Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution

by Jonathan Abrams

  The clinics prompted Dambrot to try coaching again. The game had never really left him. He agreed to coach St. Vincent–St. Mary in 1998 and James and his core of friends—including Joyce III, Sian Cotton, and Romeo Travis—opted for the school instead of Buchtel High, the nearby almost all-black school. Dambrot told people after James’s freshman year that his protégé would evolve into an NBA player. “Three games into his sophomore year,” Dambrot said, “I knew he would never go to college.” The team once played in the small town of Salem, Ohio. James led them to another resounding victory and had gone to take a shower. He walked out of the school to find the customary line of people eagerly waiting to get his autograph. Dambrot noticed that some of the opposition, those who had just played against James, had skipped taking a shower to get in line. “It seemed kind of strange. You had just played the game, the kid is in the shower, and they’re still in their uniforms,” Dambrot said. “It was like traveling around with Elton John.”

  Things that would seem unusual anywhere else became routine around James. Everyone wanted something from him. “Trying to shield him, I felt an unbelievable pressure,” Dambrot said. “I knew the only way he wasn’t going to be a pro was if he kind of lost his way, whether it was drugs, alcohol, women, or babies. So I really tried to do a good job of shielding him [from] that and [tried] to teach him to do the right things as a player and person…basically, I didn’t kiss his ass like most of the stars are treated now. I held him to a higher standard because I knew he could make a lot of money.” The NBA had its eyes on James from early on. John Lucas, the coach of the Cavaliers who had once watched a young Kobe Bryant and had roomed with Moses Malone, asked James to work out with his team. The league fined the Cavaliers $150,000 and suspended Lucas for two games after he had hosted the amateur. “It was a tough situation because the better we got, the worse they ran our team,” Lucas recalled. “So they would have a better shot to get him,” by landing a top selection in the draft.

  •••

  Satellite trucks preparing to beam the game across the nation were parked long before James arrived for his first nationally broadcast game. A blimp hovered overhead. More than 100 journalists—some from New York and Los Angeles—were credentialed to either anoint James as the best player since Michael Jordan or denounce the attention and adulation that he had received. They packed in elbow-to-elbow along the mezzanine level of the arena. Parking lots that normally sold spaces for a couple of bucks charged $20 that evening. ESPN opened its telecast by comparing James with some of the NBA’s greats—Jordan, Magic, and others—and wondering if James’s path would one day match their storied careers.

  Steven Culp, an assistant coach for St. Vincent–St. Mary, had the same feeling approaching the game as he did watching James against Lenny Cooke at the ABCD camp. Culp had sat in the stands among NBA personnel for that showdown. When Cooke scored first and the crowd roared, Culp whispered to the scout next to him, “It’s about to get ugly.” James had shown few nerves then and he showed none now as tipoff approached against Oak Hill. The teams met before the game and Culp recalled the Oak Hill players displaying apprehension. “When they saw him, you could see the look in their faces,” Culp said. “They wouldn’t even look him in the face. They put their heads down. You got a feeling that they knew it wasn’t going to go well.”

  James looked a decade older than his competition as his 23rd-ranked Fighting Irish prepared to take on Oak Hill, the top-ranked team in the country. He was 6 feet 8 inches and 240 pounds. James wore a green headband and patches to cover up his tattoos—a policy the Catholic school enforced—and green and gold Adidas shoes, a Tracy McGrady model, fashioned specifically for him by the company. James had encountered Oak Hill twice before, losing both games. But Oak Hill was a changed team, with only one returning rotation player. Carmelo Anthony, a smooth-shooting forward who would lead Syracuse to a national championship as a freshman, was the team’s most noticeable loss.

  Courtside seats fetched more than $100. Vegas ran a betting line for the game.

