Lakers’ rookie ‘wasn’t above anyone else,’ his ex-teachers recall

BATH TOWNSHIP, Ohio — Carrie Brown was an exasperated middle school teacher who had a famous student she knew she could count on.

In the fall of 2017, Brown was teaching social studies at Old Trail School, a small, private institution of about 500 children on a sprawling 62 acres inside Cuyahoga Valley National Park, a few miles northeast of Akron, Ohio.

Each day at recess, as Brown looked out onto the outdoor basketball court at the bottom of an old amphitheater, she watched her sixth-grade students bicker intensely over who should have the ball or take all the shots.

She knew there was a seventh grader who could help: Bronny James.

“I pulled him aside and said, ‘Hey, would you mind giving up a recess and talking to my sixth graders?’ But I didn’t tell him what to say,” Brown said during a recent tour of the school and visit with several of Bronny’s former teachers and coaches. Brown allowed The Athletic into her classroom where she once taught Bronny.

The hallways inside the Old Trail campus building where most classes are taught are long and narrow. The walls are white and the lockers red; there are hooks on both sides for students to hang their coats and backpacks.

Brown said she wasn’t surprised when Bronny, 13 at the time, agreed to forgo his recess, stroll down the long hallway and into Room 616, where she taught him world history, to deliver his message.

But she was stunned by the poignancy and clarity of what he said.

“It was like I paid him,” she said. “He said perfectly that ‘if you ever want to play competitively, like for real, they’re not going to take you unless you’re a team player. You could be the best of the best. But if you don’t know how to work with other people, then they don’t want you on their team.’

“Coming from him, it meant so much, because he could speak to it.”

If all you know about Bronny James, 20, the eldest son of world-renowned basketball megastar and billionaire LeBron James, is that Bronny is young, rich, famous and plays on the Los Angeles Lakers because his dad, who is the leading scorer in NBA history and is also a Laker, wanted it to be so, then the way the people of Old Trail remember him might surprise you.

Old Trail School is just minutes from Bronny’s family mansion in Bath Township and about 25 miles from Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, where LeBron, Bronny and the Lakers played the Cleveland Cavaliers on Wednesday night. Bronny scored the first 2 points of his NBA career in the game.

LeBron, or Dad, depending on your perspective, built the house and moved into it early in his career with the Cavs. For a time, Savannah James, LeBron’s wife and Bronny’s mother, sat on the board at Old Trail.

Bronny went there for prekindergarten, kindergarten and part of first grade before moving to Miami when his dad joined the Heat for the 2010-11 NBA season. When the family returned to Cleveland in 2014, Bronny, his younger brother Bryce and their baby sister Zhuri were all enrolled there. Bronny was back at Old Trail from fourth through seventh grade, before the family relocated to Los Angeles.

Bronny, his former teachers said, would occasionally miss a homework assignment. They chalked that up to the time demands of the hectic life he led as the son of arguably the greatest NBA player ever, whose legend is even larger in the Cleveland and Akron areas.

To this day, though, Brown keeps in her desk a sample of Bronny’s creative writing and a picture he drew as part of a lesson on Greek mythology. “Bronny, this is excellent! I’m proud of you!” Brown wrote on his paper — a piece of historical fiction imagining how the children of Zeus plotted against one another to create the Olympics.

The accompanying art Bronny turned in as part of the assignment is neatly drawn and animated: a Black Trojan warrior with a red cape and galea on top of his battle helmet.

Six years after Bronny drew the picture, he wound up playing basketball for the University of Southern California Trojans in his lone college season. But that’s not why Brown keeps it and shows it to her class each year.

She shares it as an example of good work from a child who could have ignored school and the people he met because of the fame and fortune he was born into, but didn’t.

“He’s a great kid. I miss him a lot,” Brown said.

Sarah Johnston was, and still is, head of school at Old Trail, akin to a principal. She has countless memories of Bronny, including the time she pulled him and his classmates out of a study hall, as she did from time to time, for a sojourn down to the school gym with the rubbery green floor for basketball.

Johnston still has the video on her phone. Bronny, a sixth grader, gets a jogging start from half court and dribbles toward a springboard that catapulted him into the air. Johnston, on both knees for the stunt, shrieked as Bronny skied over her for a dunk.

But she also remembers a class trip to one of the dozens of small parks on campus when Bronny and his classmates were situated in a circle for some bonding exercises.

“You stepped into the circle if that’s something you relate to, you step out if it’s not, and I remember the teacher was like, ‘Who doesn’t have a cellphone?’ And everyone was like, ‘Bronny,’” Johnston said in her office at Old Trail, a big smile across her face.

“He was, like, the last one to get a cellphone,” she continued. “I think LeBron and Savannah made really clear decisions about their kids having a lot of access to a lot of things, and they didn’t need that.”

The people who knew Bronny at Old Trail, like his basketball and lacrosse coach, Tim Weber, saw his humility, grace and kindness while managing his celebrity.

“I remember being truly flabbergasted that a kid with the amount of attention he was getting was able to keep track of who had scored and who had not scored on our team and made sure that they got opportunities to do so,” Weber said. “He did everything possible when he was in there to give everybody a shot and hopefully a bucket.”

Johnston said she will remember Bronny as “a natural leader.”

“He was there not to show off his talents in ways that would make anyone else feel badly about themselves,” she said. “He was there to pump people up and bring out the best in them. He wasn’t above anyone else.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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