New LeBron Book I Might Read

rimrocker · Sep 9, 2009

This looks interesting... an account of LeBron's pre-pro years written by the guy who wrote Friday Night Lights...

September 9, 2009
Books of The Times
An N.B.A. Giant and How He Grew
By DWIGHT GARNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/books/09garner.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print

SHOOTING STARS

By LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger

Illustrated. 258 pages. The Penguin Press. $26.95.

In the memoirs of most professional athletes, the author’s grade school and high school years are burned through, like speed drills, in a chapter or two. The good stuff, it’s assumed, comes later: college and pro stardom, attended by the moral agony of trying to keep it real in the face of fat checks, eager girls, shoe contracts, tattoos, steroids and the rat-a-tat bee stings of talk radio.

“Shooting Stars,” a new collaboration between LeBron James, probably the greatest basketball player alive, and Buzz Bissinger, the author of “Friday Night Lights,” is a different kind of book. It avoids speaking about James’s professional career with the Cleveland Cavaliers (he was the National Basketball Association’s most valuable player last season) almost entirely. And since James skipped college, well, ixnay on that too.

Instead “Shooting Stars” is a measured, modest book about four kids from Akron, Ohio, James among them, who became best friends off the court and a mighty force on it. The book, mostly told in James’s gentle first-person voice, follows his life and those of his three friends from their often troubled childhoods through the state and national championships they win for St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron.

“Shooting Stars” reads like a better-than-average young-adult novel, “Stand by Me” with breakaway dunks and long, arching three-pointers. I suspect it will find its best and most eager audience among the teenagers and preteenagers for whom James is a deserving role model. He was smart to hook up with Mr. Bissinger, who showed in “Friday Night Lights” that he writes about young men and sports as well as anyone alive.

Still, there were moments, early in the book, when I worried that Mr. Bissinger was going to blow it, forcing his voice into James’s mouth. Before the first chapter is over, we’ve read about a “brooding” apartment building, “the taunting cruelty that is basketball,” a boy who plays with “spark and bite” and “a prickly bunch” of mapmakers. That’s the language of a professional writer, and it doesn’t feel like James’s language. It breaks the spell this narrative tries to cast.

“Shooting Stars” finds its groove, however. James relates his own story, about growing up a fatherless only child in Akron, and about how he moved with his mother 12 times between the ages of 5 and 8 while she tried to put her life together. His mother finally placed him for a year with a local family, until he came to live with her again in a grim building overlooking Akron.

James grows tall and begins to play basketball, and to meet the people who will change his life. There’s Coach Dru Joyce II, who notices his talent early and helps bring him together with the boys who will become his best friends. These include Willie, whose mother, James writes, had a drug problem; Sian, a burly, fearless kid; and Little Dru, Coach Dru’s short but scrappy son and the owner of a world-class three-point shot.

They become known as the Fab Four, almost cultlike in their devotion to one another. “The four of us — Little Dru, Sian, Willie and I — began to be with each other whenever we could,” James writes. “We shared everything with each other, and it became a kind of unspoken rule — if you’re eating something, everybody gets a piece, pizza, Starbursts, the thin sticks of Twizzlers, it didn’t matter. All for one and one for all.”

The team starts winning, but controversies tag along. When it’s time to consider high school, the Fab Four pass over Akron’s mostly black public school, Buchtel, to attend the private, Roman Catholic and largely white St. Vincent. The group makes the decision because of Little Dru, who worried he wouldn’t make the team at Buchtel because he wasn’t tall enough.

This decision brought scorn from black people in Akron. But it delivered the boys into the hands of a brilliant basketball coach, Keith Dambrot, who was trying to rebuild his career after losing a college coaching job by using a racial slur during a game. (There is enough large- and small-scale redemption in “Shooting Stars” to fill a holiday weekend’s worth of slots on the Hallmark Channel.)

The Fab Four and St. Vincent were not always a perfect fit. The school required students to conform to a dress code and made the basketball players cover up their tattoos during games. Academics, for the Fab Four, came a distant second to basketball. On the court, however, their troubles seemed to melt away.

The Fab Four morphs into the Fab Five when a new player, Romeo, comes to St. Vincent. The team wins a pair of state championships and during its senior year begins to dream about a national championship.

An awareness of James’s increasing fame lingers in the margins of every page of “Shooting Stars.” By his sophomore year, fans are scalping tickets to the team’s games. During his junior year he appears on the cover of Sports Illustrated under the headline “The Chosen One.” Reporters and video cameras follow his every move.

The team begins to crack under the pressure. And James makes some dumb moves, allowing his mother to buy him a Hummer for his 18th birthday and accepting a gift of two expensive jerseys from a Cleveland store, nearly getting himself banned for a season. He even dabbles in mar1juana.

“Did it go to my head?” James asks. “Of course it went to my head. I was a teenager.”

Don’t look to “Shooting Stars,” a companion piece of sorts to a new documentary film about James and his teammates called “More Than a Game,” for a meticulous accounting of the ups and downs of his early career.

He and Mr. Bissinger leave things out, like the fact that James considered petitioning the N.B.A. to change its rules and let him enter the draft after his junior year of high school. Or that he met his longtime girlfriend and the mother of his two children (he mentions her only in the acknowledgments) while in Akron.

In this book James complains about the Sports Illustrated cover, claiming it was too much for a young man. “No one in high school deserves to be compared to Michael Jordan,” he writes. He doesn’t mention that he ultimately got a version of the magazine’s headline (“Chosen 1”) tattooed across his back.

Oh, well. LeBron James is large. He contains multitudes and contradictions. Does this spoil the modest but real charms of “Shooting Stars”? Not at all.
Click to expand...

nolimitnp · Sep 10, 2009

Lebron can rot. May he never make it to the finals again.

Forums

New LeBron Book I Might Read

rimrocker Member

nolimitnp Member

Share This Page

About ClutchFans

Rockets Content

Support ClutchFans!