LeBron James is arguably the best basketball player in the entire world today. But as Yahoo! Sports reporter Marc Spears points out in a piece that he just published here, there was a time at the beginning of his high school career when LeBron was still an anonymous basketball player outside the confines of Akron, Ohio.
In his piece, Spears details how LeBron went from a relatively unknown freshman to a highly regarded sophomore in the span of just one year. Specifically, he writes about how LeBron spent time playing AAU ball in Oakland, Calif. for a team called the Soldiers after an Oakland native spotted LeBron playing in Akron. But the most interesting tidbit from the story comes when Spears discusses what happened the first time Sonny Vaccaro, then a top executive for adidas, came to see LeBron play.
It took place at a tournament that the Soldiers were playing in at the University of San Francisco in May 2001. adidas reportedly paid for LeBron and his family to attend the event. But during the very first game of the tournament, LeBron didn't play well and it looked like it might jeopardize his potential relationship with Vaccaro and adidas. And his reasoning for his poor play? The adidas shorts that he was wearing.
"The first game, he was fooling with his shorts, wasn't playing really hard and wasn't playing really good," his then-high school coach Keith Dambrot remembers. "I just remember going into the hallway and saying, 'LeBron, look, I am not going to tell you what to do. That's a pretty powerful guy watching and you are out there [expletive] around. You need to play a little bit.' He said, 'Coach, my shorts are bothering me.' I told him, 'You better stop playing with your shorts and start playing a little harder.' He went back out there and played like he is capable of playing…I told him there is going to be a lot of money determined by what [Vaccaro] thinks of you."
As we all know by now, LeBron didn't have much trouble convincing Vaccaro, all of the other sneaker executives out there, and, well, everyone that he could play. But it's kind of crazy to think that, once upon a time, a pair of uncomfortable shorts slowed LeBron down more than just about any other defender has been able to do since then.
Check out the rest of Yahoo! Sports' story on LeBron here.
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[via Yahoo! Sports]
