Patterson would not go begging. He felt Demetrius needed IEBP more than the program needed him. He let it be known that he and Howard were open to working with Demetrius and pointed out that Demetrius’s uncle, Jordan Walker, had once played for IEBP.
“I heard from my uncle that those coaches are good and they are not going to do me like Coach Joe, but I need to be on a program with a higher profile,” Demetrius said one day in March. A few days later, he went to his first workout with his new team and its coach:
Pat Barrett.
When Roberto saw him, emotions dulled by the two-plus years since he last stepped on a court with Demetrius came rushing back.
He entered the gym at a Houston-area high school with his teammates on California Hoops and noticed Demetrius off to the side, wearing the familiar red and black of SCA. To that point, Roberto had expressed mostly indifference to Demetrius’s plight since they parted. Told that Demetrius had struggled during his freshman season or that he hid in a bathroom at the Superstar Camp, Roberto shrugged. “Man, I don’t really care what D’s doing.” Roberto was also not one to attach exterior motivation to a sporting contest. If a coach drummed up a fire-and-brimstone speech about earning “respect,” he was more likely to roll his eyes than go firing out of the locker room. But he spotted Demetrius before an elimination game of the Kingwood Classic, watched him stretch off to the side of the court while wearing those same high black soccer socks and a different model shoe from his teammates’, and resentment bubbled to the surface. Roberto’s thoughts returned to the humiliations he’d been served as a younger player, the practices when he and Demetrius went toe to toe and Keller rigged the contents against him. “What’s your ranking?” Demetrius would say often during those battles, and what could Roberto say to that? Back then there was no doubting Demetrius’s status, his importance, and Keller and Demetrius let Roberto know every chance they got that he was not as special.
But, oh, how things had changed.
Roberto was ranked in the top 25, getting calls almost every week from coaches like Ohio State’s Thad Matta, who lobbied him to come to Columbus for an unofficial visit on the weekend of the Ohio State–Michigan football game. Florida’s Donovan told Bruce: “Your son is a pro,” the highest of compliments. Demetrius, in contrast, had fallen off the grid. He told people that Memphis and Villanova wanted him, but the truth was that no big-name recruiters called or sent him text messages or pleaded with him to make an unofficial visit. He was the less special one now, and Roberto gave in to the urge to show the nearly 1,000 people in the gym just how ordinary Demetrius had become.
Payback, motherfucker, Roberto thought, and while his vehemence was directed at Demetrius, Keller was in his thoughts as well. If he humiliated Coach Joe’s boy, surely word would get back to Keller.
“I’m guarding Demetrius,” Roberto told his coach as warm-ups ended. He repeated that statement to his teammates, knowing a few might try to make a name for themselves by undressing the onetime Sports Illustrated cover boy. To be certain everyone knew his intent, Roberto took up a position next to Demetrius at the center circle when the starters went out for the opening tip. Without acknowledging him, Roberto announced: “I got this right here.” He then clapped his hands twice and licked the tips of his fingers, the basketball equivalent of a butcher sharpening his blade.
Demetrius had more confidence in his game at that moment than at any point since the eighth grade. During warm-ups, his 3-point shot was falling and he felt bouncy and strong. He was still handicapped, however, by the lingering deficiencies in his game, particularly his ballhandling, and, most of all, by the portly man standing on the sidelines with his shirt tucked into his sweatpants. In the month since Demetrius joined SCA, he had come to understand two truths about how Pat Barrett operated: First, he favored his star, Brandon Jennings, to the point that he could do no wrong. If he took 30 shots in a game and missed 29, Barrett would congratulate him on that one make. Secondly, Barrett didn’t know basketball. Total disregard for the teaching of the fundamentals, fixation on dunks and other highlight plays at the expense of a structured offense, defense treated as an afterthought—pick a poison once associated with Keller and it applied to Barrett. “Practices are kinda like what Coach Joe used to run,” Demetrius said. “We do a few little drills at the start and then we just play.” There were no individual workouts, no drills likes the ones Ryan Smith drew up. After finally freeing himself from Keller’s clutches, Demetrius had run directly into the arms of the coach he most resembled. As one rival AAU coach put it: “Demetrius went from one pimp to another.”
