Don’t misunderstand: Keller talked a lot about basketball. As he watched the 2002 NCAA Championship game with Demetrius at a restaurant in Ontario, Keller loudly debated the NBA potential of the players. Demetrius, meanwhile, seemed to realize that he and the players on television played the same game. When a Maryland player caught the ball on the right block, Demetrius pieced together his moves as if he’d discovered the answer to a riddle. “Fake high. Spin low. Finish. Good.” He turned to Keller and exclaimed, “Coach Joe, that’s just like what I do!” Busy pondering the NBA potential of players he would never meet, Keller acted as if he didn’t hear him.
Keller once said, “I model my program after Coach K’s at Duke.” Yet he never read Mike Krzyzewski’s Leading with the Heart: Coach K’s Successful Strategies for Basketball, Business, and Life. In that book, Krzyzewski spends several pages explaining two metaphors. “There are five fundamental qualities that make every team great: communication, trust, collective responsibility, caring, and pride. I like to think of each as a separate finger.” Later in the book, he writes, “I look at the members of our team like the five fingers of a hand,” and says he strives to make all five players on the floor “fit together into a powerful fist.” For Krzyzewski, the fist was a metaphor for sportsmanship, integrity, and teamwork. For Keller, Fist was a defense he used to crush weak teams.
If Keller had a model as he built the Inland Stars, it was the Southern California All-Stars, despite the fact that Barrett was one of the poorer basketball minds among the top grassroots coaches. Barrett sat first chair when SCA played, but he usually had a parent or another person seated near him who ran substitutions and called plays. At a tournament in Las Vegas, Barrett deferred to the father of one of his players in every game. He even checked with him before calling a time-out.
Barrett couldn’t school Keller on the technical side of basketball, but from his example Keller took a vital axiom: In the grassroots game, perception mattered most. The mistake in questioning Keller’s teaching of Red Sea and criticizing him for running up the score on West Sylvan was thinking that he was only the coach of a basketball team. First and foremost, he was the architect of an image. Red Sea, if the Inland Stars ever pulled it off, would get people talking about Demetrius. Breaking the will of the West Sylvan boys, no matter how undersized and unskilled they might have been, was good for the brand.
4
The Inland Stars at the 2002 Nationals
Early in the summer of 2002, Keller and Demetrius went to Crabby Bob’s, a restaurant near the Ontario Airport. It was part of the trinity of chain restaurants, along with Outback Steakhouse and Benihana, that Keller frequented. They chose a blue faux leather booth just off the bar. Two plastic lobsters, a miniature ship’s wheel, and a shiny boat hook sat on a shelf above their booth. Keller ordered oysters to start and then shrimp and steak. Demetrius ordered ribs.
“How did I know you were gonna get ribs?” Keller said.
Demetrius shrugged. “’Cuz I always do.”
“Black people and ribs, I don’t get it,” Keller said. It was not the first time he’d made this comment, but Demetrius chuckled nonetheless.
“You eat so many ribs, you are a rib,” Keller said, another well-worn joke.
Demetrius shook his head. “Coach Joe, you’re sooo dumb.”
Keller cocked his head back and furrowed his brow. His face was stone, and he seemed to be staring through Demetrius when he said, without a hint of sarcasm, “I’m gonna run you so hard tomorrow.”
“Ha!” Demetrius shouted, and then he exploded into laughter.
Demetrius had a fantastic laugh. It started with that “Ha!” as if he’d tricked you and then ascended into machine-gun giggles. It was usually accompanied by some physical display. He’d jump up and down or cover his face. If something was truly funny, he’d run out of the room. At Crabby Bob’s, he rolled onto his side in the booth and laughed for half a minute, his giggles muted somewhat by the tabletop. It was easy to forget how young Demetrius was, but if you made him laugh, the reward was an endearing reminder.
Demetrius was still recovering from his laughing spell when the waitress arrived with Keller’s oysters. She was a sprightly high schooler named Kimberly, who wore her blond hair in a ponytail.
