With his new book, 'Shooting Stars,' LeBron James takes control of the narrative

John Kuntz/The Plain DealerLeBron James, author, observer: "It came natural to me. And I still am to this day very reserved; I like to see other people's action. My mom always told me I had a great sense of common sense."

Bond across seasons: Fame could wait, but not football

Brace yourself. The cultural footprint of LeBron James is about to get bigger.

His size 16 sneakers are striding onto a grander stage, beginning Tuesday. And for the Akron kid who started his first team practice a mere 13 years ago, bouncing an orange ball along the linoleum gym floor of a Salvation Army, the planet -- Paris, London, Beijing -- is paying attention.

James will be 25 in December, and this season the audience is widening beyond fans of the National Basketball Association.

Clevelanders, living beneath a mural that might make a South American oligarch blush, are accustomed to James' outsized presence. With the publication of the candid, calmly told "Shooting Stars," others are about to catch up.

James' coming-of-age book swishes into bookstores Tuesday. It tracks five African-American boys -- three born into poverty -- whose decision to stick together helps them prevail over the mania that their athletic triumphs engender.

To illustrate the book excerpts in the September issue of Vanity Fair, celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz flew to Akron in July. She shot James and his core of close buddies in the dust-mote stillness of their old high school gym.

Next week, the U.S. president and the basketball player hit the airwaves with a public service special to promote staying in school. Then, beginning on Friday, Oct. 2, "More Than a Game," a documentary film about James' formative years, rolls out nationally with touching, grainy footage of five boys who work together on the puzzle of becoming men.

It wasn't easy. Red-faced adults would gather by the hundreds to cheer against the "Fab 5" players of St. Vincent-St. Mary High School. Reporters were assigned to investigate their parents. The media circus meant practice had to be shut to all outsiders.

The book (Penguin Press, 258 pp., $26.95) is co-written with "Friday Night Lights" author Buzz Bissinger in James' voice. After the torrent of words from reporters and sportscasters, LeBron James takes control of the narrative.

"Me and my business partner sat down -- that was the first thing we discussed," James said Monday in a telephone interview from Paris, where he was touring for the documentary. "If it wasn't our point of view, my words, then we weren't going to do it. I really believe the story I have, people can really relate."

Early indications suggest the NBA's most valuable player might be right. When "More Than a Game" premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, the film buffs -- not typically basketball fans -- got out of their plush chairs and gave it a lusty, tearful standing ovation.

James, too, wiped away tears with his thumb and forefinger as the lights came up. The third-highest-paid athlete in the world said he is still traveling with, and re-reading, "Shooting Stars." He described the reception to the documentary in China, North America and Europe as surreal.

Such displays have fueled worries among Cleveland Cavaliers fans that the book and the movie will add up to a valedictory lap. With James' contract expiring next year, some nervous bloggers have started calling him "LeGone."

Patty BurtonFrom left to right the "Fab 5" in 2003 on graduation day: Romeo Travis, Willie McGee, LeBron James, Sian Cotton and Dru Joyce, III.

Willie McGee doesn't hector his boyhood pal about any of that. McGee said he picked up his early copy of "Shooting Stars" during the Leibovitz shoot, started reading chapter four, entitled "Willie McGee," and had to walk away from the others to mask his tears.

He didn't pull it off. Former teammate Sian Cotton began ribbing him.

There may be no crying in baseball, but James writes frankly of his own weeping -- from fear, as a 12-year-old taking his first plane flight to play in Salt Lake City; from disappointment, at losing an important game during his sophomore year; and from frustration, two years later, when a suspension (later lifted) forced him to sit out practice on the sidelines.

For the ordinary reader, "Shooting Stars" also delivers an emotional wallop. The book can be read as a variation on the themes of masculinity, as a young LeBron and his buddies try out different approaches.

"Being around those guys was about figuring out how to be a young man, and with Coach Dru, about ultimately becoming a man," James said of his revered childhood coach. "Without even telling anybody, we were all working on the same goal -- more than basketball. Basically about life."

The germ of James' fabled loyalty takes root in the grade-school friendships that jell on the "Shooting Stars," Coach Dru Joyce's scruffy travel team. "As an only child, I was desperate to be around other kids," James writes.

The boys move from sharing Twizzlers and selling team duct tape door-to-door to choosing a high school -- together -- at which each could expect playing time.

The decision to attend St. Vincent-St. Mary instead of Buchtel, the sports powerhouse and mostly black west Akron public school, provoked angry repercussions in Akron's black community, James writes, and put him in a classroom for the first time with white students.

Phil Masturzo/Akron Beacon JournalJames read the infamous Sports Illustrated cover story that drew a demarcation line through the team's life, amplifying the scrutiny and adult craziness around James

Two-and-a-half years later, on Feb. 18, 2002, Sports Illustrated published a cover story it called "The Chosen One." James was 17, a junior, and had let the photographer spritz his face with water to mimic sweat. The consequences, however, were more like a slap:

Mothers, comically, began phoning as if James were Slider to invite him to their sons' bar mitzvah parties; an occasional girl jumped onto the team bus to lift her shirt; and men started showing up at school to say they were James' father.