Demetrius hoped that by joining SCA he would, at the least, be on one of the best grassroots teams in America. The previous year, Kevin Love and Jennings led SCA to titles at the Kingwood Classic, the biggest event of the spring, and the Reebok Big Time, the summer’s top tournament. Love moved on to UCLA, and Jennings played for Barrett only intermittently. SCA’s success was often cyclical. After a team like the Love–Jennings powerhouse, it took Barrett a few years to restock the cupboard, and in the interim he filled SCA with the best he could find on short notice. Demetrius saw SCA and Barrett as the big-name team he needed to rebuild his reputation. Barrett likely saw him as an adequate placeholder until better players could be found.
Soon after California Hoops won the opening tip, Roberto had the ball on the right side with Demetrius guarding him. He rolled the ball to the left with his left hand, as if he might go in that direction, and when he saw Demetrius adjust his feet, he pounded the ball back to the right and moved hard in that direction. Demetrius was quicker than Roberto, but the combination of being caught off balance and Roberto’s strength with the ball overwhelmed him, and Roberto drove in for a clean layup.
The ease with which Roberto got by him changed the way Demetrius played defense for the rest of the game. The crowd’s reaction, the collective “OOOOOHHHH!” rising from the stands after Roberto crossed him over, led Demetrius to step back from Roberto the next time down on defense and every time after that. He would give him the outside shot rather than risk being embarrassed again. Roberto identified this instantly, casually made a 3-pointer, and repeated the act twice more in the game’s first eight minutes. The one time Demetrius dared to step to him, Roberto drove on him again and pulled up for a 12-footer as Demetrius watched helplessly.
When SCA had the ball, Demetrius stayed near the 3-point line, watching as Jennings took most of the shots. Demetrius scored off an offensive rebound at one point, but he got nothing in the flow of the offense, and he didn’t make Roberto work to guard him.
Late in the half, when it looked as if Roberto would win their matchup in a rout, Jennings forced a turnover and sprinted ahead, creating a 2-on-1 break with Demetrius to his left and Roberto as the lone defender. Jennings drove straight at the basket, and as he reached the free-throw line, Roberto stepped toward him, shading to the side Demetrius was on to take away the passing lane. Without stopping, Jennings lofted the ball toward the rim just as Demetrius, in a full sprint, left the ground. He rose toward the rim and turned in midair so his back was to the basket. He met Jennings’s pass at the moment the rim was directly behind him, his head several inches above it. The pass was a little low, and so Demetrius had to lean forward to grab it. He snared it with both hands, then scooped the ball up and over his head, slamming it through the net in what was called a reverse alley-oop.
The crowd’s reaction almost halted the game. Players ran onto the floor near the benches, people along the baseline slapped hands, and a few leaped into one another’s arms. It took several seconds for Roberto to retrieve the ball and then inbound it to a teammate, and the crowd basked in what they had just witnessed: the best dunk of the tournament.
Emboldened by his dunk and the crowd’s boisterous response, Demetrius bumped Roberto with his shoulder as they crossed at half-court.
“Man, you suck!” he shouted over the cheering.
“I suck? What does that say about you i
f I suck and I’m still killing you?”
Demetrius didn’t say anything.
“You can dunk, but you can’t guard me.”
Demetrius remained silent but gave him a push in the chest.
“This ain’t middle school no more,” Roberto quipped.
Seconds later, Roberto got the ball on the right and made a 3-pointer over Demetrius, catching him on his heels. As he jogged back on defense, Roberto shook his head, as if he was disappointed by how easily he could embarrass his foe.
Early in the second half, with Roberto ahead in their head-to-head battle 16 points to 4, Demetrius moved over to point guard. Roberto picked him up near midcourt, and as Demetrius awkwardly attempted to cross the ball in front of his body, Roberto reached in and tipped the ball free. He picked up the loose ball and raced unabated toward the basket. Roberto would say later, “I had no idea what I was going to do until I did it,” but his showmanship seemed rehearsed. He ran at the basket from the right side and then jumped off two feet and twisted his body counterclockwise, completing a perfect revolution before slamming the ball home with two hands, a 360-degree dunk.
