Shooting Stars

by Lebron James

  As a believer in karma, I wasn’t sure what to think, except that it was just a weird way to begin the season, up by 35 and not even getting the win because it was too dark to see. (For all I know, Romeo’s free throw is still floating up there.) If nothing else, that shortened first game did foreshadow the rhythm of the season. Stuff was going to happen.

  The first full game of the season, against George Junior Republic, also had a special flavor. Coach Dru remembered the way they had played the previous year, with those hard fouls all over the place and knocking me to the floor. Before this game, he heard an assistant coach for George Junior talk to his players in a way that Coach Dru thought was encouraging them to play dirty once again. For the first and only time in his career, Coach Dru decided to bury another team. The final score was 101 to 40, and he had the team pressing until the very last second.

  “You have no class,” the George Junior coach said afterward.

  “I don’t care,” Coach Dru responded.

  In a postgame press conference, Coach Dru addressed the issue of dirty play after it had been brought up by a reporter. When he was getting on the team bus, the assistant coach stepped off his own bus.

  “I understand you didn’t like what I had to say to my players. I can say whatever I want.”

  “It sounds like you were inciting them to play dirty.”

  The assistant coach then challenged Coach Dru to a fight.

  “If you got a problem, we can settle it right here.”

  Coach Dru just laughed and walked away, although running up the score like that was something he later deeply regretted.

  The near-brawl didn’t distract us from what was looming on our horizon. In the third game of the season awaited an opponent that would make our dream or destroy it. We would face our old foe, whom we had never beaten, whom we had to beat now.

  Oak Hill.

  Oak Hill ranked number one in the country—undefeated at 7 and 0. The game would be broadcast live on ESPN2, with Bill Walton and Dick Vitale and Dan Shulman doing the commentary. As usual, Oak Hill boasted a host of Division I signees on their way to schools like Virginia and Connecticut and Ohio State. We would meet them at the Convocation Center at Cleveland State University, which basically gave us home-court advantage. But how much of a difference would that really make against Oak Hill?

  II.

  It doesn’t look promising in the first quarter. We’re playing too tight. Missed jumpers. Fadeaways falling short. Turnovers. Oak Hill is by no means perfect, but they’re methodical, patient. Before we know it, we are down 13-5 after Isaiah Swann hits a 3-pointer for Oak Hill. They are playing with poise, and we’re not. It’s as simple as that. We are clearly nervous, not doing what we know we can do. We need to collect ourselves, breathe a little bit, forget about Dick Vitale and Bill Walton. Forget about the more than a hundred reporters attending the game. Forget about the pro scouts who have come to watch.

  It’s still 13-5, with less than 2 minutes left in the period. Coach Dru calls a time-out: “It’s time for us to get going. It’s early, but you don’t want to get blown out in your hometown on national television, so you guys better wake up.”

  Oak Hill commits a turnover. I score on a dunk off a feed from Brandon Weems to make it 13-7. Weems follows with a 3-pointer. The gap is closed to 13-10. Oak Hill is called for a 3-second violation; their poise is beginning to wear off a bit.

  We inbound and take the ball upcourt. Over to Sian. Sian over to me on a perfect feed. I maneuver over Swann for a layup inside to make the score 13-12. The first period comes to a close, and we are back in the thick of it.

  At least we think we are, until consecutive 3-pointers by Maurice Williams and J. R. Reynolds stretch Oak Hill’s lead to 7 at the start of the second period. Collect. Take a breath. Collect. Take a breath. That mantra must guide how we play if we are going to win. No panic. No fear. No panic. No fear. That’s another mantra we must keep reciting to ourselves. I get a lob pass from Sian and score on a layup off the glass. 19-14. Then a two-handed dunk off an Oak Hill turnover. 19-16. Then Romeo, who is just beginning to get into the flow of the game, steals the ball and is fouled trying to make a layup. He hits both free throws. 19-18.

  We continue the burst of momentum. No panic. No fear. No panic. No fear. Romeo makes a 3-point play to give us the lead for the first time, 21-19. We stretch that lead to 5 by the end of the first half, 30-25.

