N.B.A. Star, Now Memoirist, on Hometown Court
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: September 4, 2009
AKRON, Ohio — LeBron James, the most famous alumnus of St. Vincent-St. Mary High School here, goes back to visit all the time. He’s such a familiar fixture, dropping by for lunch or to watch basketball practice, that he scarcely attracts attention anymore. Outside, however, he’s a traffic hazard. One afternoon last month, a guy cruising by in an S.U.V. caught sight of James, the 6-foot-8 superstar of the Cleveland Cavaliers, outside the school. The driver rolled down the window, yelled “Noooo!” and almost swerved off the road.
St. V., as it’s known locally, is a small, private Roman Catholic school on a hill at the edge of the city. The students are mostly white, and mostly come from families prosperous enough to afford the $8,000 tuition, though the school does offer scholarships and financial aid. It’s the kind of place that has a golf team as well as a basketball squad, and where there’s mandatory religion class and a dress code. No tattoos, no facial hair, no chestnut-size diamond earrings: the grown-up LeBron would have been sent home.
Recalling his first day, in the fall of 1999, James pointed to the cafeteria door. “I came through that door, and thought, ‘Wow, there might be a problem.’ ” He explained: “I had never spent any time with white Americans, and I didn’t know anything at all about their culture. I didn’t know whether it was the same as ours or different, or what. I didn’t think I made a mistake, but it was a big transition.”
Most people in Akron had assumed that James would go to John R. Buchtel High School, a largely black public school with a reputation for being a basketball powerhouse. He wound up at St. V. because his friend Dru Joyce III, or Little Dru, as he was called for obvious reasons, worried that he was too short to make the team at Buchtel and persuaded James and two other friends, Sian Cotton and Willie McGee, to attend the Catholic school instead.
In “Shooting Stars” (Penguin Press), a memoir he has written with Buzz Bissinger, which comes out on Tuesday, James now calls that decision an instance of “karma,” a providential destiny that he believes has attended him all his life.
“This is the place where all the dreams turned into reality,” he said while visiting the school. “If you grow up poor and black in this country, you dream a lot, but you don’t really think they’re going to come true. This is where it all started — where I began to think I could do it.”
“Shooting Stars,” which covers much the same ground as “More Than a Game,” a documentary film by Kristopher Belman, opening on Oct. 2, says next to nothing about James’s N.B.A. career. Like the film, it ends with his last game in high school and is essentially the story of the bond between James and his friends — the Fab Four, as they called themselves, and later, with the addition of Romeo Travis, the Fab Five.
You have to read carefully to realize that James was the star. The team won three state championships and in 2003 USA Today named it the best high school team in the country. In the St. V. locker room, just below a graffito that says “King James,” is one that reads, “Fab Five 4 Life.”
“I didn’t want one of those books where it’s ‘I played this team and I got so many points,’ ” James said. “That’s too typical. People have read those stats before.I wanted the book to be about my childhood, my friends, my feelings.”
Mr. Bissinger, the author of “Friday Night Lights,” a best-selling book about high school football, was put together with James by his agent. “But the whole story was LeBron’s idea,” Mr. Bissinger said. “He already had a beginning, a middle, an end. The self-effacing part — that it’s about the team, and not just LeBron — that’s just his nature. I’ve met a lot of athletes in my life, and he doesn’t have that patina of privilege. He really is a humble guy.”
He added: “The book is faithful to the way he thinks, which is what he wanted. But capturing the voice was tricky. I’m sure there are moments when it sounds more like me, even though I was always holding back. I like to write with my own voice — sometimes too much, probably.”
Between the ages of 5 and 8, James, the only child of a single mother, moved 12 times. For a while he boarded with another family, the Walkers, whom he now considers part of his fortunate karma. Akron, James writes, wasn’t even on the map in some of his schoolbooks, and already some of the Akron he remembers has vanished. His grandmother’s house on Hickory Street, where he was born, was condemned and bulldozed. The Elizabeth Park projects, where he lived for a while, were leveled and replaced with condos. What used to be a basketball court at the corner of Silver Street and Doyle is now a weedy vacant lot.
But James still lives in the Tire City and keeps up old connections. His personal assistant is Randy Mims, whom he met when James was 5. Maverick Carter, a high school teammate, handles his business affairs. And Otis Carter, Maverick’s father, who used to pick up LeBron in the morning and drive him to school, still drives him around sometimes, only in a much slicker ride: an Audi A8.
As a boy, James says, he used to walk by car lots and fantasize; he said of his current fleet, “You name it, I got one.”
With Mr. Carter at the wheel, he made a quick tour of some remaining landmarks on the city’s west South Side: the Lincoln-Mercury dealership where he used to look at the new cars, the McDonald’s at the corner of Aqueduct and West Market.
“I remember when that place opened,” James said. “Those golden arches were like the pearly gates.”
Mr. Carter pulled into the parking lot at the Spring Hill Apartments, a severe, Soviet-looking housing block, and James got out and pointed up to the sixth floor.
“Top right — that’s where I lived from 6th grade until 12th,” he said. “Spring Hill 602. The apartment was about 300 square feet, but the great thing was that from up there, you could see part of the city. This was where the stability started. I knew my mom was going to be there every single day. I had my own key that I wore around my neck. Having your own key to your own crib — that’s the greatest thing in the world. And you learn responsibility, because you don’t dare lose that key.”
He paused a moment and said, shaking his head, “My house now is almost as big as this whole place.”
But the places that struck the strongest chord were the hoops shrines: the Summit Lake Community Center, where James played as an 8-year-old; the Ed Davis Community Center, home court of Little Dru’s team, then his arch-rivals; the linoleum-floored Salvation Army gym, right around the corner from St. V, though James didn’t know it at the time. Still more karma.
“I’m not the same person I was then,” James said. “I’ve moved on to being a man. I have more responsibility. But I believe that everything happens for a reason, and my struggles here in this city helped to make me who I am. My teammates and I got to see the light at the end of the tunnel. We all loved basketball, we all had the same goal, and when you have six or seven guys with that much in common, all staying on the right track, you can accomplish a lot.”
