by Lebron James
Soon after Coach Dru took the head coach’s job at St. V, he received an anonymous letter warning him not to ever think he could be part of the St. V family. He felt there was an underlying racism to it, and he believed that it represented the beliefs of many people, his outsider status as a black man. He felt constantly scrutinized, to the point where he said the team was not allowed to wear black sweats sent by Adidas because it wasn’t a school color. He also said he got flack for the team wearing black practice uniforms, even though the name “Irish” was in school colors. He was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t—everybody was coming at him from every angle—but we didn’t understand. Or we didn’t care to understand. Because we were still undefeated. We were still invincible.
II.
The Slam Dunk to the Beach tournament in Lewes, Delaware, which took place over the Christmas break in 2001, was the mother of all high school basketball tournaments. The promoter, Bobby Jacobs, paid out over $100,000 in transportation costs, according to the Akron Beacon Journal. He also paid another six figures in hotel and meal expenses to attract thirty-four teams from twelve states, eight of which were ranked in the top twenty-five. In return Jacobs got dozens of major sponsors, including $75,000 from the state of Delaware, so I’m guessing he made a nice profit off of all of us. The economic impact on the Lewes area, a Delaware shore town normally sound asleep in the winter, was said to be about $3.5 million.
Such tournaments were becoming the national rage, making high school basketball feel far more professional than it should have been. Athletic directors and coaches of top-ranked programs spent hours on the phone with tournament organizers discussing promotional fees and expenses. Looking back on those negotiations, I think they were too much. Coaches should be coaching, and athletic directors should be athletic-directing. The interest of promoters was self-interest—their goal was to make money off of us. For all the hype enveloping us, we were still just high school kids.
But since we were still in high school (I actually turned seventeen during the tournament), we didn’t give any thought to these excesses at the time. I just knew that more than thirty of the nation’s top one hundred seniors were slated to be at the tournament, which meant that dozens of college and pro scouts would be there as well. It was a great place for St. V to showcase its skills, particularly if we were going to make our push toward a national championship in the USA Today poll. A strong showing here would probably move us up a couple of notches, energize us after a string of lackluster games in which the Fab Four Plus One all knew we could have played better. Intensity was missing. Our defense was porous. We hadn’t heeded Coach Dru’s warnings. He continually told us that if we kept it up, somebody would come along and smack us down when we weren’t expecting it. But we were also 6 and 0.
Our first game of the tournament was against St. Benedict’s, yet another ugly win. It was clear that we were still seeking our rhythm, just as it was clear that we were still hungering for Coach Dambrot. If we had to practice defense all night, that’s what he would have somehow made us do, because that’s the kind of coach he was. Coach Dru was more benevolent.
And then in our next game of the tournament we played Amityville High School from Long Island.
AMITYVILLE IS NO SLOUCH. They are defending New York State champions in their division and have a bona fide All-American in six-nine senior center Jason Fraser, who will later go on to play at Villanova. They have won 34 out of their last 35 games. But we have won 60 out of our last 61. We start out well, moving to a 9-point lead in the second half. Most of our opponents quit at that point. Amityville refuses to give in, backed by the play of Fraser, who will score 28 points for the night and take in 18 rebounds.
They go up by 5 with just a few minutes left, but pressure-time 3-pointers by Romeo and Little Dru keep St. V in it.
Then a basket by Fraser and a free throw by teammate Max Rose with 15 seconds left gives Amityville a 3-point lead, 82-79. The game is over.
But not yet.
With 5.4 seconds left, I hit a 3-pointer while getting fouled, and convert it into a 4-point play to gain us an 83-82 lead.
A time-out is called by St. V. Coach Dru lays out a strategy for how he wants the team to set up pressure on Amityville on the inbound. We have never done it that way before and we aren’t about to do it now because we think we know better. We don’t let Coach Dru control the huddle, and his son makes it clear we aren’t going to follow his instructions. But our stubbornness backfires. Little Dru gets beaten, and on the inbounds pass Amityville guard A. J. Price breaks into the clear. I foul him, which gives him two free throws. He makes the first.
