by Lebron James
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1. - Mapmakers
Chapter 2. - Saviors
Chapter 3. - East Liverpool
Chapter 4. - Willie McGee
Chapter 5. - The Decision
Chapter 6. - School Daze
Chapter 7. - Swish
Chapter 8. - Romeo Oh Romeo
Chapter 9. - The Invincibles
Chapter 10. - The Invincibles?
Chapter 11. - Cover Boy
Chapter 12. - In or Out?
Chapter 13. - Pressure
Chapter 14. - Back to the Future
Chapter 15. - Shooting Stars
Chapter 16. - Fab Five
AFTERWORD
Acknowledgements
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ALSO BY BUZZ BISSINGER
Friday Night Lights
Three Nights in August
A Prayer for the City
THE PENGUIN PRESS
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First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press,
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Copyright © LeBron James, 2009
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
James, LeBron.
Shooting stars / LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-14490-9
1. James, LeBron. 2. Basketball players--United States--Biography. I. Bissinger, H. G.
II. Title.
GV994.J36J36 2009
796.323092--dc22
[B] 2009016067
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To my mother, without whom
I would not be where I am today
LEBRON
We all we got.
—SIAN COTTON
Prologue
I am a sophomore at St. Vincent-St. Mary, a coed Catholic high school on North Maple Street overlooking the small cluster of downtown Akron. It has fine academics, and it’s about three miles from where I live, with my mother on the sixth floor of a brooding apartment building rising up like a slab of stone on the crest of a small hill. I have my own room that I have decorated with posters of my favorite NBA players—Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson. I would like to say I go to St. Vincent for the fine academics, but that would not be true. I go there to play basketball with three friends who have become my brothers, Little Dru and Sian and Willie.
We have a coach who is driven and maniacal and seems a little bit crazy sometimes. He spits out obscenities whenever we do something wrong in practice. “That was fucking terrible” is one of his favorite phrases. He is only five-eight, and for those of us who are tall, he never reaches eye level when he yells, no matter how much he stretches. But he is also brilliant. He criticizes me mercilessly, as if I have no idea of what I am doing, but he does it because he is convinced I can play in the NBA someday. He calls Sian, who is big and burly and menacing, a “coward” because he knows it is a way of motivating and challenging him. He is maybe a little bit softer on Little Dru, probably because he identifies with him. Little Dru plays with a huge rock on his shoulder since he is only five-three, and that’s giving him every benefit of the doubt. Our coach guides us with the same rock on his shoulder, given his family legacy and his own professional disgrace when he was younger. He knows that Willie has come back from shoulder surgery the previous summer, and he realizes that the road back to the player he once was has been long and difficult, a promise that is no longer promising. That still doesn’t stop him from cursing and swearing and getting frustrated and treating us like the college players he once coached instead of the high school players we actually are.
We are doing well as sophomores. More and more, we are playing with the warrior mentality that he has been trying to instill in us. More and more, we are making fewer and fewer mistakes. He is preparing us for something, and then we figure out what it is, the biggest game of our lives against the greatest dynasty in all of high school sports, Oak Hill Academy. It is a prep school in a town called Mouth of Wilson, Virginia, tucked into the western triangle of the state near Bridle Creek and Volney and dozens of other little dots on the map. Its players include such NBA stalwarts as Jerry Stackhouse, Kevin Durant, and Rod Strickland, plus over a hundred players who have gone to play basketball at the Division I level. Fourteen of its players have become NBA draft picks, including six in the first round. And here we are playing them, a bunch of upstart kids from Akron.
WE HAVE NO CHANCE against the lineup they put out on the court, maybe one of the best lineups ever in the history of high school basketball. Their center, DeSagana Diop from Senegal, is seven-one and 305 pounds and is sure to be a first-round draft pick. Their shooting guard, high school All-American Rashaad Carruth, has already committed to the University of Kentucky. Their point guard, high school All-American Billy Edelin, has committed to Syracuse University. Rounding out the middle at six-seven and close to 300 pounds is Mario Boggan, who will end up at Oklahoma State. Our hope and prayer is to make it respectable.
SOMEHOW, Sian holds down the middle and prevents Diop from going wild (he is kept to 15). Little Dru, despite his diminutive size, has willed himself into a 3-point shooter. Willie comes off the bench with spark and bite. We also have another player named Romeo. He is a selfish, self-absorbed, self-centered pain in the ass we mostly want to strangle. He is so out of shape he only plays in the second half. But he is six-six and has a commanding presence inside when he awakens from his lethargy, and he has awakened today. We are making it close. We even lead by a point at the end of the first quarter, 19-18, and by 6 at halftime, 42-36.
