by Lebron James
Little Dru felt largely the same way. He spoke to the three of us, and he spoke to other kids who played basketball, but that was it. Nor did other students outside of basketball really talk to him. He had been in racially mixed schools before, but never in a school that felt like this. When he went to religion class, all he saw was “a bunch of white kids.” The school had students take communion several times a year, and being Protestant, Little Dru wasn’t familiar with the Catholic rite. Instead of kneeling at the appropriate time, he just sat there, and he never went up to receive actual communion. It added to his sense of tentativeness and isolation, and it wasn’t until the end of his sophomore year that he felt comfortable enough to talk to other students who didn’t play basketball. Until then, he was simply known as “that kid who never said anything.”
Little Dru gained a reputation for being snobbish and standoffish. I think it was his innate shyness around new people, combined with the difficulties of becoming at home with the atmosphere of St. V, that made him the way he was. As for Sian, he often thought everybody was against him. He had a kind of militant attitude to begin with. Because he was big he was intimidating, and he was convinced that everybody was staring at him. There was no question—heads turned when he walked into the building.
Willie didn’t feel the culture shock that the rest of us did: the much bigger shock had been leaving Chicago and going to Akron to live with his brother and go to school there. He’d attended predominantly white schools in fourth and fifth grade, so the racial breakdown didn’t bother him. He did worry whether he’d be intelligent enough, particularly in English. He was ultimately classified as learning disabled, which did give him extra time on tests and access to tutors. He still feared that he’d lag behind and be ineligible to play sports, and the blunt truth was that he didn’t want to be at St. V if he couldn’t play basketball. There was a period of adjustment. In the very first period of his very first class at St. V, a teacher stopped him and told him to tie his shoes, and he hoped he wouldn’t get in trouble. There was also the matter of facial hair. It wasn’t allowed at St. V. Willie kept getting caught, and would have to make the embarrassing trip to the headmaster’s office to get the electric razor, then shave in the bathroom. This was too good an opportunity for Little Dru and Sian and me to pass up, to the point where we said he must also be shaving his eyebrows.
Little Dru could have done well in the classroom if he had wanted to. Like the rest of us, he was really only at St. V to play basketball, so basically maintaining the minimum grade point average to be eligible. His two sisters had been honor students, but Little Dru saw school as an unfortunate and obligatory hardship. Sian didn’t want anyone to think he was smart. He was also the one who, over time, chafed the most at the school’s rules.
I was two grade levels behind when I entered St. V, but it was never hard for me academically. I actually liked schoolwork, one of those students who felt awful when it was time to turn in homework and I didn’t have it. I don’t know if it was guilt, or just the idea of being singled out, but I just couldn’t sit there and say no when a teacher asked me if I had done my work.
There was also the guidance of Maverick, who told me which teachers were comfortable with the idea that we were here to play basketball and which teachers thought it was ridiculous and would pounce if it looked like we were getting any special treatment. He also helped me gauge the attitudes of the students, which didn’t take long to figure out. They were either happy with our presence and into the spirit of winning, or they had the attitude, Fuck these kids, why are they here? Coach Dru gave me some simple, effective advice: all I needed to do to adjust was respect other students in the same way that I would expect respect from them.
Overshadowing everything was the fact that some high-echelon figures associated with St. V may not have wanted us there in the first place; their children had come up through the Catholic Youth Organization’s sports programs with the expectation of playing basketball at St. V, and now they might not play at all because we were there. One member of the school’s board of trustees saw us as ringers who did not belong in a place rooted in academics.
The school, which was a socioeconomic mix of rich, poor, and in-between, took great pride in its history. It stretched back over a hundred years to when St. Mary High School first opened in 1896, followed by St. Vincent High School in 1903. In 1972 the two schools had merged, and since then close to 5,000 students had graduated, guided by a host of advanced placement offerings and honors courses as well as a highly regarded fine arts program. Its mission statement was clear: “In the spirit of the Gospel, we are committed to educate the whole person; to lead and to serve, enlightening the mind, developing the body, touching the heart, and inspiring the soul.”
We adopted the dress code, no matter how much it hurt—dress slacks with a belt, shirt with a collar but no name or logo, dress shoes, no facial hair, no braids, no earrings, no visible tattoos, sideburns to ear level only—a preppy look on a kid from the projects. Since I didn’t own any clothing like that, I had to go out and buy clothes, like it was my first day of kindergarten. We were expected to keep up with academic standards and obey the rules, and gradually we became, as best as we could, part of a world that was initially so alien to us. Along the way we had our moments of imperfection.
Sian and Willie and I played football freshman year, which aided in the transition. It forced us to interact with other students. We were beginning to relax a little bit, make our way through the layout of the three-story building and know which classes were where—English, math, science, social studies, religion. There was a surprising comfort to the school, with its green carpeting covering the hallways and green lockers lining the walls in keeping with one of the school colors. We went up and down the stairway that featured two murals—one of a leprechaun that looked a little bit like Abe Lincoln, and the other a classic Celtic cross with the words spirit, tradition, honor, and pride written underneath. We discovered the wide space of the Learning Resource Center, with computers dotting the tables and the warmth of its privacy. We found a place to hang out in the second-floor hallway that we called the Block. We began to come to grips with the academic standards. We understood where basketball stood in the pecking order—the locker room, a narrow series of green lockers barely big enough to hold your shoes, made that point. We walked by the wide windowed case that held the gleaming football trophies as sweet as the sun, in homage to the school’s four state championships. We were getting by.
