by Lebron James
Carolyn worked where she could to help make ends meet—as the head cashier in a department store, at Kmart, on the line at a soap factory, as a manager at a gas station. She was on welfare on and off, because even when she worked, it wasn’t enough to care for the family. She had to take food stamps. Sometimes he and his siblings ate three hot dogs three times a day, hot dogs and rice for breakfast, hot dogs and beans for lunch, and then anything to disguise the fact that it was a hot dog for dinner. There were other staples in the house such as fried chicken and hamburger, but Romeo and his siblings were desperate for variation. La’Kisha, the oldest, would go to a grocery store and on different occasions steal such items as spaghetti and steak and Stouffer’s lasagna just so they could have something different.
Like me, Romeo went to a variety of schools growing up. He moved constantly, about twenty times. But I had found Little Dru and Sian and Willie. They were my body and soul; they kept me going no matter how tough the times. Romeo never had that, the concept of lasting friendship silly and wasteful in his eyes. “You could be my friend today, and you could be gone tomorrow,” he would put it.
Something happened to Romeo when he was twelve or thirteen that shows how his sense of distrust developed. One summer day, he remembered, his father called and said he was coming to see Romeo. His friends asked him to play hoops or just come over. Romeo said no, because his dad was coming, and he so rarely saw him. His mother warned him not to get his hopes up. She advised him not to wait. But Romeo knew his dad was coming, he just knew it, and he waited all day until finally, at 9:00 p.m., he gave up.
At a young age, Romeo developed a protective shield of self-interest. His uncle had taught him, “You gotta get your own.” Romeo took that lesson to heart even in elementary school, buying four-packs of the snack Jell-O for a dollar and selling them at school for fifty cents a pop to make a tidy profit. He could have cared less whether other kids saw him as a bum trying to hustle some money, or maybe someone who actually had pretty good marketing instincts. He had no use for us, and he made that clear. He knew another kid at St. V already, and as far as he was concerned, that was all the friendship he needed. Nor would he share Twizzlers and Starbursts and pizza and soft drinks with the rest of us, our unspoken rule. That was for idiots.
His mother, Carolyn, thinks she might have contributed to that selfishness. With the older kids pretty much off on their own, according to Carolyn, she became interested in her own life and doing what she wanted, like going out at night and clubbing. She felt guilty about leaving Romeo. She knew she should be spending more time with him, so she began to give him gifts to reduce the guilt. “I just gave him stuff to take my place,” she later said, and Romeo would cling to those possessions and refuse to share them with anyone else. “He just wanted to hold on to [possessions] because I think he thought that’s all he had, just stuff,” said Carolyn. “So he became selfish for a very long time.” She also believes he became angry as a teenager, disappointed by his father, disappointed in her because she wasn’t there for him. As La’Kisha put it, “He was left to his own devices.”
He also wrestled with the difficult transition from a public high school, where he never took a book home and was late to school over fifty days, to a private Catholic school where he was suddenly expected to work—science projects, study hall from three to five before practice, “all sorts of crazy shit,” in Romeo’s words. He actually could be charming when he wanted to; at Central-Hower he used this charm to his advantage, putting his arm around a teacher, asking her how her day was, coming in early and acting like he needed help. At St. V, Romeo said, “that shit didn’t work. There was no point in trying.”
Romeo was smart and could easily handle the academics at St. V if, as his mother said, “he put his mind to it.” But she said he missed a lot of days of school. He just didn’t want to go until he was told he would be placed on academic probation and, in the words of his mother, “not be able to play if he didn’t get it together.” He went to school, doing enough to be eligible.
Then there was the dress code, when he was used to sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt. At first, he begged his mother every day to let him return to public school. Between homework and basketball, Romeo was getting up at seven in the morning and not getting home until eight thirty or nine at night (unless it was a day where Coach Dru picked him up at 6:00 a.m. for a before-school workout). The approach to basketball at St. V was vastly different, and more challenging than what he was used to—so much so that he didn’t even make it through the first practice. But his mother had a no-quit rule; no matter how unpleasant it was, you weren’t allowed to give up. That certainly applied to St. V. He was staying, no matter how much he whined and complained.
To Little Dru, there was something suspect about Romeo’s attitude, a deliberate effort to be different from the rest of the crowd. It seemed to him that Romeo got upset just to get upset, went on rampages because somebody had innocently asked him a question he didn’t appreciate. You could ask him anything, and if he didn’t like it, his response would be, “Who the fuck are you talking to?” He and Little Dru got into it all the time, on the court and off. Little Dru was a yeller on the court: if Romeo did something he didn’t like, he was immediately in his face, his admonitions laced with curse words. Romeo’s role at the beginning wasn’t particularly hard as far as Little Dru saw it: make rebounds on defense, make layups on offense. He had trouble finishing, and if there was anything Little Dru could not stand, it was a teammate missing a layup. Perhaps the greatest puzzlement to Little Dru was that Romeo refused to dunk even though he was six-six and a great athlete.
