Shooting Stars

by Lebron James

  With Little Dru so deep in the zone, it’s been a great half. A double-digit lead is a double-digit lead. Nobody can complain about it, except for the General, which is why he is the General. He is worried about Romeo. He knows that Romeo feels lousy. He knows that Romeo still isn’t over the flu yet, which is why he has only 5 points and just hasn’t been strong to the hoop; he feels so sick he’s been getting the dry heaves during time-outs. Little Dru also knows this is basketball, where 10-point leads can evaporate. There is still something tenacious about Canton McKinley, still the little kid who won’t quit no matter how outmanned.

  So Little Dru buttonholes Romeo during halftime in the locker room. He isn’t angry or belligerent, just straight to the point when he sees something that is bothering him.

  “Hey, you’re going to have to suck it up,” he says to Romeo. “I need you. I need you to come on. So come on.”

  Romeo listens. He knows Little Dru well enough at this point to realize that Little Dru isn’t trying to be a jerk, just tough and serious in the heat of what is still a game that can be won or lost. He believes that Romeo can do better. But does Romeo believe that he can do better? Will those words from the General make any difference?

  The answer comes early in the third quarter, with St. V up 36-28. Romeo gets the ball and slashes in the paint to the hoop with an energy that was nowhere to be seen in the first half. Romeo repeats the answer a few minutes later when he scores on a nice tip-in. Soon after he grabs a rebound, is fouled, and makes both free throws. At the buzzer, he gives the most resounding answer yet when he goes high to tap the ball in off his own offensive rebound to push St. V to a 12-point lead. Of all the words that Little Dru has said to us over the years, of all the correction and criticism, what he said to Romeo may have been the most important.

  Thanks to the night-and-day play of Romeo, the fourth quarter is fine. He drives in the paint, then kisses the ball off the glass so soft and light. He makes a turnaround jumper from fifteen feet off a feed by Sian. He makes a layup off a dish from Little Dru, a 5-point first half complemented by 16 in the second. Our lead hovers in the double digits, 60-50 with 58 seconds left. I’m still having trouble sitting still. But the game has been put away now. Everybody knows it.

  McKinley scores to make it 60-52 with 52 seconds left. So what? There’s not possibly enough time left. McKinley intercepts a pass, and Hall pulls up for a ten-footer. With 37 seconds left, 60-54. McKinley is fouled. Sean Weatherspoon goes to the line, converting both free throws. With 24 seconds left, 60-56.

  McKinley immediately fouls. Corey Jones makes both free throws: 62-56 with 21 seconds left. Now it is over. It has to be. What could happen?

  McKinley’s Papacostas gets the ball and just heaves it from the left side. It’s a desperation Hail-Mary you-got-to-be-kidding there’s-no-way forget-about-it get-a-grip 3-pointer.

  It goes.

  Seven seconds left, 62-59 St. V.

  The ball is inbounded to Corey Jones, who is immediately fouled. He makes the first. He misses the second. But it’s 63-59 now. Six seconds left. Jones’s free throw has iced it. I know that. But if I know it, why am I still so nervous?

  The ball is fed to Papacostas. He puts up another Hail-Mary you-got-to-be-kidding not-in-your-life 3-point bomb.

  It goes.

  St. V 63-62.

  Followed by the most beautiful sound I think I have ever heard in a basketball game. The buzzer. We are still undefeated. Still with the dream to be dreamed. And I’m not playing.

  14.

  Back to the Future

  I.

  I wanted to play basketball on a court, not in a court of law. Courts have better things to do, and I knew that, but I felt I had no choice. The punishment did not fit the infraction because there was no infraction. I huddled with my mom. We discussed it. It was clear to her, as it was to me, that simply caving in violated every principle that I stood for. A right is a right and a wrong is a wrong, and this was an egregious wrong. If I was guilty of anything, it was bad judgment; although many refused to believe it then, I was still a teenager when the flap over the jerseys unfolded. That meant I was going to make mistakes. That meant I was going to do things I might later regret.

