by Lebron James
After graduation from East Liverpool High School, Coach Dru went to Ashland College in Ohio. He had been a pretty good receiver in high school, and he went there intending to continue football. But football and Coach Dru didn’t mix well at Ashland. He didn’t have the driving force he felt he needed, and Ashland began to feel small to him, too small, like being back in high school. That summer he got a job at Crucible Steel, across the Ohio River in Midland, Pennsylvania. It was painless lifting, in an office that was away from the soot and the furnaces and all the other hell that steel mills routinely churn out. He prepared samples of steel for chemical analysis by taking little shavings. He was often done early, and when he was through, he went and sat on a loading dock and watched community softball games. The money was good, and since Coach Dru didn’t have a lot of it—still with only a couple of pairs of blue jeans to his name—the temptation to stay and forget about college was enormous. His mother told him to not even think about it. So he transferred to Ohio University, and while he partied harder than he should have, he found his calling in business. His mother must have had a sixth sense anyway, because two years after Coach Dru worked at Crucible Steel, the mill closed up. All his friends who had money in their pockets and cars and thought they were going to live the good life were now out of work.
That was the kind of life he led until he became the first member of his family to graduate from college, a life that was hard but lived without complaint because that’s just how life was. I think I somehow knew that about Coach Dru the first time I met him when I was about nine. Something just told me. We just had that instant affinity for one another. I understood him, and he understood me. I trusted him, which is not something I did easily back in those days.
II.
Since Coach Dru lived in Akron, he knew where to find raw talent, one of the advantages of a place small enough so that word of athletic potential traveled fast. He knew about the Ed Davis Community Center near the Akron Zoo and the Summit Lake Community Center. Even in his own church, between the prayers and the hymnals and the sermon, he would scan the pews, looking for a kid who had some size on him and might be a defensive force.
That’s how I first came into his life, through the Summit Lake rec center. He saw me play basketball, and he must have observed something that enticed him; I wasn’t with the Walkers yet, but he found out where we lived, over in the projects in Elizabeth Park, and talked to my mom, Gloria, about joining an Amateur Athletic Union travel team called the Shooting Stars. The AAU, as it is known, is a national nonprofit entity that organizes leagues and tournaments on the amateur level in virtually every sport imaginable.
Coach Dru didn’t know the backstory of my life. But I’m pretty sure he knew that my life had been a crazy quilt of moves there and moves here growing up until we finally landed in the forlorn red brick of Elizabeth Park. Up until then, it had been constant on-the-go, and so many different schools that I tried to lose count. Who ever wants to keep track of something like that? All it does is cause you pain and memories you would rather forget.
Coach Dru’s circumstances were slightly different from mine. He did have two parents. But he knew the meaning of what it was like to be poor. Just as he also knew that sports, under the right conditions, could save a child’s life. He also picked up right away that for all I had been through, I wasn’t hardened or bitter. He liked the fact that I was friendly and curious about the world. While I downplayed it at the time, he knew in his heart that as an only child, I was desperate to be around other kids. I also liked the idea of joining the Shooting Stars because I heard they traveled to places as exotic as Cleveland, where I had never been before even though it was about half an hour away.
So after my mom’s initial skepticism (she even insisted on going to the first practice to make sure Coach Dru was legitimate), she let me join the team.
Coach Dru was still on the lookout. You need at least five players to make up a basketball team, and the next piece of the dream came from church. The Joyce family went to the same church as the Cotton family, called the House of the Lord. Coach Dru and Lee Cotton had been Sunday school teachers together. Coach Dru knew that Lee Cotton had been a great high school basketball player in Akron; when he saw his son Sian in church one Sunday, there was something he liked about him—his size. He was aware Sian was a good baseball player, which doesn’t automatically translate into skill in basketball, but he also realized he could take up a lot of essential space on the court. Sian had a personality to match his size, funny on the outside but fearless and a little bit of a renegade on the inside, a natural-born intimidator. If you didn’t want to mess with Little Dru when he told you something, because he wouldn’t ever let it go, you also didn’t want to mess with Sian. So he became the third piece of the dream as a player.
Sian came from a sturdy family. They lived over in Goodyear Heights, a tidy section of two-story homes built for workers from the various Goodyear plants that had once dotted the city. His dad, Lee, had been a longtime courier for FedEx. His mom, Debra, did occasional temporary work, but largely stayed home to take care of Sian and his older brother, L.C.
Basketball was simply alien to Sian. He couldn’t make a layup to save his life, and Little Dru’s exasperation would become palpable: “I’m passing you the ball, and you can’t score. That’s a problem.” So was the fact that Sian traveled constantly. In baseball he could go out without any practice and throw no-hitters. In basketball he was growing so quickly that he was still trying to catch up to his body. I would never say this about Sian, because I love him too much, but he has a pretty good assessment of how he played that first year we were all together:
“I was kind of a bum.”
Little Dru knew more about the game than anyone at the time, including his dad. Even when he was nine and ten, you could see those fundamentals taking hold. I, on the other hand, had no use for fundamentals despite what Frankie Walker had taught me, not back then. I could tell that it drove Little Dru right to the edge. The first time he saw me play, it was like I was trying to make a highlight reel, behind-the-back passes and all other sorts of nonsense and the ball flying in every which direction all over the court. I could feel Little Dru’s anger boiling up even then.
