excerpt fr LeBron James' upcoming book SHOOTING STARS

[evanovitch]

<span style="font-style: italic">LeBron’s Band of Brothers</span>
In an excerpt from his new book, the N.B.A.’s biggest star <span style="font-style: italic">recalls the team that made him: five kids who challenged themselves, one another, and their community, going all the way to the bittersweet final game that would make them National Champions</span>.

By LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger September 2009
Excerpted from Shooting Stars, by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger, to be published this month by the Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.; © 2009 by the authors.

Ibelieve that things happen for a reason. I believe it was Karma that connected me to Coach Dru.


Dru Joyce graduated from Ohio University in 1978. He got a sales job at Hunt-Wesson Foods, in Pittsburgh, and after a few years was promoted to senior sales rep for Cleveland and the eastern suburbs. By all rights Coach Dru and his family should have settled in the Cleveland area. Had he done so, I never would have met him, and without meeting him, who knows what would have happened to me. A district manager at Hunt-Wesson suggested he settle in Akron, which was a little cheaper than Cleveland, and Coach Dru took his advice. He moved there with his family in March of 1984, thinking it was temporary. But there was something about Akron he liked—the size of it, the feel of it, even the smell of it: although Goodyear and Firestone had closed their tire plants in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a few companies were still making rubber products back then, and every afternoon you could catch the sharp aroma. So he stayed, eventually moving to a house on Greenwood Avenue in West Akron. And because he stayed my life changed.

In January 1985, Coach Dru and his wife had their third child, a son, Dru Joyce III. Coach Dru didn’t waste any time getting Little Dru involved in sports. On Saturday mornings Coach Dru played several hours of pickup basketball at the Elizabeth Park Community Center with some men from his church. Little Dru tagged along, and even though he was only four or five, he began picking up the nuances of the game just by watching. For most of the time we played together he was a puny little pip-squeak. He had big ears that stuck out like gigantic stereo speakers. He was so quiet sometimes I thought he wanted to be one of those monks who take a vow of silence.

But he also had that little man’s chip on his shoulder. It motivated him to be great because there were so many who said he was too small to ever be great in basketball, ever be much of anything, just a little kid coming along for the ride. He was inexhaustible. In sixth grade, when I was virtually living with the Joyces, I played one-on-one with Little Dru. I always had to quit because he refused to give up even though I was beating him. “I’m not going to stop—you got to keep playing.” It was the same with his father. They played in the driveway, where there was a basketball hoop attached to the garage. Coach Dru, trying to toughen his son up a little bit, won. But Little Dru wouldn’t have it. He made his father stay out there until finally Coach Dru just gave him a victory so he could go inside.

Because of his combination of combativeness and perfectionism, we eventually started to think of Little Dru as “the General.” And whether it was rec-league basketball or traveling-team basketball or whatever kind of basketball, there was always one constant: if you screwed up on the court, Little Dru was going to march up to you and let you know. Like I said, our General. And the first piece of the dream, along with his father.

Since Coach Dru lived in Akron he knew where to find raw talent. He knew about the Ed Davis Community Center, near the Akron Zoo, and the Summit Lake Community Center. Even in his own church, between the prayers and the hymns and the sermon, he would scan the pews, looking for a kid who had some size on him and might be a defensive force.

I first came into his life through the Summit Lake rec center. He saw me play basketball, and he must have observed something that enticed him. He found out where we lived, over in the projects in Elizabeth Park, and talked to my mom, Gloria, about my joining an Amateur Athletic Union travel team called the Shooting Stars.

Coach Dru didn’t know me at all, but I’m pretty sure he knew that my life so far had been a crazy quilt of moves, until we finally landed in the grim red brick of Elizabeth Park. Up until then, we had been constantly on the go, and there were so many different schools that I lost count.

Coach Dru’s circumstances were slightly different from mine. He did have two parents, but he knew the meaning of being poor. Just as he also knew that sports, under the right conditions, could save a kid’s life. He picked up right away that for all I had been through I wasn’t hardened or bitter. He liked the fact that I was friendly and curious about the world. And he knew in his heart that, as an only child, I was desperate to be around other kids. I also liked the idea of joining the Shooting Stars because I’d heard they traveled to places as exotic as Cleveland, where I had never been before, even though it was only about half an hour away.

So, after my mom’s initial skepticism (she even insisted on going to the first practice to make sure Coach Dru was legitimate), she let me join the team.

