by Lebron James
Starting as early as seventh grade, Little Dru started showing up at the JCC on those Sunday nights. Coach Dru at the time did not know anything about what had happened at Central Michigan. Dambrot had been recommended to him by another coach, largely because of his college experience, and Coach Dru was willing to take his son to any clinic where he might learn something. Later on, after Little Dru had been going to the JCC clinic on a regular basis, somebody took his father aside and said of Dambrot, “You need to stay away from that guy,” because of what had occurred. Coach Dru’s basic attitude was that he would find out for himself what Dambrot was really like.
Because Little Dru showed up at the JCC, so did I. I immediately noticed we were just about the only black kids. I also noticed something else. Whenever Dambrot wanted a player to show how a drill should be done, he picked Little Dru. At first I thought it was racist, a white coach always singling out the black kid, some sort of shadow of what had happened at Central Michigan. Then I realized that Little Dru always did it right. That’s why Dambrot singled him out.
At those JCC clinics, I also saw how clearly Dambrot identified with Little Dru. They had a player-coach chemistry that I had never seen before and I don’t think I have ever seen since. I learned that Dambrot himself had once been an exquisite athlete who had suffered under others’ assumptions that he was too small. Like Little Dru, he’d showed that heart could matter more than size. Gritty didn’t do justice to how he played baseball at the University of Akron: in one season alone on the baseball team, he got hit by a pitch eighteen times, willing to do anything to get on base.
Dambrot coached just like Little Dru played—with that classic little man complex. Part of it, I think, had to do with the situation at Central Michigan and Dambrot’s determination to coach again no matter what the level. Part of it also had to do with his own family heritage and his feeling that he had failed in the one aspiration in life he had always harbored, which was to be a great basketball player. His father, Sid, had been a member of the nationally ranked Duquesne teams of the early 1950s, and his uncle Irwin had been the captain of the City College of New York team that won both the NIT and NCAA tournament in 1950. His dad kept scrapbooks of their exploits, and Coach Dambrot looked at them over and over, wanting to continue the family legacy. At five-eight he was a well-regarded high school player in Akron, aggressive and relentless. But he wasn’t good enough to play in college. He transferred his desires in basketball to coaching. So Little Dru and Dambrot both always had something to prove.
The more he saw Little Dru play, the more Dambrot realized that he had someone special on his hands, no matter how tall this kid was or wasn’t. Little Dru’s focused, businesslike approach to the game impressed Dambrot, who knew that his kind of intensity was rare in someone not even in high school yet. You never had to get on Little Dru about working hard, like you did with most kids that age. He also had a skill level better than that of many college players. Perhaps most compelling of all, he just felt he belonged on the court, was as good as anyone else out there. If so many others were turned off by his size, Coach Dambrot could easily see that Little Dru wasn’t the least bit intimidated by it. It was an obstacle that could be overcome the way most obstacles can be overcome—by tenacity, by belief in himself.
Karma entered the scene again. After being rejected for jobs at several local high schools, including his alma mater, something finally popped. In 1998 Dambrot was offered the head coaching job at St. V, a building of low-slung brick that stood as the gateway to the west side of Akron and had that clear-eyed view of the downtown. The area wasn’t the best: just up the street at the corner of Maple and West Market was the frowning beige brick of Dominic’s Automotive Services. Across the street was the almost-blackened stone of St. Vincent Catholic church, and on the other side was a parking lot. But the school had a strong reputation for academics, and Dambrot was no longer consigned to the no-man’s-land of the JCC. He had some place to go, and, in Little Dru, he also had someone who wanted to play for him. “Man, I don’t think this is gonna work,” Little Dru finally said to me of Buchtel. “I don’t think they’re gonna give me a chance. I don’t think they’re gonna give me a chance over there.” I shrugged it off, but in the middle of his eighth-grade year, with the high school basketball season having already begun, Little Dru advanced his plan a step further and told his father he wasn’t going to Buchtel. Coach Dru first tried to adjust to the shock of it, then tried to counsel him out of it. For one thing, he was coaching at Buchtel—how would it look if he couldn’t even deliver his own kid there?
“Dru, come on, what are you talking about? We got this all in place. They’re expecting you guys to come.”
Little Dru said he had made up his mind although he wasn’t quite as adamant as he had been in other situations. “You need to talk to Dru,” his dad said he urged Harvey Sims. “He doesn’t feel like you’re giving him a chance.”
Coach Dru also offered to resign from the Buchtel job. He said he told Coach Sims, “I’m going to get off the bench because I can’t deliver the kids.”
“No, you stay,” Sims reportedly replied. “I’ll talk to Dru, it’s early [in the season]. We’ll work it all out.”
According to Coach Dru, Sims never talked to his son until after the season was over, and nobody among us was committing to Buchtel. All for one and one for all. One thing we did know is that we were bouncing back and forth as eighth-graders, going to Buchtel games, then St. V games, then St. V games, then Buchtel games. It was becoming dizzying.