Until the first basketball practice.
II.
Based on our experience at the Jewish Community Center, I thought I would be in for a cakewalk with Coach Dambrot at St. V. I thought I was lucky to have such a nice coach. I thought it was all going to be very mellow.
Instead, the firm but patient coach who had held those Sunday-night clinics at the JCC had become a madman, now conducting practices with the same rigor as the Division I college coach that still burned inside him. He made it clear that the program would be run exactly like a college program, that our goal was to win and win big. He told us not to take anything he said personally, that he only wanted to make us better. And then he screamed. He demanded. He cussed. If parents made the mistake of attending a practice, he screamed and cussed even more to make sure they knew he didn’t care who was there.
The team’s star was Maverick Carter, a six-four forward. He was a natural leader and a superb basketball player, and I know he tried to keep an eye out for us, our mother hen. But Dambrot wasn’t about to change.
Little Dru and Sian and Willie and I had been dubbed the Fab Four by a reporter, based on a similar moniker that five freshmen from the University of Michigan had earned when they went to the finals of the NCAA tournament in 1992. I am sure Dambrot hated that. It made us sound cocky. He also knew, though, that even as freshmen we could make a significant contribution, with so few players with experience returning from last season.
He was hard on me, almost rut
hless. He believed that perfection was obtainable and would not tolerate mistakes. His eyes were everywhere, never missing anything on the court. During a drill, he would be watching the player handling the ball. You assumed that was the object of his focus. But if you were out of position away from the ball, he was on you. He cracked my game open as if it were worthless, all glitter and no substance, self-absorbed flash and style. I played no defense. I was selfish. I knew fundamentals but snubbed them. I figured at the time he just hated me, thought I was some ghetto-kid hot dog who would never be a team player. I now realize what he was doing, and I’m lucky he was doing it.
Actually, it wasn’t luck. It was karma that put me with a high school coach who had been a Division I college coach and had seen players who went on to play in the NBA. His experience told him, even in those early days of my high school career, that I had a chance—if I learned how to respect the game and played with the warrior mentality. “I was very difficult on LeBron,” he later said, “but in the long run it was good for him. The pressure I felt was that he had a chance to make something great out of his life.”
But I didn’t see it that way at all.
At least not during that first day of practice.
He was an asshole. There’s no other way I can put it. Nonstop screaming for two hours, the kinds of things you would never say to your own children: “Who the hell do you think you guys are, you freshmen! I don’t like what you’re doing! Sprint! Get back on defense! Get off my court!”
After precisely one day of practice, there was near-insurrection. The way I remember it, Little Dru was looking at Dambrot the whole time like they were about to get into a fistfight, and Little Dru wasn’t above fistfighting anyone. I was thinking the same thing, only after practice, just jump him in the parking lot. Sian, still filled with the adrenaline of the football season, seemed ready to tear Dambrot’s head off. Willie was typical Willie on the outside, mature and keeping it in perspective and, hey, sometimes people turn out different than you think, depending on the setting and the circumstance, and you just learn to go with it. There was also a look on Willie’s face that I had never seen before, as if he was trying to believe all those things but was burning inside because he knew what the rest of us knew, which was: Dambrot is insane. All of a sudden Buchtel looked beautiful to us. All of us shared the sickening thought that we had made a terrible mistake.
We were also young. And yes, we were cocky, thought we knew everything about the game of basketball, when the truth was, we didn’t really know much at all. Coach Dru had been a great coach, but he was the first to admit that he didn’t have the experience that Dambrot had, obviously had never been in the college trenches of Division I. We had never been tested this way, pushed this way, by a coach who saw far more potential in us than we did. He never calmed down during practices. Even if you did something right, you did it wrong. If you made a right-hand layup on the left-hand side, he was all over you for not using the left hand. “That was fucking terrible,” he would scoff when we did something he didn’t like. “What the fuck is that?” he would hiss. Or “You’re fucking up.” Or “This sucks.” When he called Sian a coward, even though he was one of the toughest players he had ever seen, it was not just to motivate him during practice but to get him fired up if he was ever called that during a game. He had more patience with Little Dru, who uncharacteristically didn’t say a word in practice the entire year and just tried to watch, observe, listen, and stay out of the maelstrom.
During the games, Dambrot generally let us play, concentrating his brimstone and fire on the referees, pounding on them mercilessly. I actually felt sorry for some of those refs, because I knew firsthand what it was like when Dambrot breathed his fire on you.
III.