<span style="font-style: italic">Scouting in the House of the Lord</span>
Coach Dru was still on the lookout. You need at least five players to make up a basketball team, and the next piece of the dream came from church. The Joyce family went to the same church as the Cotton family, called the House of the Lord. Coach Dru and Lee Cotton had been Sunday-school teachers together. Coach Dru knew that Lee Cotton had been a great high-school basketball player in Akron, and when he saw Lee’s son Sian in church, there was something he liked about him right away—his size. He knew Sian was a good baseball player, which doesn’t automatically translate into skill in basketball, but he also realized he could take up a lot of essential space on the court. And Sian had a personality to match his size, funny on the outside but fearless on the inside, a natural-born intimidator. So he became the third piece of the dream.

Sian came from a sturdy family. He lived with his mom, dad, and older brother, L.C., over in Goodyear Heights, a tidy section of two-story homes built for workers from the various Goodyear plants that had once dotted the city. His dad had been a longtime courier for Federal Express, and his mom stayed home to take care of the boys.

But basketball was simply alien to Sian. He couldn’t make a layup to save his life, and Little Dru’s exasperation would become palpable: “I’m passing you the ball, and you can’t score,” he said. “That’s a problem.” By his own admission, Sian wasn’t very good. I would never say this about Sian, because I love him too much, but he has a pretty good assessment of how he played that first year we were all together:

“I was kind of a bum.”

Little Dru knew more about the game than anyone at the time, including his dad. Even when he was 9 and 10, you could see those fundamentals taking hold. I, on the other hand, had no use for fundamentals, not back then. And I could tell that it drove Little Dru right to the edge. The first time he saw me play, it was like I was trying to make a highlight reel, behind-the-back passes and all sorts of other nonsense. And I could feel Little Dru’s anger boiling up even then.

So Coach Dru had a long journey ahead. But he also believed he could take the raw talent that was there and, maybe, mold it into something. Because his only experience in basketball had been as a pickup player, he willed himself to become a coach. He bought every book and tape on basketball he could find: his favorite was The John Wooden Pyramid of Success. Little Dru was going to camps and clinics, and Coach Dru went with him whenever he could, bending the ear of any coach he could find to learn more about the game.

Little Dru in turn had that streak of perfectionism—he insisted on doing the drills until he had them exactly right—so Coach Dru would work with him at home. As for me, I was a good natural athlete. And Sian was, well, Sian, big and strong and able to play defense.

We started out in fifth grade, in 1995, in a red-brick building on Maple Street that housed the Salvation Army. The gym was tiny, about 20 feet shorter than a regulation court. The floor was made of linoleum; playing on it was like dribbling in your kitchen. But that was the best we could find. A few more boys were added so we would have enough players, and we played well. In fact, the Shooting Stars qualified for the national A.A.U. tournament in Cocoa Beach, Florida, that summer for kids 11 and under.


At first Coach Dru didn’t want to go. Getting to Florida was expensive, and there was no way we could fly there. But one of the dads, Kirk Lindeman, just couldn’t let go of the opportunity that lay before us. One day, he turned to Coach Dru and said, “Let’s do this. They may never qualify for a national championship again in their life.”

Somehow, we finished an astounding ninth out of the 64 teams there, even though we had barely played together. The three of us—Little Dru and Sian and me—were starting to develop a chemistry even then. And not just when we played basketball. We were beginning to gravitate toward one another off the court, partly due to that interminable 1,187-mile ride from Akron to Cocoa Beach. After close to 20 hours in a minivan, you are going to know everything about your car-mates whether you like it or not.

After the tournament, Coach Dru said something I will never forget. The championship game had ended and they were giving out the trophies, and there was ours for ninth place, along with an equipment bag with the A.A.U. insignia on it. Our hopes going down there had not been very high, so we were excited and exploding with confidence. We were packing up our gear to return to Akron, preparing for the ride home, when Coach Dru just looked at his son and Sian and me and said, “I don’t know what it is, but you guys are going to do something special.”

And even though we were still young, we somehow knew it, too. When we got back to Akron, there was no real buzz; we were just a bunch of kids who had done well in a tournament. But the seeds of the dream were already forming. It began to swirl around in our young minds that the following summer we could do better than ninth place, maybe even achieve the miracle of winning a major national championship one day.

But we still needed more pieces.

