Shooting Stars

by Lebron James

  Little Dru, despite their initial differences, articulated it best that day: “This is a guy that we can trust. And that’s what you look for in a friend.” As for basketball, there had been a complete turnaround. When Romeo first started playing at Central-Hower, “I didn’t give a shit,” as he later put it. He saw that the seniors had all kinds of girls and all kinds of clothes, and he wanted in on that. But as he began to work harder at St. V, he fell in love with the game, felt crippled without it.

  When we told him that the Fab Four would now be known as the Fab Five, he tried to act like it didn’t mean anything to him. He said, “Thanks guys,” with a corny look on his face. Whatever the reaction, you could tell he was excited. To Romeo, it meant that the Fab Four wasn’t arrogant, but a group of individuals who enjoyed being around one another and lived for each other. It was important to him to become part of the group; no matter what self-image you project, you still want to be part of something. He fully opened up to us, talked about what he had been through as a child, where the selfishness and self-protectiveness had come from. He was initially uncomfortable with the affection we gave each other, but he even got over that. “I felt this was the turning point in his life,” said De Shawnda.

  He also found great inspiration in how Willie handled the news that he wouldn’t be a regular starter senior year, but a role player off the bench. Basketball had just become star-crossed for Willie after the shoulder separation surgery. It put him behind the rest of us, and he could never quite catch up. He became nervous about reinjuring his shoulder. He could never get fully in shape. He simply lost his touch, and it was sad to witness. Sometimes his frustration became almost unbearable, given how good he had been in junior high. His body had disappointed him even further by failing to grow to six-seven, as many had predicted it would. As a senior, he was about the same height as he had been in eighth grade, six-two.

  In junior year, Willie played what he considered to be the worst game of his life—turning it over, fouling a player on a 3-point shot. He felt like he was hurting the team; maybe even more difficult, he no longer felt comfortable on the basketball court. He dressed quickly afterward and hurried to the team bus before the rest of us. Sitting alone on the bus, he began to cry. He’d pulled himself together by the time the rest of us appeared, but I could tell something was wrong. “Are you all right?” I asked him. He said he was, but I knew he was bleeding inside. He couldn’t help but hearken back to junior high school and ask himself the wrenching question: What had happened?

  It was hard for him to see the rest of us thriving on the court while he struggled. It was hard to him to see most of us getting recruiting letters for college for either basketball or football when he was not. But Willie was also expanding, to the degree that basketball did not dominate his life as it once had. He was making great strides in football after he switched positions from receiver to quarterback: he had a splendid arm, although there was always some question as to where the ball was going to land. It was also important to Willie that he be seen by other students at St. V as not just an athlete. He had been on the student council in junior high school, and he decided he wanted to do something similar at St. V. He also wanted to deflect the negative feelings that some students had about us. So he decided to run for junior class president and started preparing a speech. When he gave it in the cafeteria, Sian and Romeo and Little Dru and I sat in the front row and somehow stifled the urge to tease him a little bit. He didn’t look at us, because he knew he would crack up. Willie was sincere about why this office mattered to him and what he could do for the school. He said he didn’t simply want to be considered a jock. He suggested such ideas as a talent show, a 1970s-themed dance, and a sleep-in in the gym for the junior and senior classes. The four of us got to our feet afterward and gave him a standing ovation, and teachers, almost surprised by Willie’s heartfelt words, were impressed.

  When it came time to vote, Willie was pretty sure that Sian and Romeo and Little Dru and I voted more than once, since more ballots were cast than there were students in the junior class (I have “no comment”). That’s “love,” as Willie later put it, and he said he would have done the same had one of us been running for class president. There was controversy, but Willie was ultimately named the winner, the first African American at St. V since the 1970s to be elected president of a class.

  He helped organize the junior prom and the junior-senior prom. He made sure that fund-raisers like the bake sale ran smoothly, and he represented the class to the board of the school on certain issues. He did also help to humanize the basketball team in the eyes of our class-mates. He let other students know that we did want to be part of school life at St. V beyond what we did on the parquet floor.

  A lesser person than Willie would have quit basketball, or transferred to a school where he’d get more playing time, as some were urging him to do. Neither of those options were true to Willie’s character. He still wanted to contribute, whatever that contribution might be, and he would not abandon his brothers.

  He knew he’d been depressed junior year, and he was determined to be a different kind of player senior year, to accept whatever Coach Dru had in mind for him, then do his very best with it. Romeo was deeply affected by Willie’s selflessness. In fact, Willie’s example had a huge influence on Romeo. If Willie could set aside his disappointments and adapt himself to the team’s needs, Romeo believed that maybe he could too. He also admired Willie’s maturity. When Coach Dru told us to get some sleep because we had a game the next day, even though we weren’t tired, it was Willie who would say, “You need to go to sleep so you can be more prepared for the game.” When a player got silly on the court, Willie would get straight in his face and say, “You’re wrong. Stop it.”

