by Lebron James
Even in the debacle of Memphis, something powerful was forming. Despite our age, the bond between us was built on much more than basketball. We were still kids. We still crossed the line, I most of all. I couldn’t resist picking at the chip on Little Dru’s shoulder or pointing out those funny ears of his. Or I’d make fun of Willie’s silence, or Sian’s wide body and the way he once cut his hair in the shape of a bowl. There were times we almost got into fights. Because that’s what happens when you create a bond with someone that close. You get out of line, you talk too much, say too much, then you patch it up and work it out.
We also knew Coach Dru was right—we had squandered something precious in Memphis, that once-in-a-lifetime ability to be special. We wanted to win a national AAU championship, and we wanted to win it for Akron, put it on the map even if the mapmakers never would. We wanted to achieve our dream. We also realized that this might be our last opportunity, given the possibility we would all be going to different high schools.
When the AAU tournament for fourteen-year-olds and under came around the following summer in Orlando, we knew this probably was it. Either we’d achieve our dream then and there—or we never would.
IV.
The Shooting Stars played almost eighty games that eighth-grade year in 1999. We lost only one tournament, the first one of the season. When it was time for the AAU nationals, we were ready, determined in a way we had never been before. We played well, then lost to the Houston Hoops in pool play, with two team members who would later become first-round NBA draft picks straight out of high school, Ndudi Ebi and Kendrick Perkins. We still moved into the championship bracket by finishing second, which meant we were playing teams with high seeds. Unlike other opponents, we refused to let ourselves be distracted, even by the irresistibility of Orlando. We never went to Walt Disney World. We never went to Universal Studios or Epcot. We didn’t go to the pool where we were staying, because Coach Dru had forbidden us to. We were focused this time: on basketball. We started beating teams we had never defeated before—two teams from Indiana as well as the Missouri Skywalkers, who had embarrassed us so badly the year before. Little Dru, who now was five feet, maybe, realized he had to add another element to his game. When he was younger, he had been able to take the ball to the basket. Because of his height everyone started blocking his shot. He and his dad started working on his jumper. By the time Little Dru was in eighth grade, he was averaging at least three 3-pointers a game. He was also handling the ball well and not turning it over.
Willie was rebounding with toughness and had a nice little jumper from ten to twelve feet. He could guard players out on the wing who were big and athletic and good ball handlers. He shut down the Skywalkers’ best player, who had hurt us the year before, and he actually made a 3-pointer toward the end to cement the victory. We all cringed because we didn’t know what Willie was doing shooting from out there, but he made it, so you couldn’t complain. Sian took on players in the post who were physical and outmuscled them.
Something else was happening that I can’t deny: I was getting better, a lot better. I had grown to about six-two. I could see the court in a way that I had never quite seen it before, more than a mess of pieces that sometimes fit and sometimes did not fit. I liked running the floor. I liked going to the hoop. I liked the competition of moving in for a rebound. Most of all, I loved to pass and dish off to teammates and neutralize the double teams and even triple teams that were becoming more common even then. Because to me that was one of the great challenges of the game, one of its greatest beauties—finding the open man, getting teammates to excel.
I had also learned to dunk in the eighth grade. I had first tried it a couple of months earlier at the middle school I went to, Riedinger, in a teachers-versus-students game. It was during the warm-up, and I just thought, What the heck. During the game I did it again on a breakaway and not over some hapless teacher’s head, where there would be serious academic hell to pay afterward. I wasn’t stupid.
We played the Southern California All-Stars in the final game. They were sponsored by Nike with shoes and bags and warm-ups and three different sets of uniforms. They looked fresh in their red-and-white Nike gear. They looked like a championship team. Up until then, I had felt good about the way the Shooting Stars looked. Now we looked terrible.
The Southern California All-Stars had a center about six-five and a power forward roughly the same height. They had a player who was six-one and could jump out of the gym, and a little guard with lightning speed. They had been the AAU national champions as fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders, so the idea of facing a bunch of kids from Akron must have seemed like instant slaughter to them. Ohio was a football state, not a basketball state. If you wanted basketball, then you better push one state over to Indiana, home of Rick Mount and Damon Bailey and Larry Bird from French Lick and a million other legends who could hit a 3 from anywhere. The Southern California All-Stars were arrogant. They had players like Trevante Nelson and Wesley Washington, who would go on to become major stars in high school. They had swagger and they talked trash, and they liked making fun of us as bumpkins from Hicksville U.S.A. who still had outhouses. “You’re still in it?” was their attitude.
I have since been to Southern California many times. It is a cool and beautiful place, filled with riches and glamour and secret palaces hidden in the pockets of the Hollywood Hills. But right then and there, I hated Southern California. I can tell you something else that I learned about basketball at that moment—don’t ever dismiss another team before you have played them. Because it only revved us up even more, energized us even more, put a chip on our shoulders just like the one Little Dru always carried around as perpetual anchor and burden. These were snot-nosed kids. They might have thought Akron was Hicksville, but they didn’t know Akron, and they didn’t know us. We knew even then the value of brotherhood on the court, that it is a team who wins against great competition, never a single individual, no matter how dominant.
