On the night before the biggest high school basketball game in modern times, two teenage prodigies—strangers, soon to be rivals—sat on a hotel staircase and bonded.
They talked for hours, though, only briefly about basketball. The boys had so much else in common: raised by single moms; brought up in broken neighborhoods, amid drugs and gunfire and the blare of police sirens; their basketball skills honed on decaying asphalt courts.
The game was their escape, their salvation, and it had brought these two boys—a passing wizard from Akron, Ohio, and a scoring maestro from Baltimore—to this modest hotel in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, across from a Sesame Street theme park.
The next day, the two phenoms would go head-to-head, the featured attraction in a high school showcase in Trenton, New Jersey. Their game, hyped for weeks, would draw 11,000 people and an army of NBA scouts and executives, all eager to bear witness to their talents.
The boys' fame would only grow in the months and years that followed.
But for a quiet few hours, there in the lobby of the Sheraton Bucks County, LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony were just two 17-year-olds in search of kinship.
from the line