From Darkness to Light
Willie McGee was all resilience. Probably the reason for that was the time he had spent growing up on the West Side of Chicago, which, as he once put it, “will swallow you whole, good family or not.” His grandmother Lena was the backbone of his family, tough and strong. She commanded respect in a neighborhood that was rife with drugs and gangs. Willie lived with her as a young boy, in a two-family duplex at the corner of Kedzie and Arthington, several blocks from Chicago Stadium, where the Bulls used to play. Lena was a savvy entrepreneur, running a diner in the front of the house, but she was getting up in years and there was just so much she could do with Willie. His mother and father were struggling with drug addiction, and Willie started being looked after by his sister, Makeba, who was 13 years older.

The responsibility placed on Makeba was monumental, and when she had to run an errand, it was Willie, six or seven, who changed his niece’s and nephew’s and youngest brother’s diapers. He started to miss school, close to 40 days at Bethune Elementary one year. Looking back on it, Willie himself could have predicted what would have eventually happened, that the lure of easy drug money on the corner would have landed him in jail.

When he was seven, he spent the summer in Akron with his brother Illya, a former high-school basketball star at Providence St. Mel School, in Chicago, who had been recruited by the University of Akron. Illya and his girlfriend, Vikki, spoiled Willie that summer, taking him to his first movie, his first real restaurant, his first buffet, his first mall, his first amusement park.

At the end of the summer Illya and Vikki took Willie back to Chicago, but it broke their hearts to do so. As they drove down the Indiana Toll Road on the way back to Akron, Vikki just blurted it out:

“You know what we have to do, don’t you?”

“No.”

“You know we’ve got to bring him back. He just did so much better with us. He’s going to have a better opportunity.”

Illya had actually been thinking the same thing. But he wasn’t married to Vikki yet, and he was concerned that it was too much to ask of her.

“Are you ready for something like that?”

“Yeah. I am.”

By the time the final decision was made, Willie had already started the school year in Chicago. So Illya waited until school was over, then came back the following summer. Still in college, he was scared to be taking care of an eight-year-old for good. But as he rode back to Akron with Willie, he said to himself, “Lord, just stay with me and show me the way. Just show me the way.”

That first night Willie went into his bedroom and saw a new Superman bedspread. He was elated and excited. So were Illya and Vikki. They all sat up much of the night just talking, and when Willie finally went to bed, Illya must have peeked in on him about 10 times, thinking that, in the six-hour trip from Chicago to Akron, Willie McGee had literally traveled from darkness to light.

Illya took Willie to the downtown Y.M.C.A., on Canal Square, on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays and started teaching him the finer points of basketball: where to hold his hands, layups over and over, talking trash to him so he would toughen up. Illya then got him involved with the Summit Lake Hornets, where he played with me and won a championship.

So Willie became the next piece of the dream. He came in seventh grade. Coach Dru liked the toughness with which he played and how he wasn’t afraid of Sian, unlike everyone else. He also had size. He was about six feet two at the time, and even Little Dru, who wasn’t impressed by much, knew Willie was a player—a potentially great one.

When Willie got dropped off at Coach Dru’s house for the first time, Little Dru was doing homework and didn’t say a word. I was there, too, and all I managed was a halfhearted “What’s up?” Little Dru finally introduced himself as he put the basketballs in his dad’s car. We were still in that feeling-out process anyway, treating each other the way a cat does when it paws about in a new room.

Then we got on the court. Willie could see right away the love we had for the game, just as we saw it in him, and things quickly softened. Soon after, he spent the night with me and Sian at my little apartment over in the projects, and my mom cooked dinner. We started playing video games together, and then things got real quiet and we both said to Willie, “You pretty cool.” For a kid who had been uprooted from his home, those few words were among the best he’d ever heard. It was a way of giving respect and also of saying that we were all about the same thing: winning and taking care of business on and off the court. All for one and one for all.

The four of us—myself, Little Dru, Sian, Willie—began to hang out together whenever we could. We shared everything with one another, and it became a kind of unspoken rule: if you’re eating something, everybody gets a piece, pizza, Starbursts, Twizzlers—it didn’t matter. All for one and one for all.

Varsity Blues
As early as the middle of eighth grade, we had already begun to discuss the idea of going to the same high school so we could still play basketball together. It was the only way we felt we could keep our dream alive. At first, the decision where to go seemed natural and easy. The school of choice for skilled black athletes was Buchtel, a public high school in West Akron. The basketball coach, Harvey Sims, was considered the Phil Jackson of Akron, hip and smart and sharp and innovative.

