Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  I don’t understand how you say I’m like your son, but you aren’t there for me anymore. You came out of retirement and you found me and I made you who you are. If it wasn’t for me being good you would have nothing. You got money from me being successful. You bought a house and Violet a car and you got wood floors all through your house and a big pool and what do I have?

  How come when I ask for shoes you take so long to get them for me or you don’t get them at all? How come when I ask you for a ride or to come take me to work out you say you are going to come but then I just sit here and wait and you never show?

  It was not a “Dear John” email. At no point did he express a desire to sever all ties with Coach Joe. There was anger behind his words but also fear. He had hit bottom, and he was scared. Keller had to know that even though Demetrius wrote of what he was owed, what he really coveted was for Coach Joe to be part of his life again. Yet Keller focused on the anger, on Demetrius’s veiled demands to be compensated.

  “When he started talking about the money I owed him, I knew that was it,” Keller would say later. As he would do with anyone staking a claim to his hard-earned fortune, Keller cut Demetrius out of his life.

  It’s a shame we can’t continue our relationship. I guess we have to go our separate ways, Keller wrote in response to Demetrius’s email.

  Demetrius replied immediately: I don’t want that.

  Keller wrote: I wish we could solve all our issues but I guess we will have to go our separate ways.

  Demetrius reached out to Keller a few times after that—when he was looking for a new grassroots team, when he was deciding whether to stay at FoHi, after he and his mom got into a fight. He sent Keller text messages, and sometimes Keller responded, but most often he did not. Eventually Demetrius stopped trying, and Keller was out of his life forever.

  “Man, I’m not gonna lie, it does hurt. I mean, I looked at stuff like . . . like he was my pops, you know. I didn’t have a pops and he was like my pops and, you know, okay, I’ll just say it: I loved him like he was my pops.”

  Early in 2007, I traveled to Moreno Valley to say goodbye to Joe Keller.

  We would still keep in contact, of course, and I gave updates on Demetrius and his other former players even after he stopped asking for them, but his journey was over. He had gone from a punch line, the guy who lost Tyson Chandler, to one of the most important figures in basketball, the Sonny of middle schoolers. The ending he had long sought had arrived, and he didn’t see the advantage in letting me remain inside his world. Phone calls had begun to go unanswered, messages unreturned. When I did reach him, he was annoyed by my inquiries.

  Keller greeted me at the door of his home with a hug and asked that I not tease him about the weight he’d gained. He was pleased to be able to show off his house and led me from room to room. The kitchen had been completely redone, with dark cabinets, stainless-steel appliances, and an extra refrigerator with a glass front, full of the Gatorades and soft drinks Keller preferred. New wood floors covered the kitchen, den, and dining and living rooms. The house looked as if it had recently undergone a makeover. There was an overabundance of candles, vases, lamps, and pillows, and ornate place settings were arranged perfectly in front of every seat at the dining table.

  The most obvious sign of Keller’s prosperity was his backyard. His bean-shaped pool had a waterfall along the far side that was so large you had to raise your voice to be heard over the rush of water. There was a circular spa attached to the pool and a thatched-roof cabana nearby. “My pool’s better than Sonny’s, don’t you think?” Keller said as we took seats at a tall bar table. “Sonny’s house is probably still nicer than mine, but my pool is better.”

  Keller knew I wanted to talk about Demetrius, and he tried to avoid it by rattling off the projects he had in the works, including the purchase of a sports bar, the renovation of the guest bathroom, and the redecorating of his downstairs office. “I also think I am going to buy the house next door,” he said. “That’s right, Joe Keller is not done buying houses. We are going to buy the one next door and then another one at the end [of the cul-de-sac]. Violet’s sister is going to move into one and her parents into the other one. I told them, ‘Just keep it as an investment.’ All they have to do is pay the taxes on it, which is like three thousand a year.”

  Business had never been better, he said. He was starting another camp, Phenom Elite, which he said would resemble Sonny’s ABCD Camp, and he had recently partnered with former NBA player Antonio Davis. They’d visited with Adidas officials in Portland a few months earlier, and Keller claimed that the three-day summit had changed his perspective on developing young phenoms.

