Shooting Stars

by Lebron James

  The end of that summer was maybe the hardest time Illya ever experienced. He knew he had to take Willie back to Chicago, but it devastated him. He just counted off the days, and when the time came, they got into the car and made the six-hour trip on the Ohio Turnpike and then the Indiana Toll Road. They talked some, but the ride over the eternal flatness was long and only made longer as Illya tried to prepare himself for what he had to say. They stayed in Chicago three days, with Willie clinging to Illya almost the whole time. The moment came, and as much as Illya had tried to prepare for it, he realized there was no way he could ever prepare for something like this.

  He went into the back room of the house with Willie and Makeba, and she said, “You know, Illya has to go back.”

  “Can I go?” asked Willie.

  “No,” said Illya. It was his senior year at college, and he had to finish.

  Willie started to deteriorate in front of Illya’s eyes.

  “Willie, it will be all right. I’ll be back.”

  “No, no, no. I want to go.”

  Willie started to cry. So did Illya. He hugged him and gave him a kiss and told him that he loved him and was going to send him something wonderful for Christmas. He couldn’t look back. He just had to keep going because there was no other place to go, because he felt that everything was crashing in around him. He felt that he had betrayed his younger brother, that the one person he looked up to and had faith in had just torn down his mountain. He worried that Willie was going to lose faith and trust in him.

  Vikki was with him on the ride back to Akron. Illya could barely talk, he was still so overcome. It was on the Indiana Toll Road that Vikki just blurted it out:

  “You know what we have to do, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You know we’ve got to bring him back. He just did so much better with us. He’s going to have a better opportunity.”

  Illya had actually been thinking the same thing. But he wasn’t married to Vikki yet—they married in 1995—and he was concerned that it was too much to ask of her.

  “Are you ready for something like that?”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “Wow,” was all Illya could say in return.

  For the next several weeks he made sure that Vikki truly understood the responsibility of having a child live permanently with them. Afterward he called his family and got the blessings of Makeba and their mother. Illya told Willie next, and Willie started screaming and yelling through the house.

  “Illya said I’m moving in with him! Illya said I’m moving in with him!”

  The agreement was that Illya and Vikki wouldn’t take Willie until the middle of the summer, so he could finish school. But every day Willie would come home and say to Makeba, “When is school over with? When is school over with?”

  The middle of the summer finally came, and Makeba packed his clothing into a trash bag because they couldn’t afford a suitcase. She made sure there were six or seven changes of clothes that were clean and washed and ready to go. With equal amounts of tears and guilt she took him to live with his brother, who was about to finish up at the University of Akron. It was terribly painful for her. She cried when she brought his meager possessions down to the car, a silver Honda Accord, and put them in the trunk and told him to be good and to listen. Willie drove off with Illya and Vikki and just kept looking back and looking back, feeling an emptiness that he had never felt before. He could see Makeba in the middle of the street, still crying. He could see the big berry tree in front of the house that messed up your clothes every summer when the berries dropped. As he kept looking, the finality of what was happening hit him: I’m leaving, and I’m leaving my sister. It was so terribly hard for Makeba. Willie didn’t simply feel like a brother but one of her own children. But she knew he needed a male role model, someone strong and steady, someone who could not be found in the drug-strewn streets of west side Chicago.

  The responsibility placed on Illya and Vikki was enormous, taking care of an eight-year-old. Illya was scared, and all sorts of thoughts raced through his mind: Am I going to be able to do it? Am I going to be the man I really think I am, or am I going to fail? As he rode back to Akron that day, he also said to himself, Lord, just stay with me and show me the way. Just show me the way.

  That first night, Willie went into the bedroom where he had stayed the summer before and saw the Superman bedspread crisp and new. He saw the television. He was elated and excited. So were Illya and Vikki. They all sat up much of the night just talking, and when Willie finally went to bed, Illya must have peeked in on him ten times just to remind himself that he was truly there, thinking to himself that in the six-hour trip from Chicago to Akron, Willie McGee had literally traveled from darkness to light.