If Little Dru felt like practice needed to be more intense, he would purposely hit a player with a cheap shot. If a player set up a screen, he wouldn’t go around him but straight through him. One time Romeo hit Little Dru with a cheap screen, and Little Dru answered back by shooting him a little elbow. Romeo started talking trash, warning Little Dru there was going to be trouble if he did it again. Little Dru did it again, this time hitting him in his balls. The play ended. Another one began, and Romeo came down the court and punched Little Dru in the face. Romeo, in turn, thought Little Dru was a “little arrogant dickhead” who talked like he was the head coach. Yo, shut up, you’re the smallest guy out here, Romeo thought to himself.
Even Romeo admitted that he went out of his way to be an asshole, starting something called the Rude Association, whose purpose was to hurt other people’s feelings with cuts and digs. Romeo was an expert at that: he could size you up instantly, had a knack for pointing out the characteristic you most despised about yourself. If you were small and self-conscious about it, he was sure to focus on that. If he spotted someone wearing a hat in the hallways of St. V, he’d announce, “That’s the dumbest fucking hat I’ve ever seen.” If someone said, “What’s up?” he responded, “Screw you.” He said in front of white students, “Too many whites at this school.” Romeo liked to call himself the “angry man.” Willie, who had a kind word for everybody, readily acknowledged that Romeo was an asshole, but at least an equal-opportunity asshole: he was nasty to just about everyone. But Romeo, while he may have been loath to admit it, was also lonely. The Fab Four was tight, and Romeo felt he could never penetrate us. “They don’t like me,” he told his mother. “They don’t want to be my friend.” She said he just had to give it time, but Romeo couldn’t see the light of any improvement.
“I’m by myself,” he answered back.
Romeo’s transfer from a public high school to St. V only intensified resentment from Akron’s black community. Again, a Catholic school was poaching a player who belonged at a public school. Some in the St. V community were also upset by Romeo’s arrival; they saw him as another ringer who would deny playing time to other kids on the team who might not be as good but still deserved to play.
Those deserving kids would be riding the bench more than they might have been in the past because Coach Dambrot was on a personal mission of redemption. He
knew the best way to do it was to win back-to-back state championships at St. V, and if that meant that certain kids never played, then certain kids never played. He paid virtually no notice to them during practice, until they got the message and just quit. Dambrot also spiced up the schedule, reducing the number of local teams and increasing the number of high-profile opponents from out of state. If the Fab Four had a dream of a national championship, I think Dambrot had his own dream of making it back to the college ranks. It might be impossible, given what he had been through, but at the very least he needed to prove that he was a great coach.
II.
We started the 2000-2001 season exactly the way we had ended the one before, by continuing to win. Cape Henry Collegiate was one of Virginia’s top teams, with two players who’d already signed scholarships with Division I schools. We overpowered them 74-38. Next was Wisconsin powerhouse Case High School. We beat them by 52 and put on a 30-6 run in the second quarter. We beat the Redford Huskies from Detroit, one of the ten best teams in the Midwest, 45-40, thanks in large part to a 5-point surge by Romeo in the fourth quarter. For all his huffing and puffing and moaning and groaning, Romeo could come through when he wanted to. Then Cleveland Central Catholic: 78-63. Poor winless Crestview: 74-31. Always gritty Massillon: 84-51. We moved to a a 9-0 record and climbed to number three in some of the national rankings.
Next came the biggest game of our lives, against Oak Hill. If we beat them, we probably would be ranked number one in the country by USA Today, the measurement that everyone uses to determine a national champion in high school basketball, since there is no such thing as a national play-off. If we could run the table the rest of the way, go undefeated, maybe the dream of a national championship for the Fab Four Plus One would be ours as sophomores.
We didn’t beat Oak Hill. We lost 79-78, and of course we could have won had I made that last shot. Coach Dambrot still heaped lavish praise on me that night. “He played a great game,” he told the Akron Beacon Journal. “Everything we did was because of him.” I still cried after that buzzer sounded, those feelings roiling inside me that I had failed my brothers, placed our dream in jeopardy. Karma? Bad luck? Which one was it? For one of the few times in my life, I didn’t want to know.
The tears soon stopped. The Oak Hill game had given us the confidence that we could play with anyone at any time, and we sliced through the rest of the regular season. Rayen from Youngstown, 98-40, where I hit for 20 and Romeo 25. Traditional Catholic school rival Walsh Jesuit—done and gone, 96-37. Then came another local war.
FOR THE FIRST TIME since the Fab Four made its fateful decision not to attend Buchtel, we are playing them. To accommodate the crowd, this game is being played in the James A. Rhodes Arena at the University of Akron with its seating capacity of 5,500. Because bragging rights are in the offing, more than four thousand people have shown up. Buchtel supporters and Akron’s African American community—many of whom still see us as traitors—have come out in droves. As Little Dru says later, it’s like playing with a “bull’s-eye on your back,” the atmosphere is so intense.
It also adds to the sense of challenge and adventure. Little Dru, for one, likes being in hostile territory. We all do, since it makes victory even more marvelous. The only problem here is that Buchtel, despite a relatively mediocre season, is ready to play at the end of January in 2001.
