\n<\/p>\n
In the summer of 2003, James was putting in extra work before his rookie season. Aged only 18, he had long been regarded as basketball’s next great hope. <\/p>\n
He was the cover star of the prestigious Sports Illustrated magazine while still a junior in high school. For years it had been predicted he would be the number one pick in the 2003 NBA draft – and sure enough he was. Selected by his hometown team the Cleveland Cavaliers, rarely has a teenager carried such high expectations into their professional debut. <\/p>\n
Throughout that summer, James travelled to the Cavaliers’ practice facility – a 40-minute drive from where he grew up in Akron, Ohio – for intense one-to-one training with Bob Donewald Jnr, one of the team’s assistant coaches.<\/p>\n
After one session, coach and superstar-in-waiting chatted during a cool-down routine. “I wasn’t great today,” James said. “It wasn’t a great workout.”<\/p>\n
“You were alright. It’s been a long week,” replied Donewald, who had pushed the teenager hard across consecutive days of gruelling work in preparation for the 82-game season. “LeBron, I just want you to be great. That’s why I’m pushing you.”<\/p>\n
“I am great,” James responded, a flat, serious expression washing over his face. “If you want me to be the greatest ever, I’m with that.” <\/p>\n
No-one was more aware of the future that had been written for him than James himself. No-one better appreciated the work required to fulfil that promise.<\/p>\n
“Every cut, every shot, every move he made – you’d have thought it was a Game 7 finals, the intensity with which he went,” Donewald remembers of those early one-to-one sessions. “I’m trying to crush this kid in a workout just to teach him a lesson, and he is bringing it and bringing it.<\/p>\n
“Everybody was hard on him too – the players, head coach Paul Silas. They were friendly, but they weren’t going to hand it to this kid, and he didn’t want it handed to him.” <\/p>\n
James also understood the highest echelons of superstardom are only attained when the pageantry of elite sport is embraced; that you create your own myth before selling it to the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n