So Coach Dru, who had become the coach because of his volunteer work with the Shooting Stars the year before, had a long journey ahead. He also believed he could take the raw talent that was there and maybe mold it into something. Because his only experience in basketball had been as a pickup player, he willed himself to become a coach. He ultimately bought every book and tape on basketball he could find, his favorite being The John Wooden Pyramid of Success. Little Dru went to camps and clinics, and Coach Dru usually accompanied him, then bent the ear of any coach he could seek out to further learn the game.
Little Dru in turn had that streak of perfectionism—he insisted on doing the drills until he had them exactly right—so Coach Dru would work with him at home. As for me, I was a good natural athlete. Sian was, well, Sian, strong and able to play defense, although approval from Little Dru was still not forthcoming: “We had to use him for something.” Little Dru’s theory was pretty simple—if your fingertips touched the basketball, you should catch the basketball. So even if the pass was a little bit wild, if your fingertips touched it, it was on you as far as Little Dru was concerned. Then he would yell at you for not catching it, so Sian got yelled at quite a bit. But Sian was almost six-one, so big that he could only play one year of peewee football because of weight limitations, and he could easily take what Little Dru spewed out.
We started out in 1996 in a red-brick building on Maple Street that housed the Salvation Army. The walls were a dingy white, with the Salvation Army logo painted in the middle. The gym was tiny, about twenty feet less in length than a regulation court. The floor was made of linoleum; playing on it was like dribbling in your kitchen. But that was the best we could find. We were in fifth grade, playing with a lot of sixth-graders, then the sixth-grader
s left to form their own team, and we were basically the only ones left. A few more boys were added so we would have enough players, and we played well. In fact, the Shooting Stars qualified for the national AAU tournament in Cocoa Beach, Florida, that summer for kids eleven and under.
At first Coach Dru didn’t want to go. Getting to Florida was expensive, and there was no way we could fly there. But one of the dads, Kirk Lindeman, just couldn’t let go of the opportunity that lay before us. One day, he turned to Coach Dru and said, “Let’s do this. They may never qualify for a national championship again in their life.”
Coach Dru realized that Lindeman was right, and they found a way to do it.
We had only seven players on the team when we piled into Coach Dru’s minivan and headed off to Florida with Little Dru’s mom and two sisters and little brother in another car with food so we would have something to eat on the way down. We were kids from Akron, the Rubber Capital of the World that wasn’t even that anymore, and for us, going to Cleveland was a long trip. Now we were heading to Florida for the AAU tournament. It was there in Cocoa Beach that I saw the ocean for the first time with all that water rushing in, inching into it toe by toe before I started joyously splashing around with some of the other players like the kids we still were.
We didn’t know what to expect in terms of the tournament. We found sixty-odd other teams there, some of them from the big basketball meccas of Houston and Chicago and Southern California, decked out in their fancy shoes and jackets and rip-away warm-ups and matching bags. “We didn’t care who we were going to play next,” Little Dru remembered. “It was just like, ‘Look at their uniforms.’” The opening ceremonies were at the Kennedy Space Center, like something out of the Olympics, and Coach Dru also couldn’t help but wonder what we had just gotten ourselves into. He started talking with a fellow coach in front of him as they lined up at the ceremony. The coach was going on and on about how they were the number-one seed in the tournament. He mentioned a player on the team named J. R. Giddens, who later went on to be drafted by the Boston Celtics with the thirtieth pick out of the University of New Mexico. He talked about how they had played about sixty-five games together. The newly constituted Shooting Stars had played about seven games together, and all Coach Dru could say to himself was, This doesn’t look good. This doesn’t look good at all.
But basketball is about finding the right parts and putting them together. There was the cohesiveness of Little Dru and Sian and me, since we had played together earlier in the summer. We added a player named Grant Urbanski, who was a great shooter and handled the ball well. We added Jim Lindeman’s son Pat, who wasn’t very athletic and was a little bit slow, but could also shoot if he got his feet set. We added Jarryd Tribble, who was willing to do the scut work—setting up screens, rebounding, going for loose balls. We added Vahn Knight, a superb all-around athlete who ran the ball well and played defense well and shot well and went on to play at Ashland University in Ohio.
Little Dru had those great fundamentals and a shot that seemed to be on its way to becoming legendary. I was fast and loved offense (defense I could do without). From the very beginning, Little Dru and I had this uncanny ability to understand each other on the court. Sian did hold the middle defensively, and he also improved considerably during the tournament as he gained confidence. The other players fulfilled their roles.
Somehow, we finished an astounding ninth out of the sixty-four teams there, even though we had barely played together. The three of us—Little Dru and Sian and I—were starting to develop a chemistry even then. And not just when we played basketball. We were beginning to gravitate toward each other off the court, much of it the result of that interminable 883-mile ride from Akron to Cocoa Beach. Because it doesn’t matter who you are—after close to twenty hours in a minivan, you are going to know everything about your car mates, whether you like it or not. Silence is not permitted.