  For as long as Willie could remember, he had always had a basketball in his hands. When he had been living in Chicago, he often played at a parking lot across the street from his house, where there were four sets of hoops. It was different in Akron. They lived near the university campus in a two-bedroom apartment on South Adams Street, across from Akron City Hospital. There weren’t many kids around like there had been in Chicago, and Illya had just started working full time for the Ohio Community Corrections Association—basically a halfway house called Oriana—as a resident supervisor. Vikki was working there as well. Willie felt lonely at times, and he still had his Chicago tendencies: when he was riding in the car one day, someone mentioned that they needed to go to the drive-thru of a local store, and Willie thought she said drive-by and immediately ducked his head.

  Illya and Vikki responded to the challenge. They clothed him. They fed him. They taught Willie morals. They taught him how to be responsible and respectful and take pride in himself. They took Willie to the malls at Chapel Hill and Rolling Acres, where they inevitably bought something for him, whether it was the newest in sneakers or the newest in trendy clothes. They took him out to eat at his favorite restaurant, Red Lobster, where Willie invariably ordered what Illya did, except for French fries instead of mashed potatoes. They took Willie to the library and to the movies and to plays.

  Illya also took Willie to the downtown YMCA on Canal Square on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays and started teaching him the finer points of basketball, how to hold his hands, layups over and over and over, talking trash to him so he would toughen up and not be a baby on the court if someone tried to get between his ears. He pushed Willie around and smacked his hands, and Willie hated that, but it was all part of becoming a basketball player. Illya then got him involved with the Summit Lake Hornets, where he played with me and won a championship.

  It was also Illya who consoled Willie and counseled him when it became clear that, because of what he had been through in Chicago, he needed special education help in reading and writing. Willie didn’t want to be placed in any special education classes—it had a stigma attached that embarrassed him; he feared that other students would make fun of him. But Illya made it clear to Willie that he must have the help in order to catch up, a reality that set in when Illya realized that Willie could not read his middle name. Willie trusted his brother, and he became determined to get out of special ed as quickly as possible. He did just that, entering in the fourth grade and testing out in the middle of sixth grade. He continued to get good grades. Illya, in his role as surrogate father and mentor, didn’t shower him with rewards when the report cards came around. He expected Willie to do well, and Illya’s attitude rubbed off, because that’s what Willie began to expect from himself.

  There was something about Willie that just carried weight, the kind of kid you could always depend on, count on, a steady influence. If somebody was about to do something silly or stupid, it was Willie who would say, “Hey, we’re not getting into that.” There was a maturity to him, a determination to overcome whatever had to be overcome. It also became clear that Willie was one of the best junior high basketball players in the city of Akron, a kid for whom sports could be so integral if he could find the right ou
tlet.

  So Willie became the next piece of the dream, along with me and Sian and Little Dru. He came in seventh grade. He played for an AAU team called the Akron Elite, and Coach Dru had his eye on Willie. When his team lost in the qualifying round for the national tournament, he was able under the rules to join another unit, and he hooked up with the Shooting Stars. Coach Dru liked the toughness with which he played, how he wasn’t afraid of Sian like everyone else when he matched up with him. He liked Willie’s relentless hustle. He also had size. He was about six-two at the time, and even Little Dru, who wasn’t impressed by much, knew Willie was a player, a potentially great player, because he had competed against him. As Little Dru later put it, “He could handle the ball. He could defend. He could rebound. He could score.” Some were predicting that he might grow as tall as six-seven, so Willie’s potential seemed unlimited. There was no hint of the adversity he would later have to overcome.

  II.

  The year before, in 1997, without Willie, we made our bid to qualify for the twelve-and-under AAU national championships in Salt Lake City. To even think about making the trip, we needed money, so we walked door-to-door to ask for donations, or stood on Akron street corners begging for money like the homeless you see with their signs of desperation. Thanks to a business colleague, Coach Dru also came up with something perfect for us to sell—duct tape.

