Play Their Hearts Out

by George Dohrmann

  “Do you know what an epiphany is?” he said one day. “I had one. I just want to play basketball now and have fun and experience my life. The one thing I can influence is how hard I play. So now I know that’s just what I have to do, no matter what goes on at home: just play as hard as I can. Then one day I can just bail and get out of my mom’s life for good.”

  Immediately after each conversation, there was hope that Aaron might survive until college, when he would be free from Barbara. But then there would be another fight—like the time Barbara kicked him out of the house for weeks without even letting him pack any clothes. He was also flunking classes because of repeated absences and missing practices and games for unknown reasons. Two years of high school remained, and that was too much time. Aaron needed to “get out for good” now. He couldn’t take any more obstacles.

  And then one evening, Aaron called Roberto and delivered the news.

  “My girlfriend’s pregnant,” he said. He was neither happy nor despondent. It was just what life brought. “She’s gonna have the baby, and I guess I’m going to help take care of it. … My mom says she will help me.”

  29

  Ryan Smith

  If there was one aspect of Demetrius’s game that personified the vastness of the work he needed to do yet also represented hope that a recovery was possible, it was his jump shot.

  The jump shot appears to be a straightforward endeavor: A player leaps in the air and releases the ball. Yet few aspects of the game are more technical. It is like a golf swing in that it requires a series of interconnected movements done properly to achieve the desired result. One book, The Perfect Jump Shot by Scott Jaimet, breaks down the shot into twenty-two separate steps, beginning with (1) controlled stop and ending with (22) balanced landing with feet in open position. Where Lakers coach Phil Jackson saw similarities between basketball and jazz, Jaimet, who achieved a perfect score on the math portion of the SAT as a teenager, saw a wondrous combination of physics and mathematics, deserving of 174 pages of analysis, including a section in which he compares the Lilliputians’ method of tying down Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels to a basketball player who shoots from “an unbalanced position with multiple flaws.”

  Two tenets of the jump shot as deconstructed by Jaimet that were particularly relevant to Demetrius were covered in sections of his book titled “Release” and “Drift.” Demetrius’s most visible flaw was in his release. It differed on almost every shot. Late in games, he would not shoot until he began his descent, which gave the impression that he forgot to let go of the ball and hurried to get rid of it before he landed. Other times, he shot on the way up, as if he couldn’t wait to let it go. This inconsistency was probably an instance in which his physical blessings acted as a curse. A young player with tremendous leaping ability often tries to jump as high as he can on every shot. But how high a player can leap changes over the course of a game; his legs will have more spring in the first quarter, for example, than in the fourth. “A great release has the ball leaving your hand at the peak of your jump with your body in full extension,” Jaimet writes. “If the top of the jump passes before the release, the energy of the legs is wasted. If the body is falling while the arm is trying to throw the ball forward, there will be major opposing forces, and the brain won’t have a clue how hard to shoot.”

  Demetrius also tended to jump in a manner that forced his body to drift backward in the air five or ten degrees, making every shot a “fadeaway” jumper. This was not uncommon with kids his age, and the NBA was probably to blame. Demetrius emulated the superstars he saw on television, and they commonly attempted shots slightly off plumb because of the influence of defenders. But they never chose to make a shot more difficult than it had to be, which Demetrius did by fading away from the basket even when no defender was nearby. “When the vertical alignment is off, it starts a chain of events,” Jaimet writes. “The jump acts as a multiplier of the original imbalance. The higher the jump, the greater the drift. That is why great jumpers are often not great shooters.”

  Demetrius had good wrist snap, and from start to finish he got the ball in the air quickly (what a coach would call “release time”). He always put the proper amount of backspin on the ball, and his follow-through was excellent. Also working in his favor was the small number of outside shots he’d attempted over his career. One benefit of Keller not working with him on his outside shot was that he hadn’t gotten comfortable with unsound mechanics. Some young players have relied on a shot with flaws for so long that changing their form is next to impossible. Demetrius’s bad habits weren’t ingrained. He was winging it, and in some ways that made him a more malleable pupil. As a college coach noted after watching Demetrius at the Superstar Camp: “There’s nothing wrong with his form that a little coaching and five thousand shots won’t fix.”

