Play Their Hearts Out

by George Dohrmann

  That setback shattered Demetrius’s newfound confidence, and he arrived in Las Vegas dejected and vulnerable. USC remained in the picture, but that was of little consolation. “People hear that you are going to a big-time program like Indiana and they know that you are for real,” he explained. “Man, it just sucks. Why does this shit keep happening to me?”

  In SCA’s opening game of the Super 64 at Rancho High School, Demetrius played like he wasn’t completely over the Indiana disappointment. Against Utah Pump N Run, he missed his first four shots and SCA quickly fell behind, 18–8. Barrett hadn’t accumulated much new talent, and the few players with promise were younger. It was another rebuilding year, and Demetrius’s chances of impressing the recruiters would suffer because of that.

  Justin walked into the gym early in the second half, with Utah leading 44–30. The Compton Magic weren’t slated to play until later, but he had come to see if the message-board posts and scouting-service reports he’d read about Demetrius’s improvement were true. “You know, we beat this team by twenty at a tournament in the spring,” he said matter-of-factly. Assistant coaches from a dozen schools, including USC and Cal, leaned against a wall along one baseline, and they saw the same flaws in Demetrius’s game that Justin covered in rapid-fire statements. “He’s dribbling the ball too high. He’s gotten better handling the ball, but it’s still not great. … He’s showing the ball too much. A good defender will take it from him. … He’s trying to do the same crossover every time. I would take that away from him if I was guarding him.” Like most of the SCA players, Demetrius gave little effort on defense, and it was no surprise that SCA couldn’t mount a comeback and lost 81–68. “You are supposed to be one of the top teams here and you lose by twelve—jeez. That doesn’t look good to them,” Justin said, and he gestured toward the recruiters.

  Demetrius followed that performance with a better showing against Houston Select, although few college coaches witnessed it. SCA played the late game, and the side of the gym reserved for college coaches was mostly empty. Not even USC and Cal bothered to attend. Demetrius scored 11 points in the first half, including three 3-pointers, and boosted SCA to a 36–31 lead. He got tired in the second half, and Houston pulled ahead, but a late rally cut the deficit to 1 with under a minute left. As the best senior-to-be on the team, the final shot was Demetrius’s to take. Barrett might have devised a play beforehand, but it looked as if Demetrius just got the ball out on the wing and improvised. He drove into the lane and slipped between two defenders, then flipped a shot over Houston’s center that looked good but rattled in the rim and fell out.

  Despite the loss, Demetrius felt good about his performance, which included 21 points and at least seven assists.

  In between Demetrius’s games, so many of the former Team Cal kids or their parents roamed the gym that it felt like a reunion, complete with gossip about those who weren’t present. “I heard Rome is going to continuation school,” one parent said. Another said he had seen Aaron a few days earlier: “He didn’t look good. Do you think he is doing drugs?” A number of the kids asked me about Keller. “Is it true that he lives in a mansion?”

  The boys looked and talked differently from when they were younger and Keller brought them onto his team, but some things remained the same. Watching Jordan Finn take the floor for Double Pump Elite, John bellowed from the stands, “Jordan, be aggressive!” His words bounced off the walls of the gym, and I thought I saw Jordan roll his eyes. Two hours later, as the Compton Magic defeated EBO, Carmen sat with two UNLV fans who had come to watch Justin. She saw them arrive wearing Runnin’ Rebels attire and introduced herself; by halftime she had their numbers programmed into her phone and was talking about job opportunities for Justin after college. “Boy, he can sure play defense,” one of the men said as Justin forced a turnover. Carmen, forever modest, said, “We’re working on it.”

  Following the Magic’s victory, a number of Keller’s former players and their parents made their way to another gym to watch IEBP and Andrew Bock take on Indiana Elite. IEBP played smartly and with great discipline, a testament to Keith Howard and Julius Patterson, two good men operating in a den of thieves. The team didn’t have enough talent to win the tournament, but they had Andrew, who with each passing game proved more and more how wrong Keller had been about him. Coaches from Stanford and Gonzaga watched him closely, and against Indiana Elite he scored on two drives in the final minute to give undersized IEBP the victory.