83-83.
He makes the second.
84-83.
We manage to get the ball down the floor for one final shot.
The ball is fed to me. I split two defenders.
I get the look I want from about twenty-five feet, sweet and open. And here we go again, déjà vu upon déjà vu, slow motion upon slow motion. The shot is clean off the fingertips. The rotation is good. The angle is right. This is it. This is it! An 86-84 win at the buzzer to give me 42 for the game.
C’mon, baby. C’mon! In or out? In or out?
Out.
We have lost. We are no longer invincible.
THE REACTION TO THE PLAY Coach Dru laid out in that final time-out against Amityville was yet another signal of where our heads were at, the eternal cockiness. Coach Dru himself realized he wasn’t coaching as much as he was handling egos. He placed the onus on himself for not controlling the huddle, but he was upset that we had not listened when he was, after all, the head coach. Instead, we had continued to think we knew more about the game than he did and ever would. We still didn’t get it.
We were 7 and 1, with some pretty nice notches on our belt. We were damn good, and we knew we were damn good. When the season resumed, and the quality of competition dipped a little bit, the games seemed almost boring—22 points over the University School, 40 points over defending state champion Franklin from Pennsylvania, 33 over Brush. As Romeo later put it, we expected to win by 25 or 30, so when we won by 25 or 30, what was the big deal? His attitude was still a continued source of aggravation and concern. His transition to St. V had been brutal, and although he was getting closer to us, he wasn’t one of us. He still threatened to return to Central-Hower, and Coach Dru had to talk him out of it: “Why go back there? For what? Why would you leave this?” So Romeo stayed, feeling like the puzzle piece that would never fit in, jammed into a spot that didn’t have the right shape.
By the time Oak Hill came up again, we were 15 and 1. But our behavior was just getting worse and worse. Practices became contentious. There were constant squabbles. We would have scrimmages, and instead of playing, all we would do was argue over calls Coach Dru made—fouls, travels, out-of-bounds, you name it. The arguing would completely disrupt the scrimmage, which would completely disrupt the practice. Other times we just clowned around.
One day Little Dru got mad at me because he thought I was shooting too much. So he started launching 3s of his own. Romeo, exasperated, threatened to leave practice if Little Dru did it one more time. Which of course Little Dru did. Which of course resulted in Romeo leaving practice. Another time, Coach Dru ordered us to run because we weren’t practicing hard enough. We refused, and he had no choice but to cancel practice. Yet another time, Romeo used four obscenities and was ordered to do a hundred push-ups. He did about ninety before he just quit, and another player stepped in to do the rest. Beyond the breakdown in practices, the team just never seemed to come together. We had the Romeo situation with the continued threats to quit. We had another player who had transferred in and never blended. There was also another player who was brilliant during practice but then didn’t compete hard during games.
Coach Dru now had a mutiny on his hands, and he didn’t know how to quell it. He kept telling us we were going to ruin our season. He kicked Romeo out of practice five times. Because he didn’t allow cur
sing, he made us do those push-ups. But given the mouth of Dambrot, we found it almost amusing. Instead of maintaining his position as the head coach, Coach Dru too often sank down to our level and bickered with us. It made no difference: even Willie thought we could win with or without Coach Dru.
More and more, Coach Dru began to find the season unbearable. Most coaches at the high school level got to make mistakes in the anonymity of small gyms before small crowds. As the legend around me and St. V continued to grow, he made his mistakes in front of television cameras in a sold-out college arena. Whatever he did was being dissected by more eyes than most high school coaches ever had to face in their career, much less the first year of their career.
