by Lebron James
Even worse, I thought, was the failure to highlight the people who had been so integral to whatever success I’d had so far—Little Dru, Sian, Willie, and Romeo.
Maybe naively I didn’t really understand what it truly meant to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated. I took it in stride. As Willie later said, none of us really understood just what impact it would have, how big it would be. The cover pushed me onto the national stage, whether I was ready for it or not and whether my team was ready for it or not. Coach Dru understood, because it didn’t take long before there were as many as thirty reporters at our games. On top of all the other pressures that weighed on him, he now had the burden of a player who, like it or not, had become a celebrity. St. V headmaster David Rathz, sensing the potential of chaos, had at the beginning of junior year closed the institution to the media during the school day. Before the ban, cameramen were filming me in the classroom. I was being followed around by sneaker representatives. I had trouble eating in the school cafeteria in peace, as did other students tired of cameras lurking there. Rathz knew it would only get worse if nothing was done. Some members of the media were shocked by the ban: the headmaster had no qualms. “I would rather be blamed for being hard-nosed and strict and uphold our academic standards than turn it into a circus,” he said later.
After the Sports Illustrated cover came out, Coach Dru now faced a similar dilemma, since practices were held after the school day. A stream of followers was beginning to emerge, Coach Dru realizing quickly that they were jockeying for position over my future. They acted like they were interested in Coach Dru, “cheesing in your face,” as he called it, telling him what a fine job he was doing. Coach Dru could tell they had no interest in him, that he was just a conduit to me. It seemed like everybody wanted to be around. He recognized few of the faces, and closed practices to outsiders.
Coach Dru had already gotten a taste of the maneuvering over me during a St. V football game in the pouring rain in which I was playing. A man came over to Coach Dru and talked like he knew him, though Coach Dru did not have the faintest idea of who he was. They chatted about the game, and then toward the end he handed Coach Dru a packet and said, “Hey, just pass this along.” It wasn’t until he got home he saw what it was—a proposal from an agent.
What had made us so great was the way we had played as a team. That is what had brought us two consecutive state championships. The Sports Illustrated cover had made us all into rock stars, only reinforcing our sense of our own invincibility junior year. In the classroom some of the Fab Four Plus One also began to flout the rules. Little Dru showed up late to class and then wised off. Sian ultimately stopped doing his homework, or would just copy it from someone else. When he took tests, he had a cheat sheet, and one time he got caught. Sian always sat in the back of the classroom, and one of us would walk by the classroom and say Sian’s nickname, Si, and he would sneak out the back door without a hall pass. “We were getting away with murder,” Sian said. “And that’s a lot of the reason why a lot of the teachers in the school didn’t like us. And the students felt like we were getting away with murder.” Jealousy was also building, fellow students who did not appreciate the notoriety that a group of kids were getting for simply being basketball players. But we didn’t care, since it was a small minority.
“Everybody was in on it, from kids to teenagers to our peers to students in the school to the administration,” said Little Dru later of the lavish attention we received. “It was like, We can do this and nothing’s going to happen. We can do anything.” I was arrogant, dubbing myself King James; my head did swell. In hindsight I should have kept quiet, but I also was what I was, a teenager, and every reporter in the world seemed to be rushing toward me at once.
As for the season, we had lost a couple of games, which meant that the dream of a national championship would escape us junior year. There was no way USA Today would ever rank us number one with those defeats to Amityville and Oak Hill. Yet we were strangely untroubled by that. We would still win the state tournament. We would still win our third straight state championship in 2002.
Weeks passed, but still the cover’s impact did not dissipate. I was hounded for autographs wherever I went. Adults wanted the magazine signed. So did kids, and I tried to accommodate all of them, until I figured out that parents were sending their kids in so they could then sell the signed copy on eBay—weirdly similar to the drug runners who used children as their mules. Little Dru and Sian and Willie and Romeo were all stopped for autographs as well. None of this adulation helped our attitude on the court; we still argued during practices. We still didn’t listen to Coach Dru and his assistants, Coach Cotton and Coach Culp. As freshmen and sophomores, we had often stayed late after practice to hone our skills, be the best we could possibly be. Now, with our own cars, we cut out right after practice was over. As Little Dru later said, “We lost our work ethic. We lost our focus. We lost our sense of urgency.”
