Coming Friday: Much more to LeBron in 'More Than A Game'

"Basketball is a vehicle to get you from Point A to Point B ... use basketball, don't let it use you."

Those are the opening words to the new documentary, "More Than A Game," which comes out in release in L.A., New York and Cleveland on Friday. The posters may have you think it's all about LeBron James, but that's really only for effect. It's truely a team effort, about the 1999-2003 St. Vincent-St. Mary's high school team from Akron, Ohio, where James was joined by several friends he'd known since AAU days to form this nationally-recognized dynasty.

They won three state titles in four years, but the one time they lost, when they were juniors, is when they probably learned the most. That's the year, 2002, when James suddenly showed up on the cover of Sports Illustrated and was dubbed "The Chosen One."

The story of James' interaction with coach Dru Joyce II, his son and point guard Dru II, plus Sian Cotton, Romeo Travis and Willie McGee completes an interesting focus on how team play is fragile when individuals are singled out, how respect and authority for the coach is imperative to success and how a father-son relationship really took a back seat to a coach-player dynamic, much to the disappointment of Coach Joyce, who was really was far more up to speed on how to coach and play football than he was basketball, but was put in the situation out of necessity.

Harvey Mason Jr., the former Crescenta Valley All-American from the mid '80s who went to the University of Arizona and was on Lute Olsen's 1988 Final Four team with Steve Kerr, Sean Elliott, Tom Tolbert and Kenny Lofton, tells us what it was like working as an executive producer on the project with James in Friday's media column.

As you'll read then, and then see in the movie, James' humble beginnings really can change how you look at him today, a burgeoning media mogul who has been linked to so many Hollywood-type projects you wonder if next season, after he becomes a free agent, if he'd be better off playing for the Clippers.

More background:

== Harvey Mason Jr.'s official media website, for his North Hollywood company and background on all the Grammy winning artists he has worked with (linked here)

== The film's official website, which is somehow connected to Nike (linked here)