“How old do you think he is?” Keller asked her, and pointed across the table at Demetrius, who suddenly sat up straight and smiled.
Kimberly brought a notepad to her mouth, appearing to give the question serious thought.
“I’d say he’s in high school. Maybe a junior.”
“Nope. Wrong,” Keller shouted, and he clapped his hands.
Keller’s excitement bewildered her. “How old is he?”
“I’m eleven,” Demetrius announced proudly.
“No way.”
“Yep, he’s eleven,” Keller said. “And look at his feet. Size fourteen.”
She went through the motion of glancing under the table. “When you said he wasn’t in high school, I thought I offended him, that he was really in college.”
Keller clapped again and sent Kimberly off for a Corona. Upon her return, Keller said, “He is the number one basketball player his age in the country.”
She seemed impressed. “Well, then dessert is free. If he wants one.”
“Oh, I want dessert,” Demetrius said. “I want that chocolate cake thing.”
As Kimberly left, Keller lowered his voice. “If you were taller, I could get the whole meal for free.”
“Ha!” Demetrius shouted, and the giggles started. Soon he was back on his side, laughing like he couldn’t stop.
No one could make Demetrius laugh like Coach Joe. At the mall, on the long drives to tournaments, during those NBA Live showdowns, they joked with each other the way brothers do. One evening, Keller disagreed with Demetrius’s assessment that the Los Angeles Lakers were better than the Chicago Bulls on NBA Live. He tried to prove him wrong, but Demetrius, playing as the Lakers, beat him, so Keller did what an older brother would do: He wrestled Demetrius into submission on the rug.
Moments like that made their relationship difficult to quantify. They were father-son and coach-player, but they were also like friends or partners working toward a common goal. It was all blurred lines, and at Crabby Bob’s the many facets of their relationship were on display.
“How can you eat those things? That’s just gross,” Demetrius said as he watched Keller pop an oyster in his mouth.
“How do you know? You’ve never tried one.”
“And I never will.”
Keller slid an oyster in a half shell onto his bread plate and passed it across the table. “Try it.”
“No way.”
“D, how do you know you don’t like something if you don’t try it? You gotta try new things.”
Demetrius protested some more but eventually picked up the oyster gingerly, inspected it from all sides, and then closed his eyes and dropped it into his mouth.
He immediately gagged, spit the oyster back into his hand, and hurled it under the table as if it were hot to the touch.
“It’s horrible.”
He sucked on a slice of lemon he retrieved from Keller’s plate.
“Well, now you know for sure that you don’t like oysters.”
Later, while munching on a rib, Demetrius mentioned a girl at school who had a crush on him. “I don’t know about girls. I try to like them and I guess I kinda do, but I don’t know.”
“What did I tell you? Don’t get serious,” Keller said. “If I hadn’t gotten serious with a girl and gotten her pregnant, I’d be playing professional baseball right now. I’d be playing for the Yankees or some team like that. Girls will fuck things up, D. Stay away from them.”
Near the end of the meal, Kimberly brought dessert. (“For the number-one player in the country.”) It was a massive slice of chocolate cake topped with vanilla ice cream and crushed Snickers and Oreos and a six-inch mound of whipped cream. It would have been a sufficient meal for t
hree people. As Demetrius, spoon in hand, sized up where to launch his attack, Keller said, “D, that is going to make you sick. Don’t eat too much or it will upset your stomach.”
Demetrius spooned an oversize piece of the cake into his mouth. Then another and another.
“D, you’re gonna get sick.”
“No I won’t,” he mumbled.
“Okay, if you finish that and don’t get sick, you don’t have to run at practice tomorrow. If you do, you have to run double.”
About fifteen minutes later, with two-thirds of the dessert gone, Demetrius hurried out of the booth and ran to the bathroom. He remained there for twenty minutes and then emerged, ashen, with his hand on his stomach.
“You, okay?” Keller asked.
“No.”
“Let’s go. Get ya home.”
“I may need to go again.”
