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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…

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. They were a motley group who faced challenges all too typical of inner-city America.

Despite hardships, 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 pursue that promise. In the years that followed, they would endure jealousy, hostility, exploitation, resentment from the black community, and the consequences of their own overconfidence.

Together these five boys became men, and together they claimed the prize they had fought for all those years. United by their love of the game and their yearning for companionship, their bond carried them through thick and thin (a lot of thin) and, at last, to a national championship in their senior year of high school. Shooting Stars is their story.

Books featured in this episode:

		Shooting Stars LeBron James Buzz Bissinger Hardcover The Penguin Press $26.95 add to cart Read more...

		Shooting Stars LeBron James Buzz Bissinger Moe Irvin CD Unabridged Penguin Audio $29.95 add to cart Read more...

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.