Most people assumed that we’d be going to Buchtel. They had been to the Division II state finals in 1997 under Coach Sims. And Sims had also made Coach Dru an assistant basketball coach there during our eighth-grade year, knowing that he had more influence on us than any other adult in Akron. Sims to this day is adamant that he hired Coach Dru because he was a good coach. But as Coach Dru tells it, his hiring was all part of “the deal” of getting the four of us to Buchtel. He felt he knew why he was there and he made no bones about it—to deliver us to Harvey.

Buchtel made perfect sense to me. I knew the athletic reputation of the school; every black kid in Akron did. I was already having fantasies about how it would be: the four of us marching in as Big Men on Campus who would lead Buchtel to state and national championships, and, best of all, the prettiest girls in the entire city were there. But during “open gyms” at Buchtel in eighth grade, which were basically informal tryouts, Little Dru sensed that the coaching staff saw no immediate future in him—too short, too scrawny, too little of everything. Buchtel was stacked for the coming year, and there was no way Little Dru would make varsity. He would have to start on the junior-varsity team, then methodically work his way up, and Little Dru didn’t want to go that route.

[evanovitch]

Re: excerpt fr LeBron James' upcoming book SHOOTING STARS


A Coach with a Past
On Sunday nights over at the Jewish Community Center in West Akron, across the street from a vacant tract of woodland, a basketball clinic was held by a onetime wunderkind college coach whose career had abruptly ended in disgrace. His name was Keith Dambrot, and in 1991, in his early 30s, he had become the head coach at Central Michigan University, a Division I school. It was virtually unheard of for someone that young to be the head of a Division I program. The team was improving under his leadership. But then, during a game in 1993 against Miami University of Ohio, in what he said was an attempt to motivate his players, he had used the word “[censored].”

According to court records, he said he had used the term to connote “a person who is fearless, mentally strong and tough,” in the same vein that players themselves used the term in referring to one another. At least eight black players on the team subsequently said that Dambrot had always treated them fairly. I believe them, because I got to know Coach Dambrot as well as anybody and never ever did I see him act in any way that was racist. It just wasn’t in the man.

Scandal erupted once the story broke in the college newspaper. It was soon picked up by the national media, and he was fired in April of 1993. And now, out of coaching more than four years and working as a stockbroker, he was running a Sunday-night clinic at the Jewish Community Center, trying to teach kids the fundamentals of basketball.

But Dambrot took the clinic seriously, like he took everything seriously. He was one of those compact, intense men who never quite learned how to find the middle ground. There was no coach in the country who had sunk so low so quickly. He was toxic, untouchable, the J.C.C. clinic a noble but almost pathetic way of maintaining some contact with the game he still loved. But he had not lost his fire.

So, as early as seventh grade, Little Dru started showing up at the J.C.C. on those Sunday nights. Coach Dru at the time did not know anything about what had happened at Central Michigan. Dambrot had been recommended to him by another coach, largely because of his college experience, and Coach Dru was willing to take his son to any clinic where he might learn something. And because Little Dru showed up at the J.C.C., so did I. Later on, after we had been going on a regular basis, somebody took Coach Dru aside and said of Dambrot, “You need to stay away from that guy,” because of what had supposedly occurred. But Coach Dru’s basic attitude was that he would “find out for myself” what Dambrot was really like.

In 1998, after being rejected for jobs at several local high schools, Dambrot was offered the head coaching position by St. Vincent–St. Mary High School. Housed in a low-slung brick building, the school stood as the gateway to the west side of Akron. The area wasn’t the best: just up the street, at the corner of Maple and West Market, was the sullen beige brick of an auto mechanic’s shop. But the school had a strong reputation for academics, and Dambrot was no longer consigned to the no-man’s-land of the J.C.C. He had someplace to go, and he also had, in Little Dru, someone who wanted to play for him.

“Man, I don’t think this is gonna work,” Little Dru finally said to me of Buchtel. “I don’t think they’re gonna give me a chance over there.” I shrugged it off, but then, in the middle of his eighth-grade year, Little Dru advanced his plan a step further and told his father he wasn’t going to Buchtel. Coach Dru first tried to adjust to the shock, then tried to talk him out of it. For one thing, he was coaching at Buchtel, and how would it look if he couldn’t even deliver his own kid there?

When Little Dru announced to Sian and Willie and me that Buchtel was out and he was going to St. V., we looked at him as if he were hallucinating. This was a major switch, not just in terms of basketball but in terms of social and racial environment. Buchtel, a public school, was 97 percent minority, with 40 percent of its roughly 700 students economically disadvantaged, which made its academic strides all the more impressive. St. V., a Catholic school, was the virtual opposite, with close to 100 percent of its roughly 550 students going on to college and a minority population of about 13 percent. Buchtel had a legendary history of athletics in Akron, including basketball. St. V.’s best sport was football.