They sat there for another twenty minutes, and when Demetrius rushed back to the bathroom, Keller followed a few minutes later to check on him. “We just gotta get you home, D, so you can lie down,” he kept saying.
In that hour-long dinner, Keller filled a variety of roles. He was Demetrius’s friend, teasing him about his love of ribs. He was his coach, promoting him to Kimberly, building up his profile. He was like an older brother, counseling him on girls. And he was a father, urging him to try new foods and worrying when he got an upset stomach. If asked, Keller would say that the constant was “I am always honest with D,” but he was also uncensored. When Keller saw a pretty woman, he told Demetrius, “Man, I love my wife, but if I wasn’t married right now …” If Keller wanted to cut a player, Demetrius heard about it first. When he was upset with a parent, Demetrius knew why. Whether Keller was a father figure or a friend or a coach was not a conscious choice. He was winging it, and whatever he felt in the moment was what Demetrius got.
It was most accurate to think of them as partners working to close a deal that would mutually benefit both parties. And if there was a moment when that partnership took shape, it was a late-summer afternoon at Truman Middle School in Fontana not long after Keller discovered Demetrius. It was the first day of a week of workouts that Keller called “Hell Week.” The team met at the school’s track, and Keller timed the players as they ran 100-meter sprints and then 400-meter sprints, making them run again if they didn’t finish in under a certain time. When Keller thought they were exhausted, he made them run the stairs that divided the wooden stands.
“That was the warm-up,” Keller said, a wry smile on his face, just before he ordered the boys into the gym. “Now practice can start.”
For Rome, Andrew, and Jordan, the running was difficult but not extraordinary. They had known demanding coaches before Keller. But Demetrius had never had to work so hard.
Once in the gym, Keller organized some light basketball drills, but it was a mere respite before running the team some more. After less than thirty minutes he shouted, “On the line!” and the ten boys lined up along the baseline. “Do any of you know what a Rambo is?” Keller asked, and ten boys shook their heads. A Rambo was Keller’s variation on a common conditioning drill. Players sprint continuously from the baseline to the free-throw line and back, from the baseline to midcourt and back, from the baseline to the far free-throw line and back, and then from the baseline to the opposite end line, finishing in a tired huff against the opposite wall of the gym. Keller’s version doubled the running. It was a special kind of torture, and when he finished describing it, a collective moan rang out from the boys.
“How many we gotta do?” one player asked.
“As many as I want,” Keller said, and the team moaned again.
Demetrius ran the first Rambo under protest. He was last to cross the line at the end. “Come on, D, there is no reason you should be last!” Keller shouted. After the second Rambo, when Demetrius again brought up the rear, Keller ordered, “You better pick it up, D.” After the third Rambo, when Demetrius’s last-place finish was probably because of fatigue, Keller had seen enough. “Until Demetrius finishes in the front, we’re going to run all day long.”
Demetrius was bent over, his hands grasping the front of his shorts. Without straightening himself, he yelled back, “Well, maybe I’ll quit, then!”
Keller pointed to the twin doors leading to the parking lot. “Get the hell out of my gym.”
Demetrius didn’t know how to respond. He stood up straight and let go of his shorts. Keller stared crossly at him, his finger still pointed toward the doors. “Get out of my gym,” Keller repeated. “You’re a quitter.”
Demetrius took a few slow steps forward, still believing Keller would drop his demand. Around the free-throw line, he sped up and veered to the left. He retrieved his backpack from up against a wall and then moved swiftly toward the doors. He slammed into them with his right arm and shoulder, and light from the outside slipped into the gym for a second. Then the doors swung shut and an impassive Keller turned toward the nine boys who remained.
“On the line. We’re not done.”
Outside, Demetrius stood alone in the parking lot, unsure of what to do. He could call his mom, but there was no guarantee she’d be able to pick him up; he would also have to explain why he’d been kicked out of practice. He leaned against the gray exterior wall of the gym, trying to decide whether to wait for practice to end so Keller could drive him home or to walk the five miles to his house. As Demetrius pondered his options, Keller came out of the gym.
