"Looking for the next LeBron James?"

That's the question my official Primetime Shootout program asked back in February of 2004. I was, in fact, looking for the next LeBron James; I had traveled to Trenton, N.J. for this tournament to write a profile about Dwight Howard, who was gaining steam as the likely No. 1 overall pick in the '04 draft. The program's write-up of Howard's Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy team could not stay away from the aura of LeBron, but — as every publication did back then — it was careful to draw some distinctions. Here's more:

"Howard drives to school in a 1984 Ford Crown Victoria that was fixed up by his father, Dwight Sr. — who also happens to be the athletic director at Southwest Atlanta Christian — not a Hummer2 like the one given to James by his mother. Howard has received little national media attention, hasn't made the cover of Sports Illustrated, and isn't constantly featured on ESPN, as James was during his senior year in high school."

"I'm glad, absolutely glad that he isn't as big as LeBron," said SACA coach Courtney Brooks. "We're going to do everything in our power to make him an average 18-year old high school senior."

I don't know about "average," but you could still see some glimpses of a normal teenage life. He ate Air Heads. His favorite movie was Finding Nemo. One family friend described him as a "little child." I visited Atlanta during the All-Star break, but Howard wanted to watch Rush Hour instead of the All-Star Game.

He said goofy things, like how he wanted to bring such a strong Christian element to the NBA that it would one day put a crucifix right in the middle of The Logo's chest. And when he was on national TV — like during a January '04 appearance on ESPN2 — Howard still took the analysts' comments personally, in that case the comments of Len Elmore and Fran Fraschilla, who had been slightly critical.

"Today it's all about finding the next LeBron," Howard told me back then. "They're just looking at high schoolers as superheroes. They don't feel how I feel because they're not in my shoes. They just see me on the outside and pass judgments, they don't know me personally. They've only seen me one time. I really don't concern myself with what people say."

Virtually all the basketball experts I talked to for my story naturally brought up the name of LeBron. Like here was Howard's AAU coach, talking about his junior year: "Everybody in the country was focused on LeBron James, but (Howard's potential) was already there."

Or here was a prep basketball analyst and promoter I spoke with: "At some point LeBron became kind of wary of people, and LeBron was in some regards unapproachable. In the back of his mind, he wondered if people had an agenda. Dwight doesn't get caught up in all the hoopla."

When I finished my story, even after I had seen him play twice, I started telling people I didn't think Howard would be a dominant NBA player. That whole "he doesn't get caught up in all the hoopla" thing was part of it. Howard seemed too normal — playing against these short little high schoolers from Christian schools, goofing around in church, walking through the school hallways with just a normal star athlete's confidence — to be a LeBron-like megastar.

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And who knows what these guys turn into by the end of their careers, but it's hard not to connect those impressions to this week's James backlash. The kid in the beat-up Crown Victoria won the playoff series and moved on with a smile, and the kid with the Hummer2 and the unapproachable exterior bailed on the handshakes and refused to apologize.

Go back to my Primetime Shootout program for a second. Howard, remember, was billed as the Not-Really-LeBron in those pages, but there was also a reprinted Trenton Times piece about LeBron's appearance at the same tournament a year before, when he became the second performer -- after Cher -- to sell out Trenton's downtown arena.

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"The LeBron James Show was everything advertised," the column read. "No, it was a lot more. It was, well, magic. No, make that Magic. The overflow crowd last night was treated to the second coming of Magic Johnson. As promised. He had us, Babe."

It's not bad to be the second coming of Magic, but maybe it's better to be an average 18-year old high school senior.

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