Jump-shot heroes

SHOOTING STARS

By LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger

Penguin Press

258 pp., $26.95

"Shooting Stars," by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger, seems like a story too good to be true -- too good even for Hollywood. Start with five black kids -- all blessed with talent, grit and attitude -- from hard-luck backgrounds in Akron, Ohio, a city that, we're told, "for all its goodness of heart, wasn't soft." But against long odds, they go on to the national high school basketball finals. One of them turns out to be James, the most celebrated high school basketball player and maybe the greatest pro player ever. He narrates this story, and Bissinger, the author of a classic book on high school football, "Friday Night Lights," helps shape his vision.

I'm as big a sucker as anyone for the underdog sports theme, and much of "Shooting Stars" has momentum. The story of "the fab five" preteen basketball players who banded together and even chose the high school they would play for -- St. Vincent-St. Mary, a nearly all-white Catholic school -- holds your attention even if you know how their championship quest ends.

We never, though, quite get into the heads of the other four players: Willie McGee, Cian Cotton, Romeo Travis and Dru Joyce (whose father ended up coaching them in high school). For some reason, they are allowed to speak only in faded, second-hand recollections. Surely, their voices would have added some fresh perspectives, particularly in light of their former teammate's superstar success in the NBA. James tells us at the end that "we obviously don't see each other as much as we used to. When we do, there is still the same music of laughter and chatter. . . . Whatever my status in the NBA, they still treat me like their brother." I don't doubt that, but one would like very much to know how they feel about James's success and what they are doing now.

A bigger problem, though, is that we never really get in the head of James himself. Occasionally, but not often enough, he takes time out from game-by-game accounts, which are undoubtedly important to him but often tedious to readers -- particularly the blowouts, of which there are many. We get the idea that he believes in karma: "I look for karma, I believe that things happen or don't happen for a reason." This belief, however, rarely moves beyond such cliches and sometimes morphs into a vague sense of providence, as in, "God was surely leading all of us somewhere."

At other times, James's reflections sound like the heavily filtered romantic notions of the prestigious sportswriter. On the first page, for example, James tells us that he grew up in "a brooding apartment building rising up like a slab of stone"; a few pages later, a shot falls away from a rim "with the taunting cruelty that is basketball." But neither karma nor God nor overwriting provides much insight into the game of basketball. The few nuggets we're offered are along the lines of "Basketball is about finding the right parts and putting them together," which sounds as if it had been texted in. The closest we get to genuine emotion is when James vents his anger on the sports media -- the newspapers, magazines and TV networks -- which he repeatedly accuses of exploiting him while he was in high school. And of course, he is correct. They did exploit him shamefully at a time when the system prevented him from tapping into the enormous revenue streams he was helping create. But what James doesn't tell us is how he thinks he would have landed that staggering $90 million Nike contract without the media attention that made him a household name in his senior year of high school.

One roots for "Shooting Stars" to be better than it is because James is so engaging and Bissinger has produced some great books, but ultimately this book is an air ball that doesn't do well by either man.