Carter a Star in His Own Right

Although it’s the end of yet another long day of interviews in yet another city, Ken Carter is lively and eager to promote the movie he inspired.

His snazzy blue tie remains neatly knotted on a white shirt that’s as crisp as when it came from the cleaners. He greets visitors to his posh hotel room with eager smiles and firm handshakes, casually referring to the men as “sir.”

Wow, the interview hasn’t even begun and already it’s evident that the real “Coach Carter” is a lot like the character played by Samuel L. Jackson -- stylish, energetic and really courteous.

Whether he’s talking about the reason behind the moment that brought him to Hollywood’s attention -- keeping his undefeated high school basketball team off the court until they become better students -- or describing his involvement in the movie, Carter comes alive with the passion, intensity and commitment Jackson shows on screen.

Nothing gets him going more than talking up the movie’s message, his message: Regardless of your circumstances, you can reach high goals by working hard and always doing the right thing.

“In our community, 80 percent of our talk to each other and ourselves is negative,” Carter says, using a statistic to set up a life lesson -- a trick Jackson uses several times in the movie.

“We say, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t lose weight. I can’t jump higher.’ What if you turn it around and say, ‘I can, but I can’t do it overnight. So I’m going to take these baby steps.’ If you are 30 pounds overweight, you can lose it over the period of a year, or even two years. What matters is that you are getting there.”

Carter accidentally became a celebrity in 1999 when he padlocked the gym at Richmond High in northern California because one-third of his players were slacking off in class. The publicity was stoked by backlash from the neighborhood; residents of the impoverished area didn’t want to give up the one thing they had to cheer about.

Producers Mike Tollin and Brian Robbins called Carter during the uproar. When they eventually followed up, they discovered a man who provided far more than one moment to build a movie around. They had enough for MTV Films to make a 2-hour, 17-minute biopic that opened last weekend as the most-seen movie in the nation.

“When you see this movie, you are seeing the truth,” Carter said. “That’s why it grabs you and takes you through these emotional roller coasters.”

The outline of the story sounds familiar: A tough-love authority figure takes over a group of rogue high school students in a dead-end environment, gives them reason to believe they can rise above it, then teaches them how, with some clashes along the way.

What makes this tale unique is Carter.

A former star player at Richmond, he agreed in 1997 to replace his old coach -- but only on a part-time basis because he owned a sporting goods store.

Carter did well enough that he drove an expensive car and wore sharp suits, even to practice. His sense of style was meant to show that “not only drug dealers can drive nice cars, dress real well and have good perceptions of themselves.”

Another of his creeds is that “the way you do one thing is the way you do all things.” So he ran the team like a business.

Players referred to him as “sir,” and he extended the same respect to them. They had to wear coats and ties on game days and be good citizens on campus, which meant cleaning and painting the school and selling T-shirts to pay for road trips.

They also signed contracts vowing to sit in the front row in class and maintain at least a 2.3 grade-point average -- 0.3 higher than the state required to play sports.

“Everything we do in life that we consider extremely important, we sign some type of document, from a driver’s license to getting married,” Carter said. “It was something tangible in their hand that we could refer back to when there was a problem.”

He believed conditioning was the one thing a coach could control, so he ran them relentlessly, and they ran foes ragged.

The Oilers had only seven plays and each was named for one of Carter’s sisters: Diane, Ernestine, Hettie Jean, Cookie, Linda, Deborah and Grace. (He has a brother, too, but there wasn’t an eighth play for Albert.)

Carter also challenged players to think about their future. He told them not to dream of being the next Michael Jordan, but of becoming the person who signs Jordan’s paychecks. He introduced them to business leaders and took them on field trips to places like Silicon Valley, encouraging them to join the crop of cyber-millionaires.

“If you can be successful on the basketball court, then you can be successful in the classroom,” Carter said. “I saw what these kids could be, not where they were, and I planted that dream in them.”

Where did he come up with this stuff?

Carter insists it was all instinct. He remembered what did and didn’t work when he was a player and threw in some things he picked up in the business world.

Everything was done with the intention of getting players to “walk out of their classrooms thinking, ‘I’m a very smart person,’ and feeling good about themselves,” just like he did when he went to Richmond in the mid-1970s.

His formula worked. The four-win team he inherited won 25 games his first season and they lived up to academic expectations. The Oilers started the next year 13-0 and seemed to be doing fine in class, too.

Then Carter received progress reports showing that 15 of the 45 players in his program -- varsity, junior varsity and freshmen squads -- were violating their contracts.

“I had no choice,” Carter said. “I put a big lock on the gym door with a chain and a big sign that said, ‘All players report to the library.”’

Over the next week and a half, six games were forfeited, two by each level. The varsity still wound up making the state playoffs, although they were ousted in the second round.

Carter left Richmond in 2002, having sent many of his players to colleges, several on scholarships to four-year schools. The success stories included his son, Damien, going to West Point -- after breaking his dad’s school scoring record.