  Dru Joyce II, who had replaced Dambrot as the St. Vincent–St.Mary head coach, cautioned his team to play its game. Oak Hill took an early seven-point lead. James started the game slowly, missing on his first three shots. On television, Walton cautioned James to become more assertive. Culp, on the sidelines, did not worry. He had seen James in other contests wait to gain a feel for the game before playing more aggressively. James often liked to allow his teammates to score early and often before racking up his points. James scored his first points on a follow-up dunk off Corey Jones’s missed jumper with 3:05 left in the first quarter. The night belonged to James from there on. He raised his hands, asking the audience to do the same, after one thunderous dunk. He pounded his chest after hitting a three-pointer.

  Vitale turned to Walton within the first few minutes of the game. “Redhead, let me tell you something, my man,” he said. “This kid is better than advertised. He’s better than what people even said and that’s tough to believe.”

  James ended the game with 31 points and a number of rim-rattling dunks and behind-the-back assists. “He seems to have overcome a sluggish start,” Walton joked midway through the game. James converted 12 of his 25 shots, while adding 13 rebounds and 6 assists in 32 minutes. St. Vincent–St. Mary trumped Oak Hill by 20 points. It was less a basketball game and more an affirmation of James’s talents and potential for the 11,523 fans in attendance and the millions who watched ESPN broadcast the game into their living rooms.

  “When I sat back and really thought about St. Vincent–St. Mary being on national television, it’s crazy,” James told reporters afterward. “But I don’t think it’s too much pressure.”

  After the game, James admitted to Vitale that he had gone to bed nervous the previous night. “Man, you’re everything plus,” Vitale said to him. “Remember now what I’m going to tell you. You’re going to be hit upon by everyone, leeches like you can’t believe. Be intelligent. Make good decisions. Surround yourself with good people.”

  Walton stopped James as he walked off the court.

  “Congratulations,” Walton said, according to the Associated Press.

  “Thanks for coming,” James replied.

  “No,” Walton said. “Thanks for having me.”

  •••

  The game got a rating of 1.97, translating to a reach of 1.67 million homes across the country. It represented ESPN’s third-highest-rated basketball game ever. “It was everything we’d hope for,” Magnus said. “It [had] a huge audience.”

  Ghazi had worked furiously to secure sponsors before the game. He called more than 150 companies, telling them about a phenom, a future NBA star they could be tied in with from the beginning. Only Progressive Insurance, Spalding, and Gatorade paid to sponsor the game. Progressive was based in Cleveland and still knew little about James. “I know who James LeBron is,” said one of the people Ghazi worked with early on at the company. Ghazi guaranteed them all a rating of at least 0.5, knowing that if it underdelivered, he would have to return some of the sponsorship payment to the companies. He was likewise thrilled over the ratings.

  “Before the game took place, Adidas, Nike, and Reebok all knew who LeBron was,” Ghazi said. “College basketball, recruiting fans, and diehard NBA fans all knew who LeBron was. After that day, because of the game, the ratings, the highlights, the publicity, and the media coverage, the average fan knew who LeBron was. More importantly for LeBron and his future, the marketer who does not have a brand directly tied to the sports business—they may sell a car or bubblegum, a drink or beverage—they all know who LeBron was. From a branding standpoint, he really put his name out there.” ESPN hurriedly planned to broadcast another of James’s games the following month, one in California against Santa Ana’s Mater Dei.

  James supported a burgeoning economy that his talent and work had created. Yet, under the amateur rules, only others could profit off him at the time. USA Today estimated that James generated $1.
5 million his senior year of high school for his school, promoters, arena owners, cable television, online auctions, and others. “The young man is being exploited by people all around the country,” Clair Muscaro, commissioner of the Ohio High School Athletic Association, said to the newspaper. “Fifty dollars a ticket is ridiculous. But we have no control over ticket prices for regular-season games, only the playoffs.” The school sold season tickets for James’s senior season at $125 for adults. Students tickets could be had for $3 a game. The local newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, figured that James’s presence made the school an extra $275,000. James stopped signing copies of his Sports Illustrated article after he saw them being auctioned online for more than $200. James’s game tapes sold online for nearly $50. His bobbleheads fetched more than $100. Counterfeit basketball cards of James also sold quickly online. Scalpers sold tickets for three and four times the face value outside most of his home games.

