If he wanted to shake the label of being LeBron’s personal reporter, though, Windhorst isn’t trying all that hard. He writes a few big pieces about James’s team each year, and he is writing a book about James’s businesses, his fourth book about James. Before the season began, Windhorst predicted there would be an early-season crisis — like James’s first year in Miami — that he would cover.

He was right. The Lakers opened the season with a 2-5 record, amid a report that Coach Luke Walton’s job was in jeopardy.

Two decades on from seeing James score 15 points in his high school debut, Windhorst talks matter-of-factly about one of the more unique athlete-reporter relationships.

His mother, Merrylou Windhorst, was a health and sex education teacher at St. Vincent-St. Mary, teaching James and her own son. When Merrylou had a health scare years ago (everything ended up O.K.) Brian quickly left Miami to fly home. When he returned, James pulled him aside after a news media scrum to ask about her.

“It makes Akron seem like a small town, frankly,” Brian Windhorst said. “I guess it is. But he knows my mom, and I know his mom.”

Through a spokesman, James declined to comment for this article.

Windhorst, 40, began answering phones for The Akron Beacon Journal while in high school. He attended college at nearby Kent State University and freelanced for the paper. After college, The Beacon Journal hired him to cover high school sports and Kent State, and he was promoted to Cavaliers beat reporter in 2003, the year the team drafted James first over all. He moved to The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2008, and, in part because of his relationship with James, ultimately to ESPN in 2010.