Right before the game, Coach Dru called into the locker room the original seven who had played at Cocoa Beach three years earlier.
“Look, it’s been my dream to win a national championship, just like it’s been yours. But I want you to know that you’ve given me everything that I could ever want from this. So I just want you guys to play and play well and be relaxed and no pressure. You don’t have to win.”
WE ARE PLAYING at the Milk House at Disney’s Wide World of Sports in Orlando. The court has an insignia of Mickey Mouse, and it seems almost appropriate, as the Southern California All-Stars take a 15-point lead early in the game and are treating us like cartoon characters. They are doing whatever they want. We take a shot and miss, and they are fast and laying it up at the other end. Then comes the turning point, when the Shooting Stars collectively say to themselves, No, we’re better than this, and we’re not going to quit. The game starts to reverse itself in the third quarter when we make a steal and convert it into a layup. I break an opponent down, get to the rim, and pour it in.
By the fourth quarter we start cutting into the lead even more, and the crowd fires up, and that only produces more adrenaline. All of a sudden the kids from Akron are making the kids from Southern California in their Nike red and white sweat for every point. Sian is a vacuum on defense, playing like the defensive tackle that he will ultimately become in high school but also getting his share of buckets at the opposite end. Willie is fearless, all blood and guts. Little Dru is the General. I am in the zone. It gets to where we are only down by 5, then 3, then 1.
We have a shot at the lead, with 12 seconds left, and to this day, despite all the wonderful things that have since come my way, despite being a member of the U.S. Olympic team in 2004 and the one in 2008 that won the gold medal and going to the NBA finals in 2007 with the Cleveland Cavaliers and leading them in the play-offs the last two years, I am still haunted by what I did.
I break by my defender and see an opening in the lane, a clear line to the basket. I go tha
t route, but a player from the weak side comes up and blocks the shot when I should have gone for the dunk. We immediately foul, and their player misses the first but makes the second. Coach Dru calls a time-out. We get possession back down by 2, and now there are only 4 seconds left, and I know it is up to me, because either we are going to go down with me shooting or win with me shooting.
I am able to get off one dribble on the inbounds.
Three seconds . . .
Two seconds . . .
One second . . .
I cast off from downtown, beyond the 3-point line, a good thirty-five feet away but still a clear shot. From my vantage point everything goes into that sensory flow of slow motion. It is almost like I am dreaming as I watch the trajectory of the ball and everybody is looking at it and the whole crowd is dead silent. And the ball just hits the rim and goes in. Win the game. Win an AAU national championship. Put Akron on the map. Fulfill not just my goal but the goal of my brothers Little Dru and Sian and Willie.
Until it pops out.
THE SOCAL ALL-STARS respected us after that. They were excited about winning—you could see it in their eyes—but they had no idea it was going to be as competitive as it was. Their coaches conveyed a clear message: I’m glad this is over. Coach Dru was convinced that if the Shooting Stars had had 2 more minutes left, we would have won. We had turned it around. We had momentum in our favor. True to our word, we had not given up when it looked so hopeless at the beginning.
But our dream, which had started out as a tiny kernel in fifth grade, which we had been nurturing for the past four years, was gone. We were off to high school, and Coach Dru thought this was the last time he would ever coach us again.
5.
The Decision
I.
We just couldn’t let it go.
As early as the middle of eighth grade, we had already begun to consider the idea of going to the same high school so we could still play basketball together. It was the only way we felt we always could keep our dream alive. As Little Dru put it, “Let’s go do something big; let’s go do something special.” The loss to the Southern California All-Stars had only confirmed the decision, because as far as we were concerned, a 2-point loss might as well have been a 50-point loss. We did not take a single moment of solace in coming close, in returning to Akron with second-place trophies. Little Dru felt so distraught he didn’t even want to pick his up. We wanted to do the city proud, and second place was exactly that, second place. We wanted another chance to reverse the order of finish. We all still felt unsatisfied, the lost chance that forever gnaws, that final-second shot kissing the rim and then kissing back out still playing in my mind. I had to right that, because no feeling in basketball is worse than ending on a shot missed. Even now, when I practice, I will not leave the floor until I have made that last shot. It’s all part of karma—you finish the same way you want to begin.
At first, the decision of where to go seemed natural and easy. The school of choice for skilled black athletes was Buchtel, a public high school in West Akron. Named after John R. Buchtel, a leading Akron industrialist and philanthropist who had been savvy enough to be an initial backer of Dr. Benjamin Goodrich after he founded his rubber company. The sprawling school had been built of red brick in 1931. Its entrance jutted out like a big box of crackerjacks and had two stories of classrooms on either side. It also had a basketball coach named Harvey Sims, who was considered the Phil Jackson of Akron, hip and smart and sharp and innovative.
