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 LeBron,
James, Basketball player
LeBron James was only a high-school junior in his native Akron, Ohio,
when, in a highly unusual occurrence, Sports Illustrated ran his image on
the cover of its February 18, 2002 issue along with the words "The Chosen
One." That designation referred to his potential to be a force in the
National Basketball Association (NBA), and as a forward for the Cleveland
Cavaliers, he has already begun to fulfill that promise--winning
rookie-of-the-year honors at the conclusion of the 2003-04 NBA season and
leading his struggling team in the following year to its first winning
record since 1998. James first won national attention as the star
basketball attraction at the all-male preparatory school Saint
Vincent–Saint Mary’s, helping the Fighting Irish to capture three state
basketball championships in four years; he then joined such NBA stars as
Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, and Jermaine O’Neal as players who made the
jump to the pros directly from high school.
Many have compared James to the legendary
former Chicago Bulls shooting guard Michael Jordan, whose play has long
inspired the 20-year-old. Like his idol, James is the rare player who,
along with his raw muscle, leaping ability, and knack for scoring from a
variety of angles, shows an enthusiasm for passing the ball. In addition,
his six-foot eight-inch, 240-pound frame makes him an imposing player to
guard in one-on-one situations. "A lot of players know how to play the
game," James explained to Grant Wahl for Sports Illustrated (February 18,
2002), "but they really don’t know how to play the game, if you know what
I mean. They can put the ball in the hoop, but I see things before they
even happen. . . . That’s one thing I learned from watching Jordan."
Discussing James’s development as a basketball player, the San Antonio
Spurs' head coach, Gregg Popovich, told David DuPree for USA Today
(February 17, 2005), "His maturity, in the sense that he really
understands the responsibility he has as a big-time, money basketball
player to bring it every night, is what sets him apart. I think that
separates him and puts him in a category with [Michael Jordan, Larry Bird,
and Earvin ‘Magic' Johnson], who competed every single night like that. He
just seems to know all sorts of things kids just don’t know."
LeBron James was born on December 30, 1984
in Akron to Gloria James, who was six months shy of graduating from
Central-Hower High School on the day she gave birth to her only son.
LeBron’s biological father, Anthony McClelland, who has served jail
sentences for various offenses, did not contribute to his son’s
upbringing. The responsibility of raising LeBron became more difficult for
Gloria James when her mother and grandmother, who had both helped to
support the young single parent, died within 18 months of each other,
before LeBron was three years old. Gloria was unable to find regular work,
and she and her son, who struggled financially, were forced to move
frequently. "I saw drugs, guns, killings; it was crazy," James told Grant
Wahl. "But my mom kept food in my mouth and clothes on my back." While in
the fourth grade, James was forced to miss an excessive number of days at
school. After drifting from one unstable romantic relationship to the
next, Gloria James began dating Eddie Jackson when her son was still very
young. Jackson has been credited with being a father figure to LeBron, and
he often took the role of the family’s representative after LeBron emerged
during high school as a major basketball talent.
Inspired by Michael Jordan, James found
solace in sports, particularly basketball and football. (At the age of
four, James excelled at slam-dunking a Nerf basketball into a tiny hoop
set up in his living room.) At as young as nine, he began to show signs of
being an all-around player, learning to dribble and shoot with both hands
to make it easier to evade on-rushing defenders on local playgrounds. As a
boy James also excelled as a receiver in peewee-league football, scoring
19 touchdowns in only six games in his first year.
As a consequence of his stellar play on the
football field, James and his mother became close friends with LeBron’s
coach, Frankie Walker. Walker took notice of James’s increasingly
worrisome school attendance and invited the boy to live with him, his
wife, Pam, and their three children. James stayed for approximately 18
months in the Walkers' home, where he was given daily chores. During that
time his school attendance improved, and afterward Gloria James again
assumed the responsibility of caring for her son. Later, when she had
additional financial problems, the Walkers stepped in once more to care
for LeBron. "Frank and Pam were great to us," Gloria James explained to
Tim Rogers for the Cleveland Plain Dealer (February 11, 2002). "LeBron and
I were fortunate in that we always had people who looked out for us, and
Frank and Pam were two of them."
