by Lebron James
I.
As we went into our junior year, our dream of a national championship was in its fullest bloom.
The schedule was stronger. I was putting on some facial hair now, looking more and more like a man than a still-awkward kid, playing with more and more physicality. I had grown to six-seven, and Little Dru came up close to my knee now at five-seven (just kidding, Little Dru. It was my waist). It wasn’t our growth plates that mattered. It was our continued togetherness off the court that translated to on the court. The four of us had played together for so long that we could virtually get out there blindfolded and know exactly where each of us was. So how could the dream possibly fail?
Coach Dambrot wasn’t coming back.
He is certain he told us directly. But the recollection of Little Dru and Romeo and me is different: we remember finding out through a reporter and feeling devastated. Given our relationship, how much we had done for him, and how much he had done for us, we just assumed, based on our recollections, that we would be the first to know. Little Dru was probably stunned the most, because he and Dambrot were so close. He also felt Dambrot had just used the team to get back into college coaching, revealing a side of him Little Dru had never realized before.
Dambrot had been offered an assistant’s job at the University of Akron, and he was taking it. He had gotten what he wanted, his ticket out of disgrace to possible redemption, not to mention he was bored to tears as a stockbroker. He had been out of college coaching for eight years, and he had paid more than enough for an admittedly terrible mistake. He said later it was one of the hardest decisions he ever made, and even his own son barely spoke to him for several weeks. He knew that we had resurrected a career that had “crashed and burned” because of the Central Michigan bloodbath; he was indebted to us for that. But he felt he had to prove to the outside world that there was such a thing as coming back from adversity, and he believed that the only opportunity to coach in college again would come from Akron. I will not lie about how I felt at the time—scorned and deceived. Another adult had broken a sacred promise and run out on me. Later on, as life made me wiser and I learned how hard it is to get a second chance, I would understand that Dambrot had no choice. When I was sixteen, I felt as if Dambrot had betrayed me and the rest of the Fab Four. He had even betrayed Romeo, who’d let himself feel that Dambrot might help him achieve his potential more than any other coach ever had.
I never wanted to talk to Dambrot again, never wanted to see him again. And when I did see him, I refused to call him “Coach.” Instead, I called him “Mr. Dambrot,” just to show the depths of my resentment.
Sian took the news with angry bitterness. “He used us. That’s exactly what it was. He used us to get back to college. . . . He didn’t have any loyalty. He had no loyalty and he sold us up the river, and there’s no getting around it. And he was dead wrong.”
Little Dru was equally emphatic. “I didn’t care about his personal reasons at all,” he later said. “I just know what he had said to me, that he was going to be there for four years. What came into my mind was ‘Man, you lied to us.’ You just lied.”
Little Dru’s emotions would became even more complicated when rumors started circulating that his father would be taking over as head coach. He was proud of his father, and whatever they had been through, he had always wanted to play for him. But everyone on the team had seen how rocky their relationship was—how hard Coach Dru was on his son, and how hard Little Dru took his father’s pressure and fought back against it. If Coach Dru took the top job, we could only see the hard times between them getting harder.
Like the rest of us, Coach Dru was completely surprised by Dambrot’s departure. He was looking at prospective homes for sale in Akron with his wife, Carolyn, when a sportswriter from the Plain Dealer of Cleveland called and told him.
Later that evening Coach Dambrot himself called and shared his reasons. This did represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get back into college coaching. According to Coach Dru, Dambrot also shared another concern that had contributed to his decision to leave. Given the hype that had begun to build around me, the increasing feeling that I would go straight to the NBA from high school, perhaps even be a possible lottery pick in the draft, Dambrot worried that he could no longer control the situation. The possibility of agents hanging around like gnats. The possibility of shoe companies offering me under-the-table endorsements. The possibility of reporters trying to dig up dirt. (Just for the record, there was no major scandal. I never took a dime from anyone.) Dambrot believed he could not afford the risk of being involved, even indirectly, in any scandal, since his college coaching career already had a major strike against it. He told Coach Dru he had been advised by a college coach he respected that he should leave before anything erupted: “My goal and my dream is to resurrect my college coaching career, and I’ve got to get out of this thing.”