Most people assumed that we’d be going to Buchtel. They had been to the Division II state finals in 1997 under Harvey Sims. And Sims had also made Coach Dru an assistant basketball coach there during our eighth-grade year, knowing that he had more influence on us than any other adult in Akron, as an actual father to one of us and a father figure to the rest of us. Sims, to this day, is adamant that he hired Coach Dru because he was a good coach. As Coach Dru tells it, his hiring was all part of “the deal” of getting the four of us to Buchtel. He felt he knew why he was there, and he made no bones about it—to deliver us to Sims.
Buchtel made perfect sense to me. I knew the athletic reputation of the school; every black kid in Akron did. I was already having fantasies about how it would be: the four us marching in as Big Men on Campus who would lead Buchtel to a state and national championship, and best of all, the prettiest girls in the entire city. Coach Dru might have banned us from the motel pool ever since Memphis, but he couldn’t ban us from talking to girls in the school hallways.
During “open gyms” at Buchtel in eighth grade, which were basically informal tryouts, Little Dru sensed that the coaching staff saw no immediate future in him—too short, too scrawny, too little of everything. Buchtel was stacked for the coming year, and there was no way Little Dru would make the varsity. He would have to start on the junior varsity team, methodically work his way up, and Little Dru simply didn’t want to go that route. He wanted a chance to compete for the varsity, and he knew he wouldn’t get it at Buchtel. The coaches there respected his cerebral style of play. They respected his fundamentals. To me at least, they made the mistake that most coaches make, whatever the level in basketball—they valued size over the incessant beating of a hungry heart. They didn’t care that Little Dru would work on his game as long as he had to. They didn’t care about that chip on his shoulder that had become his almost maniacal motivator. They didn’t see the fearlessness behind the quiet exterior. They didn’t see a kid who would not back down from anyone, no matter how outmatched.
The Shooting Stars had a major rivalry with a team from Huntington, West Virginia. They had a point guard who was bigger and stronger than Little Dru, but it didn’t matter. The guard put a hard foul on Little Dru, and the ref didn’t call it, and, Little Dru being Little Dru, we just knew what was going to happen next. When Huntington inbounded, Little Dru fouled the guard as hard as he could. His father pulled him aside and said, “Okay, we’re done with that.” They inbounded again. Little Dru fouled the guard as hard as he could again. They inbounded again. Little Dru fouled the guard as hard as he could again. His dad yanked him off the court and into the locker room. Coach Dru was so angry with his son that one of the assistant coaches had to pull him off. But Little Dru insisted that what he had done was right. “He fouled me hard, and he isn’t getting away with that,” he told his dad. Coach Dru knew, like we all did, that you could talk to Little Dru forever, making logical point after logical point, and he still wouldn’t change.
Little Dru didn’t think that anyone at Buchtel had slighted him. He had great respect for Coach Sims. It was just a feeling he had, a vibe, that it just wasn’t going to be a situation in which he could succeed the way he felt he should, given he was barely five feet tall. He got the sense that I was the only player who mattered to Buchtel. The coaches there also didn’t calculate that Little Dru had found a school with a completely different vibe, and a coach so like him it was eerie.
II.
On Sunday nights over at the Jewish Community Center in West Akron, across the street from a vacant tract of woodland that would later be developed into cream-white office condos, a basketball clinic was held by a once-wunderkind college coach whose career had abruptly ended in disgrace. His name was Keith Dambrot, and in 1991, in his early thirties, he had become the head coach at Central Michigan University, a Division I school. It was virtually unheard of for someone that young to be the head of a Division I program and he was making great progress: his recruiting class in 1992 was ranked among the top fifteen in the country. But during a game in 1993 against Miami University of Ohio, in what he said was an attempt to motivate his players, he had used the word niggers.
According to court records, he said he had used the term “to connote a person who is fearless, mentally strong and tough,” in the same vein that players themselves used the term in referring to each other. At least eight black players on the team subsequently said that Dambrot had always treated them fairly. I believe them, because I got to
know Coach Dambrot as well as anybody, and never did I see him act in any way that was racist. It just wasn’t in the man.
Regardless of how he had intended his remark, he deeply regretted it. His mother had founded the women’s studies program at the University of Akron and had been an inexhaustible champion of equality, so he’d grown up with a strong sense of civil rights. The comment was a lapse of judgment fueled by a competitiveness he could not keep in check. In trying to motivate his team, he had crossed a line.
Scandal erupted once the story broke in the college newspaper. It was soon picked up by the national media, and he was fired in April of 1993. Now, out of coaching more than four years and working as a stockbroker, he was running a Sunday-night clinic at the Jewish Community Center charging a dollar a kid, trying with varying degrees of success to teach them the fundamentals of basketball.
Dambrot took the clinic seriously, like he took everything seriously. He was one of those compact, intense men who never quite learned where to find the middle ground. There was also no coach in the country who had sunk so low so quickly. He was toxic, untouchable, the JCC clinic a noble but almost pathetic way of maintaining some contact with the game he still loved. He had not lost his fire. He still had it in his blood, and he also had the rare experience of having been a Division I college coach. There was still a tremendous amount he could teach, whatever his status.