LeBron James forged a close relationship
with Frankie Jr., the Walkers’ oldest son. The two played basketball
together and were joined on the local courts by four others boys—Sian
Cotton, Dru Joyce III, Willie McGee, and Romeo Travis. The group often
played at the Akron Jewish Community Center, under the tutelage of Keith
Drambot, a former head coach at Central Michigan University. With James as
their unofficial leader, the six boys earned a local reputation for their
excellent play. James became adept at playing all five of the standard
basketball positions—point guard, off (or shooting) guard, small forward,
power (or big) forward, and center.
Through his years as a member of the
Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), from the fifth through the eighth grades, it
was not uncommon for James to live with the Joyce family for extended
periods. James and Dru III became very close friends and played together,
with their other friends, on the Northeast Ohio Shooting Stars AAU team.
Coached by Joyce’s father, Dru, the Shooting Stars qualified for the
under–sixth-grade AAU national competition that took place in Salt Lake
City, Utah. The elder Dru Joyce explained to Tim Rogers that during that
period, as later, James wanted "to act like he knows more than you do.
He’s coachable in the sense that when you call him out on something he’s
done wrong, he knows. But you’d better understand and know what you are
talking about because he knows the game." Two years later, competing in
the under–eighth-grade AAU national championships, the Shooting Stars
advanced as far as the national finals in Orlando, Florida, before losing,
68–66, to the Southern California All-Stars, despite an exceptional
performance by James.
On the advice of their parents, James and
three of his close friends, Joyce, Cotton, and McGee—who were then
referring to themselves as the "Fab Four," in homage to the 1992 Michigan
University men’s basketball team—settled on Saint Vincent–Saint Mary's
High School (SVSM), a parochial school in downtown Akron. James also
agreed to play football for SVSM, whose sports teams were nicknamed the
"Fighting Irish." Making his debut as a freshman in the starting lineup
for the varsity basketball team on December 2, 1999, James—who had by then
grown to over six feet tall—quickly attracted the attention of Division I
college-basketball programs and even NBA scouts. James and one of his
teammates, Maverick Carter, who was then a senior, led the Fighting Irish
to a perfect 27–0 record and to their first state championship since 1984.
As a freshman James averaged slightly below 20 points per game (PPG) and
was also among the team’s leaders in many other statistical categories. Of
particular interest to many scouts was James’s ability to make his
teammates on the court more productive players by virtue of his
willingness to pass the ball, despite his own knack for scoring.
The following fall, as a sophomore, James
played football for the Fighting Irish, gaining more than 700 yards
receiving and scoring 14 touchdowns. For his accomplishments as a wide
receiver, he was named the team’s most valuable offensive player. On the
basketball court as a sophomore, James became one of the hottest young
prospects in the country—a position in which, normally, only upperclassmen
found themselves. He led the Fighting Irish to their second consecutive
state championship, averaging over 25 points per game, 7.4 rebounds, and
5.5 assists; he thus became the first sophomore in Ohio state history to
be voted the state’s "Mr. Basketball," an honor he would also win in his
junior and senior seasons. Having grown another several inches, James
began to court the attention of such college basketball enthusiasts as the
ESPN commentator Dick Vitale, who included James on a list of his top five
high-school sophomores in the country. In order to accommodate the large
crowds that James was attracting, SVSM began to schedule some of the
basketball team’s home games at the University of Akron’s James A. Rhodes
Arena.
Between James's sophomore and junior
seasons, his performance at several instructional basketball camps
increased interest in him among scouts even more. Also that summer James
participated with his idol, Michael Jordan, and several other NBA players
in an exclusive workout session organized by Jordan. James had a brush
with controversy during that time, when he said that he was considering
entering the NBA draft after his junior season at SVSM. He later retracted
his comments and stayed at SVSM, and on its basketball team, through his
senior year.