Judging by the crowd’s response, Roberto’s slam ranked below Demetrius’s from earlier, but it capped off his dominance of his former rival. Not three minutes of game time later, Demetrius claimed he hurt his knee and retreated to the bench.
A couple of late baskets by Jennings gave SCA the victory, and that, combined with seeing Demetrius feign injury yet again to avoid a challenge, left Roberto unsatisfied. Watching Demetrius shirk away rather than give his best the entire game was not part of the script he’d written in his head. It didn’t feel like payback; it felt like kicking a kid when he was down.
“Man, it’s just sad. It is like D is waiting for everything to come easy again, like all of a sudden it was gonna be like it was, where he can blow past everybody or jump higher than everybody,” Roberto said later. “And, you know, he’s good enough. I mean it. He is still a good enough athlete to make it. Did you see that dunk he had in the first half? I can’t do that. I can’t get high enough to do that. He just needs to work on his game and get his confidence back. After that dunk, he was talking shit and acting like he was confident, but he isn’t really confident.”
That one game and Roberto’s reaction were harbingers of Demetrius’s entire grassroots season. He joined SCA to restore his reputation, but as he traveled the nation playing for Barrett, the reaction of the grassroots populace—the players, coaches, and scouting-services types—mirrored Roberto’s. Instead of showing people that he was once again a phenom, he reminded them how far he’d fallen. Instead of redemption, he got pity.
31
Justin Hawkins and Roberto Nelson
When people asked Demetrius what colleges were recruiting him, he rambled off a list that included some of the best programs in the country: Memphis, Villanova, Florida, and UCLA. None of those schools was actively recruiting him, but it was not entirely his fault that he misjudged their level of interest. The recruiting process is confusing, with too many NCAA rules governing the actions of recruiters and with both the colleges and the recruits practicing deception to better their positions. Add in greedy grassroots coaches looking to cash in on their players, and it is not surprising that Demetrius wouldn’t know exactly where he stood.
The recruitment of a high school basketball player begins with the simplest of communications: a form letter, sent to recruits sometime after their sophomore season. It is often accompanied by a questionnaire in which a player provides his cell-phone number, email address, his parents’ cell-phone numbers, etc. Recruiters are not permitted by the NCAA to send high school players any correspondence before that, but many do, because enforcement is lax. In defense of those schools, the rules governing when it is permissible to write to kids are confusing. In 2006, it was not against the rules for Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski to send a middle schooler a handwritten note—like the one sent to Demetrius when he was in the seventh grade—but sending that same note to a high school freshman would be a violation.
That is one of the many byzantine NCAA bylaws that parents and kids don’t understand. Most couldn’t tell you whether a certain month was a “Contact” period, meaning coaches were free to call them, or a “No Contact” period, when they were not. They knew only that there were some weeks when their phones rang incessantly and others when they did not.
As their mailboxes filled with letters from colleges, the kids often mistook that as a sign of veritable interest, but no part of the recruiting process is more meaningless. Roberto and Bruce saved every piece of recruiting mail sent to their home in Santa Barbara. Bruce placed a large cardboard box behind a recliner in their living room, and anything they received got tossed into it. That box gave way to another and another and then another. In a twenty-month period, beginning in February of his sophomore year and continuing until November of his senior year, Roberto received 2,171 pieces of mail from fifty-six different schools. These mailings were as pointless as they were wasteful. Of all the mail Roberto received, only 387 pieces, or 18 percent, were ever opened, and Bruce opened the majority; he estimated Roberto looked at fewer than fifty. The sheer volume of mail Roberto received alerted him to the meaninglessness of recruiting letters. But Demetrius, who received fewer mailings, thought a form letter from Villanova or Memphis signaled genuine interest, when it meant only that he was on a mass mailing list.
Recruiters often speak of the prospects they are considering in terms of what tier they are on. There are the Tier 1 kids, the ones with elite talent, like Roberto. A player who really fits a need, such as a big center or pure point guard, can also land on Tier 1, even if he is not ranked as high by the scouting services. Tier 2 consists of players that a school would be willing to take if it missed out on Tier 1 prospects. Tier 2 kids aren’t superstars, but they may have a big upside because of their size, like Aaron, or have a signature skill, like Justin’s defense, that enables them to contribute immediately in college. Players who fall to Tier 3 have an obvious flaw that could prevent them from being effective college players. They may be too short for the position they play, like Terran, or too slight, like Andrew. Many Tier 3 players overcome their physical limitations and become good college players, but Tier 3 kids can be risky, and recruiters are reluctant to commit to them.