  Ryan Smith learned to shoot on a portable hoop he and his three brothers dragged into the street in the cul-de-sac where they lived in San Dimas. The base was a tire filled with cement, and the backboard was dented from the many times they’d dropped it during setup. “We were pretty poor, and basketball was one of those things we could do that didn’t cost anything,” Smith said.

  At six foot three, Smith was the shortest of the brothers, and discovered at a young age that basketball offers one salvation to those not born with great height or quickness: “If you can shoot, you can play.”

  While at San Dimas High, Smith often spent three or four hours a day shooting nothing but 3-pointers. He admired the school’s coach, Gary Prestesater, who had also been a great shooter as a young player. (Prestesater scored 62 points for Azusa [California] College, later known as Azusa Pacific University, in a 1964 game against Western Baptist Bible College of El Cerrito, California, for which he made Sports Illustrated’s “Faces in the Crowd.”) It was an ideal pairing, the onetime marksman passing his knowledge down to a kid cut from the same cloth. Smith started on the varsity team for three years, was named all–Valley Vista League for two years, and was the league’s most valuable player his senior season. He played for Prestesater’s alma mater, Azusa Pacific, for two seasons before transferring to the University of Sioux Falls, where he played a semester before injuring his wrist and returning home.

  Smith credits Prestesater for turning him into a great player and for helping forge a direction for his life after college. Their relationship seems antiquated today, given how grassroots coaches have usurped high school coaches as the molders of young players, and to hear Smith talk about Prestesater is to be reminded of what basketball was like before the shoe companies got involved and the stakes got so high. Keller gave Demetrius more than fifty pairs of basketball shoes during their years together; Prestesater bought Smith a single pair. “His parents got a divorce and they were having a hard time, and I would have helped out any of my players in that situation,” Prestesater said. That single gesture moved Smith. “I grew up believing that was how a coach should treat his kids.”

  In the summer of 2006, Smith was hired to teach special education and coach basketball at Fontana High. Like anyone who followed high school basketball in the Inland Empire, he knew that the school’s talent was down, and he also had heard about Demetrius. The kid was raw, not a basketball player, people said. He had a bad attitude, didn’t work hard in practice, and often showed up his teammates, which Smith considered a cardinal sin. Smith decided to reserve judgment on his work ethic and attitude—he didn’t know how Demetrius’s relationship with Soderberg might have contributed to the problem—but in his first meeting with Demetrius, he delivered a frank assessment of his skills.

  “Demetrius, you’ve got all this hype but not the game to back it up,” said Smith, who had seen Demetrius play once as a freshman and also watched tape of him. “You’ve got all this athletic ability. You’re probably the most athletic player I’ve ever seen in high school, but you don’t know what to do with it. You’re a post player in a guard’s body.”

  “I know, Coach,” Demetrius said, a
nd then he mumbled about that being the reason he had fallen in the rankings.

  “Who cares about your ranking?” Smith said. “You’ve got to create a whole new game, and that isn’t going to be easy. You’re going to struggle a lot, and so you’re probably going to fall in the rankings some more. … I can help you. I’ve got an overall plan how we can make you into a guard. But if you are going to be a problem, you should just go to some other school right now. I’ll sign whatever I need to sign and you can go somewhere else.”

  Smith was one of the youngest teachers at the school, and his manner of speaking and style of dress made him seem even younger. He was rarely spotted without a baseball cap on his head, which he wore turned backward. Even when he didn’t wear a cap, he looked as if he’d just taken one off. His wavy brown hair was permanently matted down, turning up only in the back along a line where the cap ended. When he dressed for school, he often wore a polo shirt from the King City golf course untucked over long shorts and low-top Vans, looking like a skateboarder who had reluctantly entered adulthood.

