His words stung. I was reminded of what Keller said during our meeting at the brewery: If an exposé in Sports Illustrated could do nothing more than increase the business of one of youth basketball’s most controversial figures, then perhaps, as Keller said, I didn’t know anything about the world in which Barrett operated.
I was in Los Angeles on assignment a few weeks later and I called Keller. I stressed that I no longer was working on a story about Barrett or Chandler but that I wanted to better understand the grassroots game. He agreed to meet, and I drove fifty miles east to Fontana, to the Inland Empire, and picked him up at the Citrus Grove Apartments, a complex that abutted train tracks, where he lived with his wife, Violet. We drove to a nearby Mexican restaurant and, after several Midori sours, Keller loosened up enough to tell me how he stumbled into coaching.
He was originally from Long Island and had moved to Riverside, California, with his mother before his senior year of high school. He had been a standout baseball player and dreamed of playing for the New York Yankees, but he tore his rotator cuff in his senior season and gave up the game. “After high school, I was the world’s biggest fuckup,” he said. He hung around guys who sold and smoked marijuana. He held several jobs, the longest for a year on the assembly line of a company that manufactured roofing tiles. He was still living with his mother when, in 1993, he applied for a job with the Riverside Parks and Recreation Department. The only opening was a $200-a-month job coaching ten- and eleven-year-old boys on a basketball team called the Bryant Park Lakers. “I needed the money,” Keller said.
His first team was made up of “little rats,” as he called them, short kids who hung around Bryant Park and had to scrap for every point. They wore black T-shirts with Lakers stenciled on the front, the words faded from too many washings. Keller showed me a picture of his first team. The boys are standing straight and stiff-armed, trying to look tough. Keller is at one end, slightly slouched, dressed in jeans shorts and a T-shirt. It is a typical photo, except for one detail: Keller slipped two fingers, the bunny ears, over his tallest player’s head.
Through a mix of luck and dogged play, the Bryant Park Lakers won more games than they lost in Keller’s first season, and in the spring of 1993 they played a regional qualifier for the state championships. When Keller arrived at a gym in Orange County for the game, he looked at his little players warming up and at their opponents and believed a mistake had been made. “Excuse me, I think we are in the wrong gym,” he told Caynell Cotton, a woman who helped organize the tournament. “My guys are fifth- and sixth-graders.” She pointed to the biggest of the boys on the opposing team and said, “That’s my son, Schea, and he’s going into the sixth grade. Welcome to AAU basketball.”
Keller’s motley bunch lost by almost 100, and Schea Cotton, who would go on to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a high schooler and play at the University of Alabama, scored more than 30 points in the first half alone.
The night following the game, Keller called the coach of the team that had defeated him: Pat Barrett. He must have sounded naïve asking Barrett how he’d put together such a talented team. “It’s simple,” Barrett told him. “Go out and find the best players and hold on to them.”
Keller was competitive and he was inspired: He hadn’t known he could just go out and start a team of his own. After poaching the best players off the Bryant Park Lakers, he started an independent team, the Inland Stars. “I’d go to parks and rec centers, looking for kids, and talk to coaches at schools, asking if they had any players who starred during recess,” Keller said. “Hunting for kids is the best part.”
Most of Keller’s energy over the next two years was spent trying to put together a team good enough to defeat SCA and Barrett, and by 1996 his team was almost ready. It lacked only a dominant inside player, someone to rebound and block shots and intimidate. “But then I found Tyson and it all came together.” When SCA returned from Nationals, Keller called Barrett and laid the trap. He goaded Barrett, saying that if he’d had the money to take a team to the Nationals, he would have come home with the glass-bowl trophy.
When Keller described the game to me, his voice rose and adopted a dramatic rhythm. He was not a natural storyteller—he often left out vital facts—but his recollection of that September day included so many details that I believed he thought about it often. At the end of his description, after he talked about the boys pouring cups of Gatorade over his head, a look of gentle sadness settled in his eyes. He hadn’t reconciled the joy that victory brought him with the betrayal he felt shortly thereafter. “That was a long time ago,” he said, and then he fell silent, fingering his empty glass.