  Aaron and Rome never journeyed to Las Vegas, and there were other boys absent who had been a big part of Keller’s team, but it didn’t lessen the nostalgia. Jordan, Roberto, Justin, and Terran sat together watching Andrew’s game, teasing Jordan about the iPod he found on the bleachers a day earlier. The type of music downloaded to it strongly suggested that it had previously belonged to a young girl, but the others took turns teasing Jordan about his love for Beyoncé and Rihanna. That scene could have taken place years earlier in Portland or Baltimore or Memphis.

  Demetrius’s absence from that scene highlighted a less obvious ramification of Keller’s influence: the destruction of his friendships. Joe pitted Demetrius against Aaron and Roberto, and he drove away Andrew, Jordan, and Justin. Those boys should have been Demetrius’s friends for life, bonded by their accomplishments and their travails. Now, when they crossed paths in the gym or elsewhere, they exchanged a brief hug or just nodded. It was the same greeting they gave to people they barely knew.

  They could have been like Seattle Rotary Select, the team SCA played next. Seven years earlier, in Portland at the Nike Invitational, Keller’s team had humiliated Rotary Select, winning by 67. That game included the moment that typified Keller’s approach: After Seattle’s point guard Peyton Siva fell to the ground and cried after turning the ball over in the face of Fist, Keller ordered the boys to press him more, to take out what remained of Siva’s heart.

  Siva was one of seven players from that team still playing for Rotary Select coach Darryl Hennings. Keller had once talked about keeping his team together through high school; Hennings had done it. “These boys are like brothers,” he said. “When we started out, we weren’t as good as Joe’s team, and we knew we weren’t going to be that good for a while. But I liked these boys, and they all got along and played hard. It’s hard to take ten superstars and keep them all happy and make them a team. So we took a different approach.”

  As Demetrius slapped hands with Siva just before tip-off, it was impossible not to contrast them. Once tiny, Siva was now chiseled, with tattoos running up his thick biceps and over his shoulders. He was not tall, maybe five foot ten, but he didn’t need to be. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of basketball could have watched three minutes of action and anointed Siva as the best senior prospect in the gym, and he was headed to Louisville. He was so much quicker than everyone else, and yet he never looked as if he was in a hurry or out of control. He dissected a defense the way Roberto did, always knowing the precise skill to call upon at the right moment. In three successive series early in the game, he ran a perfect pick-and-roll with a teammate that resulted in a layup, made an open 3-pointer, and drove through four players for a score. He tallied 14 points in the first half as Seattle built a 44–32 lead, but he controlled the game to such an extent that I would have sworn he scored twice that amount.

  Demetrius scored 8 points in the first half, and he didn’t play poorly, but Rotary Select was so dominant that anything positive he did got buried in a slew of open 3-pointers and easy layups by Siva and his teammates.

  As the second half started, Demetrius glanced over at the many recruiters who filled the gym. Some of the biggest names in the coaching business were present, including Ben Howland, Roy Williams from North Carolina, Rick Barnes from Texas, and Connecticut’s Jim Calhoun. Among the other schools represented were Michigan, Tennessee, Arizona State, USC, and Cal. Demetrius would have liked to think they were there to see him, but Seattle’s roster included six-foot-ten forward Josh Smith, one
of the elite prospects in the class of 2010. The majority of the coaches were surely there to scout him.

  Rotary Select continued to dominate in the second half and quickly built its lead to more than 20 points. Siva and his teammates relaxed a little on defense, and that enabled Demetrius to pad his stat line as he scored on several transition layups.

  With 10:26 left and Seattle up by 26, Siva began showboating, adding flourishes to his dribble, like an extra slip of the ball between his legs or around his back. He tried riskier passes, in the hopes of springing a teammate for a dunk, and cherry-picked, hoping to get a dunk of his own.

