Shooting Stars

by Lebron James

  I know how the Hummer looked from afar, just as I know how desperate my mom was to do something special for me to honor my eighteenth birthday. I know that the base price of the vehicle, around $50,000, was far more than our net worth, because we didn’t have any net worth. As the national media jumped on top of one another like excited spectators at a car crash, the equally ravenous Ohio High School Athletic Association scrutinized the loan my mom had gotten with the kind of intensity the IRS reserved for a mobster’s tax return. I cannot tell you how humiliating it was. Not for me, because I have always been able to screen out what needs to be screened out, but for my mother. After an investigation lasting more than two weeks, the loan did check out; it was legally obtained, and there was no hidden third party behind it trying to win my favor, assuming I went straight to the NBA from high school. Newspaper columnists and television commentators all over the country still continued to have a feast—how could a woman living in a rental-assistance apartment with her son qualify for a loan for a Hummer? The reason was obvious: it was only a matter of months, before I even graduated, in fact, that I would have more personal net worth than every other student at St. V combined as the result of a $90 million shoe contract with Nike. Was the vehicle excessive, with its bank of three televisions? Maybe. Probably. Of course it was. So were the BMWs parked in the St. V lot, belonging to fellow students. Nobody ever questioned those.

  It created a perfect situation for the major national media that was now following the team. The Los Angeles Times had crucified us when we had been on the West Coast, then continued to follow our every move on the court against Mater Dei, as if we were the Los Angeles Lakers. The Plain Dealer had a beat reporter who covered the team regularly, then added another one whose only intention, as far as I could tell, was to dredge up dirt. ESPN drew strong ratings for the games they televised (the first one garnered 1.67 million viewers, the most on ESPN2 since the funeral of Dale Earnhardt two years earlier). Meanwhile Bill Walton and Dick Vitale held on-air debates on the dangers of overexposure in high school. But if we were being overexposed, it was because of them, not us.

  It was a crazy situation at times. It was an out-of-hand situation. When St. V played at the Palestra in Philadelphia, then 76ers coach Larry Brown had been there, and so had Allen Iverson. But like I said, I was able to shut everything out, keep my focus on school, still doing my homework out of guilt and knowing if I at least did that, I could get a C in the course. I also focused on the dream that, after eight years, we now could actually touch. Because none of this was pressure. Pressure was being born without a father to a mother who was sixteen. Pressure was watching the house that had belonged to the family get condemned by the city and torn down, leaving my mother and me with no place to live. Pressure was staying up half the night worrying if my mom was okay. Pressure was moving from place to place and from school to school. Hummer Hysteria was no kind of pressure to me.

  As the athletic association investigation dragged on and on, we kept to our schedule. We continued to try to hold on to our number-one ranking in USA Today. Mentor: 92-56, to give us a record of 11 and 0. R. J. Reynolds from North Carolina: 86-56, to give us a record of 12 and 0. Still number one. Still playing well despite all the distractions. Then came the beautiful night that put those distractions into perspective and out of our minds.

  It was known as Senior Night, and it was the moment when we seniors were singled out in front of our home fans. Before the game, each senior would walk out to center court with his closest relatives and be introduced to the crowd. We wanted Senior Night to be held at the gym of St. V. With its yellowed floor and bench-style seats, that was where we felt the most comfortable.

  We liked the old-fashioned scoreboard that simply read “Home” on one side and “Visitors” on the other. We liked the modest cinder block of Coach Dru’s office, where, surrounding a shoddy light switch, he had posted laminated proverbs in little squares. Proverbs 15:1: A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. Proverbs 27:1: Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth. The simplicity of the St. V gym made it feel forgiving. It was the essence of high school basketball. It brought us back to our roots, helped to ground us in the humility that Coach Dru had preached and we as seniors had finally accepted.

  The feeling of family was thick and pungent as each senior was introduced to the jam-packed crowd. Sian was the first member of the Fab Five to walk onto the court, arm in arm with his parents. Little Dru went next with his parents and his nephew, so happy and proud he even smiled. Willie was next with his mother and brother, followed by Romeo with his mother and uncle. Then it was my turn.