So following Little Dru’s lead, we began leaning toward St. V. When he first made the decision, we weren’t angry. We just didn’t agree with him. I wasn’t surprised when Little Dru said he wasn’t going to Buchtel. But our friendship had traveled a long road, and we weren’t going to let anything pull it apart. A pact is a pact after all, and brothers are brothers if you define brothers by love and devotion and loyalty. Little Dru wasn’t acting in selfishness. He just wanted a chance to compete for the varsity, and he felt that his relationship with Coach Dambrot, combined with the fact that St. V. had only two players returning with significant playing time the year before, would give him that chance. Sian and Willie felt they would get a chance to play varsity as well, and I knew I would get my opportunity. So the decision was made.

But then somebody called the Cottons at home anonymously and told them about the racial incident at Central Michigan. It was clear to Lee that the call was coming from someone associated with Buchtel. Lee Cotton had played basketball against Dambrot in high school, and he found the comment totally uncharacteristic of the Dambrot he’d known. Even so, it would be a lie to say he wasn’t troubled by what he was hearing. We all were—even Little Dru.

But rather than rely on rumors, Debra Cotton ordered the transcripts of the wrongful-termination suit that Dambrot had filed against Central Michigan. The suit showed that he had not directly called his players “niggers” but had said, “You know, we need to have more niggers on our team,” in the sense of players who are “tough” and “hard-nosed.” The suit also showed that he had asked his players for permission to use the word before he said it. “Do you mind if I use the N word?” he said, according to the court records, and several players had apparently said it was O.K.

Coach Dambrot, aware of the rumors swirling back and forth, encouraged the Cottons to check out what had happened. He took Coach Dru aside and told him about the incident. He also had a player from that Central Michigan team call the Cottons; he confirmed that what Dambrot had said was meant to motivate, not denigrate, however ill-advised it was. Dambrot himself was still contrite over what had happened. He called his actions “dumb” and “unprofessional.” Regardless of his wrongful-termination claim in court (which he lost anyway), he said, the school probably had no choice but to fire him. He also knew in his heart he was not racist, and now so did we. And by the summer after our eighth-grade year, our decision was firm: we were going to St. V. We were comfortable with our choice—until the doors of the school opened that first day, and we realized we had plunged ourselves into a world we knew virtually nothing about.

Signs of Trouble
The four of us may have been brothers to one another, but to many in Akron’s black community we were now traitors who had sold out to the white establishment. Coach Dru felt the brunt of the blame, which only intensified after he left Buchtel to become an assistant at St. V., in August of 1999, right before our freshman year. Dambrot said that he had put Coach Dru on the staff because of what he had done with us on the Shooting Stars. “You’ve done a great job with the kids, and it would be good to have you here,” Dambrot told him. He also figured it would be hard for Coach Dru to simply let go. Dambrot was right about that. But none of that mattered. Coach Dru was a marked man, and he went through hell, seeing inklings of an Akron far different from the city he thought he knew.

One day, as he was coming out of the post office, a car stopped at the light. The window rolled down, and a high-ranking official from the Akron public schools angrily called out, “I hear you’re pimping for St. V.” Coach Dru explained as calmly as he could that his son’s decision to attend St. V. was his alone, and that as his father he would honor it as any father should. But the comment stung bitterly because it reflected what many blacks in Akron felt: that Dru Joyce had instigated all this, using his influence over us as a father figure. Never mind that we had made up our own minds to attend the same high school and keep our dream going. The comment also stung because of what he had done with the Shooting Stars. From its humble origins, the Shooting Stars now had eight teams playing in different age groups. The kids on those teams were mostly African-American, and some as young as fourth-graders were getting the chance to play basketball and travel. “To have this guy say this to me after all we were doing for the community—it just hurt,” Coach Dru said later.


For the four of us, the transition to an overwhelmingly white school carried more than enough challenges. Suddenly there was a dress code to worry about and all sorts of rules to follow—being on time, no loitering in the hallways, covering up tattoos during basketball games. I didn’t know anything about St. V. when Little Dru first mentioned it. I didn’t even know where the school was. I didn’t know it was a Catholic school. We were there just to play basketball together.

I did know there were a lot of whites at St. V., and I had never gone to school with whites before. Did that make me uncomfortable? Hell yes. I had never hung around white people in my life, and I just didn’t know how to get along with them. I didn’t know what to say. And then I had to wait until the basketball season began in December to show the student body what I was really there for.