In James’s junior year the hoopla
surrounding the SVSM team reached new heights. That year, for example, the
shoe company Adidas became the team’s official apparel sponsor. As a
junior James again led SVSM to an impressive record--and to their third
consecutive state championship final. Speaking to Grant Wahl, the
Germantown (Pennsylvania) Academy coach Jim Fenerty, whose team played
against SVSM, compared James with the former high-school phenomenon Kobe
Bryant: "We played Kobe when Kobe was a senior, and LeBron is the best
player we’ve ever played against. LeBron is physically stronger than Kobe
was as a senior, and we’ve never had anybody shoot better against us." At
year’s end James was a consensus All-American performer and was named
high-school basketball player of the year by such publications as USA
Today and Parade. A few months after his 17th birthday, in February 2002,
Sports Illustrated featured a photo of James on its cover, dressed in his
SVSM basketball uniform, along with the words "The Chosen One."
Prior to the start of his senior season,
SVSM signed an unprecedented contract to broadcast each of the basketball
team’s 10 home games throughout northeastern Ohio on local pay-per-view
television. The sports network ESPN2 later agreed to televise a game the
team was playing in December. According to one report, approximately 1.67
million households watched the ESPN2 broadcast of a game between SVSM and
Oak Hill Academy. Those developments, along with the team’s busy schedule,
which included games against schools as far away as California, led many
to conclude that the fuss being made over James was bordering on
exploitation. On the court James seemed unfazed by all the attention,
leading his team to their third state championship in four years, this
time on the more competitive Division II level. After the season James
went on to participate in the 26th Annual McDonald’s All-American High
School Boys Basketball Game, a contest reserved for the U.S.’s elite
high-school basketball players, and in the EA Sports Roundall Classic in
Chicago, Illinois.
On April 7, 2003 James officially declared
himself eligible for the National Basketball Association (NBA) draft. Soon
afterward he signed a $90 million endorsement contract with the shoe
company Nike. On June 26, 2003 the Cleveland Cavaliers chose James as the
first player overall in the 2003 draft. Prior to the draft, James and the
Cavaliers had negotiated a rookie contract valued at $18.8 million over
four years. A franchise that had fallen on hard times, the Cavaliers had
not reached the play-offs since 1998 and had tied the Denver Nuggets in
the 2002-03 season for a league-worst 17–65 record. Despite the unusually
high expectations placed upon him, James’s presence immediately paid
dividends. Fan attendance for home games rose by roughly 7,200 on average
per home game, as James took over in the Cavaliers’ starting lineup and
became the focal point of their offense. Starting 79 of the Cavaliers' 81
games, James averaged 20.9 points, 5.9 assists, and 5.5 rebounds per game,
contributing to the team’s revitalization, which included a 35–47 record,
a noticeable improvement over the previous season. James received all six
rookie-of-the-month awards for the Eastern Conference, joining David
Robinson, Tim Duncan, and his Western Conference counterpart Carmelo
Anthony of the Denver Nuggets as the only rookies to have done so in NBA
history. He was presented with the NBA’s rookie-of-the-year award at the
season’s conclusion.
Following the 2003-04 season, after a
number of NBA veterans declined to play for the United States in the 2004
Olympic Games, in Athens, Greece, James was tapped for the team. The
hurriedly assembled squad included a number of young, inexperienced
players, such as James, and the team’s head coach, Larry Brown, was
notoriously harsh on such athletes--leading many to express doubts about
the U.S. team’s prospects in the Games. Moreover, the team had mere weeks
to prepare, while a majority of the other Olympic squads had practiced and
played together as units for months, if not longer. It soon became clear
that observers' misgivings were well founded. After the U.S. team endured
its first two losses in Olympic basketball competition since 1992 (the
first year that NBA stars played in the Olympics), it rebounded to qualify
for the medal round and defeated Lithuania, 104–96, to win the bronze.