  My mom wasn’t there when the ceremony began. She was late for a good reason, handling the necessary paperwork required by the insurance company and the police because of an accident I had had with the Hummer. Luckily I had other family with me. When I walked out on the floor, I was far from alone. On one side of me were Romeo and Willie, on the other Sian and Little Dru. We were one that night. We swayed back and forth in our own unbreakable circle, our unbreakable bond. At this moment, I realized that whatever the Fab Five had accomplished on the court, and might still accomplish, was nothing compared to what we’d accomplished off of it.

  All the members of the Fab Five started that night. We beat Walsh Jesuit 98-46 to push our record to 13 and 0. It meant that we would retain the number-one ranking and still have a shot at the national championship. Senior Night was perfect. Too perfect.

  II.

  On January 25, 2003, I went to a clothing store called Next in Shaker Heights, an upscale suburb of Cleveland. While I was there, a person associated with the store offered me two so-called throwback jerseys. One was of former Baltimore Bullets’ basketball star Wes Unseld, the other of former Chicago Bears’ phenom Gale Sayers. When I was asked to pose for pictures to be displayed in the store, I said yes. I did not ask for the jerseys. I did not demand them in return for the pictures. I accepted them for what they were, as gifts. I did not try to take advantage of my status as a well-known high school basketball player. I did not go into Next thinking to myself, Hey, I’m LeBron James. What can I get out of these guys? I will say this about those jerseys—they were cool. I was glad to have them.

  I thought nothing more about it, until the athletic association learned bits and pieces of what happened as the result of a newspaper story in the Plain Dealer on January 30, and once again went on the attack against me and my team. After an investigation that took exactly one day, the athletic association issued its ruling on January 31: I had violated its bylaws on amateurism by capitalizing on my athletic fame by receiving the gifts, which had been priced at around $850 (although I did not know the value when I received them). The maximum amount of a gift allowed by the athletic association was $100. The investigation had largely been conducted by Clair Muscaro, who’d been athletic association commissioner for the past thirteen years, still with a perfect plume of white hair at seventy. The punishment—I was declared ineligible for the rest of the season. It was one of the worst days of my life.

  Muscaro at one point said he found out about the incident on January 27 and started his investigation then, which would mean it took five days instead of just one. But a sworn affidavit from Muscaro himself said he did not find out until January 30, and that the source of his discovery was the Plain Dealer story. I didn’t even know such a rule could be interpreted the way it was. If I did, would I have been that stupid? Of course not. Would I have put my team in jeopardy like that? Of course not. If I wanted to capitalize on my athletic fame, would I have done it for $850 when I could have done it for millions? Like I said over and over at the time and maintain to this day—they were gifts. Once I heard there were questions over them, I returned them. I did nothing wrong.

  I could not believe how harsh the penalty could be for something so inconsequential. It was clear to me, as to the other members of the Fab Five and to Coach Dru, that the athletic assoc
iation was simply gunning for St. V. It felt we had become too big and were getting far too much exposure, and I was having too many moments on Sports-Center. To us, it seemed that the athletic association, in particular Muscaro, had decided we had to be put in our place. When the loan my mom took out for the Hummer did check out after a lengthy investigation, it seemed obvious that the athletic association and Muscaro went searching for something else. It also seemed obvious that the athletic association had been getting complaints about us from other high schools. Part of it was competitive jealousy. Muscaro himself now acknowledges that St. V was a “very high-profile program and you had a lot of parents and coaches from other schools and kids saying that [this] isn’t right. . . . There may have been some petty jealousy on what they were doing.” But part of it, I believe, was the specter of a predominantly white Catholic school fielding a starting five in basketball that was four-fifths African American. How had we gotten there? Why were we there? Was it simply jealousy, or was there some racism mixed in? You be the judge.