After the tournament, Coach Dru said something I will never forget. The championship game had ended, and they were giving out the trophies, and there was ours for ninth place, along with an equipment bag with the AAU insignia on it. Our hopes going down there had not been very high, so we were excited and exploding with confidence. We were packing up our gear to return to Akron, preparing for the ride from hell home, when Coach Dru just looked at his son and Sian and me. He appreciated the hardness with which we played, and more important, the passion. He said at that moment, “I don’t know what it is, but you guys are going to do something special.”
Even though we were still young, we somehow knew it too. The thought lay beneath the surface at that point. We couldn’t really articulate it. When we came back to Akron, there was no real buzz, just a bunch of kids who had done well in an AAU tournament. Yet the seeds were already forming, something we wanted to fulfill before we were through. The dream began to swirl around in our young minds that the following summer we could do better than ninth place, maybe even achieve the miracle of winning a major national championship one day.
If we got more pieces.
4.
Willie McGee
I.
Willie McGee was all resilience. Probably the reason for that was his youth on the west side of Chicago, which, as he once put it, “will swallow you whole, good family or not.” He came from a good family, his grandmother Lena the backbone of it, tough and strong. She commanded respect in a neighborhood that was rife with drugs and gangs. Willie lived with her as a young boy, in a two-family duplex at the corner of Kedzie and Arthington near Chicago Stadium, where the Bulls used to play. Lena was a savvy entrepreneur, running a diner in the front of the house. She sold soul food and deli sandwiches and rib dinners. She even had a snowball stand at one point. But she was getting up in years, and there was just so much she could do with Willie. His mother and father were going through difficult times, struggling with drug addictions, taking everything from crack to snorting heroin, and Willie started being looked after by his sister Makeba, who was thirteen years older.
Willie felt like he owed his life to Makeba because of how she basically mothered him when he was young. Once she took him to the doctor to get a shot, and he was so resistant that he kicked the nurse. She always kept him fed, although it might be sausage and rice and toast for a week because money was so tight. Makeba’s life wasn’t easy. She had two small children of her own. She was also looking after Willie’s younger brother, Patrick, as their mother, Dale, appeared and then disappeared because of her addiction to crack. Whenever she left, Willie would grab her leg and plead, “Mama, stay here with me, don’t go.” But Dale, as she later said, “just had to,” the lure of the streets and the parties too hard to overcome.
The responsibility placed on Makeba was monumental, and when Makeba had to run an errand, it was Willie, as the oldest at six or seven, who changed his niece and nephew and youngest brother’s diapers. He warmed up their bottles and he fed them and made sure they burped and put them to sleep. There was usually an uncle or cousin living upstairs, so if Willie got into trouble and accidentally started a fire or something, there was someone to turn to. He took his responsibilities with seriousness and purpose despite being so young. But he was missing school, close to forty days at Bethune Elementary one year. Looking back on it, Willie himself could predict what would have eventually happened, that the lure of easy drug money on the corner might land him in jail.
When he was seven, he spent the summer in Akron with his brother Illya, a former high school basketball star at Providence St. Mel School in Chicago who had been recruited by the University of Akron. The drugs and the gangs in the neighborhood were only getting worse, and when the day came for him to leave for Akron in 1987, his grandmother Lena took Illya aside and said, “Don’t come back.” She kissed him and she cried and said he should visit his family, and then she told him once more, “This is not where you need to be.”
Illya, who was fourteen years older than Willie, had always wanted a baby brother. He got that wis
h on January 1, 1984, when Willie was born. It became clear as time went on that Willie idolized his brother, wanted to follow in his exact footsteps, excelling in basketball in high school and then getting a college scholarship. Illya returned that love. Willie came to his basketball games at Providence St. Mel, and Illya brought him into the locker room afterward and took Willie to practices. Both Illya and Makeba sheltered him from the streets. One Christmas, Willie’s grandmother had given his parents money to buy Christmas presents for her grandson. They spent almost all of it on drugs, and there were no gifts under the tree. Willie’s mother had about twenty dollars left, and Illya and Makeba scratched up some more. Illya went to stores in Chicago that sold items for a dollar or two and bought up all the gifts he could find. When Willie awoke Christmas morning, there were dozens of presents under the tree. It meant that Illya and Makeba went without gifts of their own, but the look on Willie’s face was enough Christmas for them.
The bond between Willie and Illya was unbreakable, so much so that Illya became terribly homesick when he went to the University of Akron. He wanted to return home, in large part because of Willie. He thought about him all the time, and he worried about the ups and downs of drugs, which he believed were affecting the family.
When the opportunity arose for Willie to spend the summer with Illya and his girlfriend, Vikki, in Akron, the bond reignited immediately. Illya and Vikki spoiled Willie, giving him his own bedroom and buying him bushels of clothes. They took him to his first movie, his first real restaurant, his first buffet, his first mall, his first amusement park, Geauga Lake Amusement Park near Cleveland, where Willie rode everything from the roller coaster to the bumper cars like the seven-year-old child he was but never had been.