He told Coach Dru something else: “I want you to take over. I’ll support you with the board at St. V, and I’ve already had a couple of preliminary conversations. Those are your kids. You brought them to me. They’ll play hard for you, and I’ll support you in front of the board.”
It had always been Coach Dru’s own goal and dream to become a high school coach. But now that the dream was within reach . . . he wavered. He wasn’t sure if he was ready. He worried that, as much as he had learned from Dambrot, he still didn’t have enough practical experience at the high school level. He worried about the junior-year schedule, which pitted us against eight teams that hovered around the top twenty-five in the country. He worried that the team was moving up from Division III in Ohio to Division II, which would also step up the competition we faced. He worried that he couldn’t prepare us well enough for the steep challenges before us. He worried that, whereas Coach Dambrot had been a new voice to us at St. V, he was an old voice because of all those days we had spent with him on the Shooting Stars, and that familiarity would inevitably breed contempt. He even asked us if we wanted to play for him. He worried about living up to fans’ sky-high expectations for the team (some had already made their reservations in Columbus for the state tournament). He saw the job as a no-win situation: if we took the state championship for the third time in a row, or even won a national championship, it would be because Coach Dambrot had molded us. If we lost, it would be Coach Dru’s fault because he’d squandered our talent through his inexperience.
He worried and he fretted. It was his nature to be careful and methodical, and he expressed those worries and frets to his wife.
“Dru, how can you say no?” Carolyn answered. “This is God honoring all those years that you have been with those guys. All those times you drove up and down the highway.” She was referring to the Shooting Stars’ early days, when Coach Dru would drive Sian and Little Dru and me all over the place just to find us a gym for practice.
Coach Dru knew she was right. He thought about all the sacrifices he had made to give a bunch of kids from Akron a chance to play basketball at the highest conceivable level. When he was offered the head coaching job at St. V, he took it. The selection process took about a week, and during that week word spread that the Fab Four Plus One were going to transfer. Little Dru did not think his father would get the job. He just didn’t think that St. V, a prestigious school that was predominantly white, would make a black man the head coach. Plus his father wasn’t Catholic. He hadn’t come up through the ranks. The Fab Four Plus One didn’t know what was going to happen, and it was Little Dru who suggested we leave and go somewhere else, maybe to Buchtel, maybe to Firestone. There was talk I might go to Oak Hill, play out the season, and afterward challenge the then-existing NBA rules so I could declare for the draft as a high school junior. Once Coach Dru had been selected, the first African American head coach in the history of St. V, there was no way any of us were going anywhere. “This is a dream come true,” Coach Dru told the Akron Beacon Journal when he officially took the job. “It’s something I’ve been working toward si
nce I got into coaching.”
His wife was right: this was God’s way of honoring Coach Dru’s years of dedication and sacrifice. And God was surely leading all of us somewhere.
II.
We had gone 53 and 1 our first two seasons. We had won two state tournaments and had finished our sophomore season ranked in the top ten nationally. Our biggest problem, besides Coach Dambrot’s screaming, had been the ongoing tension with Romeo. He still relished the role of I-don’t-need-anybody, although it was hard to tell if Little Dru was right and it was a facade. Did he want to be a part of us? Did he not want to be a part of us? Did we as members of the Fab Four want him to be a part of us? Did we not want him to be a part of us? The relationship between Little Dru and Romeo had thawed somewhat. They became friendly, but, as Little Dru later put it, “I knew at the end of the day he might just lose his mind and blow up and go crazy.” And getting a Twizzler out of him was still impossible; he’d look at you as if you were trying to rob him.
But Romeo could score in the post and was explosive. He had a quick jumper. He could rebound, and we all knew that he’d be even more of an asset to the team in the coming year. Now we really did have a legitimate shot at the national championship.
