An unhappy childhood – fatherless, living with a single mother – nurtured LeBron James’s iron will in his journey to become the number one star in the NBA.
James is seen as the greatest example of a talent overcoming adversity to rise to the pinnacle of glory and wealth in the NBA.
LeBron James’ misfortune is not uncommon in life as well as in the world of sports. But it is enough to break the will of any black child born in America in the 80s. Without a father, without a home, James wandered the streets of Akron, Ohio with his 16-year-old single mother and lived entirely on welfare. That was the beginning of the miserable childhood years of the current number one NBA star.
High school girl Gloria Marie James became pregnant after having sex with a burglar named Anthony McClelland. There was no love between them, as Gloria later said, but simply physical satisfaction. Carrying McClelland’s child was therefore not Gloria’s intention. Baby LeBron was born on the last day of 1984, one of the coldest winter days of Gloria’s life. She was 16 years old.
LeBron James’ family found themselves homeless just days before his fourth birthday. Photo: ESPN .
The first three years were easy. Gloria went to school every day, leaving LeBron at home with her grandmother and mother. Her two brothers lived together in a large house on Hickory Street, a shabby street lined with old oak trees and railroad tracks, next to downtown Akron. The tragedy began on Christmas Day 1987, when Gloria’s mother, Freda, died of a heart attack. Her grandmother had passed away a few months earlier. The family’s stability was in serious jeopardy.
Gloria’s brothers, Terry and Curt, tried to keep the house so that their sister and nephew would have a place to live. But the house’s deterioration, combined with a lack of income to cover expenses, soon left the three brothers homeless. Each had to find a new place to live without a steady job.
Gloria took three-year-old LeBron and wandered the streets of Akron. They stayed in the homes of friends for a few weeks or longer, months at a time. Sometimes, when she was desperate, Gloria would take LeBron to her brother Terry’s house for a few days. They lived on welfare during this time, as Gloria couldn’t find a suitable job because she couldn’t afford to put him in day care.
James later described this period with bitterness: “My only possession was a backpack on my back. I would say to the backpack, ‘It’s time to roll,’ every time I had to leave an apartment with my mother.” By 1993, when LeBron was nine, they were moving twice a month, often in homeless shelters or church-run sleepovers.
During his fourth grade year, LeBron moved 12 times and missed about 100 days of school. “He had trouble moving. He was confused by new classmates at new schools. He once skipped school because he didn’t know which bus to take,” said Bruce Kelker, LeBron James’ first football coach.
Keller, after a chance encounter on the street and noticing LeBron’s superior physique, took both mother and son to live with him and his girlfriend in a small apartment. Keller was responsible for James’s transportation, buying training gear and football lessons, in return Gloria made hamburgers and cooked twice a week.
But Keller’s small apartment only supported James and his mother for a few months before they decided to move out. By this time, James’s prominence in Akron’s under-10 football games had caught the attention of Frank Walker, a local youth coach.
James on his high school basketball team, where he took his first steps on the path to the NBA. Photo: Bleacher Report .
Knowing the difficult situation of James and his mother, Mr. Walker offered to help by taking James to live with his family in the suburbs of Akron. Gloria would have time to find a job, live with friends and visit her son on weekends. The offer came at a time when Gloria was planning to send LeBron to New York to stay with relatives. The 25-year-old agreed to the deal with Walker, and that was the turning point that led LeBron James to success in the NBA later.
The Walkers, who have two sons around LeBron’s age, took the homeless boy under their wing. They woke James up at 6:30 every morning, cooked him a good breakfast, and took him to school. James also got a haircut from Walker every Saturday, and on his birthday, Mrs. Walker baked German chocolate cakes for the 10-year-old. “That was real family,” James recalls of his time at Coach Walker’s house.
After afternoon homework, James started playing basketball with Walker and his sons. Despite being a football coach, Walker was good at basketball. He taught James how to dribble and lay up with his backhand, and he saw that the kid had great potential. “LeBron was one of the best football players in Akron at the time. But his basketball skills really blew me away. Although he was awkward at first, LeBron improved very quickly, and soon surpassed the other kids his age,” Walker told ESPN in 2013.
James played both football and basketball as a teenager. It wasn’t until his sophomore year of high school, at age 15, that he decided to follow in Michael Jordan’s footsteps. “It was a wrist injury, I almost broke my wrist in a game. I decided to give up football, even though it was the first sport I loved,” the Cleveland Cavaliers star shared.
While Walker was instrumental in nurturing James’ basketball talent at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School, it was his mother Gloria who inspired him the most. “She was crazy every time she went to practice with James and watched him play. She even volunteered at the club, doing the smallest jobs like filling water bottles and cleaning things up, just to be with LeBron during practice. That gave him strength,” Terry, LeBron’s uncle, said.
Gloria went through difficult years to help her son reach the pinnacle of success in the NBA with three championships and four Most Valuable Player awards.
James has never forgotten the hardships that mother and son went through: “I thank life for that. I thank my father for abandoning me. That helped me stay close to my mother, going through the worst and happiest things with her. She is not a perfect person, but I love her more than anything. She not only gave birth to me but also helped me become the person I am today.”
James is now the most likely NBA star to become America’s next billionaire, after the legendary Michael Jordan. After signing a $500 million lifetime contract with Nike last year, James bought his mother a $6 million mansion in Florida. Before that, the 32-year-old star bought 10,000 square meters of land in Akron, the place associated with the mother and son’s difficult childhood, to build one of the largest amusement parks in Ohio.
“God took away many things from me. But gave me something priceless, that is LeBron,” Gloria shared when she and James received the 2009 NBA Best Player award.
Since becoming a top NBA star more than a decade ago, James has been invited by prestigious schools like Harvard to speak to students. These are presentations aimed at inspiring the younger generation about success in life. Perhaps no one in the NBA is more suitable for these talks than James. Because his life is the most complete proof of the journey of a young boy who overcame a cruel fate to become the number one person in the field of pursuit.
