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 ather they would stay together and do whatever it took to win a national title. They had idea how hard it would be to pursue 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.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Penguin Press
ISBN-10
159420232x
ISBN-13
9781594202322
eBay Product ID (ePID)
189973154
Product Key Features
Author
Buzz Bissinger, Lebron James
Format
Hardback, Sewn,Cloth over Boards,With Dust Jacket
Language
English
Topic
Autobiography: Sport
Additional Product Features
Content Note
Illustrations
Author Biography
LeBron James plays for the NBA s Cleveland Cavaliers. 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-three he is the third-highest-paid athlete in the world (including endorsements). He has hosted Saturday Night Live, graced Oprah s stage, and appeared on the cover of Fortune. Buzz Bissinger is the author of A Prayer for the City, the New York Times bestseller Three Nights in August, and Friday Night Lights, which has sold almost 2 million copies to date and spawned a film and a TV series. He is a contributing writer for Vanity Fair.