The Barnes & Noble Review
A while back, a pair of YouTube videos made it viral in Cleveland, where I live. These "Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism" videos spoof earnest attempts to attract visitors. Featuring a shot of a steel mill and a shot of the sky, for example, they trumpet Cleveland as "the place where there used to be industry" and where you can "see the sun almost three times a year." The clip that cuts deepest is a shot of a giant "We Are All Witnesses" billboard featuring LeBron James, arms outstretched, head back, claiming dominion. The voice-over quips, "Our economy is based on LeBron James."
When James's team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, plays a home game, millions of much-needed dollars are pumped into the city. James has lived in this area all of his 25 years. He grew up in nearby Akron, and since childhood, he tells us in his memoir, Shooting Stars, he has loved the area, for it meant "people taking care of things, people taking care of each other, people who found you and protected you." He promised himself, "I was going to let the world know where Akron was."
He succeeded, and Shooting Stars is the story of how he did so. The Shooting Stars were a basketball team James played on in middle school. His teammates were his best friends, and together they all enrolled in St. Vincent-St. Mary. As the starting squad for this Catholic high school's team, they named themselves the Fab Five (after the 1991 University of Michigan team).
James is generally known as a good guy in the often morally murky world of professional athletics. He has never been arrested or suspected of drug use, and is known as a team player who unselfishly passes the ball. Shooting Stars, which could be seen as another self-indulgent plea for attention and money by an über-celebrity, is consonant with the Jamesian ethos of taking care of your own, staying close to your roots, and putting Akron (and Cleveland) on the map.
The book has two authors, though, and on the cover an ampersand connects LeBron James with Buzz Bissinger, best known for writing one of the most acclaimed sports books in recent years, Friday Night Lights. Bissinger is also a contributing writer for Vanity Fair.
The prospect of a Friday Night Lights (or Hoop Dreams) story about James's schoolyard friends -- Little Dru, Willie, Sian, and Romeo, all African American, all from modest backgrounds -- none of whom have come close to James in terms of success, is bound to make any fan of narrative sportswriting excited. But Shooting Stars is no Hoop Dreams, nor does it rival the most memorable sports autobiographies, such as Muhammad Ali's The Greatest. For all its interest, it is plagued by the fact that Bissinger and James have made a terrible decision: to tell the story in the first person -- and Bissinger does not fade into the background enough to make this work.
Here are the first lines of the Prologue: "I am a sophomore at St. Vincent-St. Mary, a coed Catholic high school on North Maple Street overlooking the small cluster of downtown Akron. It has fine academics, and it's about three miles from where I live, with my mother on the sixth floor of a brooding apartment building rising up like a slab of stone on the crest of a small hill." Brooding buildings and crests of hills? A manufactured present tense? We know from the start this book is not written by LeBron James.
To his credit, Bissinger did serious research. (One has to infer this, because he does not speak directly anywhere in the book, not even in the acknowledgements.) He (or someone else) has meticulously gathered the backgrounds of the players and their families, interviewed them about their feelings during the years they shared on the court with James, and read the most local newspapers for game statistics. But these facts are then rendered into James's voice, creating an impossible narration, as when James tells us about how many days Willie missed of first grade: "[I]t was Willie, as the oldest at six or seven, who changed his niece and nephew and youngest brother's diapers. He warmed up their bottles, and he fed them and made sure they burped and put them to sleep…He took his responsibilities with seriousness and purpose despite being so young. But he was missing school, close to forty days at Bethune Elementary one year." (In fact, James did not meet Willie until years later).
Much of the book is devoted to play-by-play. We get game recaps from when the boys were ten. We learn that, in a freshman playoff, Little Dru's "third three-point attempt came with 5:24 left in the second quarter." These painstaking re-creations of distant games are both absurd and touching. In the first half, the book lives up to its title, keeping its focus on James's teammates and the people around them. We meet Illya McGee, Willie's big brother, who was a student at the University of Akron when Wilile's life in Chicago became untenable; Illya took his brother in and raised him until Willie graduated high school. And Keith Damrot, the Shooting Stars' first high school coach, who landed at St. Vincent's after he lost a college coaching post for using a racial epithet. After the Fab Five brought national attention to St. Vincent's in James's first year, Damrot left the school for a new college job.
These and other stories are, unfortunately, filtered through James's voice (or faux voice), compounding the very problem the book seeks to redress -- that James gets, and always has gotten, all the attention. One itches for quotes from McGee, Damrot, or Little Dru, the feisty, talented (yet too-short) brains of the squad.
