CHαPTER ΟNE
Before he became the best basketball player on the planet, LeBron James was just a poor kid from Akron, Ohio, born to a sixteen-year-old mother without any money or a permanent place to live.
Before he was King James, he was a little boy clutching a stuffed animal.
He was the kind of kid most people ignore.
LeBron didn’t have his own bedroom with posters on the wall or clothes hanging in the closet. A permanent home was a luxury Gloria, his mother, could not afford. So they bounced from apartment to apartment, or slept on a friend’s couch. LeBron carried his few toys with him.
“Don’t get comfortable,” Gloria would tell him, “because we may not be here long.”
Sometimes, LeBron stayed home by himself while his mom went to school or to work. The TV kept him company, but it was nothing like the comfort of his mother’s presence. So with Gloria gone for hours, he settled for the next best thing, clutching his stuffed blue elephant close to his chest whenever he missed her.
Constantly moving from place to place, LeBron missed nearly one hundred days of school one year. He stayed in so many parts of town, he wasn’t exactly sure which school he was supposed to attend anyway.
One day, when he was eight years old, LeBron was outside playing with friends when a youth football coach drove up to his building looking for kids to join his team. LeBron loved sports but had never played on a real team before. The coach challenged the kids to a hundred-yard sprint. “Fastest one is my running back,” he said.
LeBron was up for the challenge.
Ready. Set. Go!He sprinted so fast he won the race by fifteen yards.
The coach was amazed. And he had himself a new running back.
LeBron scored seventeen touchdowns in his very first season.
Everyone who watched him play could see that LeBron was an amazing athlete. But he was also the kind of kid who had everything stacked against him.
In the years to come, he would beat the odds and become one of the most famous people on Earth.
But he never forgot where he came from.
From Akron. From poverty. From a place where hope was blown out like a candle.
They say an elephant never forgets. And neither did the boy who held the blue one.
And because LeBron never forgot his roots, he made a promise to help the kids from Akron just like him. Kids who were scared and hungry but full of dreams just like anyone else.
And he would use his voice to speak out against the forces that created inequality in the first place.
LeBron James’s biggest victories have taken place well beyond the game of basketball.
Copyright © 2024 by Andrew Maraniss. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
