Still Lots of Room to Grow

Look at those hands. Those feet.

Anyone can see Demetrius Walker is taller and quicker than most every other player on the basketball court. They see his ballhandling and a short jump shot that consistently scores.

But people in the know -- the ones who watch most closely -- see his long fingers and size-16 shoes.

Already 6 feet 2, Demetrius isn’t finished growing. His progress is chronicled by Web sites that cater to basketball fanatics, and at least one prominent observer of the game has already projected him into the National Basketball Assn. Fans go a step further, comparing him to LeBron James, who recently jumped from high school to the pros.

Demetrius hears what people say.

He is a respectful young man, quiet around strangers, and his response is brief. “I don’t listen to any of that stuff,” he says.

The Fontana boy tries to ignore the hype because he is, after all, only 12 years old.

*

The crew cut and squint are pure drill sergeant. Joe Keller plays to that look, clamping his jaw tight when he hears predictions of greatness for Demetrius. “You don’t want to hear that,” Keller says.

Not yet, at least.

The 33-year-old coach is in a sensitive position. He runs a prestigious youth team, the Southern California All-Stars, that competes in tournaments throughout the nation each summer. Demetrius is his marquee attraction.

But there is something more -- he and his protege have become inseparable over the past few years. He teaches the boy manners and buys him food when he is hungry.

“He means a lot to me,” Keller says. “Like a son.”

The situation forces Keller into a split personality. As coach, he pushes Demetrius through workouts, two hours a day, six days a week, year-round, at various community centers and school gyms. He wants to see how good the boy can become, how far he might go.

As a surrogate father, however, he wants to protect. If Demetrius progresses through the basketball system, he will face daunting pressure from college recruiters, shoe company representatives and agents wanting to sink their hooks into him.

A talented kid can forget what’s important. Things such as family and school.

Keller intends to guide him -- pushing here, shielding there -- but says, “I didn’t plan it this way.”

*

They met four years ago, when Keller walked into a community center and saw Demetrius flying up court. During a break, the coach introduced himself, asking: “How are you?”

Demetrius acted cool, indifferent.

It was the wrong attitude. While Keller storms and curses on the sideline during games, he demands better behavior from his players. Yes, sir. No, sir. That sort of thing.

Upon meeting Demetrius, he remembers thinking, Oh man, I don’t need this kind of trouble.

Yet he went against his instinct and invited the boy to practice. Maybe it was the extraordinary talent or that lanky frame, already 5 feet 2. Maybe something else. “He was a kid who needed someone,” Keller says.

A sheepish grin breaks across Demetrius’ face when he recalls those days. “Back then,” he says, “I really didn’t know manners.”

He was 8.

At first, he felt his new coach’s wrath. The glare. The screaming. Demetrius went home and told his mother, “I can’t take this.”

But Kisha Walker had been a power forward at Crenshaw High in the 1980s. She loved basketball and appreciated the value of coaching. Also, as a single mother, she knew what it was like to hold down a full-time job as a repossession specialist while studying nights for admission to the police academy.

“There’s no quitting,” she told her son.

So Demetrius sweated through conditioning drills and never missed a workout. Somewhere amid the hardship, a relationship emerged.

Basketball was the foundation. Any tough coach loves a kid who shows grit. Any kid with dreams of stardom will latch onto a coach who might take him there.

For Keller, the surprise came when Demetrius started calling him on the telephone.

“If I was sick, he called and asked if I was feeling better,” Keller says. “If he called me up and I told him I was going somewhere, like to watch a high school game, he wanted to go.”

On Father’s Day, Demetrius gave him a card.

The boy had found someone to take the place of his biological father, who had left years before. He says: “I hung around [Keller] a lot and he did a lot for me, buying me stuff to eat when I was hungry and stuff like that.

If Kisha Walker had any misgivings about this relationship, they were swept away by the obvious changes in her son’s attitude and behavior. Keller was a role model, she says. “My son listens to him.”

One more thing -- Demetrius began to dominate opponents on court. By April 2001, at age 10, he earned a glowing endorsement from Hoop Scoop Online.

“His potential for growth is scary,” wrote Clark Francis, a noted scout who tracks basketball talent on the Web site. “Right now, we’re talking about an outstanding athlete who is very fluid and almost impossible to stop inside.”

Those hands. Those feet. For better or worse, Demetrius was on his way.

*

His shorts are stylishly baggy, his socks pulled up to the knee. Watching him play -- grabbing a rebound, driving the length of the floor with authority uncanny for his age -- it is easy to forget Demetrius is a kid.

Then he sits in the bleachers after the game and talks about cartoons. “Ain’t nothing better than Scooby-Doo,” he says.

At a steakhouse where the team goes for a celebratory dinner, he sits among peers who are round-cheeked and big-eyed. His face bears the blunter features of a young man.

But as the group erupts in boyish chatter, Demetrius seems not the least bit out of place, teasing the others, boasting about his video-game prowess.

This is an extended family for a kid who lives alone with his mother. It is a defense against the pressures of early success. Demetrius says he is “trying to stay a kid as long as I can.”

That might be easier said than done, according to experts concerned about top-level youth sports. Michael Connor, a Long Beach State psychology professor who specializes in fathering, dislikes the hours of practice and single-mindedness demanded of youngsters.

“There’s not a lot of time to develop other interests and probably not a lot of conversation about other interests,” Connor says. “At age 10 or 12, a child doesn’t know what he wants to do. It’s important for these kids to be kids and grow into what they will become.”

The consequences might not be appreciated until years later, when young stars fall short of the NBA.

“Then what’s left for them?” Connor asks. “We end up with one-dimensional people.”

Others wonder about the gifts and travel lavished upon top players as a result of the so-called “shoe wars.”