  When Romeo became one of the Fab Five, the bond between us only grew stronger. We were with each other from 8:00 a.m., when school started, to 8:00 p.m., when practice ended. Afterward we usually stayed at each other’s houses and apartments. I always wanted companionship, so when other members of the Fab Five came over to my apartment, I tried to basically kidnap them for days. A tradition continued that a booster would bring us several large pizzas after a game, usually followed by a trip to Swensons, where Little Dru once did the eating equivalent of going for the cycle by ordering a double cheeseburger, a milk shake, fries, and a Coney dog, only to be denied by the Coney dog.

  From the very start, senior year was different. We had all sifted through the events of junior year; we had all realized how our heads had gotten the better of us. We all thought about the loss to Roger Bacon, which still stung and humiliated us. We all looked for ways we could change, improve, focus. We vowed to stop fooling around academically. “Everybody was planning on going to college, so it was a must now,” said Sian, whose antics junior year had made him academically ineligible for the first five games of the football season senior year. “It was getting late in the game, so you couldn’t be messing around and messing your grades up.” A rule was instituted in the locker room where we could no longer listen to music out loud.

  Coach Dru had also heard rumors junior year that the Fab Four Plus One had gotten access to a hotel room in the Akron area, invited girls over, and either drank or smoked marijuana. He called us into his office, with those walls as pale as the fog of an early morning.

  He started first with Willie, because he knew Willie could never lie.

  “Willie, man, I’m hearing some crazy stuff. What’s going on? I’m hearing you guys are getting high, trying to put a towel under the door at the hotel thinking that the smell isn’t going outside. Acting foolish.”

  He looked at Willie, and Coach Dru knew all he needed to know.

  “So it is true.”

  Willie admitted that he had been smoking marijuana in the hotel room, and it was true that he wasn’t the only one who had been misbehaving. Little Dru, Sian, and I had smoked as well, and Romeo had been drinking.

  He looked over at his son.

  “I’
ve been honest with you. I told you what drugs have done, how it ruined my early life and my early opportunities in sports.”

  Coach Dru was never going to be a great athlete, but he had lost his direction when he began to party. That’s why he had gone to Ohio University—it was known as a party school—and it wasn’t about sports anymore. He mainly smoked marijuana, but he experimented with all kinds of other drugs. He recognized a few years later that he had lost his direction without sports, and without sports, he almost went off the deep end.

  “My life has been an open book to you,” he said to his son. “I haven’t hidden that from you.”

  Coach Dru could just imagine the publicity.

  “What kind of nonsense is this? Can you imagine the headlines tomorrow? St. V starting five arrested in a hotel. Possession of marijuana. You guys have to be smarter than that.”

  Coach Dru also realized we were still typical teenagers. But he wanted to put an end to such activity for the rest of our high school days at St. V, not only as juniors but also as seniors. From that point forward such carrying-on did end, although Sian was defiant.

  “I’m going to keep smoking.”

  “Sian, you’re making a big mistake.”

  Later on, the repercussions of this stance would help ruin an opportunity unlike any other.

  I ALSO HAD TO MAKE a decision about football senior year. I loved football. The last thing I wanted to do was give it up. It was wrenching to think I might not play. Some smart people, including my mother, told me I was crazy to run the risk of an injury, forfeit the increasing possibility of a professional career in basketball. I had already broken the index finger on my nonshooting hand. But I played football anyway for three years. No matter where my skills were taking me, I did not want my persona at St. V to be defined solely as “LeBron James, basketball player.” Plus, part of high school is doing what you love. I have to say, I wasn’t half bad at it. As a wide receiver on the St. V team that went 10 and 4 junior year and made the playoffs, I gained 1,310 yards on 52 receptions and caught 15 touchdown passes and was all-state in our division. Some scouting lists rated me as the number-one receiver in the country. Sadly I walked away from football senior year; I would dedicate myself fully to basketball.

  Coach Dru rededicated himself as well, after a period of soul-searching in which he weighed whether we were too old—or he was too soft—for him to lead us effectively. In the end, he heeded the advice his son and wife had given him at the kitchen counter. He had been a little bit too tentative junior year, trying to please everyone. Now he showed a newfound decisiveness. He talked with Coach Culp, who he felt had spent the previous season trying to undermine him at times and remembers saying, “You have a choice—either you support me and support the team, or you leave.” Coach Culp doesn’t recall receiving such an ultimatum. He does recollect Coach Dru telling him that they had to be “on the same page” together, and he stayed on as an assistant.

  He listened this time to the coach at the Kent State clinic who had said that one of the first things a new head coach must do is confront the parents. The meeting took place at the school library several weeks before the season. Knowing he could not go through another year like the one before, he bluntly laid out the conditions of discussion: “I will be happy to talk about ways in which your sons can improve their games. But there are three areas in which this conversation immediately ends—playing time, strategy, or another player.”