  We got a few hundred cases for free from a company, since the Shooting Stars were a nonprofit entity. We went door-to-door with thick rolls in hand, and we started to set aside some money in case we qualified. It all depended on the season we had, so Coach Dru added five more players to the nucleus of seven that had competed in Cocoa Beach. There was also radical improvement from Sian. Although he had gotten better during the tournament in Cocoa Beach, getting the ball to him, even for an easy layup, was still a hit-or-miss proposition. Sian’s father, Lee, took his son’s performance personally. He knew he had the tools to be a good player. After that first season, Lee took Sian to the YMCA every Saturday and relentlessly worked with him, refining his coordination, teaching him the game in general. The difference was remarkable. I was better, and so was Little Dru. Vahn Knight continued to be a key player, as was Grant Urbanski.

  Always aware that his experience in basketball was limited, Coach Dru still became determined to run practices differently, not just roll the balls out. He enlisted the help of Lee Cotton and Jarryd Tribble’s father, James, and practices actually became practices. Fundamentals were gone over again and again—shooting drills, passing drills, defensive drills. The coaches started teaching us the art of recognizing a zone defense and how to attack it. Before, we had been kind of run-and-gun, but now, since we were running into so many zone defenses, the coaches put in some offensive plays to combat them. Typically, Coach Dru continued to get his hands on every book about basketball he could find. He also did research on the Web, finding strategies that were effective yet simple enough for us to understand.

  We played about sixty games that summer. All of them were tournaments, and we won about 70 percent of them. Locally we had trouble; a team from Shaker Heights called the Shaker Heat beat us, as well as a team from Columbus. But we won the AAU qualifier to get to Salt Lake City. With the money that we had raised, we were able to fly. It was my first plane ride, and since it was my first plane ride, I might as well confess:

  I cried like there was no tomorrow, scared out of my wits, my ears an impacted mess because of the altitude.

  Salt Lake City was just as intimidating as Cocoa Beach had been the year before. When we registered, the first team we ran into, the Atlanta Celtics, had three kids who were six-five. Here we were with Sian at six-two, me at five-ten, and Little Dru at about four-eight. But Sian had gotten so much better that he might have been the best player on our team. The rest of us played well, defeating a team from Springfield, Missouri, that we had lost to the prior year. We were ultimately beaten by a team from Florida, finishing tenth overall.

  We often hung out at Coach Dru’s house when we weren’t playing basketball, a tangle of bodies in the basement rec room with its off-white paneling, green indoor-outdoor carpeting, and drop-down ceiling. We played such video games as NBA Live, where Sian and I liked the Chicago Bulls and Little Dru liked the Phoenix Suns because of Kevin Johnson. Occasionally we played Madden football, as well as football on our knees on that indoor-outdoor carpeting. Sometimes Coach Dru would come down and couldn’t quite figure who was there and who wasn’t. But he trusted us, and at least he knew where we were, tossed about in sleeping bags or on the old couch. We tore that rec room apart, we were down there so much, because we couldn’t get enough of each other. When we got tired of the rec room, we went outside, where the basketball hoop was attached to the garage. Then we put one of those Little Tikes hoops down the driveway at the other end to play the closest thing we could to full-court basketball.

  III.

  When Willie got dropped off for the first time at Coach Dru’s house, Little Dru was doing homework and didn’t say a word. I was there too, and all I managed was a halfhearted “What’s up.” Little Dru finally introduced himself as he put the basketballs in his dad’s car. We rode to Cleveland for practice, because we were always riding all over the area to find someplace to practice. Coach Dru was berating Little Dru for something he had done at school, so there wasn’t much opportunity for talking. Sian joined and was a little bit more forthcoming. We were still in that feeling-out process anyway, treating each other like a cat behaves when it paws about in a new room, those tentative steps of suspicion.

  Until we got on the court. It was the music we needed, because basketball is a kind of music, jazzy at times and rap at times and balls-to-the-wall heavy metal at times. We were playing not at each other but with each other. Willie could see right away the love we had for the game, just as we saw it in him, and things quickly softened.

