A Great Basketball Caper

Danny Wright has a big heart. He believes in helping his students and will go to pretty remarkable lengths to do so.

Wright is the boys' basketball coach at Permian High School in Odessa, Texas. If one of his players finds themselves in an untenable living situation, he will take them in and make them a part of his family. He's done it before, and he'll do it again.

And he did it for Jerry Joseph, a young star on his team. Joseph arrived from Haiti not too long ago, and had been staying with his cousin Jabari Caldwell, a player at the nearby college (Texas-Permian Basin).

But then Caldwell moved to Florida and Joseph wanted to stay with his team at Permian. Wright opened his doors to him.

Joseph's stay with the Wrights was unremarkable. He was not a bad kid and not a disciplinary case.

He was a good basketball player, though, perhaps surprisingly polished for a kid not long removed from Haiti. Just a sophomore, he was a big factor in Permian's run to a fourth-place finish in the district.

These kids live, breathe, and eat basketball. Remember my story last week, with Michael Loyd playing a pickup game on the very campus where he was kicked off the team, the very day after being kicked off?

So it was with Joseph. In the offseason, he found an AAU team to join, the New Mexico Force.

AAU tournaments are a good way for high school students to showcase their skills for recruiters, and so perhaps Joseph, only a sophomore, wanted to put himself on the radar of some college coaches. He accompanied the Force in April to the Real Deal in the Rock, an AAU tournament in Little Rock, Arkansas that draws teams from across the nation.

Another school at the tournament was the South Florida Elite. Some of the South Florida coaches — Louis Vives and Cedric Smith — happened to catch a Force game. Vives did a double take when he saw Joseph, but it wasn't because of his basketball skill.

"It’s been difficult, but I knew what I saw," Vives told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. "I knew I wasn’t going crazy, but everyone had me doubting myself. It’s been difficult, my wife even thought I was going crazy. I was losing sleep, questioning myself, was I right, was I wrong?"

Vives was certain of what he saw. He decided it was only fair, only right, that he do something. He confronted Joseph. Joseph rebuked his accusations.

Officials at Permian High started to receive anonymous e-mails telling them to look closer at this Joseph kid on April 27th. Government agencies got involved.

Finally, on May 11th, Joseph was arrested for presenting false information to a peace officer. He was bonded out anonymously. Two days later, Joseph was back in jail, having turned himself in the more serious charge of tampering with governmental records. Again, he was bonded out by an unknown source.

Joseph is actually Guerdwich Montimere, a 22-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen who graduated from high school in Florida in 2007 and then played some junior college basketball in Illinois. Jabbari Caldwell was his teammate in high school.

Mortimere is now back in jail a third time. Part of pretending you are a high school kid is having a girlfriend. And Mortimere did, a 15-year-old he allegedly had sex with. If the sexual assault charges stick, he will face 30 years in prison.

Impostors in sports are not new. In 1996, Ali Dia, a Senegalese semi-pro soccer player who failed to break into the lower leagues in Europe, had his agent call the manager at Southampthon, Graeme Souness, in England's Premier League pretending to be Liberian soccer great George Weah. The caller said that Dia was his cousin with top-flight experience in France and international appearances for Liberia.

Souness signed Dia and brought him on to play without even seeing him practice. Dia was clearly in way over his head and had to be substituted out after coming in as a substitute himself. As a teammate said, "He was unbelievable. He ran around the pitch like Bambi on ice, it was very very embarrassing to watch."

But it's rare for someone would take on an entire new identity, a new life, for this reason. Maybe Mortimere had deeper reasons. Maybe there is some mental illness at play. Whatever motivated him, he has a lot in common with Frederic Bourdin, another person who pretended to be a Texas teenager (note: the article is long, but one of the most memorable pieces of journalism I have ever read).

This is all cold comfort for Danny Wright and his team, who had their wins forfeited through no fault of their own. But it's not going to stop Wright from doing the same thing again.

"I got burnt. I hate that I did, but I will say this. I won’t stop advocating kids or loving kids or believing in kids."