Keller wanted to stop there, but I wouldn’t let him. I promised I wouldn’t write in Sports Illustrated what he said but that I needed to know how Barrett ended up coaching Chandler. Before he answered, we moved from a booth to the bar. He ordered another Midori sour and also asked for a glass of olives, which he doused with so much Tabasco that there was more red than green in the glass. He began eating them vigorously. “You should try one,” he said. I told him I couldn’t think of anything I’d like to eat less. He insisted, and I felt as if this were a test, as if him telling me the story depended on me eating one of those soggy olives. I relented, swallowed one quickly, and the face I made delighted Keller. His laughter filled the nearly empty restaurant, and he slapped me on the back. “You’re all right, George,” he said, and then he began the story.
Immediately after he started to coach the newly merged team, Keller became uncomfortable with the attention Barrett showed Chandler. Barrett showered Chandler with gifts, shoes mostly, and would call Keller and ask if he could arrange for the three of them to go to dinner or the movies. About a month later, Keller got a call from George Raveling, the head of grassroots basketball for Nike. He asked for Chandler’s shoe size and his address, and then a few days later approximately twenty pairs of shoes, all in Chandler’s size, arrived at his house. Boxes of other gear—shirts, sweatshirts, bags—followed.
Coaching SCA was more work than Keller expected. He had gotten married only a year earlier, and he and Violet both worked full-time (Keller at a welding company, Artistic Iron; Violet as a clerk at the Riverside County assessor’s office). Getting Chandler and the other boys to practice and games every day proved difficult. Chandler lived more than twenty miles from Keller’s apartment, and other players lived as far away or farther. On weekdays, Keller woke at 4:00 a.m., worked until 3:00 p.m., and then either he or Violet picked up the boys and made the hour drive to a gym in Orange County near Barrett’s home. After a three-hour practice, Keller or Violet carted players home, not returning to their apartment until well after 10:00 p.m. The weekends were just as bad. There was always a tournament in Los Angeles or San Diego or the San Fernando Valley north of L.A. The hectic routine continued even after Violet got pregnant. On the few nights there wasn’t practice or a game, Chandler would sleep at the apartment to avoid the commute the following day. Or he’d call and need a ride to the mall or the movie theater or elsewhere. Violet liked Chandler, but she felt they needed to start saying no to some of his requests. They had become chauffeurs and gofers for a middle schooler who wasn’t even their own son.
One afternoon, Keller was seated at a desk in an office at Artistic Iron, looking over plans for a railing the company was welding, when owner John Robbins hurried into the room. “Joe, you need to go home right now,” he said.
Robbins didn’t want to be the one to break the news, but Keller said, “John, if you don’t tell me what is going on, I am going to bust you in the face.”
“I’m sorry, Joe. Violet just called. She had a miscarriage.”
When Keller arrived at his apartment, Violet was lying on the sofa. Her brother, her mother, and one sister were there. He looked at them, saw the tears in their eyes, and began crying. He fell to his knees in front of the sofa and wrapped his arms around Violet. Her mother said over and over, “God just didn’t mean for this ba
by to be born.” Lying in bed that night, Violet settled on a more concrete reason for losing the child. “It was because of stress, Joe,” she said. “You know it was the stress.” So right then, while lying next to Violet in their small apartment in the spring of 1997, Keller decided to take a break from coaching.
Keller took more hours at Artistic Iron and made foreman. He ran a side business installing car alarms. He bought Violet an Explorer, the perfect car for the big family they planned to have. When Violet found out she was pregnant again, Keller seemed to be settling into a nice life.
“But I missed it,” he told me. “I would go watch Tyson play once in a while. Violet was okay with that. But it wasn’t the same as being the coach.”