With Maverick Carter leading the way and me starting as a freshman and Sian and Little Dru and Willie coming off the bench, something ignited like beautiful fireworks. We coalesced as a team more quickly than anyone thought we could, and games were easy compared to practice. We started with a 76-40 win over Cuyahoga Falls (for the record, I had 15 points and 8 rebounds in my first high school game) and we just didn’t stop. Cleveland Central Catholic. Garfield. Cleveland Benedictine. Detroit Redford. Temple Christian. Mapleton. They all fell, and suddenly we were 7-0.
Then came Central-Hower, an Akron public school with a 6-0 record. The game was a war, as all games against Akron public schools would be because of our decision to attend St. V. We played the game at home. But it felt like an away game, and Maverick Carter had it right when he said, “Everyone in the city, except for our faithful, came here to see us lose.”
We started off down 7-3, then Maverick pulled off a 10-point run to help give us a 24-18 lead at the end of the first quarter that expanded into a 43-30 lead at halftime. We turned weak again at the beginning of the second half, and Central-Hower cut the lead to 43-36. Coach Dambrot called a 20-second time-out and made the point in his own subtle style (he screamed) that we had to play better, seal off the Eagles before they made an extended run. We did just that, winning the game by 22 points, 78-56. Maverick finished with 27 points. I had 21 and 6 rebounds. Yet it was Little Dru, in his small frame and floppy-flop shorts below the knee (a sportswriter for the Akron Beacon Journal said they looked like sweatpants), who attracted the most curiosity with 3 rebounds, an assist, and a steal.
7.
Swish
I.
Little Dru didn’t score any points that day. But he was continuing to develop his shot, and there was no accident in that. He was pushed along by that phenomenal work ethic, which was one of the major reasons Dambrot was relatively patient with him.
After practice he was never the first one to head to the showers. Instead he worked on his jumper. Or challenged Maverick to a shooting contest known as the “W” drill, in which you had to make twelve shots on the move in the fewest attempts possible. Afterward they played one-on-one, even though Maverick was nearly a foot and a half taller than Little Dru. He’d say to Maverick, “Let’s go today. You beat me yesterday, but let’s go today.” And even when he beat Maverick, it wasn’t enough: “You only won once yesterday, I won twice, and I’m going to beat you all three times today.” He did it to improve, and he did it to show Dambrot and the rest of the team that, regardless of his tiny size, he belonged on the court.
He was also pushed by his father. They loved each other madly, just as they irritated each other madly. They had trouble separating the father-son aspect from the coach-player part of their relationship. Little Dru had to work almost doubly hard for anything he got, going back to the days of the AAU and the Shooting Stars, when his father would find other players to try out just to challenge him. “I’m about to bring in a strong, quick guard,” Coach Dru would tell his son, to see how he reacted and how hard he worked. The purpose was twofold: to let other players know that Little Dru’s starting spot wasn’t automatic because his father was the coach, and to make sure he competed every day. “If I got this guy crawling on my back, then I better be at my best every time I’m out there,” Little Dru later said.
His father critiqued him mercilessly at times, even when we almost won the AAU fourteen-and-under championship against the SoCal All-Stars. They watched a tape of the game; Little Dru thought he had done a good job on defense, since his opponent had barely scored. In Coach Dru’s eyes, his son still hadn’t done enough.
“I’m not even getting beaten off the dribble,” he protested.
“But your hands aren’t active,” his dad shot back. “You’re not putting any type of pressure on the ball.”
“Well, what do you want me to do? I’m keeping him in front, and he’s not scoring, he’s not going anywhere.”
Then Little Dru would get defensive and refuse to discuss it anymore. His dad would continue to critique, and Little Dru would find anything else to focus on. He felt so wounded that they couldn’t even watch the entire tape of the game together.
During another game in eighth grade,
Little Dru kept getting stripped of the ball. He readily admitted that he’d stunk up the gym that day. So, for that matter, had the whole team. On the ride home, Coach Dru put most of the responsibility on his son for the loss. “I wasn’t the only one out there,” he protested. “You’re shouldering all the responsibility on me.” Finally he just put his head in his hands; he couldn’t take it anymore. Other times he was the one who was on the offensive, refusing to listen to his father during practice, instead challenging him: “Why are we doing this? Why are we doing that?” It reached the point where Little Dru almost destroyed practice sometimes, his competitiveness making him unable to let anything go, pushing his father to the brink. Even when it came to running. The Shooting Stars were expected to make the runs in a certain amount of time, and Little Dru’s attitude was his attitude: “I’m not making that time.”
Little Dru himself hated losing, even if it was a meaningless scrimmage. In seventh grade, an opponent stole the ball from him and scored the winning point. Since it was just a scrimmage, his other teammates, which included Sian, thought what happened was funny and started laughing. But when they went into the traditional team huddle after the game, Little Dru just reached out and punched Sian in the mouth despite his massive girth and six-three size.
During freshman year at St. V, Coach Dru heard the whispers and so did Little Dru—the only reason he played was due to his father’s intervention. Sometimes they were not just whispers. After a scrimmage, an angry parent came up to Coach Dru and pointedly noted how his son had not played very much. “Honestly, your son is a year or two away from making the varsity,” Coach Dru responded. “I’m telling you the truth.”
The father did not want the truth, followed by the inevitable.