  The exposure I had gotten was arguably the most ever received by a high school athlete. I was maintaining an honors average for the current grading period, roughly a point above my usual average. I continued to keep grounded in the season, in large part because the rest of the Fab Five wouldn’t allow me to either get a big head or wallow in self-pity. When the incident with the Hummer resulted in the athletic association’s investigation, they joked about it and made light of it, refused to let either me or themselves be dragged down by it. “Why you trying to ruin our season?” they asked me. All I could do was laugh, exactly what I needed.

  They always kept me grounded, had no stars in their eyes about me like so many others did. Their attitude was, “You’re still LeBron James. Don’t put on any airs with us, we know who you are.” They never glorified me. They understood I was the best player on the team if we needed a point, but I still needed them to get the ball to me. They were adamant that this was a team, and they expressed that as well: “You can’t do this without us, and we can’t do it without you.”

  II.

  The athletic association and St. V had been at odds with each other for four years. After the semifinals freshman year, Coach Dru had walked off the court, saying, “We beat eight,” meaning that we had not only beaten the five players of our opponent on the court, but the three referees calling the game. It was a mild reference, but an official of the athletic association heard it and said, “We don’t make those kind of comments here.” The next day of the finals, right before St. V was about to warm up at the Value City Arena, Coach Dru was called into a meeting room. “This isn’t the kind of behavior we want here,” Coach Dru remembers Muscaro saying, further claiming that there were reports that Coach Dru had come off the court cursing the referees. “I did make the statement that ‘we beat eight,’ ” Coach Dru replied. “If I need to apologize for making that statement, I will. But you’re not going to tell me I came off the court cursing.” Anybody who knew Coach Dru also knew that he never used obscenities. The meeting seemed silly and petty. That same year the athletic association questioned whether we had illegally recruited a player named Aly Samabaly. It was true that he had come from France where he had been living with his sister. It was also true that his parents had been killed in Somalia, where he was originally from. According to St. V headmaster Rathz, Samabaly’s sister sent him to Akron to go to school: he was taken in by the president of the county board of education in nearby Medina, who had housed many foreign students. The athletic association declared Samabaly eligible at the beginning of the season, according to Rathz, but after St. V moved to a 13-and-0 record, an archrival wrote a letter to the athletic association saying they should investigate. Then came a call from Muscaro, who says he does not recall the incident.

  Muscaro also didn’t like the schedule we were playing senior year, with its travel all over the country. “It’s not what we are about,” he said to the Akron Beacon Journal. “It should be about hopping in the yellow school bus and going 30 or 45 miles to play in a gym and then coming home again.” He felt I was being exploited, and there is no doubt that promoters arranged the games to make money. The school also received appearance fees. There were plenty who exploited me, but this was not a perfect example. These contests senior year showed the shoe companies that I could sell out arenas all over the country, which only raised the bidding. Plus we had our dream, with no way of accomplishing it by taking a yellow school bus. There was no competition left for us in Ohio. “Clair cannot look me in the eye and tell me to my face that I exploited LeBron James or my players,” Coach Dru angrily told the newspaper in response to Muscaro’s comments. “If Clair thinks this is about money, he is fooling himself. This [is] about a chance for a group of kids to realize a dream that was years in t
he making.” There was Hummergate during my senior year, and now I had been declared ineligible because of receiving two jerseys, largely on the basis of a 135-word article in the Plain Dealer. “It was a witch hunt,” Rathz concluded. “It was a classic witch hunt from my point of view. They wanted to get [LeBron] and get the school.”

  I had grown to love St. V after that first period of transition. It wasn’t just the success in basketball. Because of the academics, I had gone from being two years below grade level when I started to being on a college prep track. I even suffered through Spanish. I was popular. But the response from the school to my suspension was disappointing, to say the least.