After giving birth to a son, Jordan, named after NBA star Michael Jordan, Violet agreed to let Keller coach again, and he immediately tried to get back in with SCA and Chandler. But Barrett had closed the door. There was an uneasiness when he called or visited Chandler, and he later learned that Barrett had whispered a hurtful lie into Chandler’s ear. “Coach Joe abandoned you,” Barrett told him, “because he didn’t believe in you as a player.”
“The funny thing,” Keller said, “is at first I don’t even think Pat realized what he had in Tyson. He knew he was good, but he kept talking about some of his other guys, like Keilon, kept saying they were better prospects. I told him, ‘Forget those guys. Tyson is the best player you’ve ever had.’ ”
Exactly what Barrett had wouldn’t be known until a few months after Keller and I met in Fontana. In June of 2001, Chandler, having grown to seven foot one, was selected number 2 overall in the NBA draft just a month out of high school. He signed a contract with the Chicago Bulls for $10.6 million and, according to Keller, gave Barrett $200,000 and pledged that, upon future contracts, his former AAU coach would receive even more. Keller watched this develop from a perch far away. He occasionally went to see Chandler play in high school, but he slipped into the gym quietly and left without being noticed. It was a shameful time for Keller. As Chandler ascended, Keller’s estrangement from his onetime star became more noteworthy. In coaching circles, he became a laughable legend: the man who discovered Tyson Chandler, a once-in-a-lifetime talent, and then let Barrett steal him from right under his nose. He couldn’t walk into a gym without someone pointing him out as the dupe who had lost a winning lottery ticket.
When I dropped Keller off at his apartment later that night, he told me: “You should keep in touch with me. Things are happening.” When I pressed him for details, he claimed that he had recently started a new team and that it included at least five young players, none older than eleven, who would one day play in college or the NBA. “I am going to be in Sports Illustrated again someday. These kids are that good.”
I was intrigued by the thought of such a robust collection of young talent, but I found the man touting them to be more fascinating. Keller had recently re-formed the Inland Stars and quit his welding job so he could devote all his attention to grooming a new generation of basketball hopefuls. He was staking his future and his family’s on his ability to make a career out of coaching those kids. In other words, he was betting he could become another Pat Barrett, could land the shoe company contract and build himself into one of the most influential figures in the game. It was a basketball pipe dream, no different from a young boy insisting he would one day play in the NBA.
It dawned on me that Keller and his team presented an opportunity to get inside the world of grassroots basketball in a way never done before. Nearly every great American-born basketball player of the last ten years—from Kevin Garnett to Kobe Bryant to Tracy McGrady to LeBron James—has been a product of the AAU system, yet it remains a largely unexplored world. Stories about the grassroots game, such as the one I reported on for Sports Illustrated, usually focus on the kids who emerge from it to find a place in the NBA. What about the others, the kids who don’t make NBA millions or land college scholarships? It is not in the best interest of the power brokers, men like Pat Barrett, for a light to be cast on their actions. The shoe companies, sports agents, college recruiters—they all have reasons for wanting the gritty details of how the machine operates to go untold. They won’t let you inside, so the only way to unveil how the system works is to get inside without them knowing.
I called Keller a week later with a proposal: I would follow him and his team until the boys ended their time in AAU basketball, likely to be their senior year in high school. If he gave me complete access, if he kept no secrets, I wouldn’t publish what I saw or heard until the boys were in college. I framed it as a form of basketball anthropology, a study of how children were raised within the sport. To my surprise, Keller agreed. “When the boys graduate from high school, I’ll be rich and done with coaching,” he said. “I won’t give a shit what you write.”
Another reason Keller approved the arrangement became clear later, when he said, “Mail me about thirty of your business cards.” He intended to hand them out to the parents of the kids he scouted. “Having a guy from Sports Illustrated affiliated with my program will help with recruiting.” So that was the deal we struck. Keller got a recruiting tool, and I got entrée into the underbelly of basketball.