Starting high school is intimidating, no matter who you are. Everybody looks smarter. Everybody looks bigger. I wasn’t scared, but I was self-protective. There was no overt racism, but I did have this feeling of discomfort, as if I truly had walked into a different world. I talked to Maverick Carter, the senior captain of the team; he was three years older than me, but I had known him since I was five. I talked to Little Dru and Sian and Willie, of course. There were a couple of white players on the team I talked to, such as Chad Mraz and John Taylor. But if you weren’t on the basketball team, I didn’t talk to you. It was as simple as that.

Sian and Willie and I played football freshman year, which helped with the transition. It forced us to interact with other students. We were beginning to relax a little bit. We were adjusting to what the school expected in academics. We understood where basketball stood in the pecking order, since the tiny locker room made the point. But we were getting by, and getting used to St. V.

And then came the first basketball practice.

Based on our experience at the Jewish Community Center, I thought I would be in for a cakewalk with Coach Dambrot at St. V. Instead, the firm but patient coach who had held those Sunday-night clinics at the J.C.C. had become a madman, now conducting practices with the same rigor as the Division I college coach that still burned inside him. He made it clear that the program would be run exactly like a college program, that our goal was to win and win big. He told us not to take anything he said personally, that he only wanted to make us better. And then he screamed. He cussed. If parents made the mistake of attending a practice, he screamed and cussed even more to make sure they knew he didn’t care who was there.

Little Dru and Sian and Willie and I had been dubbed the Fab Four by a reporter, in a reference to the Fab Five, five freshmen at the University of Michigan in the early 1990s. I am sure Dambrot hated that. It made us sound cocky. But he also knew that even as freshmen we could make a significant contribution.

He was hard on me, almost ruthless. He believed that perfection was obtainable, and would not tolerate mistakes. He cracked my game open as if it were worthless, all glitter and no substance, self-absorbed flash and style. I played no defense. I was selfish. I knew fundamentals but had no use for them. I figured at the time he just hated me, thought I was some ghetto-kid hot dog who would never be a team player. But I now realize what he was doing, and I’m lucky he was doing it.

Actually, it wasn’t luck. It was Karma that put me with a high-school coach who had been a Division I college coach and had seen players who had gone off to play in the N.B.A. His experience told him, even in those early days of my high-school career, that I had a chance if I learned how to respect the game and played with the mentality of a warrior. “I was very difficult on LeBron,” he later said, “but in the long run it was good for him. The pressure I felt was that he had a chance to make something great out of his life.”

But I didn’t see it that way at all. At least not during that first day of practice. He was an [censored]. There’s no other way I can put it. After precisely one day of practice, there was near insurrection. The way I remember it, Little Dru was looking at Dambrot the whole time as if they were about to get into a fistfight. I was thinking the same thing, only after practice—just jump him in the parking lot. Sian, still filled with the adrenaline of the football season, seemed ready to tear Dambrot’s head off. There was a look on Willie’s face I had never seen before, because he knew what the rest of us knew: Dambrot is insane. All of a sudden Buchtel looked beautiful to us. And all of us shared the sickening thought that we had made a terrible mistake.

But with Maverick Carter leading the way and me starting as a freshman and Sian and Little Dru and Willie coming off the bench, something ignited, popped like beautiful fireworks. We coalesced as a team more quickly than anyone thought we could, and games were easy compared with practice. We started with a 76–40 win over Cuyahoga Falls (for the record, I had 15 points and eight rebounds in my first high-school game), and we just didn’t stop. Cleveland Central Catholic. Cleveland Benedictine. Temple Christian. Mapleton. They all fell. We shredded our local schedule that freshman season and coasted into the playoffs in March of 2000. We went on to win the state championship that year, and we expected the same in our sophomore year, the first sign of the cockiness that almost destroyed us.

Romeo, Oh Romeo
Five players make up a team, not four, and the Fab Four was just that, the Fab Four. We needed one more piece to make it whole. And then that piece arrived in the form of a sophomore transfer from public school named Romeo Travis. I was the only member of the team who really knew Romeo, since we’d gone to middle school together. Romeo was a beast on the court when he had the desire, six feet six, tough inside on offense and able to block shots on defense, a perfect complement to Sian. At least it seemed perfect.