We opened against Avon Lake, the result a 41-point blowout, 81-40. I scored 28 points and had 7 rebounds, and have to confess I did have one favorite play, a blocked shot that rocketed out of the gym. But Romeo was the star that night. He scored 16 points in 14 minutes. Sian, playing his patented defense, helped hold Avon Lake to just 5 points in the second quarter to give St. V a 47-17 lead at halftime.
The game set us up for our first major challenge of the season, against Germantown Academy, a private school in suburban Philadelphia that had been ranked fifth in the country by USA Today. Germantown had three Division I signees in the six-six Matt Walsh (Florida), six-seven Lee Melchionni (Duke), and six-eleven Ted Skuchas (Vanderbilt). We were no match for them in size, which is probably why USA Today had ranked us sixth.
Sian, now up to 285 pounds, with amazingly quick feet for someone that big, was just a beast on defense. Along with Romeo and senior forward Jermeny Johnson, the team more than held their own against the Germantown frontcourt of Melchionni and Skuchas and six-six forward Alex Lee. Skuchas fouled out early in the fourth quarter with only 5 points, and Lee had only 3. Melchionni got his points, 19, most of them were from the perimeter. I did my job offensively with 38 points, and Little Dru added 11.
Germantown was tough to the end. They made it a 5-point game, 61-56 with 3:07 left, after Matt Walsh hit two free throws. But we had the advantage of a friendly crowd, since we were playing at the Rhodes Arena in Akron (all of our home games had been moved there to accommodate larger crowds and bring in more revenue to St. V, since it seated 3,900 more fans than the school’s own gym). We also had the advantage of a sweet 3-pointer by senior guard Chad Mraz right after Walsh’s free throws that closed the game and led to a 70-64 win.
There was no letup. The next opponent was Vashon High from St. Louis, ranked seventh in the USA Today poll and a reigning state champion. Its star player, six-four swingman Jimmy McKinney, an early signee at the University of Missouri, had confounded Buchtel the year before with his dunks and jumper.
We played flat in the first half, but more than our flatness signaled danger. We played without emotion, coasting really, putting it on when we felt like it, not putting it on when we felt like it. We weren’t the scrappy underdog anymore. Based on the success of the last two seasons, we had become the team everybody desperately wanted to beat. More and more fans, even on our home turf of Akron, came to watch us lose. Vashon moved out to a 27-19 lead at halftime as we struggled from the floor, and I committed five unforced turnovers.
Coach Dru made adjustments during halftime. I was switched to point guard to get more into the flow of the offense. The rest of the team came out of its tiredness. We turned the ball over only twice. I scored 15 points for a total of 26 for the game, while McKinney fouled out late in the fourth quarter with only 9 points. Little Dru made a 3-pointer with about 3 minutes left, to put us up by 44-39, and that was the end of it, a 49-41 win.
Ho hum. Big deal. St. V beats another nationally ranked opponent. We were that confident. We were that cocky. The sneaker wars over me were also escalating, meaning piles of equipment for everyone. The team got full sponsorship from Adidas, which for the players included travel bags, four or five pairs of shoes, uniforms, two or three warm-up suits, personalized headbands, and winter coats. The shoes I got were custom-made with my number, 23, and the initials “LJ” imprinted on them. It was another reason to feel full of ourselves. But as long as we were winning, what difference did it make? If people wanted to turn us into arrogant victors, let them. If people thought we were too cocky, let them. If people wanted us to lose because we were no longer the bunch of nobodies from Akron, let them.
For Romeo, the favorite part of the game occurred before the start when he walked into the gym. Right away he could tell what kind of team we were playing, the way some opponents turned their heads and would not look you in the eye, the way some others had that starry look as if they were saying, Oh my God that’s them, the way others tried to stare you down and act macho. But none of the poses mattered to Romeo or the rest of us, because we knew what was going to happen right at tip-off.
We truly were invincible. Nobody could beat us.
10.
The Invincibles?
I.
