach, positioned him primarily at center or power forward, where his slight build and lack of strength left him overmatched against good teams. Aaron wanted to play small forward, and at six foot seven he had the height and raw skills to play that position in college and maybe the NBA, but Otis stuck him in the interior, and he resented that. By season’s end, he’d played less than ten minutes a game, and frustration over his role permeated everything. He feuded with teammates—who considered him moody and cocky for a freshman averaging 8 points a game—and his grades plummeted.

  Playing for H Squad, a Los Angeles–based grassroots team, in the spring and summer had been equally discouraging. Aaron was the last man off the bench, and he sulked and missed more tournaments than he attended. Adidas thought he would attend the Superstar Camp again, but Teron Pickett was unable to reach him in the run-up to the event. Like Demetrius, he fell in the rankings, landing at number 45 according to Hoop Scoop, four spots below Rome.

  There were any number of potential dangers that could derail the dreams of the Team Cal kids, many of them the social challenges confronted by any teenage boy growing up in Southern California, such as girls, gangs, and drugs. Like all teenagers, their ability to pilot this stage of life depended greatly on the support they got from their families. The players who made the smoothest transition to high school were Justin, Jordan, Roberto, and Andrew, and the common thread between them was obvious: at least one supportive and involved parent. Demetrius and Aaron hated to be linked, but it was impossible not to note the most relevant parallel in their declines: the role or lack thereof played by their mothers.

  Kisha’s faults, when set next to Barbara’s, were minor. She had entrusted the wrong man with her son and had been a bystander for too many of Demetrius’s salad days. There was no discounting that. But she also came through when she was most needed. As Keller stepped out of their lives for good, she picked up the phone and called schools (Taft, Westchester, Etiwanda), trying to find a better setting for Demetrius. She waited too long for anything to happen before his sophomore year—he would have to endure another season at FoHi—but she reengaged in a way that comforted her son. In his weaker moments, when Demetrius longed for Keller and sent him text messages, she cautioned him: “Little D, remember what he did to you? How he abandoned you? I will not let him hurt you again.” Kisha wasn’t going to make anyone’s list of the world’s best mothers, but when Demetrius hit bottom, she did her best to pick him up.

  Barbara, in contrast, deteriorated as a parental figure at the moment Aaron needed her most. If her only fault had been absenteeism (of which there was plenty), Aaron could have managed. But she put him in harm’s way, especially when it suited her needs.

  As a basketball prospect, Aaron was better positioned than Demetrius. He regularly heard from Pacific–10 Conference schools, Washington most of all. Assistant coach Cameron Dollar attempted to get him to make a verbal commitment to that school. “When do you want to set up the press conference to announce it?” Dollar asked. Another Washington assistant sent Aaron twenty-seven text messages in a single day, mostly chatter about his recovery from a sprained ankle. Aaron had the one attribute no amount of time on the bench could diminish: height. Even ten minutes of action was enough for the college scouts to project him to the next level. But with Barbara in the picture, it was not hard to imagine Aaron missing out on a college career.

  In January of his freshman year, Aaron announced in a phone call: “I’m not going back to Dominguez. It’s because of Coach Otis. What people say about him, the rumors about him messing with boys, it’s true.”

  How did he know?

  “Because he tried it with me.”

  His retelling of what allegedly occurred mirrored in some ways the claims made by the former Dominguez player six years earlier, which had led to the felony charges that Otis beat in court. Like that boy, Aaron had no proof beyond his word. Otis’s improper behavior occurred mostly during car trips to and from the Inland Empire, he said, when it was only the two of them.

  On one such drive, in September, Otis made the first of many suggestive comments, posing his words in a way that could have been perceived as harmless. “What would you do if Pat Barrett said, ‘I’ll give you a thousand dollars to let me touch you?’ ” Otis asked Aaron on the drive.

  “I don’t want another man touching on me like that,” Aaron said, and Otis dropped it.

  He made similar comments on later trips, and Aaron, while disturbed, brushed them off. “He hadn’t done nothing to me, really, and I just thought I could deal with it.”

  Before Thanksgiving, Otis moved beyond suggestions during a car ride from Dominguez back to the Inland Empire. As Aaron slipped into the backseat (he often slept there during the long drive), Otis said, “You’re not getting chauffeured. Get in the front.” Aaron did as he was told and quickly fell asleep, but he woke later when he felt Otis’s hand in his crotch.

  “What are you doing?” Aaron shouted.

  “Oh, you didn’t like that?” Otis responded.

  “No!”

  “Why don’t you touch mine and see if you like it.”

  “No, I’m good.”

  “Oh, I’ll get you a Sidekick if you let me touch you.”

  “No, I’m good.”