Romeo had had a falling-out with the administration at Central-Hower High School, and the principal said it would be best if he did not return. I began to work on him to come to St. V. and got the other members of the Fab Four to buy in. Sort of. Maybe. We were tight, maybe too tight. “He was coming on a new team, and he didn’t know anybody,” Willie observed later. “He had to take care of himself. So that was his demeanor when he came in; he had to look out for himself. He still wasn’t one of us.” Combine that with the personality of Romeo, a self-admitted smart-[censored] who had trust issues and thought the Fab Four giggled and carried on like little girls. Right from the outset, it was a difficult mix. As Romeo said later, “I didn’t want to be here, and they didn’t want me here.”

Part of Romeo’s trouble in getting along was his upbringing. His parents separated when he was about two, and he and his three siblings were raised by their mother, Carolyn. They lived wherever they could afford when Romeo was little (I knew something about that, too)—a house on Cuyahoga Street where the kitchen light never worked and the floor flooded, another one on Lake Street where the pipes were bad. Like me, he went to a variety of different schools growing up. But I had found Little Dru and Sian and Willie. They were my body and soul; they kept me going no matter how tough times got. Romeo never had that, and the concept of lasting friendship was silly and wasteful in his eyes. “You could be my friend today and you could be gone tomorrow” was how he put it. He had no use for us, and he made that clear.

Romeo’s transfer from a public high school to St. V. also intensified resentment from Akron’s black community. Again, a Catholic school was poaching a player who they felt belonged at a public school. Also, some in the St. V. community were upset by Romeo’s arrival; they saw him as another ringer who would deny playing time to other kids on the team who might not be as good but still deserved to play.

[evanovitch]

Re: excerpt fr LeBron James' upcoming book SHOOTING STARS

Those deserving kids would be riding the bench more than they might have been in the past because Coach Dambrot was on a personal mission of redemption. He knew the best way to do it was to win back-to-back state championships at St. V., and if that meant that certain kids never played, then certain kids never played. Dambrot also spiced up the schedule, increasing the number of high-profile opponents from out of state. If we had a dream of a national championship, I think Dambrot had his own dream of making it back to the college ranks.

We started the 2000–2001 season exactly the way we had ended the one before, by winning, and finished up 19–1. We buried the competition in both district and regional tournament play to once again advance to the Division III final four at the Value City Arena, in Columbus. We played our final game against Miami East from Casstown, before 17,612 fans, the largest to ever see a state-tournament game in Ohio. The final score was St. V. 63, Miami East 53.

What had seemed unimaginable two years earlier had now happened: we had won back-to-back state championships. We also finished fourth that year in some national polls. I was not only getting bigger, growing to six feet six, but thanks to Dambrot I was getting better, appreciating the finesse of the game and the subtleties. Even then, when I was a sophomore, hype was starting to encircle me. There were quiet rumblings that I would go straight to the N.B.A. from high school. Opposing players asked for my autograph. People were scalping tickets for $50 apiece.

How good could I really be? I had no idea, although I knew I was improving. But Coach Dambrot, despite making sure I didn’t get a big head, did. He called a former colleague named Ben Braun, then the head coach at the University of California, and invited him to watch me play. Dambrot just wanted to make sure what he was seeing wasn’t some apparition. Braun accepted the invitation and made one comment afterward:

“That kid won’t ever play in college.”

A Sudden Departure
Going into our junior year, the dream of a national championship was in its fullest bloom. The schedule was stronger. The four of us had played together for so long that we could virtually go 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 was leaving. He is certain he told us directly, but Little Dru and Romeo and I remember finding out through a reporter. The news, and how we’d heard it, devastated us. Given our relationship, how much we had done for him, and how much he had done for us, we just assumed we would be the first to know. He 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 to possible redemption. He had been out of college coaching for eight years, and he had paid more than enough for his mistake. He said later it was one of the hardest decisions he had ever made. He knew that we had resurrected a career that had crashed and burned because of the Central Michigan bloodbath, and he was indebted to us for that. But he felt 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. But, when I was 16, I felt like he had betrayed me.

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 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. “What came into my mind was ‘Man, you lied to us. You just lied.’”

Little Dru’s emotions became even more complicated when rumors started circulating that his father would be taking over as head coach. They loved each other, but their relationship on the court, to put it mildly, was combative. Like the rest of us, Coach Dru was completely surprised by Dambrot’s departure. Like us, he first heard the news from a reporter. He was looking at homes for sale in Akron with his wife, Carolyn, when a sportswriter from Cleveland’s Plain Dealer 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. He also 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 goal and dream to become a high-school coach. But now that the dream was within reach, he wavered. 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 schedule our junior year, which pitted us against eight teams that hovered around the top 25 in the country. He worried that the team was moving from Division III to Division II. He worried about living up to fans’ sky-high expectations for the team. (Some fans 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, 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.