  Oak Hill is Oak Hill. We know that. So do they. It’s why they have a record of 155 and 4 the past five seasons.

  With 2:54 left in the third period, they regain the lead by 1, 41-40, when Ivan Harris, on his way to Ohio State, hits a jumper in between two defenders. Is this the moment where we fold and fade away? Is this the moment where, so early in the season, the dream just dies?

  Sian is wide open for a fifteen-footer with 2:18 left in the period. The ball tickles the rim, plays with it, taunts it, and then finally plops in. It gives us back the lead, 42-41. We go up by 7 at the end of the third period, 50-43. Then Willie begins the fourth quarter with a 3-pointer to make it 53-43. We score 6 more unanswered points after that, my favorite play when I bring the ball upcourt, pass it to Little Dru, who passes it to Sian, who takes one dribble toward the basket and then bounce-passes it to Romeo, who lays it in with his left hand. The play is a Fab Five thing of beauty, so in tune it’s almost like magic, much like the final score against the nation’s top-ranked team:

  St. V 65

  Oak Hill 45

  In the locker room afterward, Romeo, wearing only a pair of shorts and some ankle bracelets, runs around like a little kid, jumping up and down, tackling players. He feels the euphoria of slaying the nemesis, the bully who has been kicking your ass for years until you finally say, “I’m not taking this anymore.”

  WE MOVED UP TO NINTH in the USA Today poll, but we had a way to go to get to the top despite just puncturing the giant. It wasn’t impossible: we were still alive, which is all we could ask for at that point. The glow of the victory lasted. At least for several weeks.

  III.

  Sian agonized. He cried. He went back and forth. He made up his mind. He changed it. He knew what to do. He didn’t. Every step of the way he was racked by guilt. Was he turning his back on the Fab Five? Was he turning his back on his brothers?

  With his six-three height and his weight approaching 300 pounds, his future lay in football, not basketball. He was tough and he was mean and he had those quick feet, and big-time schools like Miami and Ohio State were seriously looking at him in terms of an athletic scholarship. He had a chance to highlight those skills on the defensive line when he was invited to participate in the U.S. Army All-American Bowl in San Antonio in early January, featuring eighty of the nation’s top players. Reggie Bush would be there. Brady Quinn would be there. How could Sian not go?

  Because nothing in life is ever as simple as it seems.

  If he went to the All-American Bowl, Sian would miss our game against Mater Dei High School in Los Angeles at the Pauley Pavilion. Mater Dei was ranked fourth in the country, and given the way our respective seasons had shaken out, this game could determine whether we or they would rise to number one in the USA Today poll. We had waited what seemed like a lifetime to get to that top spot; now we were in range, having beaten another nationally ranked team, Columbus Brookhaven, in overtime, thanks to maybe the greatest karma of all during my four seasons at St. V.

  BROOKHAVEN IS RANKED SIXTH. They are coming off a state championship in the highest-ranked division in Ohio, Division I, and they feel like St. V is getting all the ink when they are the best team in the state. The game is being played in Columbus at the Value City Arena, which they feel gives them another distinct advantage as the home team. Their ace is five-seven All-American point guard Drew Lavender, perhaps the third best at his position in the country; headed for the University of Oklahoma. With the score tied 59-59 in the final vapors of the fourth quarter, Lavender strips me of the ball and goes the other way. It seems lik
e a sure basket and a sure win for Brookhaven. Lavender has lightning speed, but Sian, rumbling down the court, somehow catches up with him.

  The referee calls an intentional foul, giving Lavender two foul shots with 2.7 seconds left. Because of the call, nobody guards the line when Lavender, with 25 points in the game and an 80-percent-plus free-throw shooter, gets ready. We can only watch across the center court line with our hands on our hips, our faces glum and covered with the dull-eyed glaze of resignation, knowing that we are going to lose. There is no other outcome. Little Dru is losing it inside; he can’t believe this is actually happening, feels like everything is just gone.