In the early minutes of the third quarter we build our lead to 10, 52-42. Yet it is only a matter of time. How can you stop a backcourt that features Rashaad Carruth and Billy Edelin? You can’t. By the end of the third quarter Oak Hill holds a 2-point lead, 62-60. They are poised to pull away like they al
ways do. At least St. V, as we call the school, will feel no shame. We stayed neck and neck for three quarters. We fought harder than they ever expected.
Then it gets hot.
The lead changes eight times in the final quarter. St. V pulls ahead by a point with 1:50 left, 78-77. I am playing well, with 21 points in the first half and 33 at that point. It is in our grasp. We can feel it.
There is 1:35 left to play when Billy Edelin, who is 12 for 12 during the game, hits a layup to give Oak Hill a 1-point lead, 79-78. But we get the ball back. There is one final shot left. Little Dru has gone 5 for 5 beyond the 3-point arc. His hand is hot. But the ball is mine, because it has to be mine.
The buzzer is about to sound. I take a running jumper. I experience the sensation of everything going into slow motion as I watch the ball go into the rim. And bounce around forever and ever.
And roll out as time disappears.
People who watched me that day tell me I played a great game. Maybe I deserve the compliment. Maybe I don’t, because when it counts, when the game is there to be won or lost, I missed. I let my brothers Little Dru and Sian and Willie down. We are in search of a dream that goes beyond defeating Oak Hill. It is a dream that goes back to when we were kids who didn’t know any better, and it fell away from that rim with the taunting cruelty that is basketball.
I cry afterward. I don’t know what else to do. In the mix of those tears, I can’t stop wondering, Will we ever get the chance again to realize that dream, or is a dream exactly that, just a dream? I do not know.
1.
Mapmakers
I rode my bike all over Akron when I was small, going here, going there, just trying to stay out of trouble, just trying to keep busy, just really hoping the chain wouldn’t break like it sometimes did. If you went high up on North Hill in the 1980s, you could tell that life was not like it once was: the obsolete smokestacks in the distance, the downtown that felt so tired and weary. I won’t deny it—there was something painful about all of that. It got to me, this place in north-eastern Ohio that had once been so mighty (at one point it was the fastest-growing city in the country) but was mighty no more. This place that was struggling to be something again.
It was still my hometown. The more I rode my bike around, and you could ride just about everywhere because it was midwestern small and compact, the more familiar I became with it. I rode along Copley Road, the main thoroughfare of West Akron, past the dark of redbrick apartment buildings with red-trimmed windows. A little bit farther up, I went past the Laundry King and Queen Beauty Supply. Riding along East Avenue, which took you from the western part of the city into the south, I went past modest two-story homes with porches and the brown concrete of the Ed Davis Community Center.
I descended into the valley of South Akron along Thornton Street, past the blond brick of Roush’s Market and the Stewart & Calhoun Funeral Home. South Akron was a tough neighborhood, but still I rode, past Akron Automatic Screw Products and the aluminum siding of the Thornton Terrace apartments. Along Johnston Street I went into the east side, past simple homes of red and green and blue that looked like a rainbow. I turned south on Arlington, past the Arlington Church of God and Bethel Baptist and Allied Auto. I came to the Goodyear clock tower, towering high like the Washington Monument and the great symbol of what Akron had once been, the “Rubber Capital of the World,” producing tires by the millions until all the great factories closed.
I biked up the north side into a section of the city known as the Bottom and went past the Elizabeth Park projects—my own home for a time—two-story apartment buildings in unsmiling rows, some of which had been condemned, some of which had been boarded up, some that had screen doors with the hinges torn off or the wire mesh stripped away. I headed back west and biked along Portage Path, a wealthy section of town with sprawling houses of brick and stone and shiny black shutters all perfectly aligned.
I knew I would never live there unless some miracle happened, something fell from the sky, a shooting star that landed on top of me and my mom and made our lives better and carried us up from the projects. But that wasn’t the Akron I thought of anyway. Much of it was taken up by the neighborhoods that I went past on my bike, humble homes with tiny tufts of lawn that people tended and took care of. Because even in my darkest days growing up, and there were some dark ones, ones that left me up half the night scared and lonely and worried, that’s what Akron always meant to me—people taking care of things, people taking care of each other, people who found you and protected you and treated you like their own son even when you weren’t. With a population of about 225,000 when I was growing up, it was still small enough to feel intimate, a place you could put your arms around, a place that would put its arms around you.