“Dru, how can you say no?” his wife asked. “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 said, referring to the Shooting Stars’ early days, when Coach Dru would drive Sian and Little Dru and me all over the place to find us a gym for practice.

“This is just God honoring that,” she repeated.

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 level. So, when he was offered the job, he took it. “This is a dream come true,” Coach Dru told the Akron Beacon Journal. “It’s something I’ve been working toward since 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.

But it wasn’t where we expected. Junior year was a major disaster—too much media attention, too little attention to basketball. We didn’t even win the state championship.

“This Is Your Time”
The last game of our senior year, our last game together, was against Kettering Alter, and if we won, we’d finish our season ranked No. 1 in the country—national champions. After all we had been through, this final game felt so sweet and so bittersweet. Not just a season but our whole lives together reduced to 32 minutes. Romeo had finally come around, causing the Fab Four to be re-christened the Fab Five. But after this game, no pact could keep the Fab Five together. I knew I would declare for the N.B.A. draft, and the rest of the guys had their own aspirations. The knot that had so tightly bound me to Little Dru and Sian and Willie and Romeo would soon unravel.

We still had a grand dream to catch, but it was hard to just shut everything else out. Although we had started at different times, we still felt like Shooting Stars, still felt the same giddiness and joy of playing basketball together when luck and fortune and the grace of God had brought a bunch of kids from the former Rubber Capital of the World together under Coach Dru. It was as if that ride in the minivan had continued for eight years.

We had played Kettering Alter during the regular season, and the game had been a 33-point blowout. But Coach Dru did everything to prevent us from becoming overconfident. He knew, as we knew, there was a national championship at stake; it was a foregone conclusion that USA Today would drop us from the top spot we held if we lost.

Coach Dru gathered the team in the locker room before the game. He told us to look around and talked about how this would be the last time many of us would ever play together. He talked about the different paths our lives would take. He talked about how you never want things to end but there’s a time and a place where all things must come to an end. Then he said:

The best way to end this thing is by winning.

He turned to the grease board to go over strategy one more time, but then he stopped.

Forget all of this stuff. Forget about it. This is all about what’s inside here. It’s all about heart.

And then he finished.

Fellas, you just have to go out there and leave everything out on the court.

It was time.

The game had its moments—we were down by five after the first half—but as Little Dru held the ball and the clock wound down to zero, we had achieved the dream. St. V. 40, Kettering Alter 36. We ran out onto the court, hugging one another like the boys we once were. Little Dru threw the ball into the air and did a lap around the court, giving fans high fives. He felt like it was Christmas Day, when you ran down the stairs and got the gift that you had been asking for over and over. He saw his dad, who was in tears.


Sian looked over and saw his mother and Coach Dru and Carolyn Joyce and his brother, L.C. And he no longer felt like he was dreaming, but in a dream that was real, with everybody who had been there from the very beginning. He started cutting down the net, and he realized there was no one in the world he would rather play basketball with than the other members of the Fab Five, because they were his teammates, because they were his finest friends.

Romeo felt he was in the best place on earth. He believed most people lived lives of dreariness and routine, doing their jobs, going home to their families, not really ever changing anything. But Romeo knew he had changed something, left a mark. He had won a national championship, and no one could ever take that away from him.

Willie looked into the stands to find his brother Illya, just to thank him for all the opportunities he had made possible.

“This is all because of you,” he said. “I couldn’t have done this if it wasn’t for you.”

Tears ran down Illya’s face.

“I love you. I’m so proud. You just made me the proudest person in the world.”

And then he said, “This is your time now. It’s not my time. And you enjoy it. We’ll be here. You go and enjoy it with your friends because you’ve earned it. This is your time.”

I too felt the joy of celebration, and I couldn’t help but think how all of this had started in fifth grade, that little kernel we never gave up on. We had accomplished our goal, and as members of the Fab Five we had done it in the last game of basketball we would ever play together. But it was hard not to think that we would go our separate ways in just a few months. We would, as Coach Dru said, follow different paths. In achieving our dream, another dream, maybe one even more powerful, had been lost. The Fab Five? It was history now, already a memory as we stood at midcourt in the Value City Arena and received our medallions and were hailed as national champions. Which is why, in the tears that we shed, it was impossible to know where the joy ended and the sadness began.