By then, James had already spent two-thirds of his life essentially without a home, moving every few months with Gloria from one apartment to the next. She gave birth to him in 1984, when she was 16, and for the first few years they lived with four generations of family in a big house they owned on Hickory Street, a dirt road bordered by oak trees and railroad tracks near downtown Akron. Gloria went back to school; her grandmother and her mother, Freda, watched LeBron. Her grandmother died a few months later. Then, on Christmas Day in 1987, Freda died suddenly of a heart attack, and all family stability disintegrated.

Gloria and her two brothers, Curt and Terry, tried to maintain the house, but the place was cavernous and old, and they couldn't afford to pay for the heat. A neighbor visited that winter, when James was just 3 years old, and what she saw would later remind her of the movie Home Alone. The house was frigid and unkempt, with dirty dishes piling out of the sink and a hole developing in the living room floorboards. "It's not safe here," said Wanda Reaves, the neighbor. "Can you please come stay with me?" That night, Gloria and LeBron arrived at her house with a single suitcase and a blue stuffed elephant. "You can share the couch," Reaves told them, and so began a nomadic six years for a mother and son who were both trying to grow up at the same time.

"I just grabbed my little backpack, which held all the possessions I needed," James has said, "and said to myself what I always said to myself: It's time to roll."

They lived with Reaves for a few months ... then with a cousin ... then with one of Gloria's boyfriends ... then with her brother Terry. Their housing situation reached its nadir in the year of 1993, when they moved five times in three months during the spring, wearing out their welcome in a series of friends' small apartments while Gloria remained on the waitlist for a subsidized housing waiver from the city.

In the summer of '93, they were about to be kicked out again from a friend's two-bedroom place in a faded-brick housing project downtown when Bruce Kelker pulled into the project's parking lot looking for 8- and 9-year-old football players to join his rec team.

Kelker noticed Gloria first, sitting on the steps outside the apartment. She was 5'5" and stunning -- "Loud, proud and beautiful," Kelker says -- and as he walked over to her, he saw LeBron, lean and lanky, already as tall as his mother, playing tag with a few neighborhood kids. Kelker was, in truth, more interested in scoping out football players than women, so he walked past Gloria toward LeBron. "You guys like football?" he asked the kids.

"That's my favorite sport," James said.

Kelker was about to begin his first full season as a coach of the East Dragons, a youth team limited to boys under age 10 who weighed less than 112 pounds. The team's motto was "Teaching boys sportsmanship and teamwork," but Kelker wanted to win badly enough that he had assembled a depth chart and a 30-page playbook. He had been a great high school cornerback before wasting a decade "drinking and getting high," he says. Now he was sober, and he thought coaching a championship team might help redeem his reputation. He needed a star.

Kelker asked James and his friends to line up for a footrace, 100 yards across the parking lot. "Fastest one is my running back," he told them. James won by 15 yards.

"How much football have you played?" Kelker asked him. "None," James said. Kelker told him where to meet for the team's first practice, he says, but Gloria interrupted him. She said she couldn't afford to pay for her son's equipment. She had no car and no way to take him to practice. "How do I even know football will be good for Bron Bron?" she asked.

"Don't worry about any of that," Kelker told her. "I'll take care of everything, and I'll pick him up."

HE TOOK HIS first handoff for the East Dragons 80 yards from scrimmage for a touchdown. After that, the pieces of LeBron's chaotic life slowly began to congeal. His mother began rearranging her weekends around his football games. Teammates warmed to LeBron, gravitating to talent, even when it emerged in a boy who could still be "awkward and shy," Kelker says.