Play Their Hearts Out

by George Dohrmann

  “I thought he would go right at me,” Rome would say later. “He knows he can get by me.”

  He did drive past Rome on a few possessions, but he refused to continue toward the rim. He either dished to a teammate or pulled the ball out to the perimeter. He attempted only three shots, missing all of them, and allowed Rome to score 13 points, mostly on little pull-up jumpers and hustle play that took advantage of Demetrius’s poor conditioning.

  “It’s sad seeing Demetrius play without any intensity,” Rome, Sr., said before the game was even over. “It’s like he is a different person.”

  Added Gerry: “It used to be that when Demetrius was playing, you almost didn’t notice anyone else. Now you hardly notice him.”

  The college coaches at the camp didn’t expect Demetrius or any of the young players to exhibit a completely refined game. When scouting kids entering their sophomore year in high school, they looked only for small signs that a prospect could make the jump to the next level. A little burst of speed, an athletic finish on a drive to the rim, or a signature skill, such as G.J.’s passing or Justin’s defense, was all they needed to see in order for their interest in that player to continue. The mental side of it was also important. Lance Stephenson’s competitiveness, even if it made a mess of games as he attempted crazy shot after crazy shot, was something the coaches wanted to see from Demetrius. They didn’t expect him to dominate as he had as a middle schooler, but they wanted to see him try.

  Demetrius gave them nothing. Even worse, he planted a poisonous seed in their minds: Was Demetrius afraid to compete? There was no room for fear in big-time basketball. A coach could teach a player to be a better ball handler or shooter or defender, but he couldn’t teach courage. Even if Demetrius was indeed sick—the college coaches did not know that he was faking—they wanted to see him fight through it. Even if he got his shot blocked five times in a row, they wanted him to attack the rim again. That was what Lance Stephenson did.

  The recruiters talked to Taylor, and he knew the extent of the damage Demetrius had done. They questioned his basketball ability and his mental toughness. Most said flatly that they weren’t interested in him.

  “I don’t know if he is a [Division I] prospect anymore,” Taylor said. “Maybe some low-major like Loyola Marymount or Long Beach [State] might get interested, but no big programs.”

  On Saturday afternoon, Phil Bryant, the director of the camp, gave a closing address. He stood at the center of the middle court, the players in a circle around him. Demetrius was on the outer edge of that circle and paid no attention to Bryant as he read off the names of the campers who had been selected for one of the two all-star games.

  “Will D come back from this? That is the question,” Taylor said. He stood with his arms folded a few yards outside the circle, looking out over the hopeful kids. “He can. There is time. But if you are asking me if I think he will, well …”

  His voice trailed off as Bryant ended his talk by telling the players: “Whoever it is who is responsible for you being here, say thank you.” He then urged the players to give a round of applause to their AAU coaches. Demetrius’s head shot up as the players around him applauded, and he clapped lightly three times, a nearly silent salute to the man responsible for his state.

  ————

  Once Demetrius was back in California, Keller didn’t begin working him out again as he had promised. He barely spoke to him, and when they did communicate, it was usually through text messages.

  One of the few phone conversations they had came after the start of school, in September, when Demetrius heard that The Hoop Scoop had dropped him to number 215 in its rankings of prospects in the class of 2009. There was something fishy about Demetrius’s placement. More than a dozen players who’d once played for Keller were ranked ahead of him, including Craig Payne, even though he had recently decided to focus on football, believing that was his best chance at a college scholarship.

  “How could they have me so low?” Demetrius asked Keller. “That’s bull.”

  “I told Clark to drop you that far,” Keller confessed.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I feel like you aren’t working as hard as you can and that I need to motivate you.”

  “You think that by embarrassing me that is going to motivate me?”

  “I don’t know what else to do. You’ve already got everything you want—shoes and stuff—so there is nothing I can give you to motivate you.”

  “That is bull. You are trashing my name. That’s like the biggest slap in the face ever. People are seeing that ranking and laughing at me.”

  That conversation triggered weeks of introspection as Demetrius focused on how Keller treated him in the present rather than what he had done for him in the past. Meeting the bottom brought Demetrius clarity, most of all about Keller.

  “You know, me and my mom have started talking a lot lately about Coach Joe, and, I mean, I start thinking to myself, like, is it ’cuz of me that Coach Joe is now living like he is? It eats me up sometimes, because I don’t really know the whole truth, but if it wasn’t for me, if I had joined another team, would Coach Joe be rich like he is now? Would his name be as big as it is? My mom says that what Coach Joe has probably has a lot to do with me, and I think she is right. ’Cuz, see, it went like this: Adidas wanted a younger kid coming up that’s gonna be good, that’s gonna be marketable. So whatever they had to do to get a kid like that, they were going to do. And at the time Coach Joe had me. Which means he got paid for it, for me. He got the Adidas shoe contract, with the Adidas money, and everything else, and now he’s got everything he wants and it’s, like, you know, I’m down here and he has no time for me.”

  He felt betrayed, used, suddenly aware that the man who often claimed to love him like a son had only exploited him to get rich. Over the next several weeks, Demetrius composed a letter to Keller on his Sidekick. During class or alone in his room, he pecked out the words with his thumbs, and he labored to get across how he felt. He was still coming to terms with his feelings, and it was natural that the finished email centered less on how Keller made him feel and more on what Demetrius felt he was owed.

  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 for
ever.

  “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 was 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 tha
t.”

  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.

  PART FOUR