Play Their Hearts Out
Page 48
It would have been impossible to spend so many years around the players and not develop a great affection for them. I fell into the habit of calling them “my kids,” and I followed their lives so closely that at times they felt like family. I asked a lot of Aaron, Roberto, Justin, Rome, Jordan, and Andrew, and they were always eager to help, as were Gary, Terran, Pe’Shon, Darius, Tommy, G.J., and Craig. Finally, there was Demetrius, who took every one of my calls and put up with day after day of me at his side, notebook in hand. This is a book about many people, with many themes, but at its core it is Demetrius’s journey.
Thanks, D, for letting me tag along.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GEORGE DOHRMANN is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated and the magazine’s investigative reporter. In 2000, while working at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, he won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories that uncovered academic fraud in a university’s basketball program. Dohrmann lives in San Francisco with his family. This is his first book.