Play Their Hearts Out

by George Dohrmann

  Perhaps most impressive was the view. The patio looked out over avocado trees that dropped their dark fruit so often that Tom offered them to friends by the bucketful. Beyond the trees was the California sunset, all reds and burnt oranges, made more brilliant by the smog lying thick over the Los Angeles basin. You couldn’t see the Pacific Ocean, but you knew it was there.

  At the opposite end of the rectangular table from Tom sat his wife, Mary, and to his left were Tommy and his sister, Kelly, who was a year younger but had the same red hair, fair skin, and freckles. Taking up the chairs to Tom’s right were two more teenagers who, by the end of the summer of 2007, could accurately be described as dependents. One was Chris Gabriel, a six-foot-eleven South African who had been living in Tom’s guesthouse for the better part of a year. He had been brought to the United States by Rick Isaac, the coach of H Squad, in concert with a college assistant coach. After attending a series of prep schools, Chris came to the attention of the coach at JSerra Catholic High School in Orange County. He bonded with that squad’s point guard, Tommy, and was invited one night to sleep over. “Then I just never left,” Chris said. Tom later helped him secure a scholarship to cover JSerra’s $12,000-a-year tuition.

  JSerra was a school of 1,000 students in San Juan Capistrano, the Orange County town known for the cliff swallows that are said to migrate between Argentina and the mission there. It opened in 2003 and quickly became, along with Mater Dei, a place where some of the wealthiest families in the Southland sent their children. JSerra’s athletic teams were not as dominant as Mater Dei’s, which they competed against in the Trinity League, but their facilities were superior. The athletic complex, completed in 2006, cost $40 million to build and covered twenty-nine acres. With almost 500,000 square feet of turf fields, JSerra claimed to have the largest installation of artificial turf anywhere in the country.

  The athletic complex was on one side of a busy thoroughfare, the stucco academic buildings were on the other, and a bridge connected the two. Except for the fact that students wore uniforms, JSerra’s campus could easily have been mistaken for that of a small college. It also had a strong academic reputation—in one year, 142 of the 143 graduating seniors continued their education after high school.

  Lording over JSerra’s basketball program was Tom Lewis, a well-known figure in the grassroots basketball world. Lewis starred at Mater Dei and then played for USC and Pepperdine. He was best known among grassroots insiders as Barrett’s first prodigy. (It was during the recruitment of Lewis that Jerry Tarkanian branded Barrett “the biggest whore” he’d ever met.) After his playing career ended, Lewis dabbled in coaching, including a stint as an assistant coach with the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury. He took the JSerra job when the school opened and quickly built it into a power program—in no small part because of his relationship with Barrett, who steered players his way.

  In addition to Tommy and Chris, JSerra’s varsity team featured shooting guard Casey James, who had played a season for Keller. At power forward was six-foot-five Alec Williams, who would go on to earn a scholarship to San Diego State. It was a good team but not talented enough to defeat Mater Dei, which included the North Carolina–bound Wear twins, Travis and David, and Gary Franklin, Jr., at point guard. JSerra needed an athletic wing player capable of beating defenders off the dribble and matching up with bigger guards. It was that need that led Tom to add yet another dependent to his clan, the teenager who sat next to Chris that evening on the patio of Tom’s home.

  Demetrius.

  When Demetrius joined Barrett and SCA, he reunited with Tom, who had become one of Barrett’s biggest benefactors. Tom had bought Tommy a spot on a lower SCA team run by one of Barrett’s underlings. Combined with his support for the JSerra program run by Lewis (his housing of Chris being his biggest contribution), he was now in deep with Barrett in the same way he had once been with Keller.

  For Demetrius to attend SCA’s summer workouts in Orange County, someone had to cart him back and forth from the Inland Empire. Tom initially agreed, but he quickly tired of making the drive through traffic. He persuaded Demetrius to stay with Chris in the guesthouse in those weeks when the team practiced every day or on weekends when there was a tournament. He bought Demetrius meals and gave him money to go to the movies with Tommy and Chris. He also paid the trainer who worked them out to train Demetrius as well. Tom’s motives, at first, were purely altruistic. He knew better than most what Keller had done to Demetrius and how much he needed help.