There was something wholesome about it, the best of the Midwest, Cleveland without the ’hoods where you could go in and never come back out. One of my favorite spots in town was Swensons, which, straight out of Happy Days, still served up a burger and fries and Cherry Coke on a tray that was attached to the window of your car by a goofy-looking teenager still dealing with acne. I loved those burgers at Swensons, loved the scene and the smell and best of all the taste (order it with everything to get the full effect). But it wasn’t until much later, when I was blessed with a skill I was able to develop, that I ever got much of a chance to eat one. A burger at Swensons? There was no way I could afford something like that.
Because Akron, for all its goodness of heart, wasn’t soft. There were gangs and there were drugs and there were grim housing projects where sirens and gunfire went off in the night. There was an inner city, maybe not as bad as Cleveland or Chicago or Philadelphia. But it was there, and I know it was there because I spent a lot of my childhood living within it, hearing those sounds and just trying to keep going, just keep my head low and keep on moving. And maybe if there was anything that was really different about me from other kids growing up in similar circumstances, it was that idea:
Just keep on moving.
Growing up in the inner city is not the hardest thing in the world to do. What my mom Gloria went through—having me by herself when she was sixteen years old and trying to raise me and give me everything I wanted—was so much harder. But certainly it’s also not the easiest place in the world to begin your life, particularly when you see so many people who never even get to the middle.
You definitely have no choice but to see and hear things you never want to experience and you never ever want your kids to experience—violence and drug abuse and the mournful music of those police sirens wailing. You lie in bed, and you just know something bad is happening, something heavy, and you just thank the Lord that it isn’t you out there in it, and you lie in bed some more and just wait for those sounds to go away. Eventually they do. But it’s hard to fall back asleep after that. Sometimes it’s impossible. Was there just a terrible fight? Are the police busting for drugs again? What was that noise? No matter how much I tried to shut everything out, and I have always been good at shutting everything out, they have an impact. But maybe not the way you might be thinking.
Because it helps you grow up when you are an only child. It helps you to learn to take care of yourself. It also helps to motivate you—if you ever are lucky enough to find a way out of where you are, even if it’s for a few hours, you are going to run with it as fast as you can.
Whatever I went through, I always loved Akron. Even back then, growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, there was one thing that always bothered me. In school, whenever I looked at a map of the United States—because you know how schools are, there is always a map of the United States in every classroom—the first thing I did was look at Ohio. There was Cleveland, of course, because everybody knew Cleveland, former home of the legendary Browns and Jimmy Brown, home of the Indians. On some maps there might be the state capital of Columbus. Or even Cincinnati. But where was Akron? How come there was never Akron?
Akron who? Akron where?
Akron nobody, as far as the mapm
akers were concerned. That always got to me. Why wasn’t my hometown there? I don’t remember how old I was exactly, maybe eight or nine. But I promised myself, in the funny way that little kids make promises over things that nobody else in the world cares about, that one day I was going to put Akron on the map. Maybe not literally, because you could tell those mapmakers were a prickly bunch, but I was going to let the world know where Akron was. I didn’t know how. I just knew in my heart I was going to do it.
Was I a dreamer?
Of course I was.
But if you wish hard enough, try hard enough, find the right group of guys to dream along with you, then maybe, because there is always a maybe with dreams, they can come true.
2.
Saviors
I.
I was born in December 1984 in a house on Hickory Street that was mostly maintained by my mom’s mother. She was a wonderful woman who helped us out a lot. But when I was three, my grandmother died early Christmas morning of a massive heart attack at the age of forty-two. Typical of my mom, she did not tell me until I had opened up all my presents, including one of those little plastic basketball hoops (just for the record, I did slam it down).
The house was a large and sweeping Victorian with a front porch and foyer and grand living room and television room and kitchen and pantry downstairs and four bedrooms upstairs. It had been in my mother’s family for generations, and at one time the grounds included horses, a goat named Katrina, blackberry trees, pear trees, and a grapevine. When my grandmother died, the house on Hickory Street became harder and harder to keep up. My mom was working anywhere and everywhere to somehow make ends meet, including a stint at a toy store called Children’s Palace. The house needed work, the plumbing and the electrical were failing: work on an old house takes money, and we didn’t have money. Eventually, the city came in, served several eviction notices, and ultimately condemned it and bulldozed it to the ground.