We partied harder and harder, because that’s what stars do, isn’t it? Instead of going to bed early the night before a game, we stayed out late. Romeo, of course, was the one who ultimately put it in the sharpest focus, since there was no such thing as a party he didn’t like: “We were sixteen- and seventeen-year-old kids partying like adults, staying out until four or five in the morning when we had games the next day at three. We were doing things we had no business doing because we just figured we’d wake up and win.” Romeo chased more than his share of girls, and in his designated role of “party animal,” used fake identification cards to get into clubs.
Coach Cotton became so frustrated with us that he thought about quitting. He never would have done it out of deference to Sian. He never would have run out on his son like that. But he wasn’t enjoying his job anymore. He hated going to practice and seeing all the petty fights. He hated our loss of intensity. He even hated the warm-up music we listened to out loud before games—Jay-Z, Ludacris, Snoop Dogg—with its references to “bitches” and “hos” that in Cotton’s view were morally wrong. It wasn’t a basketball season anymore. It was a circus. Now ESPN was there. Now the national networks were there. Now the network affiliates from Akron and Cleveland were there. Like Coach Dru, Coach Cotton hated what we were doing to ourselves and what was being done to us.
Coach Dru still warned us; we still ignored him. We saw the consequences of our sudden stardom in our very first game after the cover story appeared. We were playing George Junior Republic in a sold-out Beeghly Center at Youngstown State University before 6,700. The kids who went to George Junior, in Grove City, Pennsylvania, were tough; they’d been sent there to be straightened out. It was a residential school for disadvantaged youths, and on this day at least, they played basketball with the same kind of toughness that put them in George Junior to begin with. The game was rough, too rough. I was getting hard-fouled all over the place as I drove to the basket, and the referees refusing to call any of them intentional fouls. My mom was in the stands, and after one particularly egregious foul, ran onto the court and had to be restrained.
The fouls just kept coming, and I did something I learned never to do again—I retreated to my jumper instead of just continuing to drive to the hoop. I hate to say it, but I guess I was tired of getting beaten up. We had a 33 percent average from the field, including 5 for 29 from the 3-point arc. We combined for 14 points in the third and fourth quarters. I scored 20 points, my second lowest total of the season. If it weren’t for Chad Mraz’s 11 points and Romeo’s 10, we would have been finished. Instead we were tied 50-50 at the end of regulation.
Little Dru opened the overtime with a 3-pointer to give St. V a lead, and we thought we were safe. But a foul shot by John Brown tied the game, followed by a 3-pointer from Tyrae Denmark. We lost 58-57 in overtime, marking the first time that the Fab Four had ever lost two games in a row since seventh grade.
Then, the worst of all possible things happened: we started winning again.
Orange by 11 at the Canton Memorial Field Hou
se with Shaq in attendance to see what all the fuss was about. Central-Hower by 8 after building up a 20-point lead. Firelands High School from Oberlin by 60 in the sectionals of the state tournament. Hoban by 39 in the district semifinals. Then Central-Hower by 5 in the district finals.
We just kept on rolling.
Warrensville Heights by 29 in the regional semifinals before a crowd of 20,532 at the Gund Arena in Cleveland, the largest crowd ever to see a high school basketball game in Ohio. Scalpers were selling tickets for as much as two hundred dollars apiece. St. V’s allotment, 3,500, sold out in three hours. I know that many came out to see me that day, the afterglow of the Sports Illustrated cover still shining brightly. But the real star was Romeo, who despite his don’t-mess-with-me personality (his nickname was “Grimey” by then) scored 31. Ottawa-Glandorf by 19 in the regional finals before a sell-out crowd of 8,788 at Toledo’s Savage Hall, in which Romeo again scored 31.