  On a drive a few days later, Otis produced a Sidekick. “Let me touch you and I’ll give it to you.”

  “No,” Aaron said again.

  This went on for a week, Aaron said, but he told no one. “It was the middle of the season and I didn’t know if I could transfer out, so I didn’t say anything.” He wondered if Otis made advances toward other players and if he was giving them money like the $1,000 he got each month.

  “Would you let me see it?” Otis asked him during one drive.

  “What
do you mean, would I let you see it?”

  “You should let me look at it. How much money would it take?”

  “Give me two thousand dollars a week.”

  Otis laughed.

  He continued to proposition Aaron, and Aaron continued to decline his advances. On one drive, when Otis was more persistent than usual, Aaron snapped at him.

  “You’re a fucking fag.”

  “I’m not gay,” Otis said.

  “But you like penises.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re a fag.”

  Aaron finally told Barbara about Otis’s improper behavior in December, just before Dominguez went to a tournament in Florida. She sent him to the tournament anyway, telling Aaron she didn’t want Otis to know that she knew what he’d done. When Aaron returned, and while on Christmas break, he pleaded with Barbara to let him transfer to a new school immediately.

  “You need to stand up to Coach O and talk to him,” she responded.

  “Why do I need to talk to him?”

  “You need to put him on the books about what he’s doing.”

  Barbara dialed Otis’s number, but Aaron refused to speak to him on the phone. “You want to be a punk and not stand up to him?” Barbara said.

  “What is it standing up to?”

  “You guys need to clear the air.”

  “What air is there to clear?”

  Aaron felt Barbara was being too “buddy-buddy” with Otis. He asked her why she wasn’t outraged.

  “Because I’m trying to get him to help me out this month,” she responded.

  In later conversations, Barbara attempted to convince Aaron that he had to go back to Dominguez for reasons other than the $1,000. He couldn’t transfer without first getting a grade check from his teachers, she said, because the Dominguez coaches might change his grades when they learned he was leaving. “Why can’t we just do the grade check over the phone or by mail?” Aaron asked, and there was no reason they could not. Next, Barbara promised to buy Aaron a car when she got her income-tax-return check, enabling him to drive himself to and from Dominguez. “But that means I gotta ride with Coach O until March or April,” he said.

  Barbara explored placing Aaron at FoHi or moving him in with Bruce and Roberto in Santa Barbara. Mats talked of founding a prep school in Las Vegas, and she looked into that as well. None of the coaches in question—not Soderberg, not Bruce, not Mats—promised to match Dominguez’s $1,000 contribution, and so Barbara reiterated that returning to Dominguez was Aaron’s only option.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything,” Aaron said. “It’s worse now because my mom knows, and she’s telling everybody, and Coach Otis knows that I told her. And I still gotta go back.”

  It was possible that Aaron concocted the allegations to get out of returning to Dominguez for another reason. He wasn’t happy, as a player or socially, and saying Otis had acted improperly might have appeared the surest way to facilitate a transfer. “It happened,” Aaron said sternly when this possibility was raised. He made similar definitive statements when grilled later.

  In late January, Aaron returned to Dominguez for the remainder of the school year. By the spring, he looked frailer, his skin lighter and his eyes dark. In the summer, Barbara informed him that he would be going back to Dominguez for his sophomore year as well.

  “If I could choose I would move to Santa Barbara, live with Bruce and Roberto, and go to Santa Barbara High. Bruce, man, he will give you the shirt off his back. I know he really cares about me. And Roberto and me are like brothers. I wanna move there, too, because it’s the furthest away. I just want to get away from all this. [But] whatever my mom says, I gotta do. I gotta do what she says whether I like it or not.”

  During Aaron’s sophomore year, Barbara moved the family four times. If you stopped by a home they had been in only a month before, you would find a mailbox full of old catalogs and nothing but garbage inside, as if they had left in a hurry. Barbara and Aaron’s cell- and home-phone numbers were often disconnected or changed, as she failed to pay a bill or he lost a phone. For all of Aaron’s sophomore year, chronicling his life was nearly impossible. Some Dominguez games he would play, others he would inexplicably miss. “He might have dropped out of school,” the parent of a Dominguez player said before one game he missed. In the spring, he would appear at some showcase tournament where Justin or Roberto was playing, and they would get his new cell- or home-phone number and keep in contact with him for a week or two, but then the number would get disconnected and he was back in the wind.

  The only person he contacted with any regularity was Roberto. Weeks would pass and no one would hear from Aaron, then Roberto would be sitting in class, his cell phone would vibrate, and it would be a number he didn’t recognize from the 909 or 951 area code.

  “BER-TO!” Aaron would shout.