The process gets complicated, because every school slots kids differently and because players don’t always know where they stand. USC told Roberto that he was “the number-1 guard” on their list of recruits, but a player a tier or two lower won’t hear that he is part of the backup plan.
Iowa State was one of the first schools to aggressively pursue Justin, and assistant coach T. J. Otzelberger spearheaded his recruitment. To an outsider, Iowa State would seem an unlikely school to reach into Southern California for talent, but then, few people knew that Otzelberger had spent a year coaching one of the Pumps’ grassroots teams, Double Pump Elite. In the spring of Justin’s sophomore year, Otzelberger convinced Carmen to fly out with Justin for an unofficial visit. When they arrived in Ames, Justin was handed a color brochure announcing JUSTIN HAWKINS. UNOFFICIAL VISIT. On the cover was a picture of Hilton Coliseum, where the Cyclones played, and inside was an hour-by-hour schedule of how Justin would spend his two days there, including playing pickup with the current team and meeting the program’s academic coordinator. On the back of the brochure was a short bio of Justin, written like those you find in media guides, with lines like: He ranks as one of the top guards in the state of California for the class of 2009.
By his second day in Ames, Justin told Carmen he could see himself going to school there. Carmen appreciated the small-town atmosphere and also felt, given her conversations with Otzelberger, that Justin was a priority recruit for the school. Then they met with head coach Greg McDermott.
“We like you, Justin. We like you a lot,” McDermott said during a sit-down in his office. “But we are not done taking care of the 2008 class, so we can
’t offer a scholarship yet.”
Translated from coachspeak, McDermott said: Justin is not a top priority.
One can see why Carmen and Justin would have been confused. After being convinced by Otzelberger that they were wanted, Carmen spent around $1,000 to get Justin and her to Ames, and then they were fawned over for two days, including a visit to the athletic director’s luxury box during halftime of a football game. Naturally, they thought Iowa State wanted Justin. Instead, McDermott merely wanted to keep him “warm” (in the parlance of recruiters) while he waited on bigger fish.
Players and parents were capable of the same trickery. UC Riverside offered Jordan Finn a scholarship right before the start of his junior season, and he and John visited the school twice. Jordan didn’t want to attend UC Riverside, however, and he and John went only to keep that school as an option should no others extend Jordan an offer. When UC Riverside coach Jim Wooldridge pressured Jordan to verbally commit during one visit, John told him: “Coach, we really appreciate your interest, but we want to see what success you have recruiting others and see how strong the program gets.” That was parentspeak for: We’re holding out for something better.
Some schools took a shotgun approach, offering scholarships to dozens of kids in the hopes that one would commit. This was more common with smaller programs, like the University of Portland, which had offered a scholarship to six of the former Team Cal kids by their junior seasons. A program like, say, UCLA, had to be more prudent, because so many players would jump at the chance to play for that school. The Bruins recruited Roberto hard—they made phone calls, sent emails, scouted his AAU games—but as his junior year began, he had yet to be formally offered a scholarship. Coach Ben Howland told Bruce he was concerned about Roberto’s grades and wanted to see how he scored on the SAT. Howland’s hesitancy probably had more to do with wanting to see how Roberto and other players developed: no sense in offering him a scholarship before it was necessary. That didn’t stop Howland from committing an NCAA violation regarding permissible contact. In certain months, coaches are allowed to call a recruit or his family only once. In one of these months, and after a UCLA coach had already spoken to Roberto, Howland called Bruce. “I didn’t know it was him until I answered the phone, because the number had a Santa Barbara area code,” Bruce said. “Ben said he was up in Santa Barbara visiting people, and we talked about maybe getting together while he was in town.” Howland had never called Bruce from a Santa Barbara number before. “I guess he knew that if he used his UCLA phone, then people could find out he called me.”
Play Their Hearts Out Page 42