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Published: Sep 16, 2009
Category: Memoir
"We all we got." That epigram --- from the front of this book --- tells you all you need to know about LeBron James’ memoir. He may be the world’s best basketball player. Entire chapters may be devoted to chronicles of games. But this is not a book about basketball.
LeBron's Dream Team is about race, about being born black and poor and fighting your way around drugs and gangs and despair to become a decent human being. It’s about character.
Those are big subjects, bigger and more urgent every day. Ever since an African-American moved into the White House, the idea that a black man can be worthy has come under withering attack. And don’t think for a minute that the Limbaughs, Becks and Hannitys are interested only in de-legitimizing Barack Obama. They want “their” country back --- and when you shake the rhetoric away from the message, you can pretty easily see that they want the black man to “know his place.”
But here’s the catch. LeBron James --- who is now, at 24, the world’s third-highest paid athlete --- had no place. Born in Akron, Ohio to a 16-year-old, he never knew his father. He moved a dozen times before he was 8. When he was 9, he missed 100 days of school, and his mother placed him in another home until she could get her life together. At 11, he had never been to Cleveland, just 39 miles away.
How did he figure a way out?
With the help of friends he made when they were 10 and 11: Dru Joyce III, Willie McGee and Sian Cotton. They called themselves “The Fab Four” and they celebrated their brotherhood in their neighborhood, at school, and, most of all, on basketball courts.
“We all we got.” I’m not ashamed to say I cried when I read those words for the first time, and I mist up even now --- those words, and what’s behind them, are the difference between life and death, success and failure. No one gets anywhere in life alone; everyone needs support. A family, a religious group, a circle of friends. Especially if you’re poor and marginalized.
As a group portrait, “LeBron's Dream Team" is the story of some teenagers who worked at basketball until they were just about the best team in the country. It’s about the many games they won, and how they did it, and the few they lost, and why. And it’s about a boy of immense talent and deep wounds, who became, at 18, so remarkably good that he skipped college and went right to the NBA.
Ultimately, though, it’s about a young bodhisattva --- a boy with a vision, and great teachers, and greater friends. It’s about the struggle to fit in at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School, where the kids were white and there was a dress code, and zero tolerance for facial hair, tats or bling. It’s about being hated for being good, and burrowing deeper into your brotherhood.
And it’s about teams. The truth of basketball, as Michael Jordan had to learn, is that scoring champions don’t win championships. Teams do. And that is true of so much more than basketball. “We all we got.”
So you’ll read the story of the $50,000 Hummer that LeBron received on his 18th birthday, the late-night parties in hotels before tournament games, the inability to handle what happens when you’re on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a high school junior --- and, yes, you will think he’s blown it forever. And then, because LeBron James and his friends really are exceptionally good students in the subjects that matter, you’ll get redemption that’s far more exciting than any three-pointer at the buzzer.
Who should read this book? Everyone who loves basketball, of course. But more: kids on the fence, mothers of teenage sons, teachers and preachers. And --- how could I forget? --- a few million aging whites who categorically demonize young black males as thugs but who don’t have a fraction of the character of LeBron James and his friends.
“We all we got.” Those kids believed. And they knew: what they achieved on their court was nothing compared to what they achieved in their lives. They made it out.
To buy “Lebron's Dream Team” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy the Kindle edition of “Lebron's Dream Team” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy the audio CD from Amazon.com, click here.
To read an excerpt, click here.