Laws, resembling sausages, cease to inspire in proportion as we know how they are made. – John Godfrey Saxe.

As college basketball fans, we have a vague notion that college hoops is not all smiles and sunshine. Yes, the machinery of NCAA basketball is oiled with the blood of the AAU summer select teams, but we, the fans, can ignore the seamier aspects because we are captivated with the end product, the sausage, if you will.

George Dohrmann’s Play Their Hearts Out provides an all-access backstage pass to the gritty realities behind big-time “amateur” basketball. Many of the practices of AAU summer basketball – exploitation of vulnerable, but athletically precocious, children, the ascendance of shoe companies, the emphasis on upside and “measurables” over fundamentals – will hardly surprise even the casual basketball fan. This dispiriting reality lends itself to polemic. Play Their Hearts Out could have been a caustic screed against the evils of AAU basketball, pitting naïve kids as foils against adults who possess the moral sense of a pit viper. Instead, Dohrmann provides a nuanced narrative that not only describes the “what,” but the “why”.

George Dohrmann, an investigative reporter for Sports Illustrated, is no newcomer to the world of basketball. In 2000, he won a Pulitzer Prize, while working at the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press, for a series of stories that uncovered academic fraud within the University of Minnesota men’s basketball program. While writing an article, “School for Scandal,” for Sports Illustrated, highlighting the hangers-on trying to capitalize on Tyson Chandler’s jump from high school to the NBA, Dohrmann met Joe Keller, the man who “discovered” Chandler. At the time, Keller, a former welder and car stereo salesman, coached an AAU basketball team of 10 and 11 year-olds. Dohrmann made a proposal to Keller: let him follow Keller’s team, with unfettered access, and he would not publish what he witnessed until after the boys had finished playing AAU basketball, some eight-plus years later. Keller agreed. Dohrmann received entrée into the underbelly of basketball; Keller secured the cache of Sports Illustrated affiliation.

Reminiscent of John D. Rockefeller in the oil business or Lyndon B. Johnson as a young member of the Senate, we watch as Keller scratches out a niche in a field where power resides in the hands of the few, relying on maniacal drive, which he brings to bear to alter the landscape to play to his strengths. Lacking the shoe company connections to attract elite high school talent, Keller instead parlays his ability to size up athletic potential in pre-teens to become the “Sonny Vaccaro of the Middle Schoolers”. Keller ultimately realizes his dream, picking up and casting aside kids as they suit his needs.

In lesser hands, this story could tend toward the formulaic: innocent youth callously exploited by cynical “coaches” merely interested in turning a buck. Of course, there is that. However, Dohrmann provides so much detail and context that we see the twisted rationalizations behind some of the more monstrous behavior depicted in the book. Rather than overt finger pointing at selected villains, Dohrmann intersperses the good and the bad and trusts the reader to draw their own conclusions.

If you are looking for dirt, Dohrmann has plenty to share. Because he witnessed most of the events in the book, he names names. If you are a recruiting junky, Play their Hearts Out has plenty of behind the scenes stories involving a number of recognizable 5-Star athletes, some who are still playing college ball today. Dohrmann also shines a light on the process by which AAU select team members end up at certain colleges, which provides timely subtext to the ascendance of programs such as Baylor.

Those looking for a happy ending, or at least seeing the bad guys get their comeuppance: “The grassroots-basketball society was not a just one, and the real Joe Keller would never face the consequences of what he wrought.” Play Their Hearts Out is one of the better sports books I have read in the past few years and probably one of the best basketball books I have read, entering the pantheon of Hoop Dreams and The Last Shot. Anyone with an abiding interest in basketball — high school, college, or pros — owes it to themselves to read this book. Given the current college environment, its publication could not be more timely.

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