  Smith talked to his players as he would his friends or his brothers. He never spoke down to them, and he loved to tease. One day, as Demetrius talked to a girl seated in the bleachers of the football stadium, Smith walked past him and said in a serious tone, “Demetrius, don’t you have a girlfriend?” Before Demetrius could answer in the negative, Smith walked away, shaking his head. “You know, if you ask out every girl in school, one is bound to say yes,” he said on another day, after spotting him socializing with a girl in the main quad. “I mean it. Someone will go out with you eventually. Keep trying.”

  It was hard not to like Smith. Still, Demetrius kept his distance for the first few weeks. It wasn’t that he disagreed with Smith’s evaluation of his shortcomings; he just had a newfound skepticism about coaches in general. He was trying to figure out Smith’s angle. “I never had a coach who didn’t want something from me,” he said.

  Smith opened the FoHi gym on weekend mornings, and he invited his players to come. He brought along his brothers and a few friends so they would always have enough for a full game. One Saturday, Demetrius showed up and for the first few minutes just watched as Smith, his brothers, and a few students played a lively game. Smith made every 3-pointer he attempted, and Demetrius was impressed. Coach Smith can ball, he thought. He entered the game, joining the team opposite Smith. On one possession he caught the ball on the wing and then drove past his defender, anticipating an easy dunk in this glorified pickup game. Smith left his man on the opposite side of the court and slid between Demetrius and the basket. As Demetrius rose up, Smith jumped, too, even though he had no chance of blocking his shot. He then brought his right arm down on Demetrius’s shoulder so hard that it knocked him to the ground before he could even release the ball. Demetrius landed on his butt with a thud and then fell onto his back as the gym went silent. It was the hardest foul of the day, and the impact it had on the other students was obvious: Their new coach had hammered the team’s best player to the ground.

  Demetrius stayed on the floor for a moment, staring up at Smith in disbelief. “What are you looking at?” Smith said, standing over him. “There’s no easy layups here. Get up and play.”

  Demetrius told Kisha about the play later that night, and she carped about Smith being a coach who would risk injury to his best player. Demetrius eventually judged his actions differently. Being treated as special was what had gotten him to this point—ranked number 215 in his class. Smith was going to make him work for everything he got, and Demetrius knew deep down that was what he needed.

  Smith left a standing invitation at their first meeting to work with Demetrius individually after school and on weekends if he wanted. All Demetrius had to do was ask politely, show up on time, and follow Smith’s instructions to the letter. At the first of these workouts, Smith told Demetrius: “Look, my job is to win, but it is also to make you into the best player you can be. To do that, we’ve got to turn you into a guard. And to do that, we first have to get you comfortable shooting from the outside.”

  On that first day, Smith ordered Demetrius to put all the balls on a rack and move the rack off the court. He then walked him through a series of drills focusing on Demetrius’s balance and footwork. He had him jog along the 3-point line and then quickly stop and jump as if he were taking a shot. “Your feet! Your feet!” Smith yelled, and then he stopped the drill and demonstrated the proper way to square your body to the basket before jumping. “Jump straight up. You should land in the exact same spot you took off from,” he said. For all the high-level basketball Demetrius had played, his footwork was atrocious—another indictment of Keller and the grassroots system—but Smith was glad not to have to undo the work of others. “Demetrius, you are a blank slate,” he said. “We are starting from scratch.”

  Five days a week for almost three months, Smith helped Demetrius find a jump shot from the feet up. Some weekend mornings, Kisha would come to the gym and sit on a chair along the baseline, counting out Demetrius’s makes and misses. Smith and his pupil played a shooting game at the end of each workout that Smith and his brothers had devised, called “100,” pitting the teacher against his student. Demetrius arrived at the gym each day anxious to get to the end and take on his new coach, hoping it would be the day he finally beat him. “Today’s the day. You’re going down, Coach,” Demetrius would say, and Smith would smile and nod. “Sure, sure. Just like last time.”

