Shooting Stars

by Lebron James

  In the brief filed by the athletic association and Commissioner Muscaro, they opined as much, as if it was pointless for me to continue to play basketball at St. V anyway, given what awaited me. They argued that the suspension would cause me no “irreparable harm,” the standard for granting a temporary restraining order. “[LeBron James’s] prospects with the NBA are well known and will not be adversely affected by the loss of his amateur status. Further, the loss of his amateur status presumably allows [James] to pursue lucrative endorsement contracts, and various other business opportunities.”

  They failed to see the irreparable harm if I could no longer play with my brothers, if I could no longer help them pursue our dream. Irreparable harm had to do with commitment and love and loyalty.

  We had come so far. We had waited so long. We had seen the dream fall from our fingers because of our behavior junior year. And we had regained a grasp on it because of our resolve as seniors. We were close and getting closer, still ranked number one, when Muscaro swooped in with what the brief described as his “Kafkaesque determination” that I was the one who had capitalized on my athletic fame. Huh? What about ESPN, with its boffo ratings? What about Sports Illustrated, with its splashy cover? What about the New York Times? What about the Los Angeles Times? What about the Plain Dealer? What about the Akron Beacon Journal? What about the national networks? What about the local networks? What about the morality of all these different entities in pumping me up to the size of a Thanksgiving Day Parade float? Did it go to my head? Of course it went to my head. I was a teenager.

  From my perspective and the perspective of my lawyer, Muscaro clearly wanted to put an end to what he perceived as the LeBron James train. He thought that the controversy over the Hummer would accomplish that. It didn’t work; four days later Muscaro seized on the jerseys as evidence that I was no longer an amateur athlete but an athlete looking to see what I could obtain. “The circumstances of the public pressures Muscaro must have felt from finding no violation regarding the Hummer purchase must have impacted the undeniable rush to judgment in this instance,” the brief stated. “The two events, separated by a mere four days, obviously impacted Muscaro’s judgment.”

  That’s what I felt. That’s what my lawyer felt. But would a judge find any merit in the facts and arguments we set forth? As wrenching as it was to accept, was my season actually over? Would adults, whatever the motivation, win out?

  On February 5, common pleas judge James R. Williams issued his ruling at a hearing in his Summit County courtroom. The document he issued was a page and a half, minuscule compared to the nearly 100 pages of court documents that had been submitted by both sides. You had to navigate through eleven lines of pure legalese to get to whether I was back in or still out, and there it finally was in black and white: “It clearly appears that plaintiff will suffer immediate and irreparable injury unless a temporary restraining order issues.”

  Then you had to wade through twelve more lines to get to the best part: “LeBron James’ eligibility is restored as of this day, February 5, 2003, and he can begin practicing with the team.”

  There were two setbacks—he ordered that I be ineligible for an additional game, to be chosen by St. V. He also ordered that the forfeit of our game against Buchtel, mandated by the athletic association, be upheld (we had beaten them by 11). It was a decision I could live with. So could my attorney and the other members of the Fab Five and Coach Dru and my mother. She gave a statement in which she expressed the hope that I would ultimately be able to “focus entirely on schoolwork, basketball and friends, just like any other teenager.” Even I knew those days had come and gone.

  At the hearing was a flock of reporters, including ones from USA Today and the New York Times. Courthouse regulars noted that the media interest surrounding it wasn’t the most they’d ever seen. Eleven years earlier, a man in Williams’s courtroom had pleaded guilty to murder and drew a larger crowd.

  His name was Jeffrey Dahmer.

  As for St. V, the executive board of trustees did finally come out in support of me. “Our support of LeBron is because of who he is,” said trustees’ chairman James Burdon. “He’s a member of the school community here. In his years as a student at St. V-M, he has excelled academically and socially, as well as athletically. As part of our school community, he deserves our wholehearted support.” This statement came before Judge Williams’s ruling, which according to my math, meant they took about a week to do something. The words of Chairman Burdon were comforting, but St. V should have been behind me from the very beginning, and it hurt terribly when the school chose another path. Belatedly backing me was just a smoke screen for their initial instinct of wait and see.

