Dan Wetzel - Epic Athletes: LeBron James

EACH AND EVERY FAN, nearly twenty thousand in total, was on their feet inside Oracle Arena in Oakland, California. Standing in front of their seats. Standing on their seats. Standing in the aisles. They were too nervous to sit, after all.

With two minutes left in Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals, the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors were tied 8989. In addition to the twenty thousand in attendance, there were 44.5 million people tuned in to their televisions watching across America, and many millions more around the world.

While all those people were watching, LeBron James was searchingsearching for a way to impact the game and seize a championship because he suddenly couldnt hit a jump shot. During the biggest moment of the biggest series, a series in which hed averaged almost thirty points a game, LeBron couldnt make a basket.

In the final five minutes of the game, he missed from twenty-two feet, he missed from thirteen feet, he missed from two feet. He wasnt alone. The pressure was impacting everyone; the best players in the world were struggling with the intensity of the moment. LeBrons teammate Kyrie Irving had clanked a shot. So had fellow Cavalier Kevin Love. For the Warriors, Steph Curry had missed; so had Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Andre Iguodala.

Cleveland and Golden State had been battling for more than two and a half hours on this Fathers Day. They had been going back and forth over nearly two weeks of this epic June championship clash. The action had been so even that not only was The Finals tied at three games apiece, and not only was this decisive game tied at 89, but at that very moment, each team had scored 699 cumulative points in the series. Everything was deadlocked.

Something had to give, though. There could only be one champion.

For LeBron, losing wasnt an option. Hed come too far to get to this point, to have this opportunity. He knew it meant too much to everyone not just back in Cleveland, but in all of Ohio, including the city of Akron, where he had grown up with a single mother and been a highly publicized star athlete since he was a kid.

Hed started his career with the Cavaliers in 2003 as the number one overall draft pick directly out of high school. Hed been crowned a basketball king before he ever stepped on a National Basketball Association (NBA) court and, by the age of eighteen, hed already drawn comparisons to the legendary Michael Jordan, considered by many the greatest player of all time. But after seven seasons, even as he developed into the best player in the NBA, he couldnt win a championship. So, he left for Miami as a free agent.

Doing so angered fans back home in Ohio. They burned his jersey and cursed his name. They felt betrayed as he won two titles with the Miami Heat. Those should have been Clevelands championships, they thought. Those should have been their victory parades, they complained.

LeBron didnt just win in Miamimore importantly, he learned how to win. He came to understand how it takes more than just scoring a lot of points and grabbing a lot of rebounds to become a champion. Winning requires sacrifice, teamwork, communication, and a mentality of doing whatever it takesanything at allto win, especially when youre losing.

It was a lesson he admits he didnt fully understand during his younger days with the Cavs. He said his four-year stretch in Miami was like going off to college.

Older, wiser, and even more talented, he returned to Cleveland for the 2014 15 season, reigniting a love affair between himself and the fans in Northeast Ohio. He came back for one reason: to deliver that long-awaited championship to Cleveland. None of the citys three major professional sports teams had won a championship since 1964, when the Browns managed to win the National Football League title. By 2016, you needed to be well over the age of fifty to even remember it.

LeBron wanted to end that drought, or, as fans jokingly called it, the curse. Cleveland is a blue-collar city of around 385,000 people and sits on Lake Erie. It is home to heavy industry, a major shipping port, and harsh winters. The city and its residents know what its like to struggle. Unemployment. Crime. Poverty. Even jokes about its existence. In fact, back in 1969, the Cuyahoga River, which runs through the city, was so polluted with oil that it caught fireliteral burning waterand attracted insults and cracks from around America. Cleveland was dubbed the Mistake by the Lake.

The area wasnt a mistake for LeBron, though. It was simply home. Akron sits just over thirty miles to the south, almost a twin city for Cleveland, although smaller and poorer. And LeBron knew about overcoming the odds, about not accepting what others thought possible for you.

He was raised by a single teen mother, Gloria. His father was never around. His family was poor, accepting welfare to help buy food when his mom couldnt find work. They often couldnt afford to pay their rent, and were forced to move apartments in the citys toughest neighborhoods every few months before getting kicked out again. Sometimes, with nowhere else to go, they wound up sleeping on one of Glorias friends couches. All of LeBrons clothes and possessions fit into a single backpack. This was before he ever played organized sports or anyone saw him as a future NBA star.

In the fourth grade, LeBron was stuck living on the other side of Akron from his elementary school. His mother didnt have a car, so it was a true struggle for him to find a ride to school in the mornings. He missed eighty-three days that year and was at risk of dropping out altogether even though he was just ten years old.

From that hopeless place, he rose.

And so regardless of how the outside world saw Northeast Ohio, LeBron knew this place. Yes, he knew the challenges. He also knew the positives, the success stories. He knew the good people in the community, the coaches and teachers who helped him and so many others. He knew his hometowns good times and happy stories, and the gorgeous summer sunsets. Mostly, he knew what a championship title, at last, would mean to his community.

In June of 2015, in his first season back in Cleveland, he led the Cavs to The Finals against Golden State. Injuries to star teammates Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love doomed them, though. The Warriors won four games to Clevelands two. Now, twelve months later, it was a rematch.

Everyone on the Cavaliers was healthy and ready to prove they could be champions. It wouldnt be easy. Golden State had won a record seventy-three regular-season games and was considered possibly the greatest team in NBA history. Beating Curry, Thompson, and the rest of the Warriors felt at times like an impossible task. They had too many offensive weapons. Defensively they played with heart and toughness. When Golden State took a 31 series lead, many people wrote off Cleveland. After all, no team had ever come back from a 31 deficit in the NBA Finals, let alone against a seventy-three-victory defending champion set to play two of the three final games at home.