  On one possession, he trotted into SCA’s half of the court and then settled on the right side. His teammates maneuvered underneath the hoop, and he spied a chance to slip a pass through. He fired the ball one-handed into the key, but it was deflected by one of SCA’s forwards and then knocked by another out to Demetrius, who stood on the opposite side of the court from Siva.

  Demetrius threw the ball out in front of him, beginning a speed dribble toward Seattle’s basket. The only player with a chance of catching him was Siva, who was across the court and a few steps behind. He could have just let Demetrius go; it was the choice most players would have made. What did it matter if Demetrius cut SCA’s deficit from 26 to 24? But Siva bolted after him, and by doing so he instantly injected some importance into a game that had lost all meaning.

  They covered the ground in seconds, but time slowed down. Demetrius, with those long strides that he’d inherited from his mother, needed only five steps before he was at the 3-point line. Siva’s shorter legs churned at an amazing rate, and somehow he closed the gap. After two more steps for Demetrius and four for Siva, they were dead even and they both jumped at the same time, Demetrius swooping in from the right side of the basket and Siva from the left. As Demetrius cocked his right arm back, holding the ball some three feet above and behind his head, Siva thrust his left arm forward, attempting to get his hand between Demetrius and the basket. The outcome would be decided largely by their God-given gifts: by who was taller and stronger and could leap higher. As special as Siva was, Demetrius had him in all three categories.

  Their bodies slammed into each other’s at the exact moment that Demetrius brought his right arm down. The force of the collision knocked Siva back, moving him just enough for Demetrius to hammer the ball through the rim. He did so with such force that it shook the backboard, and it continued to rock for several seconds after the boys fell to the floor. Siva landed on his butt and fell backward, and Demetrius almost landed on top of him. He managed to hold his balance, however, and hopped over Siva’s outstretched legs.

  An official’s whistle halted the game—Demetrius had been fouled—but a dunk like that, coming over one of the best players in the tournament, would have stopped the action regardless. People in the stands shouted and slapped hands. “Put that on YouTube!” one woman screamed. The college coaches usually didn’t react to anything on the court—they didn’t want to look like fans—but many of them covered their faces with their hands. One coach turned around and laughed into the cement wall behind him.

  Demetrius did his best to act like it was no big deal. As he walked away from the basket, he shook his head a little and grinned slightly, as if to say: Peyton should know better. Siva had a huge smile on his face as he lifted himself off the ground and then jogged back to his team’s bench. He knew his teammates were going to rib him for what happened, and he decided to get it over with. He walked into the middle of a scrum of his friends who surrounded him and began pointing at the top of his head. “Ooooonnnnnnn yooouuuu!” they shouted and laughed, turning a humiliating moment into a humorous one.

  When the game resumed, Demetrius made his free throw and then was subbed out. He exited the game with 20 points and received a warm response from the crowd. “Maybe he isn’t so much better than everyone else, like he was before,” said the mother of a Seattle player, “but he’s still good.”

  After the game, Hennings, Seattle’s coach, hugged Demetrius as the two teams left the gym. “You played great,” he whispered in his ear. Later, while standing outside the gym with his team, Hennings said, “I am one of the people who knows what Joe did to that kid. He paraded him around and treated him like a star and never taught him the game or how to work. What Joe did was a travesty. Poor kid. And now look: Joe is gone and Demetrius has to deal with people calling him a failure because he is not the next LeBron or whatever Joe and Clark [Francis] and everyone said he was going to be. But how can people say he is a failure? He made it. He did. Kids all over the country are trying to get a college scholarship, and Demetrius is one of the lucky ones. Maybe he’ll never make the NBA, but he is still going to get a scholarship. Not many kids achieve that. Not many kids get to be where he is.”

  Demetrius sprained his knee dunking over Siva, and it swelled overnight. It forced him to sit out SCA’s final game, a 69–53 loss that eliminated Barrett’s bunch from the Super 64.

