LeBron James and Savannah Brinson met in 2002, when they were students at nearby high schools in Ohio and just as LeBron became a national phenomenon. The promise of his early expectations was staggering, but he went on to outstrip it. At 37, he’s not so much an elder statesman of the NBA as he is the engine of its contemporary business, politics, and presentation. He’s also vocal about being a family man. He and Savannah married in 2013, and they have three children, Bronny, Bryce, and Zhuri.
As LeBron prepares to enter his 20th season as a standard-bearer for the NBA and its ever-growing cultural footprint, his family has assumed increasingly prominent roles in the landscape he has reshaped. V.F. joined them as they gathered at their Los Angeles home to commemorate, in their first photo shoot as a family (including Savannah’s parents, Jennifer and JK, and LeBron’s mother, Gloria), what Savannah described to me as a transitional moment for her children. For Bronny, who turns 18 in October, a guard for the high school powerhouse basketball team at Sierra Canyon, it’s about “getting to a place to start to make decisions about his career and where he wants to go in his life.” Zhuri, a precocious seven, has her own successful YouTube lifestyle show, All Things Zhuri (highlights have included segments on baking, yoga, and painting). Bryce, 15, Savannah lovingly calls “the mystery of the family,” insofar as he could go in any direction, though he’s also a much-hyped basketball prospect himself.
At Sierra Canyon games, the celebrities are both on the court and in the crowd, and Savannah has observed her children growing into the dynamic. “With LeBron being their dad, it’s just automatic,” she said. “It’s not something we’ve pushed or told them that they had to do, or anything like that. It just happened.”
LeBron signed with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2018, and his arrival in the city marked a culmination of how both he and the broader world of professional sports had grown entangled with the entertainment business. Some of the most resonant phrases of his career have to do with the place of an athlete, particularly a Black athlete, in society: “more than an athlete,” or his refutations of Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s insistence that he “shut up and dribble.”
“They look like the 2023 Rockefellers,” Gloria said as she surveyed the dinner table. She has a point. While the James family has not pursued anything like Kardashian levels of onscreen confessional, Zhuri’s comfort with an audience and the breathless anticipation around her brothers’ careers have meant that the family has similarly established itself as a public institution. In their Los Angeles garage, a photoshopped image of Bronny guarding a high-school-aged LeBron hangs on the wall—LeBron has said he intends for the two of them to play together in the NBA—and the basketball-internet ecosystem has recently turned its lens on a photo of LeBron and Bryce that seemed to show their heights converging.
“Watch your head, Mama,” LeBron said earlier as he tossed a basketball over his shoulder and toward the hoop. In between photographs, he and his sons had been holding a semicompetitive dunk contest on a shortened hoop in the driveway while Zhuri chased a lizard.
During LeBron’s second season with the Miami Heat that began in 2011, he proposed to Savannah on New Year’s Eve and her parents moved into their house. Their relationship has lasted 20 years and endured no small amount of scrutiny, but at the bottom of their driveway, it looked easy and spontaneous. As they posed in front of a Porsche, LeBron whispered into Savannah’s ear and she doubled over laughing: “I cannot repeat that.”
Today, Savannah hopes to communicate an image of the family’s quiet dynamic at home. “Everything isn’t for everybody,” she said, but she wanted this photo session to recognize and reflect the bonds underlying the family’s influence, to show the world their center of gravity. “Excuse my language,” she said, “but we a dope family.”
HAIR, MALAIKA FRAZIER (JENNIFER BRINSON, GLORIA JAMES), RICKY WING (SAVANNAH JAMES); BARBER, NICK CASTELLANOS (ALL MEN); MAKEUP, SHEIKA DALEY (JENNIFER BRINSON, GLORIA JAMES, SAVANNAH JAMES); GROOMING, NEICY SMALL (ALL MEN); TAILOR, CLAY G. SADLER; SET DESIGN, MARGUERITE WADE. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY ONE THIRTY-EIGHT PRODUCTIONS. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.