“What are you going to do?” Keller asked.
Demetrius turned his back and quickly wiped his cheeks.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but I don’t want to do all of this.”
Keller’s tone changed. It was softer, warmer.
“Look, Demetrius, you gotta make a choice. You can be a failure or you can succeed in life. Do you want to be somebody who quits or somebody who succeeds?”
Demetrius fingered the cell phone in his hand, the phone he could have used to call his mom.
“D, I will never lie to you. Believe me. I never will. And I’ll tell you this: You can be a great player. You can be great if you want to, but you have to work for it.”
He took a step toward Demetrius.
“I want to tell you something, and I mean this. You can make a living playing basketball. I mean that. You can make it to the NBA someday if you work hard enough and stay focused. But you have to decide: Do you want to be somebody who makes the NBA, who can take care of his mom, or do you want to be a lowlife?”
Up to that point, Keller had done much for Demetrius. He picked him up from school and drove him to and from practice, bought him meal after meal. He and Violet helped him with his homework, and Keller argued with principals and teachers who said Demetrius was unruly. When Demetrius scored well on a test, Keller took him to the Ontario Mills mall and bought him the newest Nike Air Jordans. Keller also doled out punishment when Demetrius deserved it. He grounded him for staying out too late and took away his Nintendo when he talked back. Much of what he did was very ordinary, but it was what was absent from Demetrius’s life. On nights when Kisha worked, he escorted Demetrius into the house and helped him search the rooms and closets for intruders, and he lobbied Kisha until she brought home a cocker spaniel named Sierra, a dog whose bark signaled to Demetrius that it was safe inside that dark house.
More significant than all of Keller’s noble deeds in his first year with Demetrius was what he said to him outside the gym at Truman Middle School. It is doubtful he knew the weight his words would have to a young African American boy, but he had made Demetrius a promise. Before that day, “I was just playing basketball for fun. I didn’t know it could affect my life,” Demetrius would say later. Now Demetrius had a goal, something to strive for, and, just as important, he had someone offering to guide him. If Demetrius did what he was told, he could make the NBA. That was the promise Keller had made.
After a few moments pondering Keller’s words, Demetrius stepped away from the wall and wiped the last te
ar from his cheek.
“I don’t wanna quit,” he said.
Keller put his hand on Demetrius’s back. “Come on,” he said, and together they walked back into the gym.
Going forward, Demetrius followed Keller’s orders unconditionally. As they spent day after day together, Demetrius’s view of the world changed. He loved his mom, but Coach Joe was his mentor. Coach Joe was in charge.
The affection was mutual. When Joey, Keller’s son from his earlier relationship, decided after one season he no longer wanted to sit at the end of the Inland Stars’ bench, he was allowed to move back in with his mother full-time. “We just don’t have much in common,” Keller explained. He next moved Violet and Jordan from their apartment in Riverside to Fontana, just a few miles from Demetrius’s home. To Violet’s family, it seemed strange that they would relocate to be closer to a boy on the Inland Stars, but, as Keller explained: “D is like my son.”
In the summer of 2002, their partnership reached a critical moment. Keller took the team to the AAU Nationals, the biggest of the tournaments that crowned a national champion in various age groups. Winning the tournament, held that year in Cocoa Beach, Florida, was the stated goal, but Nationals also presented Keller with the chance to market Demetrius on the grandest stage. If his young star outperformed the pack at Nationals, it would help build a consensus that he controlled the country’s top sixth-grader.
Teams advance to Nationals by winning qualifiers within their association, which comprises an entire state’s worth of teams or, in the case of California, half a state. (California is divided into the Pacific and the Southern Pacific regions.) At Nationals, ninety-two teams are split into pools of four and play three games within their pool. The top two teams from each pool (forty-six total) advance to bracket play, where a single loss eliminates a team from contention for the glass-bowl trophy given to the winner.
Play Their Hearts Out Page 7