"No one in high school deserves to be compared to Michael Jordan," James writes, "and no one in high school could be expected to withstand the pressure of such comparisons. We had become bigheaded jerks, me in particular, and we are to blame for that, but so are adults who treated us that way and then sat back and smugly watched the self-destruction."

James, whom Bissinger describes as observant and a canny judge of character, keeps the focus of the story more on his band of brothers than on himself.

"I didn't want a chest-thumping book," James said in the interview from Paris. "I wanted a very soft, inspirational book."

That tone fits the player, said Bissinger: "LeBron is a calm man. He's not a ranter. He's not Charles Barkley."

Author had instinct about James' story

With "Friday Night Lights," Bissinger proved his own game -- and his grasp of high school sports, James said. That 1990 book coils with the particular intensity of scholastic football in Odessa, Texas. Sports Illustrated ranked it fourth on the magazine's list of the best 100 sports books ever published.

"We call ours the basketball side of 'Friday Night Lights,' " James said. "I read it and thought, 'Wow, whoever wrote this book was really good.' "

Bissinger said he came to see James as the anti-Boobie Miles, the star running back of "Friday Night Lights" who can't handle the adulation and self-destructs.

In contrast, "Shooting Stars" crests with the young-adult successes of all "Fab Five," as the "St. V." teammates called each other. Three have undergraduate degrees now, a fourth is still enrolled, and McGee is working toward his master's degree at the University of Akron.

"Give me an hour, and I can give you the names of 500 great high school athletes who did nothing after high school," Bissinger said. "This is the story of five African-American kids who stood up to exquisite pressure and become exceptional men."

In March 2008, representatives for James and Bissinger arranged for the 5-foot-6 author from Philadelphia to meet the 6-foot-8 athlete for a steak dinner, prepared by James' chef at home, in his mansion in Bath Township.

"You pick books on instinct," Bissinger said. "I was intrigued by LeBron James. If you care about sports, you're going to be intrigued by LeBron James. I had never written in somebody else's voice -- that was tricky, to mine LeBron's mind, to interview him and all the principals, and to tell a story with distinct voices.

"It's just a beautiful story -- that's what really attracted me to it. These guys were honest. I've been a reporter for 30 years. I can smell honesty now -- I know when people are putting me on. Believe me, Coach Dru tells it like it is."

In both documentary and book, Joyce stands at center court -- the intense, soft-spoken, church-going graduate of Ohio University who first gathered the "Shooting Stars."

Young LeBron -- at age 11 -- hadn't even seen Cleveland. Between the ages of 5 and 8, he and his mother moved 12 times. He missed close to 100 days of fourth grade for what he describes as a transportation problem.

The following year, "when I was nine, my mom sat me down and told me that I would be living with a family called the Walkers until she could move her own life into a better situation."

Frankie and Pam Walker knew Gloria James through PeeWee football and "came forward and suggested to my mom I could stay with them, and she agreed."

LeBron called this decision "unimaginable at first. I had never met my father, and the idea of losing my mother, even if it was temporary, frightened me."

By LeBron's seventh-grade year, Gloria James had settled herself and her son into a two-bedroom apartment under a rental-assistance program. "Shooting Stars" is dedicated to her. In an interesting tension, the book's epigram is a quotation from teammate Sian Cotton: "We all we got."

An us-against-the-world sentiment may have pervaded the locker room, but the authors of "Shooting Stars" said the book exists to spread credit where it is due. For the Fab Five, much belongs to Coach Dru; and much belongs to "Ms. Glo."

Both McGee and Dru Joyce III. described James' mother as protective of them.

"I loved Gloria James," said Joyce, who last week signed to play a season of professional basketball in Poland. "She would help me in a heartbeat. I see her as 'Bron's angel who fought through the hard times, and I congratulate her on that."

James was reserved writing about his mother, and she herself was guarded during the book interviews, Bissinger said, a caution he attributed to years of being burned by a media that trafficked in race and class bias. (She was 16 when she gave birth to LeBron and only 19 when her own mother died.)

"I'll tell you one thing," Bissinger said. "If you mess with LeBron around Gloria James, you better be in a witness-protection program."

For a coming-of-age story, "Shooting Stars" is oddly bereft of girls. The first mention of Savannah Brinson and her children with James -- Bryce Maximus and LeBron Jr. -- arrives in the acknowledgments at the back of the book. The author writes that "words are insufficient to describe the joy you have given me."

Asked if he works, as Jackie Kennedy once did, to shield his children from the limelight, James said: "Honestly, I'm not one to shackle my family away from the public spotlight. My boys are at the games, the playoffs and at All-Star weekend. They love basketball.

"One thing I won't let happen is for my sons be exploited. If my kids become very good at a young age -- what they call a 'phenom' -- I'll make sure what happened to me doesn't happen to them."

source: Karen R. Long/Plain Dealer Book Editor