Before the season had started, Coach Dru had gone to a basketball clinic at Kent State University. One of the speakers was a coach who had experience at both the college level and the pro level. He gave out two pieces of advice: first, when you go into a new job, you fire everybody on the existing staff; second, make sure parents know their place. Coach Dru dutifully took notes, but he didn’t listen. He paid for it. Even when St. V did win, Coach Dru barely had any time to enjoy it before a steady stream of parents appeared in the almost cell-like sparseness of his office, with the green cinder block walls and the green radiator and the beat-up brown La-Z-Boy recliner and the desk of institutional gray. They bluntly asked him, “How come my son didn’t get to play?” Parents of seniors seemed particularly incensed: “Isn’t this supposed to be about the seniors? Shouldn’t my kid be getting a shot?” Coach Dru felt that even assistant coach Steve Culp, who had wanted the head job, was making things difficult. When parents approached Culp about playing time for their sons, he said to them, “I don’t know why. I don’t have an answer.” Coach Dru strongly felt that Culp, instead of commenting at all, should have sent the parents directly to him as the head coach.
Coach Dru tried to explain that this wasn’t the Shooting Stars anymore, where some parents, as a result of their son’s association with the team, expected preferential treatment. He tried to dissuade parents from the belief that you could put any four players on the floor with me and still win. But that’s what parents believed, and that’s what they wanted. Even the victory against Germantown Academy, one of the five best teams in the country, had been marred by complaints. He came home that night, and instead of seeing him smiling, Carolyn saw the ashen face of a man who felt he just could not win on any level.
He also knew he had made some mistakes. Right before the season began, he called senior Chad Mraz on his cell phone on the way to work and told him he was going to start as the off guard, but that Little Dru would be the point guard. He wanted to put an end to the controversy up front, and Mraz had missed his entire junior year because of a torn anterior cruciate ligament. He later acknowledged it wasn’t the right thing to do: he just should have let the competition between the two play itself out. Instead he perceived tension between Mraz and Little Dru going into the season, and once again there were the inevitable whispers that Little Dru was getting preferential treatment from his father. Even some parents of sophomores were saying that their sons were as good as Little Dru and should be playing.
Coach Dru and Little Dru, both feeling pressure, continued to butt heads. Players were just waiting for Little Dru to do something wrong. They were all bigger than Little Dru. They were all more athletic. So Little Dru, as usual, still had to find a niche, which he had done all his life. He took charges. He handled the ball well, and he handled the pass. He could shoot. The one thing his father couldn’t tolerate was turnovers, because that’s what separated Little Dru from the other players who wanted his minutes. Little Dru was also human. The second he made a mistake on the court, even fans reacted by groaning, “He shouldn’t be playing.” Which led to his father’s now familiar refrain of perfection:
“You can’t be good. You have to better than all of them. You have to be great.”
“Dad, I’m trying. I can’t make a mistake?”
“No, I’m not accepting mistakes. You can’t make a mistake.” There were times that Little Dru felt so much weight that he cried. There were times when he became hesitant on the court, lost his instincts and his confidence in what he should do because of the fear of doing something wrong. He worried that the fear might become ingrained in him, until he realized that he had to play aggressively—“Let the chips fall where they may,” as he said later.
Since Dambrot was coaching at the University of Akron, he still came around from time to time. He watched us practice, and he could tell that we had lost our killer instinct. He was convinced that it had nothing to do with the coaching change, but with the success we had experienced during our first two years: success of the sort we’d had as a team could actually wear down our unity, as each member started to crave more individual accolades. Dambrot believed he himself could have done no more to prevent that kind of selfishness than Coach Dru could have. We weren’t scared freshmen and sophomores anymore, but juniors with rapidly developing minds of our own. We knew what we were doing. Our record seemed to prove us right, as we continued to rack up easy wins leading up to the Oak Hill game: East Liverpool by 28. Walsh Jesuit by 43. Buchtel by 25. Hoban by 25.