  Thus, the final impression Demetrius would make on the grassroots game was that dunk, and it was an appropriate ending. It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t change the outcome of the game, nor would it alone sway the recruiters. As awe-inspiring as it was, it didn’t thrust Demetrius back into the realm of future NBA stars. Yet the scouting services wrote glowingly of his “posterizing” dunk over Siva, and one by one they moved him up in their rankings.

  In the world of grassroots basketball, Demetrius was a phenom all over again.

  EPILOGUE

  Like a Legend

  Demetrius Walker

  As flawed a person as he might have been, Joe Keller had a gift for identifying special athletes at a very early age. Of the roughly two dozen kids he coached on the Inland Stars/Team Cal, eighteen received Division I basketball scholarships and two others signed to play football. It was a testament to the talent Keller assembled that many of the kids he considered not elite enough went on to play in college. Even his castoffs became stars.

  Andrew Bock’s expulsion by Keller proved a blessing. While he didn’t emerge as an elite prospect according to Clark Francis’s rankings, he continued to improve under the guidance of the noble coaches of IEBP, and he received scholarship offers from San Diego State, Creighton, and other mid-major schools. Andrew had grown to a respectable six foot one but was thin and didn’t wear his athleticism the way Demetrius or Roberto did. Still, a few bigger programs were intrigued enough to ask Andrew to hold off committing to a school until the end of his senior season, hoping to keep him “warm,” while continuing to gauge his ceiling as a prospect. Worried that waiting would jeopardize the offers he already had, Andrew signed a binding letter of intent with Creighton, a school with a history of making the NCAA tournament with players the major programs undervalued.

  Andrew led Eisenhower High, which had no player taller than six foot three, to a Division II state title in his senior season, and he was the only one of Keller’s former players to be selected to the first All-State team by Cal-Hi Sports. After watching him dominate during his senior season, a coach from a Pacific-10 Conference school who had been reluctant to offer Andrew a scholarship called IEBP coach Keith Howard. “We blew it on Andrew,” the recruiter admitted. “He’s the best point guard in California.”

  Other players Keller discarded who went on to earn scholarships included Darius Morris (Michigan), Justin Cobbs (Minnesota), Kendall Williams (New Mexico), LaBradford Franklin (San Diego State), Casey James (Penn), and Chris Cunningham (Santa Clara). Pe’Shon Howard became one of the top-100 players in the class of 2010 and signed with Maryland.

  Gary Franklin, Jr. (Cal), and G. J. Vilarino (Gonzaga) proved they were phenoms as well, and their fathers, like Rob Bock, would conclude that the limited time their sons spent under Keller’s influence had been key. They weren’t around him long enough to be corrupted.

  Jordan Finn accepted a scholarship to play at Air Force. John Finn considered sending him to a prep school for a year in the
hopes of eventually landing an offer from a Pac-10 team, but Jordan overruled him and John respected his decision. Keller’s prediction that Jordan would one day rebel against his father’s demanding ways proved incorrect.

  Justin Hawkins honored his commitment to UNLV, and Terran Carter, his teammate at Taft High, also landed a scholarship, to Cal State Northridge. Terran did not qualify academically, however, and he enrolled at Pierce College, a junior college in Woodland Hills, California.

  Roberto Nelson seemed set to sign with UCLA or Ohio State, but then Craig Robinson, Barack Obama’s brother-in-law, was hired as the coach at Oregon State. His hiring of former Compton Magic coach David Grace as an assistant coach gave Robinson an in with that program’s players, and he quickly got a commitment from Joe Burton, the burly center known as “Indian Joe” when he played for Keller. Like Andrew, Burton had proved Keller’s prognostications about his potential incorrect. He had sprouted to a respectable six foot seven, much taller than Keller ever thought, and he was a top-150 prospect.

  Roberto admired Robinson, who had a background much like the white men he occasionally golfed with on Santa Barbara’s nicer courses, including an MBA from the University of Chicago. Robinson was equally smitten, telling one person during the recruitment of Roberto that, while Oregon State didn’t need any guards in the class of 2009, “I am willing to make an exception for Roberto. I think he is that good.”