  When I first learned of the suspension, I literally couldn’t think. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had somehow betrayed the other members of the Fab Five. I went to practice, forced to sit on the sidelines, crying the whole time. I knew my team would need me at some point. All I wanted was to be there for them, and now I couldn’t be. Little Dru and Sian and Willie and Romeo—they had gone into the season with the dream of winning a national championship. Now I had potentially ruined it. Which is why the tears poured down. Which is why the emotions ran over me.

  For some reason I am not quite sure of, I began to think of those maps of the United States I had seen in elementary school that never showed Akron. The Fab Five, in our own way, had put Akron on the map, created an excitement perhaps unparalleled in the sports history of the city, an excitement Akron deserved and needed. It was our honor to do that. I couldn’t help but feel that certain parts of Akron and Ohio, beyond the racial issues that had first greeted us, had turned against us. They resented us, maybe even hated us.

  Sian often felt like the Russell Crowe character in Gladiator when he played, going into a den of bloodthirsty spectators instead of a basketball arena—the jealousy of the opposing crowd, the open hostility of whites at many away games whose clear message was “go back where you came from.”

  Little Dru found the atmosphere mystifying at certain venues, fans who were grown adults with mouths as foul as drunken sailors openly attacking a group of teenagers. He knew that many people felt we were overconfident and arrogant and spoiled, and there certainly had been ample evidence of that junior year, but Little Dru never thought it would reach this level of animosity. “We were just guys playing basketball,” he said later. “We never thought it would come to any of that.”

  I realized I had no privacy anymore. The now-infamous Hummer was being filmed by the media in the school parking lot as if it was a stolen vehicle. When I went to the store and received the jerseys as gifts, somebody obviously leaked it to the Plain Dealer, trying to portray what happened in as negative a light as possible. When I went to the movies with my friends, my very presence caused a scene. The attention, at least the positive attention, was intoxicating. I am not going to deny that. But part of me just hungered to be a regular high school kid. I knew I couldn’t be that anymore. Celebrity as an eighteen-year-old? Believe me, it wasn’t worth it.

  I was miserable over the ruling, racked with shame and disappointment and anger, until Coach Dru, wise and humble as always, pointed out a simple truth: “If this is the worst thing that happens to you in your life, you will have lived a pretty good life.” The more I thought about that, the more true it seemed. Looking back on it, I see it as some of the best advice I’ve ever received. It helped put the controversy into perspective, helped to take away my pain and guilt, especially when he also told me this:

  “You know I’m gonna make sure I prepare the team the right way to go out and play the game of basketball while you’re not here.”

  The other members of the Fab Five reacted the same way. As my brother, Little Dru felt hurt that I was being attacked by the athletic association and Commissioner Muscaro. Sian felt angry as well, and also cheated. Romeo was at his outraged best: “This was some bullshit. The OHSAA guy, whatever the fuck his name was, had a hard-on for Bron. He was going to try to find something. He was going to dig deep enough until he got something, and he finally did.”

  Nobody felt sorry for themselves. Nobody gave up on either the season or the dream. In the locker room (where I wasn’t allowed) just before the practice where I broke down in tears, my absence was apparently discussed for maybe a minute. It was followed by the realization that there was still a game to be played. “Look around,” said Coach Dru. “This is who we are. This is who we can trust. We need to embrace each other and be there for one another, and if we do that, then we’ll make it through this.” My brothers heard the whispers that they were no good without me, wouldn’t be able to do a thing without me, would lose without me. To Little Dru, those were just a rallying cry. He saw the upcoming game against McKinley Senior High School, from neighboring Canton, as a perfect occasion to prove just how good a team they could be without me.