  It was Barrett who first suggested that Demetrius transfer from Fontana High to JSerra. Demetrius needed to be at a school where he would get more “exposure,” Barrett advised, and Tom Lewis had to know more than FoHi’s Ryan Smith, since he played Division I college basketball. Tom also saw the possibility of a symbiotic partnership: Demetrius would get a better education, a safer learning environment, and the chance to play on a team that could compete with almost any in the Southland; JSerra would get the kind of athlete it needed to compete with Mater Dei. It also occurred to Tom that if college scouts came to JSerra games to watch Demetrius, they might see something that they liked in Tommy as well. He still thought his son, who had grown to be five foot nine, had the makings of a college player.

  Demetrius was an easy sell; he longed to play at a school with a higher profile. Kisha, however, didn’t want to move so far from her home, and CIF rules would require her to relocate closer to JSerra. Tom offered to finance a $1,200-a-month apartment in Aliso Viejo, a few miles from the school, and, to further sweeten the deal for Kisha, he offered to pay her a salary for a no-show job with his cement company. Kisha still balked at that arrangement, but then fate intervened. She received a call from the Arizona Department of Corrections with the news that she had been admitted into its training program. Having failed to secure a job in law enforcement in California because of the felonious pasts of Big D and other family members, she had applied to other states and, finally, one had accepted her.

  There was surprisingly little discussion about Demetrius moving with her to Phoenix. At the end of the summer, Kisha rented out her house in Fontana and drove east, while Demetrius moved into the Archstone Apartments in Aliso Viejo, into a two-bedroom unit paid for by Tom.

  “I don’t see what the big deal is,” Demetrius said when I asked him whether he thought he should be living alone, a junior in high school. “I’ve been pretty much on my own my whole life. I’ve been making my own decisions since I was, like, six years old. What’s so different now?”

  Late on a Saturday night a few months into his junior year, Demetrius lounged in his apartment, eating pizza and watching the last few minutes of an NBA game on TNT. The apartment was carpeted, with a small kitchen near the front door. A table was tucked into a nook nearby, and some books and a laptop Tom had bought Demetrius were scattered there. Demetrius had taken the master bedroom, and once again his closet was packed from floor to ceiling with shoes. He left all of his trophies in storage, he said, “because I wanted to focus on winning some new ones.” The second bedroom was sparsely furnished, only enough to create the illusion that someone slept there. Demetrius told few adults that he lived alone, because CIF transfer rules mandated that a player live with a parent or guardian. If anyone learned that Kisha was living and working in Arizona while Demetrius resided in an apartment financed by Tom, he would surely be ruled ineligible. When a reporter from the Orange County Register got wind of his living arrangement, Demetrius told him that he lived with his uncle during the week and his mom on the weekends.

  For a teenager living alone, Demetrius kept an orderly house. He didn’t clean often, but he kept his clothes put away. He had only one set of dishes, so there wasn’t a buildup of dirty glasses and plates; most nights he just ate takeout. He pulled a large garbage can from outside into the kitchen so he wouldn’t have to take out the trash very often. As for groceries, Tom or Pat delivered them, or he got money from them and had a schoolmate with a driver’s license take him to the store. He h
ad his dog, Sierra, for company, and as the only kid in school with his own place, he didn’t want for visitors.

  As we sat watching the NBA game, Demetrius talked about life at JSerra. He was doing well in the classroom, with a 3.2 GPA at mid-semester, aided by the tutoring he received from the wife of one of the assistant basketball coaches. He had been instantly popular with the girls because, in Tommy’s words, “he was new and black.”