  III.

  Coach Dru told people that the worst thing an opponent could do going into a big game was anger me. He said that I liked the “big stage,” and I did like the big stage. I also liked showing fans, whether they loved me or hated me, that nothing could suppress me. The first game after my reinstatement was in Trenton in the Prime Time Shoot-out against Los Angeles-based Westchester High. We were still ranked number one by USA Today, which did not penalize us for the forfeit. Westchester came in ranked seventh in the country by USA Today, and they had a great player in six-eight Trevor Ariza, who went on to UCLA and is now with the Lakers. Scalpers got as much as $2,500 a ticket. There were nearly 140 members of the media there, including ones from Japan and the New Yorker.

  Word travels fast in basketball circles, sometimes inadvertently. When I got suspended, Ariza’s mother was at a Lakers game against the Washington Wizards. She apparently started talking to the wife of someone who was affiliated with the NBA. “This guy LeBron’s suspended. Good,” she reportedly said. “Now my son can finally showcase. He’s the number one player in the country. He’s been better than LeBron all along.” The quotes made their way to Maverick Carter, who had continued to stay close to me after his days at St. V. He of course told me. “Coach Dru, they’ve been talking,” I said to him during the pregame warm-up. Coach Dru knew then and there Westchester was in terrible trouble.

  I had something to prove, and when I have something to prove, I get excited. Just to be able to put on the St. V uniform again, to run out on the court with my teammates, was more than exciting. I felt giddy. Happy. Exhilarated. The game of basketball never seemed fresher. I was revved up when it began. Sometimes in sports that is a great motivator. But sometimes you get too pumped up, too overanxious, too eager to prove, and you lose your flow. Maybe that’s what was happening when Westchester took a quick 6-0 lead. Romeo came back with a basket to make it 6-2, and then I took over. I scored 18 points to give us a 20-14 lead after the first quarter. I had 31 at the half as the lead expanded to 41-24. I finished with a career-high 52, or as many as the entire Westchester team collected in a 78-52 victory that only solidified our number-one ranking.

  It was probably the best game of basketball I had ever played in high school. After the game, I stood in front of the media. “Maybe if something else comes up, I’ll score 52 again,” I said, a reference to the jersey incident. Some thought I was making a little joke, and perhaps I was. Looking back on it, I don’t think so. I had been treated with harsh unfairness, retaliating the best way I knew how—on the basketball court.

  There must have been something in my eyes during the game, because Romeo saw it. “I knew it was going to be ugly for Westchester,” he said later. After the situation with the Hummer had blown up, I had hit for 50 when we played Mentor, then a career high. And Romeo could feel the same cycle repeating itself here. “Every time something bad happens to LeBron, something bad happens to the next team we play.”

  The saga of the jerseys had not only improved my game, it had drawn the Fab Five even closer together. Through our adversities, we had grown to depend on each other even more. We were now used to people hating us, resenting us, praying for our failure, infuriated by the dynasty we had created over the past four years. As much as St. V had given to us and we had gi
ven to them, we still heard rumblings from some in that community that we didn’t belong there, that we weren’t worth the controversy that whipped endlessly around us. Seasoned sports columnists just loaded and fired. I don’t think there was a team in the country—high school, college, or pro—that had endured as much criticism as we did that year. Ever since I had appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, we had all become targets. None of us liked it or had had much experience with it, except maybe for Romeo, who would never lose his natural gift for attracting hatred, and had developed a particular philosophy: “Hey, I’ve been hated my whole life. And it’s not going to stop now, so people can hate, let ’em hate.”

