The king and his court

Shooting Stars
nolead ends nolead begins By LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger
Penguin Press.
352 pp. $26.95

nolead ends nolead begins

In an issue dated Feb. 18, 2002, Sports Illustrated, reaching for a biblical metaphor for its cover, anointed a basketball player "The Chosen One."

His name was LeBron James.

At the time, he was 17.

And a junior in high school.

The floodgates of hyperbole swung wide. Cue the trumpet chorus and forgive the blasphemy: Here comes the next Michael Jordan.

Heady stuff, indeed. But the facts are that James did go directly from high school into the NBA, he was the first pick in the draft, and he is making a run at the memory of MJ and at the current prince of midair, Kobe Bryant. No rings yet, but then he should have, oh, say 12 to 15 years to remedy that.

Comes now Shooting Stars, which goes on sale Tuesday, the inevitable book about King James. But this is not the usual inevitable pabulum and breathless deification. This goes back to the beginning, to the ghostly gray and grit and grime of Akron, Ohio, once the fastest-growing city in America, but since beaten and battered, taking a standing eight-count, and to a cramped Salvation Army gym whose basketball court was 20 feet shy of regulation and whose floor was linoleum, and so slippery you felt you had bars of soap laced to your feet.

This was the birthplace of the Shooting Stars - hence the book's title - where LeBron James first gave a foreshadowing of the genius that was to come, and where he and his fifth-grade mates first forged a remarkable Band of Brothers.

The circumstances are grimly familiar - fractured families, drop-in fathers, missing mothers, foster homes and constant uprooting, 12 moves in three years, police sirens wailing at night, the scary staccato of gunfire and drive-bys, and the drugs, always the drugs. The mantra of one of the Shooting Stars was: "Keep my head low and keep on moving."

They teetered on the edge of the abyss. And the way out, their escape route, was basketball.

The book reconstructs those beginnings. The narrator is King James himself. The writing is by Buzz Bissinger, Pulitzer-winning former Inquirer staffer. Theirs makes for an intriguing pairing, and at first blush an unlikely one: an elite, cloud-hopping, rim-shaking, backboard-quaking, 6-foot-8 dunkateer, and an earthbound 5-foot-6 author whose first work, the seminal Friday Night Lights, has a shelf life that is the lustful envy of the rest of us hopefuls.

But it works. They are unflinching and no one is spared, including King James.

This is a coming-of-age tale, approached from a different angle, and deftly done. The reportage is thorough to a fare-thee-well, what you would expect from a seasoned veteran, and their overall collaboration makes for an engaging read.

Bissinger gives James' voice a flinty clarity, without pretension. James, at the end, acknowledges his author with this summation: "He is one serious dude." Considering all that James has seen and endured, that is high praise, indeed.

Friend and foe alike are dissected, though the friends were mostly limited to the close circle of James and the other four Shooting Stars. They modestly called themselves the Fab 5, and they were suspicious, to the occasional point of paranoia, of anyone not in their inner circle.

It was understandable. Finding someone to trust was often a frustrating, fruitless search. You kept your head on a swivel, wary of whether someone was trying to get close to you because of who you were or because of what you had. So they became virtually inseparable and they shared everything - pizza, soda, Twizzlers . . . and the basketball.

The other four, James says, "were my body and soul."

Or in the poignant, succinct words of Sian Cotton: "We all we got."

In addition to James and Cotton, the Fab 5 included Romeo Travis, Willie McGee, and Little Dru Joyce. The latter was frequently too stubborn, too driven, too passionate for his own good. And yet there is something endearing about this little sawed-off scrapper - who would play his father one-on-one in their driveway, play and play and play, play even though he lost and lost and lost, play until midnight, play until the father, in exasperation, gave him a win just so he could go to bed.

Little Dru was the point guard of a team that almost never lost, that routinely, relentlessly pulverized overmatched opposition, and that more than held its own against a stout schedule of nationally ranked opponents.

The book is meticulously researched and earnestly reported, though it also feels top-heavy from so many detailed play-by-play recaps of long-ago games.

The Fab 5 eventually succumbed to the rock-star status that was accorded them, and James and Bissinger are unsparing in detailing their arrogance and rampant egoism - cars, clothes, pot, alcohol - a dizzying whirlpool from which they eventually escaped.

James' argument is that they were teenagers, so who should have been surprised when their heads swelled to the size of a Thanksgiving Day parade float?

Their rise provoked jealousy and resentment and hostility about their preferred status, about the double standard that was applied to them. James' rebuttal is that their critics were hypocrites, that exploitation works both ways, that promoters prospered, that their high school profited by half a million dollars from their games.

It is a telling point, impossible to refute.

If anything, the climate is worse now than it was seven years ago, shot through with greed, serious money to be made all around off, and for, tall teenagers.

Fed up and frustrated by what he perceived as a witch hunt for him, LeBron James points out that he could have just walked away his senior year in high school. There were, after all, many millions awaiting him. Who needed all the aggravation?

But long ago, he had made a pact with Little Dru and Willie and Romeo and Sian. They would stay together until the end, whenever that might come. He had, after all, given his word. And it wasn't for sale, at any price.

What a quaint concept.