Despite averaging a shade over 11 minutes per game, which was the
fourth-lowest average on the team, James performed comparatively well in
the Games. "The Olympic experience really helped him," Paul Silas, then
the coach of the Cavaliers, told David Dupree. "What it did most was that
he had to play defense in order to play at all. So that helped him be
conscious of defense."
Committed to improving his long-range
shooting in time for the 2004-05 season, James returned to the NBA with a
renewed determination. With 2,175 points scored and an average of 27.2
points per game (third-best in the league), James finished second behind
Allen Iverson of the Philadelphia 76ers for top-scorer honors. He also led
the NBA in minutes played, logging 3,388 minutes (or slightly over 42
minutes per game), a high number for a second-year player, and improved
his output in several other statistical categories, including assists,
rebounds, and steals. With a 42–40 record, the Cavaliers enjoyed their
first winning season since 1998, even if they did not qualify for the
play-offs. Over the course of the season, James set a number of personal
marks. On January 20, 2005 he became the youngest player in NBA history to
record a triple-double, posting double-digit figures in three important
statistical categories—with 27 points, 11 rebounds, and 10 assists against
the Portland Trail Blazers in a 107–101 win. Later, at 20 years and 80
days old, James eclipsed a mark held by the retired Rick Barry as the
youngest player to score 50 or more points in a single NBA game. James did
so by scoring 56 points on March 20, 2005 in a game that the Cavaliers
lost to the Toronto Raptors, 105–98. "I had to have patience with him and
teach him the fundamentals of our game," Silas explained to Pierce. "And,
then, only during the first season. Now, the second season, he came back,
and he had it down. He's the quickest study I've ever been around. He
knows immediately when he makes a mistake, and he came back with a
confidence he didn't have last year." More than halfway through the
2004-05 season, Silas was fired as the Cavaliers coach and replaced on an
interim basis by Brendan Malone. Later, in the off-season, Mike Brown
became the team’s new head coach; the franchise also named the former
Cavaliers forward Danny Ferry as its general manager.
In the months leading up to the start of
the 2005-06 season, James dismissed rumors that he had demanded to be
traded to the New York Knicks, the Miami Heat, or the Los Angeles Lakers.
He told the Associated Press (October 4, 2005, on-line), "For the record,
I am not going anywhere. I keep hearing these stories about LeBron James
is not happy in Cleveland. I don’t understand where these keep coming
from. I’m very happy in the Cavaliers' uniform and I’m going to be wearing
this uniform for a long time, OK?" As part of the team’s effort to
surround James with a solid supporting cast to increase its chances of
getting to the NBA play-offs, the team signed the free-agent guards Larry
Hughes and Damon Jones, along with the forward Donyell Marshall. "There
should be no excuses for us not to get to the play-offs with the guys that
we’ve added," James said.
James has contracts to endorse such
products as Coca-Cola and Bubblicious gum. He can often be seen on
television commercials for the sports drink Powerade and the soft drink
Sprite, as well. The 20-year-old garnered headlines following the 2005 NBA
season when he ended his association with his agent, Aaron Goodwin, who
had negotiated many of James’s endorsement deals. Other places to find
James's image include the DC Comics series that features the basketball
player competing in a clandestinely run hoops tournament.
According to USA Today (February 17, 2005),
James became a father on October 6, 2004 but has guarded the identity of
the child’s mother from the mainstream media. He nonetheless told DuPree
that becoming a father "is the best thing that ever happened to me. It has
made me more humble." James often credits his mother, who raised him
despite the family’s small means, as being an inspiration to him. In 2005
LeBron James and his mother established the James Family Foundation, a
charitable organization that sponsors events to raise money for programs
that benefit Akron's youth. The James Family Foundation has arranged
various events in the Akron area, including the popular "King for Kids
Bike-a-Thon." James lives in a lavish home in Summit County, Ohio.
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