  Earlier that night, JSerra had been defeated by El Toro High, 65–63, in the La Quinta Tournament. It was an inexcusable loss to an average team, but Demetrius was unaffected. He talked mostly about a cheerleader for JSerra, a light-skinned black girl (one of the few at the school) named Paige. He wanted my opinion on a plan he had to ask her to an upcoming dance. “We have this thing at our school, it’s called Lion Wire, and a bunch of kids do, like, these skits and stuff, kinda like Saturday Night Live but way stupider. Then every single Friday, during the two different lunch periods, the students watch it. I was thinking that if I could get, like, a little part in it, like at the end, I would just go on there and just say, ‘Could I have everybody’s attention? There’s a special girl in the room that I would like to ask something.’ And then I’m gonna say, ‘Paige, would you like to accompany me to Winter Formal?’ ”

  Demetrius was encountering much of the normal high school experience for the first time. He debated how popular he was and which teachers liked him and which might give him an A-minus instead of the B-plus he probably deserved. He talked about trying other sports. “Do you think I would be good at volleyball? I think I’d be a beast. No one can jump higher than me.” There were numerous clubs at JSerra, and while he hadn’t joined any yet, the possibility intrigued him. “They got a club, it’s, like, called the Bee Club or something, for kids who take care of bees. No way I’m messing with no bees. I could join the Dance Club, maybe. You know I can dance.” The innocence that the grassroots machine had sapped from Demetrius seemed to be returning, and it was the happiest he’d been in years. The only aspect of life at JSerra he didn’t like was wearing a uniform. “It’s kinda a preppy style, not stuff I would wear normally, but can I tell you something? I look good. I mean it. Even the nerdy uniform looks good on me.” He rolled over on the couch laughing, the first time in a long time his wonderful laugh filled a room.

  As for basketball, Demetrius was still fitting in with his new teammates and adapting to Lewis’s coaching style. “Coach Lewis is just kinda weird, like awkward socially,” Demetrius said. “Like, he never laughs. He might say something funny, but it’s, like, he tries never to show people that he laughs. I just can’t figure him out.” That was less of a concern than how he gave Demetrius free rein, especially at the ends of games. “Coach Ryan at FoHi, if we needed a last-minute shot like we did tonight [against El Toro], he would have drawn something up, something where he would have me coming off a screen or two screens. Coach Lewis was just like, ‘Demetrius, do your thing.’ He’s like Coach Joe in that way.” On a positive note, Lewis ran long practices, and the team’s conditioning and weight-lifting programs were well structured. Demetrius’s fitness level was back where it should have been for a player with his ambitions.

  At the apartment, after he finished talking about Paige and the Winter Formal, Demetrius changed the channel on the television to ESPN, to an episode of Streetball, a show sponsored by sneaker maker AND1 in which a team of players traveled the country in a bus and challenged teams of local players in different cities. If a local streetballer showed supreme flair and skill, he was invited to get on the bus while someone else was bumped off. It was sort of a modern version of the Harlem Globetrotters, with an emphasis on flashy moves and dunks rather than scripted trickery, and the show was popular with young players. Demetrius knew all the players by their nicknames—“The Helicopter” and “The Assassin” and “Springs”—and this particular episode focused on the newest addition to the touring troupe, a thick point guard nicknamed “Bad Santa.”

  “He looks familiar,” Demetrius said. “I think I’ve seen him somewhere before.”

  Bad Santa was Kenny Brunner, one of Barrett’s most famous protégés. After his dream of making the NBA finally died, Brunner, once a can’t-miss phenom, had remade himself as a streetballer, a basketball clown. Told Bad Santa’s identity, Demetrius didn’t react immediately, as if he was deciding whether he should feel happy for Brunner that he’d landed a spot on Streetball or disturbed that he’d fallen so far short of his dream.

  “Man, he used to be good, I hear,” Demetrius said. “He played with Tyson, right? I’ve heard people talk about him, like he was super-quick, I guess. Why isn’t he in the league?”

  Earlier, Demetrius explained how Barrett recently informed him of more schools that allegedly called to offer a scholarship, including Memphis and Villanova, but none had contacted Demetrius personally or come to see him play. Barrett was surely lying, probably so Demetrius would feel beholden to him.

