Lebron James

In 2016, Northeast Ohio’s Favourite Son Used His Incomparable Skills to Deliver a Title to a Suddenly Revitalised City, While Using His Voice to Have an Even Wider Impact.

- Lee Jenkins

AFTER MIDNIGHT, WHEN the kids are down and the streets are still, LeBron James asks his wife if she wants to go on a cruise. That’s the term he uses, and because Savannah has been with him since high school, she knows he is not referring to a yacht in the Caribbean. They head to the garage, grateful somebody can watch the children, and select one of the more inconspicuous cars from their fleet—usually the pickup or an SUV. And as Northeast Ohio sleeps, they turn out of their gated mansion 20 miles south of Cleveland and continue another 20 miles down Interstate 77, through the darkness and into the past.

The cruise does not follow a defined route. It can start in West Akron or North Hill, Merriman Valley or Lane-Wooster, but it always traces the same stops on a boy’s urban odyssey. There’s no need to fire up the GPS. “I don’t know every address,” James says. “But I can find the places I’m looking for.”

Hickory Street, where Big Mama’s house used to sit high atop the hill, before the city tore it down. “My first home,” James says. His mother, Gloria, who gave birth to him at 16, raised him there with her mother, Freda, across from the low-slung lawn maintenance centre. All that’s left on the property is an asphalt driveway in the woods and railroad tracks running through hickory trees in what used to be the backyard.

Overlook Place, up the block, where he and Gloria lived with the Reaves family after Big Mama died and they struggled to pay the electric. “The Reaveses cut out the bottom of a crate and nailed it to the telephone pole,” James remembers. “I hooped all day on that crate.” Now the neighbourhood kids have a real portable basket and a trampoline on the corner of Overlook and Hickory.