It put us into the final four. There, on the other side of the bracket, loomed Roger Bacon, a Catholic school with the nickname Spartans spread across the front in script. Was a rematch in the finals inevitable? Of course it was, but there would be no close call this time, where we simply got lucky. This game would be different.
We knew Roger Bacon would be physical, just like they had been in December. We knew they were bigger than we were. Now it was March, and we knew exactly what we were getting into this time. As good as Roger Bacon was, we had still beaten them. We were on the right side of that 79-70 final score; we didn’t focus too much on how much closer that game had been than the score indicated. As for the three losses during the season, we could explain those easily: Amityville had the crowd going for it; George Junior Republic played the game like tackle football, and the refs, who were from their home state (because they were nominally the home team), didn’t call a thing; Oak Hill was Oak Hill, with all those Division I recruits. In other words, we had an excuse for every one of those losses.
We were ready. And we showed the depth of our preparation for the state finals the night before the game.
For some reason that Coach Dru will never figure out, officials at St. V put the basketball team and the cheerleaders on the same floor of our hotel in Columbus. Battling a terrible flu and shivering with the chills, he could hear the cavorting and carrying-on in the hallway into the early morning hours. Eventually, he emerged from his room, furious that we would be acting this way the night before a state championship against a team that, unlike most of our opponents, didn’t fear us. Coach Dru scared the cheerleaders half to death as he hollered them back into their rooms. The assistant coaches were nowhere to be seen. He looked each of us in the eye and questioned our hearts and our character.
We knew he was right, so we listened. We nodded. We did all the things teenagers do when they’ve been caught. Coach Dru went back to bed. And we still partied, just a little bit more discreetly. Sian didn’t go to sleep until 4:00 a.m., even though the championship would be played a mere seven hours later. Romeo snuck out of the hotel at one point. Even sweet Willie and his roommate sneaked girls into their room. Little Dru and I weren’t little church mice either. Because the game was so early, we had to wake up between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m., and we’d put in our food orders the night before at Max & Erma’s restaurant in Columbus to get a decent breakfast. But we were exhausted.
It only got worse when I woke up with severe back spasms. Immediately, I knew that even if I could play—and I had no idea if I could—I wouldn’t be close to a hundred percent. I knew that my sudden torment was karma coming back around; the payback for our attitude was finally coming due. I had been perfectly fine the night before, not a hint of pain. I had never experienced back spasms before. I had never missed a game. We had just played the semifinals the day before, and I hadn’t done anything that would explain them—hadn’t come down hard or landed wrong. Now the biggest game of the year was several hours away, and I could barely walk.
Karma.
I managed to struggle out of bed. I was taken to the medical center at Ohio State. There, they tried to loosen my back muscles with one of those machines that send electrical impulses beneath your skin. I felt better—until just before game time, when my back cramped up again. I could move, but my range of motion was limited. I still wanted to play, and Coach Dru faced a dilemma: leave me on the sidelines of the Value City Arena and let me stretch and try to get warm, or put me in the game with the hope that I would start to loosen up and feel better. He decided to play me.
II.
First period begins before 18,375 fans, yet another state tournament record. There are 121 seats for the media, all of them taken.
Opening tip to Little Dru. Brings it upcourt. To Romeo off a feed. Takes a fifteen-foot jumper from the right side for the first shot of the game. No good. But Romeo isn’t worried:This is my second state championship. It’s just business as usual, go ahead, kick some butt, and go home. I didn’t even think twice, because we had beaten them previously. We know these guys, so it’s nothing. Just another notch in my belt.
Rebound by Roger Bacon. They turn it over. Little Dru upcourt again. Feed to me. I score on a little runner from the left side. 2-0.