  “Think about the parents, okay?” said Frank Jessie, the school’s athletic director during James’s junior year. “Let’s say you’re charging ten to twelve dollars a ticket and you’re gonna play eight to ten games at home. You’re talking about a school where there’s tuition money, books, expenses, and now you have [to pay] ten or twelve dollars to see your own kid play. It didn’t seem equitable to me.”

  Jessie had played basketball at St. Vincent–St. Mary and rose to become an assistant on Bob Huggins’s staff at the University of Cincinnati before returning to the high school. “My experience with him was nothing but positive,” Jessie said of his interactions with James. But the publicity James received wreaked havoc at the small school. “We had four telephone lines going to St. Vincent–St. Mary at that time,” Jessie recalled. “Many times, all four lines [were] tied up. The athletic department basically put a burden on the rest of the school. If somebody wanted to call in and see if the baseball game was rained out or something, or to check on somebody’s grades, it was pretty tough…the whole situation kind of bothered me a little bit, to be honest. But that’s the way it was. It was there when I got there and I tried to deal with it the best I could.”

  Jessie said he was offered a bribe of $5,000 for James to play in certain games, with his presence ensuring a packed crowd. “I said, ‘Hey, I’m not a saint, but if somebody is going to try to bribe me, it’s gotta be [for] more than that,’ ” Jessie said. “There’s a good amount of money to be made. So what some people do, and I didn’t mention names, but some of these promoters would try to buy off the person or persons on where the team was going to play. You could easily give somebody five grand and have a big payday.” Jessie decided to leave his job after James’s junior season. “I coached there and I loved the school,” he said. “I have the utmost admiration for LeBron. But it was philosophical differences and I went my own way.”

  Everyone, it seemed, but James was allowed to profit. He even floated the possibility of petitioning the NBA to enable him to declare for the draft after his junior year of high school. The idea never gained much traction, although it brought James even more attention, in that a high schooler from Ohio would even bring up the notion. “I really never thought much about him leaving after his junior year because I just thought he was too close to the guys on the team, really,” Keith Dambrot said. “Those are his childhood friends. That’s one of the reasons he stayed at St. V all those years. He knew he could be a pro no matter where he was and he wasn’t going to leave his friends and the guys he grew up with.”

  James still had all eyes on him. The Ohio High School Athletic Association conducted a two-week investigation after James was spotted driving a Hummer H2 vehicle worth over $80,000 before deciding that no amateur rules had been broken. Gloria James had taken out a loan based on James’s future earnings to secure the luxury car. But the association ruled James ineligible after the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that James had been given throwback jerseys of Wes Unseld and Gale Sayers, valued together at $845, in exchange for posing for photos that would be hung at Cleveland’s Next Urban Gear and Music. The case was taken to court, where a judge ruled the association could not declare James ineligible.

  •••

  James surprised no one by forgoing college and declaring for the 2003 NBA draft. The night before the draft’s lottery, Aaron Goodwin, James’s agent, worked hurriedly to finalize James’s shoe deal. He did not want the market James played in to factor into the contract’s worth.

  Before James, Tracy McGrady had served as the high point for how much a shoe company would pay for a prep star. James stretched those limits and then some. Nike, Adidas, and Reebok had all been after James for years. James coyly played them all—wearing Adidas shoes at Nike’s big camps and Nike shoes at ABCD camp. Sonny Vaccaro and Adidas had furnished St. Vincent–St. Mary with shoes for the whole team. The other shoe companies wangled their way in, too. Nike hired Maverick Carter, one of James’s close friends, to work for the company. Reebok offered the most upfront money. Goodwin put James up in an Akron hotel. Reebok executives stayed in the same place, expecting to make a deal with James.

  Vaccaro and Adidas dropped out of the running when the company opted not to offer the $10-million-a-year contract Vaccaro had promised to James. In truth, Vaccaro did not even believe that this would have been enough to lure James. “I never thought Phil Knight would lose him, even if we would have given him a hundred million dollars that day,” Vaccaro said. “What [Adidas] made me do is mislead the kid. That’s why I quit. That’s a fact…it was always Adidas and then Nike. There’s no question in my mind. Adidas screwed up bigger than any shoe company ever screwed up in their life. They never recovered from LeBron.”