Harvey Sims didn’t know about the unofficial pact we had made, or if he did, he didn’t think we would actually make good on it. If he lost Little Dru, so be it—he lost Little Dru. I think he figured there was no way LeBron James, a kid from the projects, was going to go to some Catholic school that was nearly all white and enforced a strict dress code. Now I think he knew we were serious, just as I think he also knew that perhaps a mistake had been made in the way Little Dru had been treated at those open gyms. Little Dru went to Arlington Christian Academy, and Harvey Sims went to church there. According to Little Dru, Sims saw him in school and finally asked what the situation was with Buchtel. Harvey Sims said the conversation never took place, but Little Dru remembers it in precise detail. He told Coach Sims that his decision was final: he wasn’t going.
When Little Dru announced to Sian and Willie and me that Buchtel was out and he was going to St. V, we at first looked at him like he was hallucinating. This was a major switch, not just in terms of basketball but in terms of social and racial environment. Buchtel was roughly 97 percent minority, with about 40 percent of its 700-odd students economically disadvantaged, which made its academic achievements all the more impressive. St. V was the opposite, with virtually 100 percent of its roughly 550 students going on to college, and a minority population of about 13 percent. Buchtel had a legendary history of athletics in Akron, including basketball. St. V didn’t have much history in basketball; its best sport was football.
Yes, we had made a pact to stay together so we could win a national championship. The assumption all along had been that we’d be going to Buchtel, and initially Little Dru’s decision threw all of us. Even Little Dru himself seemed taken aback by what he said he had blurted out to Sims. As he later put it, “I just told him that I wasn’t going to Buchtel, I was going to St. V. I don’t know why I told him. I don’t know what got into me.” Afterward, he saw Sian, who went to the same school as he did at the time, and told him what he had said, and the look on Sian’s face articulated it all: You said that?
“It just came out of me,” Little Dru answered.
At first I tried to talk him into coming to Buchtel. But Little Dru was adamant now. We knew we were either going to follow him or go our separate ways, since Willie had always been on the fence a little bit anyway. There were no arguments, but discussions went on for weeks. I thought at one point we really were going to split up. But there were indications that Willie was goi
ng to play on the junior varsity as well if he went to Buchtel. Following in the footsteps of Illya, who had gone to a Catholic school in Chicago, he began to think about St. V. He said he spoke to Coach Dambrot, who told Willie he really wanted him if he chose to come. Willie started leaning toward St. V. Then Sian, who was also slated for the junior varsity at Buchtel, said he saw what happened to his older brother, L.C., there. The coach on the Buchtel junior varsity was always belittling L.C.; after the last game of the season, he apparently did it again with Sian in earshot.
“I’ve had it,” Sian remembered saying. “You’re not gonna do me like you did my brother.” St. V became a possibility for him as well.
Following the lead of Little Dru, we began leaning toward St. V. When he first made the decision, we weren’t angry. We just didn’t agree with him. I wasn’t surprised when Little Dru said he wasn’t going to Buchtel. Him being Little Dru, I wasn’t surprised by anything he said. But our friendship had traveled a long and sacred road. A pact is a pact after all, and brothers are brothers, if you define brothers by love and devotion and loyalty. Little Dru wasn’t acting in selfishness. He just wanted a chance to compete for the varsity, and he felt that his relationship with Coach Dambrot, combined with the fact that St. V only had two players returning with significant playing time the year before, would give him that opportunity. He remembered something Dambrot had told him early in their relationship that had always stayed with him: “I put the best players on the floor. If a freshman is even with a senior, I’m going to play the freshman. I’m going to play the freshman because he’s got four more years left.” Sian and Willie felt they would get a chance to play varsity as well, and I knew I would get my opportunity. So after all the back-and-forth—Buchtel or St. V, Buchtel or St. V—the decision had been made.
Somebody subsequently called the Cottons at home anonymously and told them about the racial incident at Central Michigan. Lee Cotton suspected that the call was coming from someone associated with Buchtel trying to veer us away from St. V, because that’s how intense the war over us had become. Lee Cotton had played basketball against Dambrot in high school, and he found the comment totally uncharacteristic of the Dambrot he’d known. Regardless, it would be a lie to say he wasn’t troubled. It would be a lie to say we all weren’t troubled by what we were hearing, even Little Dru.
Rather than rely on rumors, Debra Cotton ordered the transcripts of the suit that Dambrot had filed against Central Michigan. In it she and her family found the context of how Dambrot said he had used the word. The suit showed that he had not directly called his players “niggers” but said, “You know, we need to have more niggers on our team,” in the context of players who are “tough” and “hard-nosed.” The suit also showed that he had asked his players for permission to use the word before he said it. “Do you mind if I use the N word?” the court records showed, and several players had apparently said it was okay.
Coach Dambrot, aware of the rumors swirling back and forth, encouraged the Cottons to check out what happened. He took Coach Dru aside and told him about the incident. He also had a player from Central Michigan call the Cottons; he confirmed that what Dambrot had said was meant to motivate, not denigrate, however ill-advised it turned out to be. Dambrot himself was still contrite over what happened. He called his actions “dumb” and “unprofessional.” He conceded that the school probably had no choice but to fire him, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that Dambrot had not been wrongfully terminated. There was also some vindication: the appeals court agreed with the lower court finding that Dambrot’s first amendment right to free speech had been violated by Central Michigan and that he be granted attorney fees.