The prospect of another game against Oak Hill pumped the adrenaline. USA Today had ranked them fourth in the country with a 25-and-1 record; we were ranked number five with a 15-and-1 mark. Our 1-point loss to them the year before still stung. After that game, Oak Hill’s coach Steve Smith had dismissed us as a good JV team. I was personally fired up by the impending face-off between me and Carmelo Anthony, who had transferred to Oak Hill from Towson Catholic High School outside Baltimore and would go on to become a star with the NBA’s Denver Nuggets.
At the USA Youth Development Festival in Colorado Springs the summer before, featuring the forty-eight best high school players in the country, I had roomed with Anthony and seen him play. I had come back to Akron and told my teammates about this guy from around Baltimore who was good, really good, the best player I had seen at the festival.
Our game against Oak Hill was on the same day as the NBA All-Star game in Philadelphia that night, and various pro scouts and executives came to the Sovereign Bank Arena in Trenton to watch the tangle between Carmelo and me. I guess we put on the show they wanted—dunks in traffic, steals off the dribble, sweet and soft ten-footers, 3-pointers. Together we combined for 70 points—I had 36 to his 34—and I was named Most Valuable Player. I took the MVP trophy back to apartment 602 of Springhill, which was all the way to the right on the top floor with an unobstructed view of the St. V football stadium, adding it to the collection I’d gathered over the years. I went back to my room decorated with the posters of Jordan and Bryant and Iverson. I didn’t really care about the award, since we’d lost to Oak Hill 72-66.
Granted, Oak Hill not only had Carmelo Anthony, but at least six other players who were Division I recruits at universities like Wake Forest, Miami, and Cincinnati. Maybe that was why the rest of the Fab Four Plus One seemed cold—even a little intimidated. I tried to pick it up offensively, but I just didn’t do enough by myself. It was our second loss in a row to Oak Hill. It was also our second loss of the season. But we could still rationalize it—hey, we’d been beaten by the best. Despite the cold shooting from my teammates, we had played respectably. We had kept it close, pulling to within 3 at one point. So even that loss didn’t change our attitude very much. Then all hell broke loose.
11.
Cover Boy
I.
My notoriety was expanding among those who followed high school basketball. I was getting more and more accolades, but I still thought it was just another magazine cover. I had already been on the front of several, and Sports Illustrated wasn’t widely read in the Springhill apartments. A reporter named Grant Wahl hung with me for a couple of games, and the photo shoot in the St. V locker room felt like it took hours. Not to mention the grief I got when they decided to put mist all over my face so it looked like
I was sweating. They did it over and over, and even Little Dru, as he watched, thought to himself, This is crazy.
The cover was dated February 18, 2002. Looking back on it, the attention it received for someone just a junior in high school is still hard to fathom. In one hand I was holding a basketball that had been given a yellowish tinge so that it looked like a shiny sun. I held my other hand in front of me, fingers spread wide as if I was halting traffic. A green headband clung to my forehead, my lips puffed with arrogance. I liked the image at the time. I was seventeen years old.
In hindsight, I also know they crafted it for their own purposes, a high school basketball-dunking duck-for-cover bad boy, at odds with who I really was. The cover title was “The Chosen One,” and the line beneath it said, “High school junior LeBron James would be an NBA lottery pick right now.” I was mentioned as the next possible heir to Michael Jordan, as a junior, in high school. The article noted that the shoe wars had become increasingly competitive, with Sonny Vaccaro, the famed Adidas rep, hosting my mother in Los Angeles, and the normally reclusive Phil Knight, the cofounder and chairman of Nike, doing the same in Oregon.
In the article, NBA general managers seemed to be competing to see who could come up with the most complimentary quote. They compared me to Magic Johnson, as ridiculous at the time as comparing me to Michael Jordan. Danny Ainge, the former coach of the Phoenix Suns, said if the choice were his, he would make me not simply a lottery pick but the number-one pick of the NBA draft. Ridiculous again, given my age and true stature. The article failed to acknowledge how little high school greatness really means. What if I got hurt? What if I wasn’t tough enough? What if it turned out I really wasn’t good enough? What if?