  There is no doubt that Little Dru and Romeo, had they gone somewhere else, could have both averaged 25 to 30 points a game. They ceded to me the role of major scorer, for the betterment of the team. They never complained, in part because I dished off to them as much as I could when they were open: I could have gone for 50 every night, but that’s not basketball, at least it’s not basketball the way I had learned it. But they had ego. They had pride. Whenever there was an article in the Akron Beacon Journal or the Plain Dealer, I was almost always in the headline, even when I didn’t play very well, or in the case of the suspension, wasn’t playing at all. Perhaps the most difficult challenge Coach Dru faced all season was getting the team to understand that it wasn’t all about me: the other players had a role, a significant one. One of the nicest letters Coach Dru ever received came from a fellow coach in Ohio who wrote, “I’ve been coaching a lot of years, and what I saw was not a great player but a great team.” The newspaper coverage still left the other players deflated, as if they were nonexistent.

  The McKinley game gave them a chance to show they weren’t just feeding off my success, but were major talents in their own right. In three years of high school, Little Dru had never seen his name in any of the college recruiting books. He was finally mentioned as a senior, and scouts saw him as a growing player who was getting better, but there was still scant recognition even though he’d grown to five-ten. One book said he had the caliber to be a Division III player. He got no letters from colleges and no interest. He only used it as added fuel, much like playing Canton McKinley without me.

  “We weren’t about to just lay down,” was the way Little Dru later put it. Willie also saw it as an opportunity to prove something, and typical of Willie, he felt it was crucial to win so I wouldn’t feel let down. It was always his impulse to think of others first.

  Canton McKinley had the richest athletic tradition of any school in Ohio. Their team was young and gritty, with a record of 10 and 4. They saw opportunity in my absence. They thought they could win; maybe I thought they could too. The Fab Five’s dream pivoted on this game, the irony cruel and bitter: I wouldn’t even be a part of it. It was up to my brothers now.

  III.

  I am nervous. God, I am nervous. It is hard for me to sit still on the sidelines, but my fears are groundless. The General has taken over; his charges are carrying out his commands. Hey, don’t you need me out there? Don’t you even miss me a little? It doesn’t seem like it.

  Little Dru is hot. So is teammate Corey Jones. He hits two quick baskets at the beginning of the first quarter to give St. V a 5-2 lead, then expands it to 12-4 with a 3-pointer. McKinley’s Pat Papacostas answers with a basket to make it 12-6, but Little Dru lets it fly from downtown with that patented balloon, St. V 15-6 with 1:36 le
ft to play in the quarter. I haven’t seen Little Dru in the zone like this since the state championship freshman year when he hit those seven 3s in a row. It’s not simply the way he’s shooting. It’s the way he is running the floor, with complete authority and command. Hey, Little Dru, remember me? I guess not.

  For all my fear, there’s nothing to fear. Once Little Dru hits that 3, the game has the makings of a blowout. I can rest easy now. I can relax.

  But I admit it—there is something pesky about Canton McKinley, like a little kid in a fight who doesn’t know when to give up. They close the lead to 5 with less than a minute left on two quick baskets, 15-10. Willie scores from inside off a crisp bullet from Little Dru: 17-10 St. V. McKinley’s Stan Hall scores the final basket of the period off an offensive rebound: 17-12 St. V.

  It’s a healthy lead after just a quarter of play. Yet I’m getting nervous again; Romeo concerns me because he has had the flu all week and he’s playing like it, flat and lethargic.

  As long as Little Dru continues the way he is, there are no worries. He’s giving a clinic out there, a performance of true beauty. His father has to be proud. Dambrot would be proud. I am proud. McKinley closes to 17-15 to begin the second quarter. Little Dru makes a runner high off the glass on the right side. McKinley scores on a basket by Papacostas to make it 19-17. Little Dru goes to the foul line and makes both free throws.

  With just over 4 minutes left in the period, McKinley scores two baskets to once again close the lead to 2: 23-21 St. V. Little Dru goes the virtual length of the court all the way to the hole: 25-21 St. V. He steals on the next possession and is fouled. He makes a free throw. St. V 26-21. He follows with a 3 from the right side for his fifteenth point. St. V 29-21.

  With less than a minute left, Willie once again gets into the flow, catching an air ball from the corner and converting it into a layup. It expands the lead to 13, 36-23. Papacostas returns with a 3-pointer just before the buzzer to reduce the lead to 10, 36-26 St. V at halftime.