Filled with plastic trays and your typical school lunch fare, we all sat like Black Vikings at these elongated brown tables. While the top five floors of St. Edmund Preparatory High School were for a formal education of the mind, the basement lunchroom tables were for informal debate. In those days, watching the basketball team play on cold Friday nights in Brooklyn was the must-see event of the week. Naturally being a starter on the basketball team, I earned my seat with the jocks, upperclassmen, and the “cool kids.” It was 2002 and our junior varsity basketball team had just won the city championship the previous year and I had lost weight to prepare myself to play on the varsity level. Socially, I was dating my first girlfriend, I had lots of gelled curly hair, and admittedly was feeling myself. Our coach mostly played upperclassman and I struggled to find minutes on the court that season, but otherwise, life was good.
A bit of a bookworm and a basketball junkie, I couldn’t wait for my issue of Sports Illustrated to arrive every week. I’ll never forget that week in February of 2002 that I received my issue with a kid that kinda looked like me on the cover along with the words “The Chosen One” emblazoned in white letters. As a deeply religious teenager, you can image how incendiary I felt that cover was, but it only inflamed my curiosity even more: Who was this kid? And why was the iconic Sports Illustrated magazine saying he could play in the NBA as a high school junior? I was a high school junior and was struggling for minutes at St. Edmund and you’re telling me this kid can play with Shaquille O’Neal (my favorite player at the time) in the NBA?! Where is Akron, Ohio anyway? Why does his school name have two hyphenated saints? Who is this kid?!
Because my family invested in the luxury of books and magazines, we were probably one of the last families to order cable television. So when LeBron James made his television debut in December of 2002, I did not get to watch ESPN broadcast the first nationally televised high school game featuring LeBron’s high school team, St. Vincent-St. Mary. Trust me when I say that I actually asked my mom if I could go watch a high school kid play basketball at a friend’s house. I have Caribbean parents so you can imagine how that conversation went with my mother: “Are you crazy? No, you’re not going to no Wesley’s house to watch no game ah esta hora a la manana! Are you crazy?” Obviously, I wanted to be prepared for the following days’ lunchroom debate to give my reaction of the kid they were calling “King James.” Alas, I was relegated to reading about him in the paper the next day. He dropped 31 points? Who is this kid?
The following year I was voted as one of the captains of the varsity basketball team. Although I was our team’s grossly undersized center, we hoisted our second New York City championship before losing in the state tournament. But I had earned the respect of my basketball peers and was voted All-City along with two of my teammates by all of the head coaches in our league. Meanwhile in Ohio, LeBron also won a city championship, but he then went on to win a third state championship and second Mr. Basketball award for the state of Ohio. He went on a few months later to be drafted the overall number one pick by his home state team, Cleveland Cavaliers. By his NBA debut in October 2003, Nike had already signed him to a record $90 million dollar endorsement deal and the pressure was mounting for LeBron to deliver that night. Although we still didn’t have cable, my mamma couldn’t tell me nothing now that I was in college, so I went to a friend’s house to watch his debut versus the Sacramento Kings. This time I didn’t have to read about it in the paper: he had 25 points, 9 rebounds, 6 assists, and 4 steals. Who is this kid?
I graduated college in three years with a 3.6 G.P.A, and in those three years, I had three internships and three jobs. You do the math. My hard work paid off and in 2007 I was proudly hired by the iconic American company, American Express. “Is this what it felt like to be drafted,” I wondered at the time. A designer that I knew from college reached out to invite me to LeBron’s Nike sneaker release party in lower Manhattan one night. I partied a lot in those days and as I was playing NBA 2K at the event a voice asks from behind me, “Who’s winning?” I turn around and it’s Lebron James in a cream mink vest. I keep my cool and simply respond, “You.” He laughs and we dap each other and he walks away. Later that summer, LeBron was taking his grossly inexperienced and relatively untalented team to the NBA Finals for the first time in Cavs franchise history – and in only his fourth year in the league! Who is this kid?
I was having a great year at work and was on my way to receiving the company’s highest rating for elite performers. In the spring of 2012, I was selected from thousands of employees to be a member of the highly selective, Global Rotation Program, which afforded me the opportunity to live in Sydney, Australia. About to embark on what would be the professional and personal journey of a lifetime, I watched from my work computer at the Amex Tower in Sydney, as LeBron won his first NBA championship as a member of the Miami Heat. He was winning on South Beach and I was winning on Bondi Beach. Who is this kid?
In 2016, I signed the largest deal of my sales career to date and Lebron had returned to the Cleveland Cavaliers to win their first championship in franchise history – the state of Ohio’s first professional championship since 1964 – his third ring overall. Since then, as I write this piece, I am at a moment of transition in my career and LeBron recently announced that he was leaving Cleveland, transitioning to the legendary Los Angeles Lakers. Who is this man?
Over the last 16 years, the world has come to intimately know Lebron Raymone James and his family. And in a sense, he and I have grown up together. From the evolution of our sense of style to our ever-receding hairlines, I’ve grown up with King James as a reflection of my generation. And in my own small way, possibly even a reflection of myself. As a double entendre, he is the celebrity look-alike that I get most often.
The Michael Jordan vs. LeBron James debate will fervently continue to go on and that is a piece for another day. Yet, there is something LeBron did this week that continues to set him apart from not only all the other sports greats before him but as one of the great philanthropists of our time. In addition to lending his voice to social issues and spending $41 million dollars in 2015 to sponsor 1,100 college educations, this week he opened a public school in Akron whose mission is to aid students and parents of underprivileged families in Akron. Certainly, other athletes (like Dikembe Mutombo, who built a state-of-the-art hospital in his native Democratic Republic of Congo) have given back to their communities in major ways. Though what LeBron is doing is slightly different given the scale of the impact that he is achieving through educating children and college kids. This is a shining moment in a darkened backdrop of Black Americans deeply complicated relationship with the American Education system. Perhaps, his legacy through education will even shine brighter than his legacy as a basketball prodigy.
In Grant Wahl’s now iconic Sports Illustrated article from 2002, he famously described the meeting between “His Airness and King James,” as akin to when a teenage Bill Clinton met JFK. But maybe the photo above is actually the more appropriate comparison.
That’s who that man is… I hope to follow in his footsteps.
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