  “I’m telling you, we’re going to change basketball. Kids now, they think everything should just be given to them. And then when they don’t make it, they don’t know anything and aren’t educated about how to live. We are going to change that by doing all this educational stuff at our camps. We are going to have these assessments for kids, and we are going to have educational stuff for the parents. We’re going to do more of that stuff than the basketball stuff. . . . You know what, I know what you are going to say, and I’m at fault for a lot of it because I didn’t do it the right way. But Antonio and me, we are going to end that. It took Antonio and me getting together and figuring things out for me to see what is best for kids.”

  Without being provoked, Keller brought up Demetrius, although he put him at a distance. He was just one of those kids who didn’t learn how to manage life.

  “D’s gotta make some choices in life. I don’t think he knows what he is going to do, and, see, that is what I am talking about. That is the problem. Everyone did everything for him. Everyone makes excuses for him. . . . Kisha, she doesn’t help. She sent me a letter the other day. She was saying, ‘It’s your fault,’ or some shit like that. Everything she talks about is so negative. . . . She wrote, ‘I never thought you were the kind of person that was gonna just leave. Why would you leave him? Why wouldn’t you be there for him every minute of his life?’ I didn’t respond, but I was thinking, Lady, you want me to forget my whole family for you and your son? And the thing is, all the money I used to spend on the team, on D and Aaron and all the kids, I now spend on my family. And Violet’s so much happier, and Jordan and Alyssa are happier, and I’m happier.

  “With D—and I know what you are going to say: There are some things that I could help him with, like finding a new school and a new [AAU] team—I could help him, but, fuck it, you know, with Kisha involved now, and her attitude, fuck it, I’m done. I’m not going to hold his hand anymore. People holding his hand was what fucked him up in the first place.”

  Keller’s attitude reminded me of something playwright Arthur Miller once said about one of his characters, a patriarch named, coincidentally, Joe Keller. Miller described the Joe Keller in All My Sons as having “a crazy quilt of motivations and contradictions in his head.” The real-life Keller had his own crazy quilt, among several similarities between him and Miller’s character. The fictitious Joe Keller was a self-made businessman who, despite no education, rose to great heights, driven by the desire to provide for his family and achieve the American Dream. But in his greed, he knowingly shipped airplane parts that were defective, resulting in the deaths of several pilots, including his son. He lied about his culpability, letting his partner take the blame.

  The salient difference between the two Joe Kellers was in the endings to their stories. The structure of All My Sons was intended “to bring a man into the direct path of the consequences he wrought,” Miller said. At the end of the play, Keller kills himself offstage, proving the existence of social justice.

  The grassroots-basketball society was not a just one, and the real Joe Keller would never face the consequences of what he wrought. His camps would remain full; parents would still dial his number, hoping to land a spot for their children; his business would expand to the point that he estimated he could sell it for $10 million. The American Dream w
as alive and well in his Moreno Valley home, and the demise of Demetrius would never threaten that.

  Before leaving Moreno Valley, I asked Keller for some photos of the team that he had promised me. We went into his office and he searched for a long time, going through a file cabinet and a dozen boxes piled up in his closet. He got frustrated and repeatedly called out to Violet to help him. She shouted directions, but he still couldn’t find his “Team Cal box.” She finally came into the room and helped him locate an unlabeled medium-sized brown box at the very bottom of the closet. Keller pulled out programs and pictures and a manila folder that contained the birth certificates of the players. He had once needed them to prove that his amazing collection of phenoms were indeed as young as he said. He tossed them to me unceremoniously and asked that I return them to the players or their parents.

  As I prepared to leave, a pile of pictures and birth certificates in my arms, I noticed the glass-bowl trophy given to the team at the 2004 Nationals. It occupied an inconspicuous spot in his office, atop a file cabinet in the corner. Keller had begun purchasing signed sports memorabilia that he intended to place around the room, and it was easy to imagine the trophy from Nationals getting supplanted by a bat signed by Derek Jeter or a football helmet autographed by Terrell Owens. In time, it would likely find its way into that box at the bottom of the closet, shoved in with what few memories he had yet to purge.