  When Coach Dru went into the office of a St. V official the day after my ineligibility was announced, he remembers receiving a shocking response.

  “Well, Dru, we’re going to support the ruling of the Ohio High School Athletic Association.”

  “What? You guys really don’t know what you’re doing here.”

  “The board has met, and our position is that we’re basically going to support this decision that LeBron is going to be ineligible.”

  “You’re not going to side with LeBron and his family?”

  “No.”

  “You’re making a big mistake. All the good that has been done because of LeBron James for this school, and you’re gonna run from him when he needs you most?”

  The attitude of the school, according to Rathz, was, “We weren’t being accused of anything. He was.” So the initial reaction was, “Let’s sit back” as lawyers for both me and the athletic association sorted it out.

  The same day I found out I had been declared ineligible, I had the hope that if I communicated with Commissioner Muscaro in an honest way, the matter would be put into the proper perspective. So I wrote him a letter coming from the place I knew best, my own heart.I want to start by apologizing for this and any other recent controversy involving me. As you might imagine, there are as many minuses as there are pluses associated with having become something of a celebrity, and I have been forced to make some very important adjustments in my personal life and lifestyle because of it.

  I readily acknowledged visiting the store and accepting the jerseys, but also pointed out I had no knowledge of their value since no price tags were attached. I reiterated that I returned them to the store. I ended the letter this way:Commissioner Muscaro, I have worked long and hard at realizing two dreams. Being a good student and an exceptional athlete. Basketball is my life. My senior year is very, very important to me and I want to complete it with honor and distinction.

  I hoped the letter would make a difference, that it would give Muscaro some sense of what I had been dealing with for two years. I hoped that he would see the lack of evil intent in my actions. I hoped and I hoped. It did no good. Instead, the athletic association later tried to use the letter against me because I said that I had been offered the jerseys as “congratulations for my academic and athletic achievements.”

  Muscaro denies there was any vendetta against either St. V or me. “I have no personal vendetta against LeBron James,” he now says. Steven Craig, who as counsel to the athletic association dealt with Muscaro extensively, says the notion of him holding a vendetta is simply untrue. “I really don’t think there is that bone in his body. I don’t think there is an ounce of that.” Muscaro is adamant he has “no regrets over the decision that I made. When I look back, the decision I made based on the information I had, I did the right thing.” He says he talked to someone at the store when the incident took place but now says he “doesn’t know” if it was the person who actually gave me the jerseys. It wasn’t.

  His name was Joe Hathorn, and he supplied a sworn affidavit. Had Muscaro spoken to him or to me, he would have learned that Hathorn had been a friend and mentor for the past two years. He would have learned that Hathorn was a trustee of Project: LEARN, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving adult literacy. He would have learned that Hathorn stressed the importance of my academic performance. He would have learned that Hathorn had discovered that I had been designated an honor student at St. V for the grading period. He would have learned that Hathorn told me he was proud of my making the honor roll and gave me a bag containing the two jerseys after removing the price tags. He would have learned my response was, “You don’t have to do that, but thank you. I am glad somebody recognizes that I am a good student.” Yes, he probably would also have learned that when asked to pose for pictures that could be put up on the wall of the store, I willingly did so. But the suspension stood, which is why I saw court as the only recourse.

  So I once again engaged an attorney named Frederick Nance from the Cleveland firm of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, who had just represented my mother and me in the investigation of the Hummer. On February 4, two days after St. V’s win against Canton McKinley, Nance filed a motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction on my behalf to prevent the athletic association from revoking my eligibility. The ruling by Commissioner Muscaro, according to the brief we filed on behalf of the motion, had been “arbitrary, unreasonable, capricious and oppressive.” The brief further stated that Muscaro served as “investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury in what can only be considered an ill-advised and ill-motivated decision.” I didn’t need legal knowledge to understand the thrust of that statement.