  That atmosphere only fortified us, the sense that at the end of the day, there are really so few you can ever depend on. Trust, such a precious commodity for all of us even when we were kids, became more precious now. As Sian said, “We all we got”—we only had ourselves to fall back on, rely on, lean on. We spent more and more time at each others’ homes, cut off from anyone else. Sometimes we went over to the second-floor apartment of Willie’s mother on the east side. She was now drug free and living in Akron in an apartment complex. Some of us were so tall we had to bend over to get inside. Then she gave us a home-cooked meal that we ravenously soaked up—roast beef, macaroni and cheese, corn bread, yams, greens, ice cream and cake for dessert.

  We became more and more suspicious of anybody trying to break into our circle. Who are you? Why are you? What do you want? Why do you want it? Maybe it was paranoia, but it was reasonable to assume that every move I made was being tracked by someone.

  The best thing about the Fab Five’s bond was how much of it went unspoken. That’s how well we had gotten to know each other. When I got suspended, it wasn’t necessary for Little Dru or Sian or Willie or Romeo to try to console me or say they were sorry. “We knew his heart,” was the way Romeo later put it, and when you know someone’s heart, as we all did, there was no need to articulate what was pumping inside it. My brothers knew I was hurting, and there was no need to talk about the hurt. Just knowing we were there for each other and would always be there for each other was all the therapy we needed. Just trying to screen out the cyclone of frenzy surrounding us and staying focused was what we gave to each other the most. Maybe it sounds funny, but it was almost as if we truly were one, just like we had been on Senior Night when we came out to center court together. If we were going to remain undefeated and win a national championship, it’s the way we would have to be. There was no other choice.

  As for Coach Dru, he grappled with whispers that, despite our success, he wasn’t up to the task. He went on the Internet, reading the comments attributing that success to his white assistant coaches. But he took it in stride. “Those are the kind of things that as an African American you just deal with,” he said later. “It’s just part of what comes with the territory.” He refused to let it interfere.

  With three games left in the season after Westchester, all of our remaining opponents were from Ohio. We beat Zanesville 84-61. We beat Kettering Alter 73-40 in front of a sell-out crowd of 13,409 at the University of Dayton. Per the order issued by Judge Williams, I was ineligible for the last game of the season against Firestone. I had to sit on the sidelines again, and I’m not one to develop insecurity about anything, but as I watched the game unfold, I did begin to think that Little Dru was getting too used to playing without me. He loved being the General, not just the General who distributed the ball to the rest of us and still let us have it when we didn’t obey his orders, but the General who liked to shoot and felt liberated. And shoot he did that night in a 90-43 win, with a career-high 31 points that included six 3-pointers and 24 points in the second quarter alone. It meant that he had averaged 26 points a game in my absence, so I knew I had to get back out there just in time for the playoffs.

  IV.

  In the third game of the playoffs, we faced Central-Hower for the district title. We had played Central-Hower before, but never in a situation like this, with so much at stake and their level of talent so high. They were good, very good, with a record of 22 and 1. They knew they were good, and they resented the fact that we were the team that got all the media focus. They had won the city championship among public schools in Akron.

  In the district semifinals, they had played Buchtel at the Canton Memorial Field House. The St. V team was in the stands that night, watching as six-seven forward Jeremiah Wood and fellow six-six forward DeJuan Dennis hit for a combined 51 points in defeating the Griffins 83-65. They played with confidence and swagger, and the win put them into the district championship against us. That was incentive enough, but Central-Hower’s coach, Dwight Carter, stoked up the volume when he said this to the Akron Beacon Journal about our team:

  “Earlier in the year, I read where they had to schedule games all over the country because playing the city teams was too boring. When we play them, we just don’t represent Central-Hower. We’re playing for every public school in Ohio.”

  Carter then took another swipe, noting that our sneakers came courtesy of outside companies, first Adidas and then Nike:

  “We’re just a little public school. Our kids buy their own shoes.”

  Then came the slap:

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if we beat them.”