  I pointed to the trophy and asked Keller what he planned to do with it.

  “What do you mean?”

  Would it still have a place in his office after the remodel? If not, did he want me to take it, to give it to Demetrius or Rome or Aaron? They would surely display it proudly; nothing they had accomplished had meant more.

  “Hell no!” Keller said. “Are you crazy? I’m not giving it to them. That is mine. I earned that.”

  A few weeks later, Kisha found Demetrius alone in his room, sitting on his bed. After his struggles during his freshman season and at the Adidas Superstar Camp, ESPN The Magazine wrote a brief story about him titled “Didn’t you used to be?” The Riverside Press-Enterprise wrote its own obituary of his career, quoting Clark Francis as saying: “The question is, how bad does Demetrius want it? I don’t think he has the burning desire to be great.” Demetrius didn’t tack those articles to the wall above his bed, where the Sports Illustrated article labeling him the “next LeBron” still hung, along with other clippings from his glory days.

  Kisha sat next to him and, after a moment, Demetrius looked at her and asked, “Mom, am I going to end up like Schea Cotton?” Without pause, she jumped into a lengthy explanation for why that would not be his fate, how he wouldn’t be just another touted young player who never lived up to the hype. But Demetrius had succinctly stated what was now the great question. Whereas the debate had once been how good he could be—whether he was the next LeBron James or just a future NBA player—it was now where he would rank on the list of the greatest flops.

  The grassroots machine rarely allowed for a player’s ending to be rewritten; it was easier to just shift focus to the next junior phenom. So when you mentioned Demetrius’s name to prominent AAU coaches like Mats or the Pumps, they spoke as if the case on him was closed, his career dead. “It’s sad how he ended up,” one of the Pumps said at a tournament in Arizona.

  It never occurred to them that a sixteen-year-old might rediscover that “burning desire”—that a great success story might start at the bottom.

  Bryan Curtis

  Wherever the gate between sports and its many adjacencies swings, you’re likely to find Bryan Curtis (b. 1977), who may be the perfect sportswriter for an era when the games we play touch so many facets of the world we live in. He has contributed to generalist outlets that dip into sports (Texas Monthly, The Daily Beast, Slate, The New Republic) and sports outlets that consider the wider world part of their purview (Sports Illustrated and the short-lived Play, the standalone sports magazine of The New York Times). Eventually he landed at places that simply let the two bleed into each other, Grantland and The Ringer. If there’s a common thread to Curtis’s work, it’s that he considers a broad range of things—pop culture, race, the media, politics, science—fodder for what’s nominally a sports story. It’s a beat he defines as “everything they let me get away with. That’s the dream for me, rather than sitting in some press box.” A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin who logged time under such titanic editors as Michael Kinsley, Mark Bryant, Tina Brown, and Bill Simmons, Curtis spent years nursing the idea for this piece. With every trip back to Texas to visit his mother, he’d see the fiberglass backboard of his youth still standing in the driveway and be reminded of his story waiting to be told. But he could never quite envision the right place for it until he landed at Grantland, where Simmons was coaxing highly personal pieces from his staff during the site’s brief run. After this reminiscence went live, Curtis said, “I remember walking away from my computer for a long time. Then I called my mom.”

  The Fiberglass Backboard

  WHEN I was 11 years old, my dad died—killed himself, in fact, while sitting in a van in our driveway. Our home in Texas filled with sympathy gifts. Mom got flowers and a new microwave. A few months later, an uncle arrived from Albuquerque and built me a basketball hoop on the opposite end of the driveway. The hoop’s backboard was made of fiberglass. There was an NBA logo in the lower left-hand corner. Over the next five years, that fiberglass backboard and I became fabulous teammates, like Ro Blackman and Derek Harper, and partners in a fierce existential struggle. If I’m picking a sports hero from childhood who deserves a profile . . . Jim Jackson . . . Alvin Harper . . . nope, I’ll go with the backboard.