Like Romeo, I feel no fear:We knew we had a game against them the next day, but who cares? We’re still winning most of our other games by 40. We can get away with it. We’re St. Vincent-St. Mary. Nobody can mess with us. I am so confident of victory that I publicly promise it in a press conference after the semifinals. I know it’s the kind of quote that is immediately pinned to the bulletin board of the Roger Bacon locker room, but a fact is a fact. We played you earlier in the year at Kent State, and it was a close game for a little bit, but we ended up pulling away at the end. Hey, we beat you already. We’re definitely going to do it now. They’re a predominantly white team with a few black kids. How can they beat us?
Bacon’s Josh Hausfeld, a six-three guard on his way to Miami of Ohio, in the lane to the hoop. Tied 2-2.
Turnaround jumper by Romeo off the glass. No good. Still 2-2.
Then Bacon’s six-five forward Beckham Wyrick from the left wing wide open for a 3. Bacon 5-2.
Little Dru from the left corner for a 3. High and lofty. His patented shot. Stays up there forever. Comes back down. 5-5.
Rebound at the other end by Romeo. Over to me. Pull up for a 3 in front of the rim off his screen. St. V 8-5.
Bacon’s Hausfeld strong to the glass again. 8-7.
Bacon’s six-eight Monty St. Clair is fouled and hits both. 9-8 Bacon.
Third lead change less than 5 minutes in.
Wyrick, boxing me in on the last foul shot, hits me with a forearm. He’s a little bit crazy to begin with, more than just aggressive. He’s talking trash, letting me know that it’s not going to be another St. V rout. He’s setting a tone here, and I suddenly realize there is a game to be played. And Wyrick isn’t afraid of me: He’s good. But he’s human.
Coach Dru is dressed in black and white. Nervous and intense. He too knows he has a ball game on his hands. We all do at this point. Bacon moving the ball around well on offense. Crisp and with authority. Strong collapsing defense making it hard for us to puncture the perimeter and get clean shots. And our press isn’t working.
Romeo goes inside from the top of the key but misses. Fouled. Shoots two. Makes both. St. V 10-9.
Fourth lead change.
Bacon’s Wyrick on a one-hander on a clear path to the hoop. Bacon 11-10.
Fifth lead change.
It is abundantly clear to me they are not intimidated:I have guys around me that shouldn’t be going around me and scoring on me. And I’m unable to dominate on the offensive end. Or the defensive end. I’m not rebounding like I’ve been able to do.
St. Clair off an offensive rebound. Bacon 13-10.
Romeo on a layup, 13-12.
Romeo again underneath. St. V 14-13.
Sixth lead change.
Bacon’s Frank Phillips finishes to the hoop. Bacon 15-14.
Seventh lead change.
Uncharacteristically, Sian senses an odd feeling:We aren’t adjusting well to the way the referees are calling the game, and at the same time we are playing a little timid. Rebounding is lacking. They are big inside and they are just outplaying us.
I pull up for a 3 just outside the line from the right corner.
Eighth lead change.
First period ends.
St. V 17
Roger Bacon 15
SECOND PERIOD BEGINS.
Bacon’s ball on turnover. Guard David Johnson on a fast-break layup. Tied 17-17.
Mraz 3-pointer from left corner. St. V 20-17.
Hausfeld open jumper from fifteen feet. Bacon closes to one. St. V 20-19.
Romeo answers with a nice ten-footer from the baseline. A little breathing room now. St. V back up by 3. St. V 22-19.
Bacon’s Phillips all alone underneath for a layup. St. V 22-21.
Forget the breathing room.
Romeo makes a crosscourt pass to me. Over to Little Dru in front of the rim for a 3-pointer. Swish. Definitely some breathing room now. St. V 25-21. But Little Dru still feels uncomfortable:We aren’t disciplined. We are lazy on defense. We are going for a lot of steals. We don’t get them and they take advantage of it, they are scoring on us. We aren’t bad on offense, but like I say we aren’t disciplined. We always have a tendency to feel the refs are against us, but this game we really let it get to us. I think that has a lot to do with Roger Bacon having control of the game so much.
St. Clair right back for a turnaround spinner at baseline. Beautiful move. Gap closed to 2. 25-23.