Early that season, we kept winning. But the wins were ugly, “smoke and mirrors,” as Coach Dru called them.
After the close call against Vashon, we easily beat highly touted Louisville Male from Kentucky, 90-69. Then we played Roger Bacon from Cincinnati; they had us, jumping out to a quick 10-point lead. We narrowed it to 60-59 after three quarters, largely because three of their starters got into foul trouble. So we were lucky. The game moved to a 66-66 tie with 3:42 left. Then Little Dru, fearless and confident and inspirational as ever, hit a crucial 3-pointer to give us the lead, 69-66. We finally started forcing some turnovers, which got us to the free throw line. The General came through again. He hit for six free throws in the last minute and seven seconds, to close out a 79-70 victory that was far tighter than the score indicated.
Although we had beaten teams from Ohio by narrower margins, the game still felt like the closest we’d ever come to losing against another team from the state. Many also thought it might be a foretaste of the state championship in March, which meant we had a significant challenge if it came down to that. Unlike our two previous opponents in the state championships, Roger Bacon would not fall easily. But there was plenty of the season left to play, and predicting opponents in a state championship was a fool’s game anyway. Would we get there? It was a given, with the talent we had. But would they? That was their problem.
What the Fab Four Plus One did know was that we had basketball games to play, and we weren’t playing them as well as we could—a 3-point win against Detroit Redford undecided until the final minute, a 7-point victory against St. Benedict’s from Newark, New Jersey, in which we were down by 12 in the first half and needed 15 from Romeo in the second half to pull out the win.
Coach Dru fretted about our defense. He thought it was sloppy, and he was right. But it was more than just defense. Something foul was brewing and building up. Something of our own creation. Coach Dru warned us that we were off-kilter. But we were invincible. We were still ranked fourth in the USA Today poll. And when you are invincible, the last thing you do is listen to good advice.
The Fab Four Plus One respected Coach Dru. We loved him. But the dynamic was different now. As an assistant, he was the coach who consoled you after Dambrot chewed you out over some minor mistake during a drill. Now Coach Dru was Head Coach Dru. His relationship with some of us had started close to seven years ago. We did truly see him as a father figure; that wasn’t necessarily a productive relationship for a coach to have with his players. Dambrot put the fe
ar of God into us. Coach Dru showered a role model’s warmth upon us. It makes for a great man, but it doesn’t necessarily make for a great coach, particularly when you have teenagers who have discovered the ultimate freedom of the driver’s license.
“We were straight up disrespectful to Coach Dru,” Sian would later admit. He was right. We were still stuck on Coach Dambrot. As angry as we were at him for running out on us, we still wanted him as our coach. We were still primed to respond positively to his in-your-face style, to his frequent insistence that our performance was “fucking terrible.” Coach Dru was different. He definitely wasn’t laid-back. But he never used obscenities and wouldn’t tolerate them from us. His approach was more genteel, and we couldn’t get the father-figure image out of our heads. He was the guy who had driven us down to Cocoa Beach for that first AAU national tournament, not the man who could coach St. V to a third straight state championship. He was the man who mentored us during the summers, not the man who could drive us through a schedule of top-ranked opponents that took us as far away as Delaware and Trenton. I saw Coach Dru as a substitute teacher, and everybody who has gone to school knows how it is with substitute teachers—you never do a thing they say except talk back and argue and ignore. We also had an easy escape if we didn’t win another state championship. As Sian put it, “We had already won two state championships, so if we failed, it was his failure, not ours.” Sian and Coach Dru were having other issues as well. To tell the truth, Sian didn’t get along with any of the coaches; even with his own father, Lee, Sian would fall into a surly funk. Only Willie was consistently respectful, because Willie always was able to put things in better perspective than the rest of us.
We never really took into account the pressure Coach Dru endured from all sides. The St. V faithful automatically expected another state championship. Others at St. V were upset that he’d been named head coach because he was considered an outsider. Some in the black community wanted him to lose because the Fab Four’s decision not to attend Buchtel would forever be unforgivable.