  Schools with genuine interest in Demetrius had found it difficult to establish a relationship with him because of the wall Barrett created. Gregg Gottlieb, an assistant coach at Cal Berkeley, knew Demetrius from when he played with Keller. He had told Cal head coach Mike Montgomery about Demetrius, how he had been used and tossed away, and Montgomery responded, “That kid is the poster child for what is wrong with the system.” Montgomery watched Demetrius play over the summer and was very interested in him. “Get him up for an [unofficial] visit,” he told Gottlieb. One of the few coaches who spoke with Demetrius directly after having gotten his number from Keller, Gottlieb thought he had a trip lined up, but then Barrett refused to pay for Demetrius to fly to Oakland. He claimed that Cal’s style of play didn’t fit Demetrius’s skills and that the coursework there would be too difficult for him. When Demetrius asked Lewis about visiting Cal, he said he would have to spend so much time on schoolwork that it would hinder his basketball development.

  Unbeknownst to Demetrius, Barrett had been telling people that if he delivered Demetrius to USC, then someone affiliated with the school would make a donation to the SCA program. One of the people he told was Keller, who asked him directly about a rumor that he would net $200,000 when Demetrius enrolled at USC. “Oh, Joe, you know how it is, people exaggerate,” Barrett answered. “Of course they’ll help out the program, but it’s never as much as people say.”

  Demetrius didn’t see the link between Brunner’s outcome and his own situation: Barrett. Demetrius was seventeen years old and his mother lived 360 miles away, and once again his primary guardian was a grassroots coach, the man who steered Schea Cotton and Brunner and many others to grievous ends.

  Before the episode of Streetball concluded, Demetrius turned off the television. He stood up and threw the remote on the couch.

  “I don’t know,” he said when asked how it felt watching Brunner. “I just know I gotta go to bed. I gotta practice tomorrow.”

  As Tommy dribbled the ball downcourt, scooting across the gym at Compton Dominguez High as fast as his stubby legs would take him, something in Demetrius’s mind clicked. He was nearly ten yards behind Tommy, standing beneath the free-throw line at JSerra’s end of the court. Most of the players were content to watch Tommy cruise in for a breakaway layup just before halftime. Only a single Dominguez guard, the one who had given Tommy the breakaway by stumbling and losing the ball, gave chase, and he trailed Tommy by three steps.

  In his head, Demetrius saw the likeliest outcome before anyone else. He had played twenty-nine games with Tommy as a member of the JSerra varsity team and countless others before that on Team Cal. Tommy moved like molasses, and that Dominguez guard would close the gap quickly. He was also taller and could jump higher than Tommy. While everyone anticipated an uncontested layup, Demetrius foresaw Tommy’s shot being blocked or at least altered to the point that he missed. So, while the others stood flat-footed, Demetrius suddenly charged after Tommy and the trailing Dominguez guard. The speed with which he closed the gap reminded me of
the first time I’d seen him play, that day in Colton when he weaved around defenders with ease and Keller shot me a glance in the stands, knowing I’d seen the expanse of Demetrius’s gifts.

  As Tommy neared the basket, he sensed the defender closing in on him. When he finally jumped to lay the ball in, he swung his right arm out wide and lofted the ball up in a manner reminiscent of a hook shot. In one sense, it was the right decision, as the Dominguez guard didn’t anticipate it. As he jumped to try to block the ball, it was farther away and higher than he’d expected, and it slipped by a few inches above his fingertips. By releasing the ball in that fashion, Tommy had made an easy shot difficult. The ball touched the backboard too high—about six inches above the painted square—and when it came down it hit the front of the rim, bouncing up and away from the hoop.

  Tommy fell to the ground, hoping to draw a whistle for a phantom foul, and as he hit the floor he turned and looked up at the ball, seeing it careen off the rim. Then he saw flash of bright blue. The JSerra uniforms were black with maroon and white trim; Dominguez wore white with red and yellow script. That blue, Tommy knew instantly, had to be from Demetrius’s shoes. Whereas every other player wore white or black shoes, Demetrius sported a pair of oversized Adidas the color of the turquoise gemstone most often seen in Native American jewelry. Teammates jokingly called these shoes Demetrius’s “moon boots,” and in that moment it was the perfect description. He seemed to defy gravity as he caught Tommy’s miss with his right hand some ten inches above the rim and then slammed the ball through the hoop. Demetrius grabbed the rim and let his momentum swing him toward Tommy and then back in the direction from which he came, a bit of showmanship with a purpose: It prevented him from coming down to earth on his teammate.