  The game had now become war. “It was like the city of Akron versus St. V,” Little Dru observed. No one went into the war with more of a personal grudge than Romeo. He had gone to Central-Hower, and the ending between him and the school had not been pretty. Now more than ever you could literally feel Romeo’s desire to prove himself. Show the Central-Hower players, many of whom he had played with, that he had made the right decision by leaving. Show that he belonged at St. V. Canton Memorial Field House was on fire that day with a sell-out crowd of 5,023 fans in which scalpers got a hundred bucks for a pair of five-dollar tickets. Some were calling this the true state championship.

  THE TEMPO IS WILD at the beginning, both teams beyond full throttle. Turnovers. Steals. Shots falling short. Back and forth. Up and down. Like a DVD in fast-forward. Will anyone score, or is the pace too ramped up? We like being up-tempo, and we’re not going to change. But it’s Central-Hower that scores first, when Jeremiah Wood makes a nice roll-in off his fingertips. We answer back, still with the engine open wide. We even kick it up a notch; then we’re flying, gliding, playing the best basketball of our lives. It’s 22-15 St. V at the end of the first quarter. We put on a 21-5 run in the second quarter. It’s 43-20 at halftime, Central-Hower is dizzy and punch-drunk.

  There is only one sour note in the first half, and that’s Romeo. Eager to perform, he gets into early foul trouble and spends most of the first two quarters on the bench with only 4 points. It’s killing him to just sit there. He’s asking himself, Why now, why of all times, have I gotten into foul trouble? He sits on that bench and looks into the faces of the Central-Hower fans. He can see their glee and he knows what they are thinking—See, he never should have left. See, he’s not as good as he thinks he is. His old friends are there. His ex-girlfriend is there. He looks into the faces of the St. V fans and he can tell that they are sad and disheartened and feeling for him. The whole thing is messing with his head, messing with it badly.

  At halftime Coach Dru comes up to Romeo. He knows he is wounded. He knows how important this game is to him. He tells him, “We’re coming back to you.” He wants the game to be in full blowout mode, and he knows that Romeo can do that for us. “We’re winning without you and so we’re going to blow them out with you, so get ready,” says Coach Dru at halftime.

  Romeo comes back out in the second half. He is playing looser, more freely. He gets a feed for an easy layup for the first basket of the third period. St. V 45-20. He gets a feed from Little Dru and slashes inside to the hoop past Jeremiah Wood. St. V 49-22. He gets another feed from Little Dru to make a thundering dunk. St. V 53-24. He is suddenly in double figures in scoring, with the third quarter still in its infancy. He has sc
ored 6 of the team’s first 10 points in the quarter. None of the Central-Hower fans are looking at him with glee now. Not his old friends. Not his ex-girlfriend.

  Romeo has awakened. He has arisen. He scores 8 more points before the game is through on the way to the 83-56 blowout that Coach Dru was looking for. He finishes his 14-point second-half flourish with another rattling dunk to give him 18 for the game.

  AFTERWARD, COACH DRU told us that our focus was the best he’d seen since we’d played Oak Hill our sophomore year. The victory inspired us only more. Four more wins, and the state championship would be ours. The national championship would be ours. The dream would be ours. First came Tallmadge in the regional semifinal, beaten by 50. Then came Ottawa-Glandorf in the regional finals, beaten by 10. Then came Canton South in the state semifinals in Columbus, beaten by 25. It was down to one.

  15.

  Shooting Stars

  I.

  After all we had been through, the twists on the court we’d prepared for, the twists off the court we never could have prepared for, this final game felt so sweet and so bittersweet. Not just a season but our whole lives together reduced to 32 minutes.

  After this game, no pact could keep the Fab Five together. I knew I would declare for the NBA draft, and the rest of the Fab Five had their own aspirations. The knot that had so tightly bound me to Little Dru and Sian and Willie and Romeo would soon unravel. The expression of our bond on the basketball court, where each of us always knew where the others were, would disappear.