  The most significant gathering of the season, though, was a team meeting in the locker room before the first practice. It was decorated with a padded floor of gold carpet with the words Fighting Irish imprinted on it. On one wall was a green leprechaun stretching his fist in defiance. On another wall was a plastic board that Coach Dru had put up, bearing the following words in green: Humility, Unity, Discipline , Thankfulness, Servanthood, Integrity, and Passion. There were thirty-three lockers in the room, all of them painted dark green. The looks on our faces were somber and serious, no time for jokes and backslapping. We had done enough of that. The locker room had been remodeled, and I sat at my locker, number 29. Little Dru was at number 22. Romeo was at number 17. Sian was at number 20, and Willie was at number 21. We were there by ourselves without any coaches, and then Willie spoke: “This is our last year together. If anybody says anything about Coach Dru, I’m going at them. I won’t have it.” As for me, I knew at that moment I would have to step up and become a leader, and my words were succinct: “Let’s just go ahead and take care of business and win a national championship.”

  We were angry. We were ashamed of the year before. We were inspired by USA Today’s preseason national rankings, which placed St. V twenty-third in the nation. We viewed that as a slap—and a spur. We were better than that. Now we had to prove it.

  In the effort to fulfill the dream and win the national championship, St. V had a schedule worthy of a Division I college team, with trips to Los Angeles, New Jersey, North Carolina, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh to compete against other top-ranked high schools. Some called the travel excessive, but there was no other way—the caliber of your competition was a key component in how you were ranked.

  Back home, games had already been moved to the University of Akron because of its seating capacity. St. V could now charge $12 a ticket for an assigned seat, netting nearly half a million dollars from the Fab Five the last two years we played. A northern Ohio cable company put ten of our contests on pay-per-view at $7.95 a game. Our game at the Palestra in Philadelphia would draw a sell-out crowd of 8,722, and over 200 media credentials would be issued even though the fabled arena had only 87 press seats. Our game at Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles would draw another sell-out crowd, this one 12,500 strong. Our game at the Greensboro Coliseum would draw more than 15,000, the largest in the basketball-mad high school history of North Carolina. Our game at the Sovereign Bank Arena in Trenton would draw 8,600—yet another sell-out.

  Despite all the travel, we never missed a day of school. When we left town, we played either on weekends or on holidays. Was it insane for a high school basketball team to jet around the country? At the time I thought it was exciting, going to places I never ever thought I would get to see in my life when I was a scared, lonely young boy. Now I believe it was excessive. I believe it was too much, for us and every other high school around the country that followed a schedule similar to ours. So I applaud the rule since passed by the Ohio High School Athletic Association essentially banning travel of more than three hundred miles in any one direction. I can virtually guarantee that when we traveled, there were plenty of promoters who enjoyed a nice payday off of us as high school kids, knowing that our presence would fill arenas.

  The media hype that had surrounded us junior year would only multiply senior year. There would be more autographs. More followers. More reporters, to the degree that Coach Dru closed practices not only to outsiders but to the media. More girls begging to know where we were staying when we played in North Carolina and, Sian, being Sian, yelling out the name of the hotel, so the lobby was packed when we got there. One woman hopped on the team bus and took her shirt off. Two autograph seekers drove two hours from New York to Philadelphia and waited outside the Doubletree Hotel for hours until the team bus arrived just so they could get my autograph. I guess I should have felt flattered, but instead I thought, These guys need to get a life, and I’m not it. A meaningless preseason scrimmage in nearby Brunswick, Ohio, attracted 950 people, the watchful presence of police, and four television stations and three newspapers.

  The Late Show with David Letterman and The Oprah Winfrey Show called and invited me to appear. Live with Regis and Kelly called to see if I would shoot baskets with Regis Philbin himself (I’m pretty sure I could have taken him). One mother called to see if I would attend her son’s bar mitzvah. A steady stream of men came into the school claiming to be my father. Some of the celebrity was flattering. Some of it was funny. But some of it was also growing darker and darker, as more people simply hoped
I would fail, the whole point of the media to build me up to absurd proportions no matter what my age so they then could beat me down. It was early in my life to learn such a lesson, but I learned it.

  When we held that team meeting, we had only a vague idea of the roadblocks and distractions that lay in front of us. But we already had a sense it would not be easy. To remind ourselves, before each practice we touched the words that Coach Dru had put up on the wall. If you weren’t willing to abide by them, Sian said, “Don’t come out.”

  WE OPENED THE SEASON against Wellston High School in the gym at St. V. It was a rare opportunity to truly play at home, and the place was packed. We wanted two games at the St. V gym while school officials would have liked all of them at the Rhodes Arena because of the revenue it generated. Coach Dru took the issue to the board of the school, arguing that we really weren’t getting the high school experience we deserved since we regarded the Rhodes Arena as a neutral court. The board granted the request, but as usual there was an added degree of hoopla: in addition to playing at St. V, it was also our first game televised on cable. In keeping with the take-no-prisoners approach we had promised one another, we led 23-2 at the end of the first quarter, then stretched the lead to 45-10 with about a minute left before halftime. Romeo led all scorers with 15 when he went to the line for a free-throw attempt. The ball went up; the lights went out. Officials had to cancel the game on account of a power failure. Other parts of Akron lost power as well, the rumor rife that the outage had been caused by an overload of wires snaking in every which direction at the St. V gym, which simply wasn’t equipped to handle a live cable event.