It’s amazing to think that in LeBron James’ 22-year NBA career, only four of those years were spent as a member of the Miami Heat. LeBron’s time in South Beach was a turning point in NBA history. Together with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, he didn’t quite live up to the “not one, not two, not three…” pronouncement he made at his introduction, but he did manage to win the first two rings of his career while indelibly changing the landscape of the league and helping bring about the age of player empowerment.
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Though his departure from Miami to return to the Cavs wasn’t met with the same level of hostility nationally as it was when he told Jim Gray, “I’m going to take my talents to South Beach,” it was a shock to Floridians who expected LeBron to be there for the long haul. Dan Le Batard, arguably the biggest journalistic name in the Miami sports scene, famously trolled LeBron after he returned home, and he relived the experience on a recent appearance on The OGs podcast with Udonis Haslem and Mike Miller.
“Originally I’m trying to buy a newspaper ad. They say it’s $100,000 just to put a newspaper ad … And so we needed an alternative, and it turns out that Akron billboards are much less than that. So they saved me a lot of money… and they all said, ‘You’re welcome, Lebron. Love, Miami.’ … ESPN made me immediately take down the billboards.”
Le Batard had Haslem and Miller rolling as he described this expert troll job. He also talked about how he had planned to take it to another level by renting a plane to fly a banner over LeBron’s homecoming with the same message. “I had the banner and everything,” Le Batard said.
Dan Le Batard’s legendary troll of LeBron nearly cost him his job
Le Batard’s employer at the time was ESPN. Given how important LeBron has always been to the network’s coverage (remember that they had the exclusive rights to air “The Decision”), it’s no surprise that the network demanded Le Batard take down the billboards immediately and cancel his plans to fly the banner. They also suspended him for two days. Perhaps ESPN was worried about being cut out by King James in the same way that Sports Illustrated was years earlier for it’s unflattering story about Michael Jordan. Nevertheless, it made sense that The Worldwide Leader wouldn’t want to seem complicit in such a move. Le Batard complied, but was almost sabotaged anyway by an overzealous Heat employee.
“I got a call from a high-ranking member of the Miami Heat organization saying, ‘I’m going to fly the plane. I’m gonna do it.’ And I’m like, ‘You can’t do that, I’m gonna get fired. You’re gonna get me fired. I’m not gonna have plausible deniability that someone else flew the plane. It’s going to look like an act of insubordination.'”
Luckily for Le Batard, the Heat employee relented, and he returned to work two days later, though he did eventually have a falling out with ESPN and create his own sports media company, Meadowlark Media, with former ESPN president John Skipper.
