#10 [2024/CBR16] Lucky Me by Rich Paul

Lucky Me (2023) by Rich Paul was recommended to me by a friend--and as I do with many biographies--I listened to it on audiobook. Now, I have only recently been learning a little bit about basketball through my husband, but it is not a sport I have followed. That information is relevant because Rich Paul is a basketball agent. He represents LeBron James and a number of other very famous players. He is also in a serious relationship with Adele (maybe married?).

Rich Paul grew up in a particularly dangerous area of Cleveland. His mother was a drug addict. She was not abusive, but she was often absent. His father was a married man who owned the corner store in the neighborhood. He had an affair with Paul's mother when she moved to town. Even though Paul's father was still married to another woman, he played a large role in Paul's upbringing. Paul worked in his father's store and was expected to go to school everyday. In fact, his father would give him $20 every day for food.

One interesting aspect of this book for me was that I was half expecting poverty to be a major issue in Paul's life, but in this case Paul almost always had some kind of money. His father was a successful businessman, and from an early age, Paul was very good at earning money himself.

This started with gambling when he was only a kid, which eventually evolved into drug dealing. Although Rich had some feelings about dealing drugs when his mother was suffering so much from her addiction, he continued to do it for some time. Later, Paul began selling sports jerseys. 

Wearing the best clothes (or whatever was in style at the time) and blinging out his bike and/or car was always very important to Paul. It was the only thing he could really control, so he would spend hundreds and thousands of dollars for this purpose. When he ran into LeBron James at the airport, it was his outfit that first caught LeBron's attention. 

It is clear that Rich Paul is smart, hardworking, and focused on success. I am impressed by what he's accomplished. However, I didn't love this book. First, it didn't help that I know so little about basketball. Paul would mention a basketball player and what they were doing or describe a basketball game, and I didn't know who he was talking about or why it mattered. Second, I got really tired of him talking about his clothes. I understand why they were important to him, but I am very uninterested in clothing brands and trends. I am not familiar with the shoes he was talking about and I couldn't bring myself to care. I kept wishing that he would describe his feelings more.

On the whole this was not a bad book, but I think people who know more about basketball (especially the last twenty or so years of basketball and not just a couple famous stars today) might get more out of it.