  He would promise to come to Santa Barbara for a visit and offer a vague explanation for what he had been doing the past weeks. “Shit, it’s crazy, Berto, you’re not going to believe it. But I am still ballin’. You won’t believe my handle right now. No one can stay in front of me. I be killin’ people.”

  Roberto never dug too deep, and that was probably why Aaron chose him. He could remind himself that he had a friend and then drift back into the tumult.

  The correlation between a stable home environment and emotional stability in children has been so thoroughly examined over the last fifty years that psychologists, a group prone to placing qualifications, rarely dispute it. When handicapping who—Demetrius or Aaron—was more likely to rebound from his rocky start in high school and achieve his hoop dreams, Demetrius had a decided edge: Kisha. For all her faults, she provided her son a safe haven. Demetrius had clothes and food and a home. Living in the same place for nearly a decade anchored him, contributing to a psychological firmness. He had hidden in a bathroom at the Superstar Camp, and he doubted his abilities for the first time, but one got the sense that he could recover.

  A child can overcome a lot of adversity, even an unsettled home life, but it usually requires a responsive and warm parent. Barbara was not that. A psychologist needed to know only the number of times Aaron moved and how Barbara handled the Russell Otis problem to predict his behavior during his sophomore year: feelings of insecurity, a tendency to get into trouble, inability to regulate aggression, difficulty representing himself as being worthy of love and respect, self-medicating with drugs or alcohol. All of the above applied to Aaron after Barbara forced him to return to Dominguez, and it only got worse.

  In the spring of 2007, Barbara called the police on Aaron for the first time, after he and his older brother (who lived on and off with them) got into a fight. “My mom and I were arguing and I was trying to leave the house, and my brother pushed me and so I hit him, and that is how it started,” Aaron said. As the fighting ceased, he repeatedly yelled at his mother, “I don’t want to be here no more!” He meant he didn’t want to live with her anymore, but Barbara told police that Aaron had threatened to kill himself.

  He spent the next seven days at Canyon Ridge Hospital in Chino. “That doctor there, man, he was trying to say I had all these diseases and stuff, like bipolar and manic–depressive.” He was given medication upon his release but refused to take it. “There ain’t nothing wrong with me.” He went to his girlfriend’s house, avoided Barbara, and also stopped going to school, even after Barbara transferred him from Dominguez to Riverside Poly.

  The Riverside Press-Enterprise wrote of Aaron’s transfer to Poly after the CIF granted him a hardship waiver, making him eligible to play immediately. (Barbara claimed in her filing with the CIF that the death of Aaron’s grandfather and her diagnosis with emphysema necessitated a transfer.) In the article, Barbara was quoted as saying: “It’s been a very traumatic year for our family, and [Aaron] wanted to be closer to me.”

  In reality, Aaron wanted nothing to do with his mother. He stayed at his girlfriend’s house or with friends and he began experimenting with marij
uana, which Barbara soon learned about. After one shouting match over the phone, Aaron said, “Just leave me alone.” It was something every teenager probably says to a parent at one time or another, the anthem of teenage angst, but Barbara responded by calling the police and telling them that Aaron had threatened suicide again. Officers found him a few days later at his girlfriend’s house, pinned him to the floor, and handcuffed him in front of her.

  Per police procedure, Aaron was placed on a seventy-two-hour hold and examined by a psychologist. “We don’t think you need to be hospitalized,” Aaron says the doctor told him. “Is there somewhere [other than Barbara’s] where you can go?” He said he could stay with his grandmother or Bruce and Roberto in Santa Barbara. But Barbara refused to sign off on his release (Aaron was not yet eighteen), and so he was transferred to Loma Linda University Medical Center for a ten-day stint. Much of that time, he shared a room with a boy who had been hospitalized for cutting his dog’s ear off.

  Aaron didn’t surface again until late in the summer. He appeared at a tournament on a team made up of Dominguez players. While Aaron was hospitalized at Loma Linda, Barbara had reenrolled him at Dominguez, no doubt hoping the $1,000 payments from Otis would resume when she did. “I didn’t have any say in it. She just went up there and signed me up without even asking me.” He was also living with his mother full-time again. “I’m just trying to make the best of it, you know, stay out of her way.”

  When Aaron was at Canyon Ridge and Loma Linda, Barbara was unreachable or didn’t return phone calls. She showed up at the tournament and, when asked why she had Aaron hospitalized, she said: “I had to give my son to God. I had to put him in God’s hands. As his mother, that was all I could do to save him.” She said nothing more, as she said she needed to focus on watching her “baby” play basketball.

  Over time, Aaron came to adopt a rosier disposition than his plight dictated. Times were tough, he’d admit, but then he would offer some new outlook on life that he swore was going to enable him to overcome his troubles.