Harvey Sims truly does know what he is doing. In one game his team scored 129 points, but here he puts in a slowdown offense. It takes our rhythm away—we always play up-tempo, a high school version of the “forty minutes from hell” that the Arkansas Razor-backs became famous for when they won the national championship in 1994. We are frustrated. They are squeezing the life out of us. We are bothered and the crowd is feverish as they begin to sense upset.
A 12-2 run by Buchtel closes our lead at halftime to 33-27. The third quarter comes, maybe the worst quarter we ever play together as members of the Fab Four Plus One. We score exactly one basket. Buchtel scores 10, taking the lead with Charlton Keith’s slam dunk at the end of the quarter, 37-36.
Is it possible that we are actually going to lose?
After being stymied without a basket in the middle two quarters, I hit for 2 at the beginning of the fourth. Then Romeo hits for 2 and the lead is back in our hands, 46-40. Buchtel’s Keith responds with a 3-pointer, closing the gap to 46-43. But we have a sense of rhythm now, and even with those bull’s-eyes on our backs, we escape with a 58-50 win.
WE FINISHED WITH A RECORD of 19-1. We buried the competition in both district and regional tournament play to once again advance to the Division III final four at the Value City Arena in Columbus. We had a slight scare in the semifinals against Wayne Trace from Haviland, pulling out a narrow 56-50 victory. In the finals against Miami East from Casstown, a team with a 25-2 record, we started out tight, throwing up air balls. Miami East shot out to a 17-8 first-quarter lead and even led at halftime, 26-25. In the second half we found our extra gear. The final score was 63-53 before 17,612 fans, the largest to ever see a state tournament game in Ohio.
What had seemed unimaginable two years earlier, when we were scared freshmen appearing in front of a coach who made Darth Vader seem affable and easygoing, had now happened: we had won back-to-back state championships. We also finished fifth that year in the USA Today poll. I was not only getting bigger, growing to six-six, but thanks to Dambrot I was getting better, appreciating the intricacies of the game. His constant pounding drove me to do what he hoped I would do: I was learning how to respect the game. Even then, as a sophomore, hype was starting to encircle me. There were quiet rumblings that I would go straight to the NBA from high school, a notion that probably had been promoted the most by then General Manager Jerry Krause and his special assistant B. J. Armstrong of the Chicago Bulls. They had been at the game against Oak Hill to scout DeSagana Diop, who would become the first-round draft pick of the Cleveland Cavaliers straight from the prep school. But as they watched me play, they started scrambling through their programs. Who was this number 23 from some school in Akron called St. Vincent-St. Mary, hitting 3s and making assists and playing the passing lane and, despite the likes of Diop and Carruth and Edelin, being the best player on the floor that day? At first they thought they had discovered a senior gem that nobody else had noticed. They found out instead I was just a sophomore. Their hearts sank a little bit, but it was the first game in which I got major attention at the professional level, particularly after Krause and Armstrong started telling other NBA general managers. Opposing players, just after competing against me in games, asked for my autograph. People were scalping tickets for fifty dollars apiece. Coach Dambrot began to feel a little bit like he was touring with Elton John. Back in Akron, the phone began to ring constantly about me, and he had trouble getting any work done in his regular job as a stockbroker. I was being touted as the best sophomore in the country, until Dambrot dismissed the comment as usual as if he was spitting out chewing tobacco: “Best sophomore in the country, my ass. You don’t even play defense.”
How good could I really be? I had no idea, although I knew I was improving. But Coach Dambrot, despite making sure I didn’t get a big head, did. He had coached three players who had gone on to play in the NBA, and while he wasn’t about to tell me this, he thought I was better than any of them at the age of fourteen. No matter how much he rode me and criticized me, he thought I was perhaps the most coachable player he had ever encountered: he only had to tell me something once and it stuck. Dambrot still had contacts in the college ranks, so he called a former colleague named Ben Braun, then the head coach at the University of California, and invited him to watch me play. Dambrot just wanted to make sure what he was seeing wasn’t some apparition. Braun accepted the invitation and made one comment afterward:
“That kid won’t ever play in college.”
While Romeo and the Fab Four were having enough issues to fill the couch of a family therapist for days on end, Romeo proved he could work with us on the c
ourt with an 11.8 average, even though he didn’t start a single game. Sian, no matter how much his heart belonged to football, was becoming more and more of an enforcer on defense, our resident bully, the basketball equivalent of the bouncer at a hot club, unafraid to set up screens and take charges if it enabled others to score. We even gave him a nickname because it seemed so appropriate—the Brawl Street Bully. Willie, still adapting to the effects of the operation on the separated shoulder that he had originally suffered in football, came off the bench without complaint. Little Dru’s high-arching 3-point balloon kept getting better and better.
We still didn’t know what to do with Romeo, shower him with love or just dump him in the shower. He was still on the outside looking in. He still thought we giggled like a bunch of girls, and we still thought he was the most selfish human being ever created. On the court, we tried to put aside the differences between him and the Fab Four. He had now savored a state championship with us, and I think he shared our desire for something more. At least until we were on the bus on the way back to Akron, when he whined that he was going back to Central-Hower. We knew he never would, but that was our Romeo.
9.
The Invincibles