Finding a group of kids at the beginning of their journey felt like a remarkable stroke of good fortune. What I didn’t know was that at that moment a boy named Andrew was practicing his 3-point shot and a quiet forward named Rome was working on his mid-range game. I didn’t know that a boy named Jordan was being urged by his father, John, to be more aggressive and drive to the hoop and that in Los Angeles a coach named Gary Franklin was starting his own team of ten-year-olds, some of whom would one day help determine Keller’s fate. I didn’t know that in Santa Barbara a guard named Roberto was learning the nuances of the game from his father, Bruce, or that across the Inland Empire, in Riverside, a tall boy named Aaron was kicking a soccer ball, not yet introduced to the sport he was destined to play.
I was also unaware how deep into the world of grassroots basketball my alliance with Keller would take me. I would encounter unscrupulous agents, college coaches, and the other profiteers just as they took aim at the best kids; I would sit with parents, good and bad, as they tried to manage the suddenness of childhood stardom; I would watch as men in boardrooms and locker rooms plotted the futures of the most gifted players. Through Keller and his team, I would come to understand why some kids made it and others did not and how the youth-basketball machine determined their fates.
None of that was apparent, however, when Keller agreed to let me follow his team. Most of all, I was intrigued by one of his players, a boy who would influence my charting of the world of grassroots basketball more than any other.
“Now that I can trust you, you need to know something,” Keller had said in a phone call. Then he lowered his voice. “I just found a kid, a player so good you are not going to believe it. He’s a phenom. He’s going to be better than Tyson. He’s going to be the best ever.”
PART ONE
A Prized Long-Term Investment
1
Demetrius Walker (third from left) at 10 years old
The Frank A. Gonzales Community Center sits on the corner of Colton Avenue and E Street in a mostly Latino neighborhood in Colton, among houses with unkempt yards and low-sloped roofs and next to a baseball field with an all-dirt infield. Like many public buildings in the Inland Empire, it is less inviting the closer you get. The bottom third of the building is painted a reddish brown, the rest a dirty pink, and the whole rectangular structure appears in need of a good hosing. During a development spree in the 1990s, many similar structures were built—elementary schools, community centers, government buildings—and aesthetics were forsaken for speedy construction. All around the Inland Empire, these buildings rose along with cookie-cutter housing developments, each more soulless than its predecessor.
Standing outside the gymnasium, which takes up the left half of the center, you’re most aware of how the thick concrete
walls and steel doors mute the life inside. Sneakers sliding, a leather ball pounding on the wood floor, coaches urging players to get back on defense, parents shouting at their kids to take the open shot—you hear none of it. The milieu of Southern California abounds: cars speeding by on Colton Avenue, the zip of an air gun from one of two auto-repair shops across the street, a constant hum from Interstate 10. The sounds of its residents, meanwhile, remain locked within that windowless cement box.
Inside the gym, on the far side of the court, Joe Keller stood with his arms folded in front of a black golf shirt. He had positioned himself at midcourt, behind the scorer’s table, which struck me as an odd place to stand. Fans seated behind him were forced to either end of the aluminum bleachers to gain a clear view of the court. Keller seemed oblivious to his obstruction, and it may have been intentional; it was like him to believe no one’s view of the court was more important than his.
He watched intently a game between a team from Santa Monica and another from Orange County. The kids on the floor were no older than eleven, some as young as eight, and it was difficult to see basketball greatness amid the chaos on the court. In the time it took me to walk from the door to the far side of the court, one small blond boy had a pass go through his hands as if they were coated in butter and the center for the Orange County team had bounced a pass off a teammate’s leg so strongly that the ball rolled into his team’s bench. Looking at Keller, I wondered if he possessed a clairvoyance that enabled him to see the game and its participants differently, to find greatness in the folly of children.
Another AAU coach, only twenty-five and in his first year of coaching, stood next to Keller. They discussed the players on the court, beginning with the eleven-year-old point guard for the Santa Monica team, the only girl in the tournament. She deftly dribbled through defenders, slipping the ball through her legs and around her back with ease, and her outfit was equally refined. The red rubber band holding back her ponytail matched the red trim on her jersey and on the black Vince Carter–model Nikes she wore.
Play Their Hearts Out Page 2