By the second half of the book, James's own success takes over: he gets on the cover of Sports Illustrated, buys a Hummer, is suspended because of a scandal involving free shirts: "This was a one-man posse's attempt to humiliate me, subject me to ridicule, rip open rumors that I was corrupt, and ruin a dream." James's anger here contrasts with his refusal to delve into personal issues. Of "the crazy quilt of moves there and moves here growing up" as a young child, and the nights when he did not know whether his mother would return, James notes: "Whoever wants to keep track of something like that? All it does is cause you pain and memories you would rather forget."
Whether or not he stays a Cavalier, James has kept his promises to his friends in Akron, but he has not stopped being the figure through which they are seen. If only we could turn this book inside out; if only Bissinger allowed the Shooting Stars to speak for themselves. --Anne Trubek
Anne Trubek is associate professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College. Her website is annetrubek.com.
From the Publisher
From the ultimate team—basketball superstar LeBron James and
Buzz Bissinger, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Friday Night Lights and Three Nights in August—a poignant, thrilling tale of the power of teamwork to transform young lives, including James’s own.
The Shooting Stars were a bunch of kids—LeBron James and his best friends—from Akron, Ohio, who first met
on a youth basketball team of the same name when they were
ten and eleven years old. United by their love of the game and
their yearning for companionship, they quickly forged a bond
that would carry them through thick and thin (a lot of thin)
and, at last, to a national championship in their senior year of
high school.
They were a motley group who faced challenges all
too typical of inner-city America. LeBron grew up without a
father and had moved with his mother more than a dozen times
by the age of ten. Willie McGee, the quiet one, had left both his
parents behind in Chicago to be raised by his older brother in
Akron. Dru Joyce was outspoken, and his dad was ever present;
he would end up coaching all five of the boys in high school.
Sian Cotton, who also played football, was the happy-go-lucky
enforcer, while Romeo Travis was unhappy, bitter, even surly,
until he finally opened himself up to the bond his teammates
offered him.
In the summer after seventh grade, the Shooting
Stars tasted glory when they qualified for a national championship
tournament in Memphis. But they lost their focus and had
to go home early. They promised one another they would stay
together and do whatever it took to win a national title.
They had no idea how hard it would be to fulfill that promise. In the years that followed, they would endure
jealousy, hostility, exploitation, resentment from the black
community (because they went to a “white” high school), and
the consequences of their own overconfidence. Not least, they
would all have to wrestle with LeBron’s outsize success, which
brought too much attention and even a whiff of scandal their
way. But together these five boys became men, and together
they claimed the prize they had fought for all those years—a
national championship.
Shooting Stars is a stirring depiction of the
challenges that face America’s youth today and a gorgeous
evocation of the transcendent impact of teamwork.
About the Authors
LEBRON JAMES plays for the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers. His superstardom is hard to overstate: At seventeen he
was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated; at nineteen he became the youngest Rookie of the Year in NBA history; at twenty-four he is the third highest paid athlete in the world (including endorsements) after Tiger Woods and David Beckham. He has hosted Saturday Night Live, graced Oprah’s stage, and appeared on the cover of Fortune.
BUZZ BISSINGER wrote what is widely regarded as the best and bestselling book about high school sports ever—Friday Night Lights. That work has sold almost two million copies to date and spawned a film and TV series. His other books include A Prayer for the City and the New York Times bestseller Three Nights in August.
The New York Times -
Dwight Garner
Shooting Stars is a measured, modest book about four kids from Akron, Ohio, James among them, who became best friends off the court and a mighty force on it. The book, mostly told in James's gentle first-person voice, follows his life and those of his three friends from their often troubled childhoods through the state and national championships they win for St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron…reads like a better-than-average young-adult novel, "Stand by Me" with breakaway dunks and long, arching three-pointers.
Publishers Weekly
James, the highest-paid athlete (including endorsement deals) in the NBA, turns to Bissinger (Friday Night Lights) to tell the story of his meteoric rise as a high school basketball player, when he and his teammates took a private school in Ohio to state and national championships. Looking back at the media circus that put him on the cover of Sports Illustrated at 17, James accuses the media of overexposing him for their own benefit. It feels like the young superstar is working out some grudges against the athletic officials who challenged his amateur status after he accepted two jerseys from a sporting goods store as a gift, along with his school for failing to take his side in the controversy, but Bissinger smoothes out the rough edges, letting very little anger show. That polish is the as-told-to memoir's biggest problem—despite stylistic flourishes like shifting to present tense to write about James's big games, his passion seems muted. James hits all the right moments, from the childhood promise he made to himself to put Akron on the map to the graduation day photo with his teammates, but it's a story readers hear rather than feel. (Sept.)
