LeBron's Dream Team by Buzz Bissinger | Teen Ink

LeBron's Dream Team by Buzz Bissinger

January 12, 2016
By ElijahCrawford BRONZE, Portland, Oregon
ElijahCrawford BRONZE, Portland, Oregon
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

Lebron’s Path to Success
LeBron’s Dream Team is a story written by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger about Lebron’s life and the things he had to go through as a kid to get to where he is today. 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.
Life wasn’t always that easy for Lebron and his friends though, Lebron faced challenges such as moving to multiple schools, poverty, and not being able to live with his mother at one point in time. He never let that stop him, he always found a way to adjust and overcome the challenges thrown at him at a young age. 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.
I would recommend this book to readers that are interested in sports, preferably basketball. I chose this book because LeBron is one of the best in the league today and one of my favorite players and I wanted to get to know a little more about him outside of basketball. If you’re interested in knowing more about his life and what he went through before he got to the league, this book is perfect for you.



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