It likely wouldn’t solve the GOAT debate, but Michael Jordan and LeBron James did once face off on the basketball court.
A 16-year-old James met Jordan in 2001 for a pickup game, and after sitting on the sidelines for the first hour while other NBA players like Antoine Walker, Jerry Stackhouse, Paul Pierce, Penny Hardaway, Ron Artest, Jamal Crawford and Eddy Curry were on the court, James finally got in.
“For me to be on the court, 16 years old, sophomore in high school, with my favorite player of all time, it was like, ‘This can’t be real,'” James said Monday on Uninterrupted’s “WRTS: After Party.”
“If you pinched me, I was like, ‘Please, I hope I don’t wake up.'”
Meeting Jordan, who was 38 at the time and preparing for his second comeback out of retirement, was a life-changing moment for James.
“When I met Michael Jordan for the first time, I literally couldn’t believe it was him,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. The dude looked like Jesus Christ. He was Black Jesus to me. Nobody could tell me anything different. … I was like, ‘Oh my f—ing God.’ I didn’t think he was real, man. I only thought he lived in the TV.”
They played on the same team two years later in a pickup game at Jordan’s camp in Santa Barbara. Jordan had just retired for good and James was a rookie.
“We didn’t lose a game,” James said.
While those two days were highlights for James, Jordan’s first retirement in 1993 left him at the other end of the spectrum. James was nearly 9 years old and couldn’t understand why the most iconic player in the game, coming off of three straight titles with the Bulls, was no longer playing.
“For me, growing up in Akron, Ohio, all the hardships I had to go through, you look for inspiration,” James said. “I had Ken Griffey Jr. and Deion Sanders and a lot of other musicians, but Michael Jordan was kind of like that guy. He was that angel sent from heaven that I kind of used him to help me get through some of the darkest days that I had.
“People say, ‘Well you were only 9 years old,’ but there’s a lot of dark days when you grow up the way I grew up and you’re part of a single-parent household. Every other day, if I got an opportunity on WGN to watch Mike, it gave me another boost of life. It made me feel that I can make it out of this situation. When he decided to give it up after winning that third title versus Phoenix, I felt like, ‘What can I do? I don’t know what to do.’
“When you’re a 9-year-old kid and you need inspiration from someone, they become your father, which I needed, they become your brother, they become your teammate, they become your pastor, they become your superhero. It’s like Batman and Michael Jordan, for me, when I was growing up.”