Library Journal
James may be the best basketball player in the world right now; he's definitely one of the most popular. And Bissinger's Friday Night Lights became a national sensation, spawning a movie and a successful television series. They should make for a powerful combination as they present the story of James's amazing Akron, OH, high school basketball team, which won multiple state titles and a national championship. Many readers will be interested to know the details surrounding his suspension during his senior year for accepting free "throw-back" jerseys from a local sports dealer and his mother's controversial purchase of a $50,000 Hummer. Unlike Friday Night Lights, few details of the lives of either James himself or his best friends/teammates, the "Fab Five," are given. VERDICT People will want to read this because of James's star power and the controversies he addresses. Both fans of James and of books on high school sports will find the story of the games, the players, and the coaches engaging, but they may be disappointed with matter-of-fact game descriptions that fail to build much excitement.—Todd Spires, Bradley Univ. Lib., Peoria, IL
Kirkus Reviews
NBA superstar James and Vanity Fair contributor and acclaimed sportswriter Bissinger (Three Nights in August, 2005, etc.) profile James's championship high-school basketball team. Although Bissinger's authorial stamp can be somewhat heavy at times, there's still plenty of conversational snap in James's modest but passionate first-person voice. The co-authors adequately humanize all five starting members of Ohio's St.Vincent-St. Mary Shooting Stars. Of course James is the focus here, and he provides ample biographical details about his fatherless upbringing in the Akron housing projects. James proved to be not only a gifted athlete-effortlessly excelling in both football and basketball-but also an honor-roll student. His teammates were an eccentric mixed bag, but all hailed from economically underprivileged backgrounds and ended up on scholarship at the mostly white private high school. As a result, they were often considered traitors by the black community, while never feeling wholly accepted in white society. It was James's remarkable individual play that eventually brought national attention to the team. During his senior season, he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and suddenly his team was pushed into the national spotlight-with all the attendant accolades, pressures and pitfalls. When James accepted $850 in merchandise from a local Cleveland clothing shop-in violation of an obscure and rarely enforced rule-he was temporarily suspended and then dragged into a court hearing. The inspirational heart of the book is James and his teammates' gutsy performance in the face of the tornado-like media frenzy. The co-authors dramatically re-create the minute-by-minute highlights of keygames in St.V's national-championship drive, but they also interject some serious social commentary on the vindictiveness, greed and exploitation that can infect the seemingly pristine world of amateur sports. A simple but moving story about the double-edged sword of precocious athletic talent and the redemptive power of teamwork. Launch events in New York and Cleveland. Agent: Mort Janklow/Janklow & Nesbit
What People Are Saying
Madeleine Blais
"Told in a voice that is streetwise, yet gentle, SHOOTING STARS shows how inner determination trumps bad breaks and how a winning combination of coaches, mentors, and friends turns lucky breaks into a way of life. If a book can have game, this one does."--(Madeleine Blais, author of IN THESE GIRLS, HOPE IS A MUSCLE)
John Grisham
"A heartwarming story of boys who became men, teammates who became brothers, players who became champions, wonderfully told through the maturing eyes of basketball's greatest star."
Steve Lopez
"The clock ticks, the suspense tightens, the scrappy kids from hard-luck Akron leave you hanging on every shot. But the wonder of SHOOTING STARS is that it's hardly about basketball. Instead it is a nuanced coming-of-age drama about American culture and race, about organized sports as redeemer and exploiter, and about the blessing and curse of celebrity. At this book's heart, though, is an uncommon bond forged in youthful innocence and desire, a friendship at least as meaningful as anything LeBron James will ever add to his trophy case."--(Steve Lopez, author of "The Soloist")
Mike Krzyzewski
"In the Olympics, LeBron was a star, a leader, and the ultimate teammate. He helped our team become a family. Reading SHOOTING STARS taught me how he became that kind of a teammate, developing the selflessness and loyalty that define who he is. What an amazing story."--(Mike Krzyzewski, Duke University men's basketball coach, Gold-Medal winning coach of US men's basketball team, 2008 Olympics)
Bob Costas
"Our sense of modern athletes is often limited to what highlight reels and marketing campaigns reveal or obscure. SHOOTING STARS is the compelling and often poignant story of a remarkable group of young men only one of whom happens to be a future NBA superstar. In the end we care about them all, even as we come away with a truer understanding and appreciation of the circumstances and relationships that forged one of the most significant sports figures of our time."--(Bob Costas, HBO and NBC sports commentator)
Jay-Z
"When I first saw LeBron James play as a professional, it was his selflessness that dazzled me the most. After reading SHOOTING STARS, I now understand why. It is a book of five boys coming together to learn the true meaning of teamwork and togetherness, loyalty and love, through highs and lows and thick and thin. It is a book filled with excitement and unforgettable characters. It is a book that will incredibly move and inspire you."
Warren Buffett
"Reading about LeBron James' transition from boyhood to manhood was a thrill for me. SHOOTING STARS is a remarkable and riveting story, filled with lessons of life we can all learn from."
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