  The first thing you could say about my backboard is that it was beautiful. When my uncle installed it, it was the most absurdly white thing I’d seen besides my own legs. It glowed against a backyard tableau of monkey grass, rose bushes, a mulberry tree, crepe myrtles, and a sagging garage apartment. The second key thing about the backboard was its placement: on the long side of a narrow cement rectangle. Picture a court, then, that was wider sideline-to-sideline than an NBA court but not even as deep as a free throw line. There was no top of the key. No elbow. My game was forged deep in the corners. My court was like the factory where Bruce Bowen was created.

  Brrrrryyyyyan Curtis, a 5-foot-3 only child, strolls onto this court for the first time. He throws the ball against the backboard. The backboard answers, Thungggg. Which was weird. I’d watched Mavs games at Reunion Arena and noted squeaky shoes and (much later) miked rims. The backboards didn’t make a sound. Yet here, on fiberglass, every bank shot sounded like I was firing artillery shells into the neighborhood. Thunggg. Thunggg. Thunggg.

  “Going fiberglass” can do magical things for your Player Efficiency Rating. To bank shots off a glass backboard, you have to have Tim Duncan–quality arc and touch. For the rock-hard backboards on school playgrounds, you need double-Duncan. A fiberglass backboard requires no talent at all. When a basketball hits fiberglass, it instantly loses all its velocity. If you get the angle right, the ball plops down into the cylinder, like a duck being shot out of mid-air. It’s a beautifully corrupt form of the sport, akin to bumper bowling, and best appreciated by kids the same age.

  When I discovered the secret of fiberglass it was like Naismith ­discovering the peach basket. I shot a layup off the backboard—thunggg—and the ball dropped into the cylinder. I backed up to nearly 20 feet—pretty far out on the prairie for an 11-year-old—and heaved the ball toward the backboard. It bounced into the cup again. I picked one shot on the court I liked best, a 20-footer from the left-hand side—my “3.” I used to go to that spot around six o’clock and shoot 100 thunderous bank shots in a row. I bet I hit 90 percent. On a bad day.

  Bank shots took the form of therapy. I was angry about my dad dying—even if I didn’t show it—and I needed to hurl the ball against the backboard. But I was in a tender enough emotional state that I needed to be good at something, too. The
fiberglass backboard came through on both counts. It was like shooting a silky Rabbit Angstrom jumper and committing a flagrant foul in the same motion. My mom looked out the kitchen window and probably thought this was how you were supposed to play basketball.

  A frequent trope of sports writing is the athlete who uses sports to escape trauma: dead dads, rough neighborhoods. This—minus the talent—was me. My dad, Dan, didn’t know anything about team sports. Though he was a 6′4″ runner who chewed up marathons on weekends, he broke out in a cold sweat when his guy friends brought up the Cowboys’ draft. (In North Texas, knowing the width of Jason Witten’s jock strap is more socially valuable than being able to run a marathon.) When I was five or six, I’m pretty sure I taught him which way to run around the bases. My mom noticed all this and, in a subtle but sly move, steered my play dates toward kids who did have sports-crazy dads. Long before my dad died, I got the basics from outside the house.

  There were some assists along the way, sure. My grandfather taught me the fine points of softball. My uncles planned a vacation to Cowboys’ training camp. Mom took me on shuttle runs to Action Baseball Cards on West 7th Street. That’s where we were going one June afternoon, racing to get there before it closed, when we happened to glance inside the windshield of Dad’s van.

  Bloody pictures like those creep into your head when you play H-O-R-S-E alone. Call it the Loneliness of the Long-Distance Shooter. So I started dragging a radio out to the backyard. Skip Bayless was in his prime as a Dallas drive-time radio host, and I shot baskets to the vocal stylings of “Dr. Bay.” When the Dallas Times Herald shut down in 1991, Dr. Bay faxed his sports column to interested parties for $99 a year. I was very interested. I didn’t have a fax machine, so I arranged to get Bayless’ Insider by regular mail, and I didn’t mind if the game he was writing about had occurred two days before.