  Lavender takes the first shot.

  It hits the side of the rim and bounces out.

  We still stand there helpless to do anything except watch a second time, figures of loneliness across that center court line, the dream on a thread that is about to break.

  Lavender takes the shot.

  It hits off the front of the rim and bounces out.

  Now he is the one bowing his head in agony. And the karma is too spectacular to let us down. We outscore Brookhaven 8-3 in the 4-minute overtime to win, 67-62. Still somehow unbeaten.

  IF WE BEAT MATER DEI, it would give us a record of 8 and 0. It would also mean that three of those wins had come against teams ranked in the top ten.

  Sian too had waited what seemed like a lifetime. Playing without him seemed impossible to contemplate. How could the Fab Five forge ahead, in maybe its biggest and most important game ever, without Sian?

  Sian was struggling with the same question. It was a complicated issue, just as Sian himself was complicated. He may have liked playing the role of the bad boy at times. He sported a fake gold tooth for a while as a freshman. He often misplaced things, like his letter jacket. He lost his state championship ring from sophomore year and had to buy a replacement. He knew there had been moments of rebellion junior year when he hadn’t listened to anyone. He was well aware of how his poor academic average had cost him dearly, since he was a highly promising football recruit. Of all the members of the Fab Five, he felt most acutely that he wasn’t wanted at St. V, did not belong there. At the very least, he felt like he was in no-man’s-land. He wondered if the school, particularly as controversy unfolded, enjoyed the success that the Fab Five had brought to St. V, but wanted to go back to the old days and do it primarily with players who had come up through the Catholic Youth Organization. “We brought a lot of good attention,” Sian said later. “But they wished we could have been white. They wished everything could be the same, but they could do it with white kids.” There was also the Block—we liked to congregate there, and Sian resented it when one particular teacher kept telling us to disperse.

  Beyond St. V, he keenly felt the racism that sometimes existed when we played away; it burned inside him, while the rest of us were more inclined to just let it go. During one game, fans in the stands repeatedly used the word nigger. An opposing player, inbounding the ball after a change of possession, hit Sian in the face with it, an act that he interpreted as racially motivated—which only caused Sian to move in a step closer, fearless as he was.

  But beyond his nickname, the Brawl Street Bully, there was a soul-fulness and complexity that went beyond sports. Coach Dru felt that Sian liked to play the role of the thug even though it wasn’t his true nature. As a child he had taken tap-dance lessons, and he was a good writer and loved writing poetry (so good that friends paid him to write love poems to girls they liked)—not the qualities you expected to find in someone who fancied himself as Warren Sapp on the football field and Charles Oakley on the basketball court. His dedication to the Fab Five bordered on the religious. At one point he felt we had become more family to him than his own. When we were young, he would make excuses to his parents—like telling them I needed his help on a school project—just so he could stay with me.

  At first he decided to just pass on the All-American Bowl. At one point he hoped that the organizers of the football game would let him go to California to be with us at the Pauley Pavilion, then fly back to participate. But they said no, presumably because they didn’t want anything to overshadow the game and other activities associated with it. So he would have to make a decision one way or another. And as he sat there crying with his family, not knowing what to do, they pointed out that he had to think about his own future. The All-American Bowl was a showcase. Dozens of college recruiters would be there. The exposure he would get could not be matched by anything else senior year. He knew what he had to do, and we knew it too: he had to play in that football game. There was no other choice, and the Fab Five supported him. He would be missed. There was no doubt about that. We might even lose without him, and knowing Sian, he would never forgive himself if that happened. As brothers, the best thing we could do, the only thing we could do, was reduce his level of guilt as much as possible. Not for a second did we think he was running out on us.

  But we still had to compete without him.