  James chose Nike, signing a deal that would pay him more than $90 million over seven years.

  He could finally profit from his own talents, years after others had made money off him. Vaccaro credited it all to James’s beginnings against Cooke at his camp. “The camp basically made ninety million dollars for LeBron if you want to take it to the nth degree,” Vaccaro said.

  ABC decided to broadcast the NBA draft lottery’s results in prime time for the first time—a result of the high interest in James and his future destination. James’s hometown Cavaliers and the Denver Nuggets shared equal odds of winning the lottery at 22.5 percent. Meanwhile, the Memphis Grizzlies had only a 6.4 percent chance at the top pick. The struggling franchise had traded their pick to the Detroit Pistons a while ago and could only maintain the selection if they wound up winning the lottery. Improbably, as the draft order was revealed, only Memphis and Cleveland remained. Jerry West, the Lakers’ great who had drafted Kobe Bryant, was now Memphis’s general manager. He appeared devastated when the lottery revealed that not only had the Cavaliers won the top pick and would take James, but Memphis would also have to relinquish its second overall pick to Detroit. “It didn’t take a genius to look at LeBron James and know what he was going to be,” West said years later.

  The Cavaliers did little to hide their glee at a future with James. The franchise had struggled for years and now had a homegrown kid with the talent to lead them into the playoffs. Cleveland hired Paul Silas to coach the team. Silas was a respected NBA veteran who had won three championships as a player. James astounded Silas when he talked knowingly about Silas’s days of playing in the NBA with the Celtics on the first day the pair met. No player had gained the level of attention James had in high school. No player would also be as equipped as James was to enter the NBA from high school. But he did experience one early speed bump.

  “We had a lot of players there that did not like him that much because the media and everybody, they would talk about him, how great he was going to be,” Silas remembered. One practice, Silas noticed James was down. Silas would ask his team to shoot 100 free throws before every practice and James idled by himself in a corner. Silas summoned him to his office. From his own playing days, Silas knew that leadership had to be given and not demanded. He wanted James to earn his leadership role, even if it
hurt the egos of some of the other players on the team.

  “You’ve got to change,” Silas told him. “What they’re saying means nothing to you. You’re going to be one of the best players ever.”

  Soon after that conversation, the Cavaliers traded away Ricky Davis, a swingman who had been the team’s leading scorer and who had bristled at the prospect of taking a backseat and fewer shots to accommodate a teenager. James flourished after the trade and was named the league’s Rookie of the Year. He had been the most touted high school player in history and somehow the hype still fell short of the final product. “He could do anything,” said Silas, who ended up coaching James during his first two NBA seasons. “He could run. He could shoot. He could jump. He could defend. He could block shots and he understood the game. To me, that was the key. He understood how to play and he was so young, but understood everything.”

  James arrived at superstardom during his sophomore season, when he averaged 27.2 points and became the youngest player selected to the All-NBA Team. In 2007, James led his severely outmanned Cavaliers (the team was composed of him and a bunch of role players) to the finals against the San Antonio Spurs, where they fell in four games. His play impressed. Just as surprising, his off-court image continued to sparkle. James mostly avoided controversy, despite constant scrutiny, and claimed the first of his four MVPs in 2009. His reputation took a substantial hit when he very publicly left the Cavaliers in 2010 during free agency for the Miami Heat. But after two title wins and four consecutive championship appearances, James reversed course, returning to the Cavaliers and delivering them to the 2015 NBA Finals, where Cleveland lost to the Golden State Warriors. The journey all began with that dream. “This is the cream of the crop at this point,” James said. “It gets no higher than this and, for a basketball player, it was a dream of mine to be able to have the impact I’ve had in this league. It has been surprising at times. It’s been overwhelming. It’s been gratifying. At the same time, it’s something I don’t take for granted.”