He knew in his heart he was not a racist.
By the summer after our eighth-grade year, our decision was firm: we were going to St. V. We were comfortable with our choice. Until the doors of the school opened that first day, plunging us into a world we knew nothing about.
6.
School Daze
I.
The four of us may have been brothers to one another. But to many in Akron’s black community, we were now traitors who had sold out to the white establishment. They wondered how four talented African American kids like LeBron James and Sian Cotton and Willie McGee and Little Dru Joyce could play at any high school other than Buchtel. Coach Dru felt the brunt of the blame, which only intensified after he left Buchtel to become an assistant at St. V in August 1999, right before our freshman year was about to begin. By that time, we had already decided to attend St. V. But some charged it was all part of a package deal in which Coach Dru was being rewarded for aiming us toward the Catholic school.
Dambrot said that he put Coach Dru on the staff because of what he had done with us on the Shooting Stars. “You’ve done a great job with the kids, and it would be good to have you here,” Dambrot told him. He also figured it would be hard for Coach Dru to simply let go, given the closeness of our relationship with him. Dambrot was right about that, and Coach Dru did have a great rapport with all kids. None of that mattered. He was a marked man, and he went through the agonies of hell, seeing inklings of an Akron far different from the city he thought he knew.
He was coming out of the post office one day when a car stopped at the light. The window rolled down, and a high-ranking official from the Akron public schools angrily called out, “I hear you’re pimping for St. V.” Coach Dru explained as calmly as he could that his son’s decision to attend St. V was his alone, and Coach Dru would honor it as any father should. But the comment bitterly stung because it reflected what many blacks in Akron felt: that Dru Joyce had instigated all this, using his influence over us as a father figure. Never mind that we had made up our own minds alone to attend the same high school together and keep our dream going. The comment also stung because of what he had done with the Shooting Stars. From its humble origins, the Shooting Stars now had eight teams playing in different age groups. The kids on these teams were mostly African American, and kids as young as in fourth grade were getting the chance to play basketball and travel. “To have this guy say this to me after all we were doing for the community—it just hurt,” Coach Dru said later. It was the only comment he received directly, but he could see the looks and sense the whispers as he passed by other people.
Lee Cotton went through a similar ordeal. He was hurt as well; he too had been a loyal part of the Akron youth sports community that helped so many African Americans. He too became an assistant coach under Dambrot, only adding to the enmity. Friends he’d known for years were no longer friends, so great was the hostility; people associated with Buchtel had no qualms about bringing it up. “When you coming home?” one Buchtel coach asked Lee and Sian Cotton whenever he saw them. “When you coming home?”
The anger and resentment, Lee Cotton said later, “was from the black community, from my friends, from people I went to school with, even from people I had played with. Just everybody. Everybody.” People called him and his son “traitors,” and nobody wanted to hear about the mistake Buchtel had made in not giving Little Dru a proper chance. According to Lee Cotton, their feeling was strong and simple: “You’re African American, you should go to Buchtel.” Others warned Lee against St. V and whites in general: “St. V isn’t going to take care of you. White people aren’t going to take care of you.” Another coach at Buchtel called Sian and told him the same thing: “You’re over there with white people. You need to come home. We’ll treat you right.”
The enmity and antagonism may have reached their peak when Sian was playing in an AAU tournament in Cleveland the summer after his ninth-grade year. He was resting during a break when a man asked him, “You play for St. V, right? You’re Sian Cotton.”
“Yes,” Sian said, and the man shot back, “You’re all fucking traitors, and your coach is a pedophile.”
“The whole family was considered outsiders by Akron’s black community,” said Lee Cotton. “We were cast out.
”
For the four of us, the transition to an overwhelmingly white school carried more than enough of its own challenges. Suddenly there was that dress code to worry about. There were all sorts of rules to follow—being on time, no loitering in the hallways, covering up tattoos in school with long-sleeved shirts and wearing white patches during basketball games that looked like poorly applied medical bandages and often fell off. I didn’t know anything about St. V when Little Dru first mentioned it. I didn’t even know where the school was. I didn’t know it was a Catholic school. I had no impression of the academics. We were just there to play basketball together.
I did know there were a lot of whites at St. V, and I had never gone to school with whites before. I had never hung around white people for any length of time in my life, and I just didn’t know how to get along with them. I didn’t know what to say. I also had to wait until the basketball season began in December to show the student body what I was really here for.
Starting high school is intimidating, no matter who you are. Everybody looks smarter. Everybody looks bigger. I wasn’t scared, but I was self-protective. There was no overt racism, but I did have this feeling of discomfort, as if I truly had walked into a separate orbit. I talked to Maverick Carter, the senior captain of the team; he was three years older than I was, but I had known him since I was five, when I had gone to his birthday party because a friend of my mother’s was close to Maverick’s parents. I talked to Little Dru and Sian and Willie, of course. There were a couple of white players on the team I talked to, such as Chad Mraz and John Taylor. If you weren’t on the basketball team, I didn’t talk to you. It was simple as that.