  EVEN BEFORE THE GAME, the vibe and atmosphere have a nasty scent. A withering story in the Los Angeles Times makes us out to be a group of spoiled louts jetting about the country. The story incenses Coach Dru, who crafted the schedule for competitive reasons, and also to give players at the end of the bench the opportunity to be in such famous venues as the Pauley Pavilion and the Palestra. There is the squabble before the game over who should have the UCLA locker room. Coach Dru insists that St. V should be there, and was given such a promise by the promoter; the Mater Dei team, which has been in the UCLA locker room, is moved out. There is even a controversy over what game ball should be used. Since Spalding is the game’s sponsor, we have been practicing all week with a Spalding basketball instead of the usual Rawlings one used in Ohio. But Mater Dei is sponsored by Nike, and they keep switching the ball from Spalding to Nike, until a referee steps in and declares Spalding the game ball.

  Maybe it’s one of the few times, perhaps the only one, where I can’t shake the hype out of my head—the stretch limo that picked us up at the airport in Los Angeles (something the promoter of the game, not St. V, arranged and paid for); the scalpers selling tickets for two to three times face value; fans buying merchandise with my face on it, hoping that it might be worth something if I excel in the NBA someday. Maybe it’s playing in Pauley Pavilion, the hallowed home of John Wooden and the UCLA Bruins and their seven consecutive national championships. Maybe it’s the fact that ESPN2 is again broadcasting the game live. Maybe it’s the sneaker face-off, with Phil Knight and other Nike officials taking up virtually a whole row, and Sonny Vaccaro and the Adidas people in a row of their own. Maybe it’s the white uniforms Adidas supplied us, with our names on the back. Maybe it’s the room Adidas set up at a hotel, with new sweat suits and new shoes and new towels that read “St. Mary-St. Vincent” and new T-shirts, once again personalized with our names on the back. Maybe it’s this. Maybe it’s that. Whatever it is, nothing is clicking.

  We should be highly motivated. In addition to the number-one ranking on the line, we’re seeing this game as payback time. Some of Mater Dei’s players may not remember us from eighth grade, but we remember them. We remember them as the backbone of the SoCal All-Stars, the team that beat us by 2 in the finals of the fourteen-and-under AAU tournament. We remember how they treated us like a bunch of hicks until they suddenly had a game on their hands. We remember Travante Nelson and Wesley Washington.

  Even with the added incentive, I can’t get untracked. I am playing terribly. My jumper is off. I don’t have a single 3-pointer. I haven’t had any opportunity for dunks on breakaways. Maybe Sian’s absence has gotten to me more than I ever thought it would, although Willie has done a nice job of filling the void. After the first period, it’s tied at 11-11. In the second period, for the first and only time, I get a little traction going. I hit 5 of 8 shots to help give us a 30-24 lead at halftime (I went 3 for 16 the rest of the night).

  It’s why I have teammates. Romeo makes a 3-point play in
the third quarter. Corey Jones adds two 3-pointers, and we expand the lead to 14 points, 41-27. With the presence of D. J. Strawberry—the son of Darryl Strawberry, and on his way to Maryland—and Wesley Washington, Mater Dei is too strong not to make some kind of run. Washington, who ends up with 18 points for the game, hits a pair of 3-pointers to close the margin to 6 with little more than 4 minutes left. Can he keep it going? Can Mater Dei keep it going?

  Time is ticking down. They start fouling to try to get the ball back. Little Dru and Corey Jones combine for six free throws.

  We get out of there with a 64-58 victory.

  WE HAD BEATEN the fourth-ranked team in the country despite the absence of Sian. We’d won despite playing one of our more lackluster games of the season. That Tuesday, back in Akron, Little Dru went to the library and scanned the sports section of USA Today for the high school basketball rankings. We were number one. Now all we had to do was stay there for the rest of the season.

  Then all hell broke loose. Again.

  13.

  Pressure

  I.

  Maybe the timing could have been better when my mom decided to buy me a Hummer in honor of my birthday. Maybe she should have waited until after the season to avoid the controversy that erupted in the immediate afterglow of our defeat of Mater Dei and our number-one ranking. With the season over, the purchase might have provided less ammunition to the vultures so eager to destroy me and my team. There might have been less at stake, although I don’t think the timing mattered one bit. I wasn’t just a high school basketball phenom anymore. I was a perpetual target.