On a High-School Classmate

I wasn't much of a student in high school. I didn't apply myself to anything, really, beyond the advanced study of box scores and high-level analysis of rudimentary fantasy baseball statistics and Van Halen albums. I was in the advanced track, but just barely, and the only reason I bothered to keep up the facade is because most of my friends were in the advanced-track classes, and it was either drown in calculus or snooze through remedial algebra. I chose the former.  This explains why I have state-school education. This explains why I did not make a fortune on complex derivatives.This explains why I am a writer.

Anyway, junior year, or senior year (I can't remember which anymore), I enrolled in an AP history course, because that's what everyone else did. It was a large class, with more than a hundred students, and it was held in an auditorium-sized hall. The idea was that AP History would be taught like a college course, which meant attendance was optional, which meant that we would show up once or twice a week and spend the other days at the nearby shopping plaza, devouring cheesesteaks and discussing the finer points of the girls who would never deign to speak to us. And were able to get away this because two of our classmates--two of the smartest dudes in a room full of pretty sharp people, the sons and daughters of college professors and scholars--transformed the AP History experience into an entrepreneurial boon. Every few weeks, before an exam, they would compile a study guide based entirely on their own copious note-taking, make several dozen photocopies, and sell them for a minimal amount. The study guides were, of course, a brilliant idea, and their creators became Heroes, Kings, Lords of our little corner of Nerdland. They were destined for something great, and we all knew it. I lost touch with them both after high school, and I always imagined I'd hear from them again when they won the Nobel Prize for some experiment in neuroscience or developed a new kind of particle accelerator.

Anyway, the ringleader of the crew, as far as I can recall, was a kid named Mike Weston.  And it turns out he did wind up living a pretty remarkable life, even if it was far too short:

After his third tour of duty in Iraq, Michael Edward Weston wanted to decompress. So in the summer of 2007, he decided to kayak about 2,300 miles down the Mississippi River, from Minnesota to New Orleans.

“He had planned it to take two months, which was sort of reasonable,” said his mother, Judy Zarit, of State College. “He did it in one month.”

Friends and family members say Weston, 37, of Washington, D.C., brought that same devotion, dedication and passion to every aspect of his life: as a student at Harvard Law School; as the writer of the family’s humorous Christmas letters; as the minister at his brothers’ weddings; as a Marine major leading troops in Iraq; and as a Drug Enforcement Administration agent fighting the opium trade in Afghanistan....


Weston, a 1990 graduate of State College Area High School, was killed Monday, along with nine other Americans in a military helicopter crash in Afghanistan. He was among three DEA special agents deployed with troops returning from a drug raid in the western part of the country.

For those of us who choose to leave our hometowns, high school becomes a strangely temporal experience. So many of these people now live entirely in my mind, frozen at the age of 17, frozen in a single anecdote, and all I can do with most of them (until they show up on Facebook) is dream up stories of what they've become. In my imaginary narrative, I had envisioned Mike would do extraordinary things, that he would someday become the kind of person who would make me proud to have had the random fortune to graduate from the same school in the same year. I may have imagined it a little differently--and I wish like hell that his story hadn't ended so soon--but I'm glad I was right.

On LeBron and His Hometown

I spent five years living and working as a sportswriter in Akron, Ohio, in the late 1990's, which would be a rather unremarkable statement, except for the fact that I can now say that I lived and worked in Akron, Ohio at a moment when perhaps the greatest athlete of our generation (or, potentially, of any generation) was coming of age. This still seems utterly bizarre to me. I remember watching LeBron James win the state championship as a freshman, at a time when he was still growing into his own body; I remember his coaches raving about his potential, uttering the kinds of things that sound so hyperbolic that you have trouble believing there could be any truth to them at all. Honestly, I didn't believe them. I remember a friend urging me to come back to Akron shortly after I left so I could write a book about this kid (since then, four different friends/colleagues of mine have combined to write three different books about him). I think, at some point, I probably watched him play football, too.

This afternoon, LeBron will do something that I'm guessing not many NBA Most Valuable Players have done before: He will accept his trophy in his high-school gym, in his hometown.

It is difficult, despite the time I spent there, for me to fully comprehend the impact LeBron has had on Akron. This is a town with a strange and checkered history, a bastion of middle-American life at its finest and its most bizarre, the home of the Soap Box Derby and Geoffrey Dahmer, the home of a world-class golf course and a once-proud (and now decimated) American industry. It is a place, my friend David likes to say, where there is one of everything, but only one. And this is why it has been so fascinating to see how LeBron James has continued to identify himself with his hometown as much (or perhaps moreso) than any other major American athlete.* This is also why I believe that as long as the Cavaliers are able to provide him with his teammates who can actually catch his passes, he probably will not leave. He has no reason to leave. He has lived here his entire life; he knows nothing else, and he seems happy with that, and I think this will remain fundamentally true even if he winds up spending six months of his year living in a Tribeca condominium and hanging out with Jay-Z. Life for a superathlete is different than in the age of Jordan; the proliferation of electronic media, of this very medium, means an athlete of LeBron's stature can succeed without actually playing in a major media market. In New York, as outstanding as he is, he would still be one of many; in Akron, he is one of one.

*Tom Brady is from San Mateo, California. Tiger Woods is from Cypress, California. I had to look these up.

(Photo: Bob DeMay/Akron B-J, Mark Duncan, AP, via NYT)