Sports apparel giants such as Nike and Adidas spend millions in search of the next Michael Jordan, an up-and-coming superstar to endorse their shoes. This quest extends down through college and high school to the youth ranks where shoe reps cozy up to promising youngsters.

Much of the courtship takes place on the club scene, outside the auspices of schools with their regulations and athletic associations. Club teams are essentially all-star squads that stay together year-round.

The best of them receive shoes, uniforms and travel expenses from sponsors. Francis, who follows the scene for his Web site, says “a lot of these kids can’t handle it.”

They lose incentive to improve. They harbor unrealistic expectations of earning millions in the NBA and turn their backs on schoolwork.

Francis says the best players ignore the hype and thrive. Sonny Vaccaro, among the original shoe reps and the man who signed Jordan and Kobe Bryant to endorsement contracts, says, “I’m no different from a concert piano teacher who finds a prodigy.”

Demetrius has yet to feel the brunt of this effort. He is too young for the shoe companies’ summer camps, and scouts such as Vaccaro, who know of him, have not begun their courtship in earnest.

Still, his team receives boxes of shoes and crisp white uniforms through a deal with Reebok. This arrangement also helped pay for a recent trip to the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) 12-and-under national championship in Newport News, Va.

Asked about the demands placed upon youngsters such as Demetrius, Keller answers like a coach.

“What makes a 12-year-old different from a 16-year-old?” he asks.

Four years of physical and emotional maturation?

“To me,” he says, “that’s not a big difference.”

*

The coach has been down this road before, back when he discovered a precocious fifth-grader from San Bernardino named Tyson Chandler.

While shepherding Chandler, Keller says he glimpsed the dark side of the youth game. Shoe reps and agents hovered around the boy and coaches from rival club teams tried to lure him away.

“I call them clonies,” he says. “That’s the name I have for them.”

Eventually, Chandler found another mentor in Pat Barrett. A controversial figure and longtime shoe rep, Barrett guided the youngster through high school and directly into the NBA draft, where he was the second overall pick in 2001.

Not that Keller complained -- his team is part of Barrett’s regionwide program. It is Barrett’s deal with Reebok that supplies shoes and uniforms to the players.

But after losing Chandler, Keller quit coaching for a couple of years. Only his competitive drive brought him back, leading him to that community center in Rialto where he spotted Demetrius.

This time, Keller says, he is older and wiser.

Any outsider wanting to speak with Demetrius must go through the coach. When a reporter interviews the boy, Keller sits nearby or arranges a three-way call. He similarly monitors interviews with Kisha Walker.

The mother approves of this arrangement. She doesn’t want strangers calling her apartment, much less coming inside. She trusts Keller to handle matters for the family.

“Me and Joe, we’re very close,” she says. “I know he’ll bring things to me and we’ll make a decision for [Demetrius] at that time.”

They have already agreed that the boy should repeat seventh grade, hoping he will be more emotionally mature when he enters high school.

“If he’s good enough to play in college, we need to get him to college,” Keller says. “Right now, that means high school is the most important thing.”

Not just any high school. Keller hopes Demetrius can play his way into Oak Hill Academy, a private school in Virginia that has produced NBA players such as Jerry Stackhouse of the Washington Wizards and Carmelo Anthony, who was picked third by the Denver Nuggets in the June draft.

At this point, Oak Hill remains a distant prospect. Coach Steve Smith rarely bothers to scout any player younger than 14 and has not even heard of Demetrius.

But Keller has already decided that if Demetrius eventually goes there, he will move his own wife and two young children to Virginia “to stand by him, set those guidelines ... to keep him away from all the clonies.”

It is suggested to Keller that by keeping such a close rein on Demetrius, he is employing some of the same tactics as the “clonies” who latch onto proteges in hopes of someday grabbing a piece of their NBA salaries.

The coach snaps back that he never received a penny from Chandler, who earned $1.9 million in his rookie season with the Chicago Bulls and remains a close enough friend to have spent a day at Keller’s house this summer.

Besides, Keller explains that he owns an auto alarm company -- a brother-in-law runs the business when he is out of town -- that provides his family with a comfortable living.

“Why would I spend the next seven years of my life on the chance I might make $1 million off Demetrius?” he asks. “I can make $1 million of my own in the next seven years.

“I’m not into [coaching] to get guys and leech off them.”

*

At the recent AAU championship, Demetrius led his team to a fifth-place finish by scoring in bunches.

Other players, watching from the sideline, whispered admiringly. One opposing coach, his team dispatched 80-37 in an early round, muttered: “He’s definitely a man among boys out here.” Another coach quietly wondered if Demetrius was truly 12 years old.

It is a common suspicion. AAU officials insist they check birth certificates and other records for disputed players.

Demetrius hears the grumbles and says it doesn’t matter. Keller says: “He might not say so, but it does. That stuff bugs him.”

Nor can the boy completely ignore the hype. Francis, the Internet scout, says that if Demetrius continues to grow and improve at his present rate, “you’re talking about a guy who’s going to make a lot of money in the NBA.”

So, for all the talk about remaining a kid, who can blame Demetrius for looking ahead? He figures a 12-year-old should be allowed to daydream about the NBA because that is what every kid wants.

He also dreams of supporting his mother.

“You’ve worked so hard for me,” he tells her.

Kisha wants to keep him humble but finds herself swept up in his vision. “OK,” she replies.

The coach just sets his jaw, keeps his eyes like slits. If the boy is going to dream, Keller will use it as a carrot to keep him working hard.

He will stick close to Demetrius. Whisper in his ear. Scream at him. Lead him through the minefield.

“I tell him, ‘One step at a time,’ ” Keller says. “I mean, it’s a long road from sixth grade to the NBA.”