  Smith pestered Demetrius in a passive–aggressive way about taking better care of his body. Demetrius would send him a text message like What time is practice? and Smith would respond: You should be eating more vegetables or: You need to stretch more before workouts. His responses would have nothing to do with the question asked, and to Demetrius there was nothing funnier in the world. Smith also passed along sayings that Prestesater had once used on him. “You don’t take a shot in a game unless you’ve tried it a thousand times in practice,” he chimed.

  Smith came to conclude that what he’d heard about Demetrius upon taking the FoHi job—he was lazy, a prima donna, a bad teammate—were interpretations by people who didn’t know Demetrius and what he’d been through. “No one has ever taken him and said, ‘Here is the right way to do it. Here is what you’ve got to do to get better,’ ” Smith said. “There is all this pressure put on him; people expect him to be great, but no one has showed him how to get there. He knows he is falling behind, and that scares him. Demetrius’s problem isn’t that he has a big ego. It’s that he’s scared.”

  FoHi’s opening game of the season came in the San Dimas Tournament in early December. FoHi drew Etiwanda in the opener—a stout challenge for any team, let alone one transitioning to a new coach and system. The task was made easier by the absence of Jordan and Rome from Etiwanda’s lineup. Jordan was sidelined by a stress fracture in his foot, which would heal completely in a few weeks. Rome’s absence was more problematic. He had been ruled ineligible for the first semester after accumulating a 1.3 GPA, including three Fs, during his freshman year. He and his parents didn’t want to discuss the cause of his academic slide, but the former Team Cal players who still spoke with Rome were unanimous in their view of what had happened. “He’s gotten into smoking weed,” Demetrius said. Added Justin: “The people I talk to say he is smoking like a couple times a day.” Jordan Finn—his classmate, teammate, and friend since they were ten—stopped hanging out with Rome outside of the physical education class they had called “Basketball,” which was essentially a period at the end of the day when the team worked out. Jordan didn’t speak about why he disassociated himself from his longtime friend—not even with his parents—but his actions sent a clear message: Rome was headed in a direction he would not follow.

  Sharon, Rome’s mom, treated his drug use and apathy at school as a phase, as if it would pass quickly, and she was unable to differentiate between the gentle boy Rome had been and the teenage slacker he’d become. “That’s my baby, I just can’t,” s
he said when I asked her before the game if Rome had been grounded or otherwise punished for his sorry grades. Rome, Sr., had gotten more involved as of late, she said, and was picking Rome up from school each afternoon. But his involvement varied from month to month, leaving Little Rome with one parent who couldn’t bring herself to discipline him and another who did so only when it fit his schedule.

  Rome, Sr., had a saying: “Twenty years from now, this will all be chaff in the wind.” It was adopted from Scripture (Psalm 35:5), and he used it to avoid confrontation. In the early days of Team Cal, when John Finn would try to mobilize parents to confront Keller, Rome, Sr., would wave him off with that line or another, like: “It just ain’t that important compared to an eternal perspective.” Rome, Sr., took a similar stance when John attempted to elucidate the seriousness of Rome’s predicament. College coaches would find out that Rome had been ruled ineligible, and some schools would rule him out for that reason alone. UCLA had shown interest in Rome during his freshman season, but that school and others would look at his grades and question his discipline and commitment. Like Aaron, he had slipped behind in credits, which meant he would have to retake old classes while also passing new ones to have any chance of being eligible as a college freshman. There was still time, but he had to get back on track immediately and lose no more ground the rest of the way.

  Once, when John asked Rome, Sr., about punishing Rome more sternly, he answered, “I don’t want to be too hard on my son, because I want to have a relationship with him later in life.” Rome, Sr., hadn’t been close with his father, and John understood his concern, but it was too convenient an excuse. The logical move, as John saw it, was for Rome to move in with Rome, Sr., and his wife, Debra. Only then could Rome, Sr., properly monitor his son’s whereabouts and his commitment to his schoolwork. “But I don’t think Big Rome wants to disrupt the nice life he has now,” John said.