  Soon after, he spent the night with me and Sian at my little apartment over in Springhill, and my mom cooked dinner. We started playing the usual video games together, and then things got really quiet, and we both said to Willie, “You pretty cool.” For a kid who had been uprooted from his home, those few words were among the best he’d ever heard. It was a way of giving respect in the way that young kids give respect and also saying that we were all about the same thing: winning and taking care of business on and off the court. All for one and one for all.

  The four of us—Little Dru, Sian, Willie, and I—began to be with each other whenever we could. We shared everything with each other, and it became a kind of unspoken rule—if you’re eating something, everybody gets a piece, pizza, Starbursts, the thin sticks of Twizzlers, it didn’t matter. All for one and one for all.

  The Shooting Stars were good that season following Salt Lake City, very good. We played between sixty and seventy games that year; the Shaker Heat no longer beat us. We were defeating all the teams we played from Ohio, and traveling out of state to play in tournaments against teams from West Virginia and Indiana. We struggled against teams from Indiana, losing two tournaments. We also struggled against the Akron Elite. We managed to beat them in the AAU qualifier for thirteen-year-olds, which is when we went after Willie. He did everything that game, rebounded and shot well and dribbled.

  We drove to Memphis in a passenger van for the national tournament. After finishing ninth in the AAU nationals in Cocoa Beach and tenth in Salt Lake City, we had high expectations, were ready to “make some noise,” as Coach Dru later put it, perhaps win the national championship that we had been thinking about more and more. Almost immediately we discovered a distraction—the pool at the motel. We were in it almost all the time in between games, which tired us out. Plus there were the girls. They were at the pool. We were at the pool, with just enough hair under our arms to discover the hormones of attraction. The flirting between the sexes was inevitable, and as Coach Dru later put it, “The quality time they were spending was at the pool, not the basketball court.”

 
It didn’t help that the first grouping we were placed in that year was loaded, and we finished third. That put us in the classic bracket, a gentle euphemism for the losers’ bracket. We lost focus, played poorly, and ended up falling to the Missouri Skywalkers in the first game to get knocked out of the tournament. Even though it was July Fourth in Memphis, with a fireworks show and spectacular events that a bunch of kids from Akron had never seen and wanted to see, Coach Dru had had enough.

  “We’re packing up and going home,” he told us. “This isn’t what this is about. You all lost, there’s no celebration here. I have given up so much of my time, and so have the rest of the parents, and if you guys aren’t going to take this seriously, then hey, there’s no point.”

  We didn’t say anything. We just piled back into the passenger van and headed back to Akron. We were upset at missing out on all the sights and sounds that beckoned in Memphis. Even Coach Dru’s wife, Carolyn, wasn’t so crazy about just packing up and leaving. He was trying to teach us a lesson, perhaps the most important lesson you can learn, not only in basketball but in life: always perform with excellence. Losses happened, and Coach Dru understood that. It was our attitude that bothered him—lackadaisical, other preoccupations on our minds. He wanted us to understand that distractions had pulled us away from the goal we had set for ourselves, that major national championship. He wanted us to understand that every time you lose focus, you will suffer.

  There were some positives. A solidarity was taking shape, teammate protecting teammate, brother protecting brother. During the tournament we played a game, and afterward, when we lined up to shake hands, a player pushed Little Dru. Of course, Little Dru didn’t budge an inch: he got right up into the player’s face, nose to nose. Willie stepped in and pushed the other player, because he didn’t like one of his teammates being treated like that. Sian’s dad Lee took Willie aside and said, “That’s not how we perform.” Willie explained the situation, how he was watching out for a teammate, and Coach Dru, who had seen what had happened, confirmed the incident. Lee Cotton softened a little bit. He realized—as did we—that Willie, who was so quiet you couldn’t exactly know what he thought or how he felt, was like the rest of us, loyal to a fault.