  As I saw it this was a witch hunt. This was a one-man posse’s attempt to humiliate me, subject me to ridicule, rip open rumors that I was corrupt, and ruin a dream. Those are strong words, I know, and so many years after what happened, perhaps I should just let it go. Perhaps I should let bygones be bygones, as I usually do. Perhaps I shouldn’t hold a grudge. But this was an injustice, and a hard lesson on the ways of the adult world. I was learning that adults will create scapegoats to satisfy their unwarranted need for revenge, act in a way that isn’t fair or for the greater good but only suits their own vindictiveness in trying to destroy someone. I can never forget that lesson.

  Muscaro now says he is “extremely proud” of what I have accomplished since turning pro for the community of Akron, which includes raising over $200,000 a year for the local YMCA and the Akron Urban League; refurbishing numerous basketball courts and rec centers; supporting the King James Shooting Stars Classic travel team tournament in Akron with a donation of over $100,000 every year; and bringing the LeBron James Skills Academy to the University of Akron, with seventy-five of the best basketball players in the country in attendance along with coaches from such schools as Duke University, the University of North Carolina, UCLA, and the University of Connecticut. Those are kind words from the commissioner and I appreciate them. But it’s too little, too late.

  The brief filed on behalf of the motion was a legal document, so it contained its fair share of legalese. But it contained its fair share of what we were convinced were incontrovertible facts. Muscaro called St. V several times in an effort to reach me, since it is standard in investigations by the athletic association to go through the school. After being told by school officials that I did not want to talk to him because I had legal representation, he never tried to contact me directly. “If someone says they don’t want to talk to me, then I have to go with what I have to make a decision,” Muscaro now says.

  According to our brief, no one from the athletic association, despite dealing with my attorney just a few days earlier over the Hummer, made any attempt to reach him to see if a meeting with me could be set up. Counsel for the athletic association did in fact contact Nance, roughly five minutes before the decision to declare my ineligibility was made public. Instead, Muscaro and the athletic association issued their one-day verdict without ever talking to me, without having more than a cursory conversation with my attorney to notify him of the decision, without talking to the person who had handed me the jerseys.

  Muscaro, as part of his investigation, did speak to the person at the store who was quoted in the Plain Dealer story, Derrick Craig. Craig told him I had received the jerseys,
but once again, he was not the one who had actually given them to me. Which meant that Muscaro had yet to find out the exact circumstances under which they had been presented. The athletic association, in their own brief, never specifically stated that Craig was the one who had given me the jerseys.

  Muscaro also contacted Robert Rosenthal, a principal of the store. In a sworn affidavit, Rosenthal said he and Muscaro spoke on January 31. According to the affidavit, he told the commissioner he wanted to help, but would need to conduct a thorough investigation of the employees who had been at the store on the day in question to be as accurate as possible. Muscaro said he already had a statement from Craig, but Rosenthal told him that media reports of Craig’s participation might be incorrect, according to the affidavit, and that the investigation would be finished by 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. As our brief emphatically asserted, Muscaro simply decided not to wait for the results of the investigation and issued his ruling at 3:15 p.m.

  The suspension was meant to punish me for trying to capitalize on my celebrity as an athlete. But, as the brief explained succinctly, it was in fact other people, all adults, who were trying to capitalize on my celebrity. “Newspapers and magazines have capitalized on LeBron’s fame, flush with the knowledge that LeBron makes good copy. LeBron’s own school has increased ticket prices, moved to a larger venue, scheduled games in far-flung locations. . . . By all accounts, LeBron’s celebrity is a valuable commodity. For his part, LeBron has tried scrupulously to comply with [athletic association] regulations and has signed no contract that gives him any compensation for his notoriety.” I could have made such a deal with Adidas, or Nike, or Reebok. I could have easily walked away from my high school career, put an end to the autograph seekers begging me to sign something so they could then sell it on eBay, put an end to the members of the media climbing over themselves either trying to interview me or just plain trying to write viciously about me, put an end to it all.