Le Batard & Friends Presents: The Step Back - The Decision (feat. Jim Gray & John Skipper)

i mean can i ask you to provide a dramatic reading of some of dance column lebron's choice will reveal whether ego or glory feels a little bit of a hold on a second we're gonna do this to you to get this is gonna make me very uncomfortable because this is a young me writing a column about fit for a king lebron james is coming to miami it is the news that lebron would change miami sports basketball in a way that okay i'm not gonna like how long it how long had you been a columnist before i get into this how long did you get a call it's been a minute this is 2010 no i would have been a columnist at this point for just still about 10 years right it's a vet right there all right here we go bro i'm tired of this man being celebrated for what this is the step back and the cleveland cavaliers select lebron james lebron what's your decision i made a difficult decision but i understood what my future was about i believe our president is trying to divide us my first response was you're bummed welcome to episode two i was 25 years old and i wanted to be liked by everybody the decision from the time we landed in miami that first night when we got there at like whatever time it was i was like hell just happened lebron's choice will reveal whether ego or glory fuels him dan didn't actually write that that was this the headline set the table i don't write the headlines i thought i mean knew these things i don't i thought i thought i had more power than that and just so we know like the order of things here and who's on top dan's on the front page and uh i am somewhere else i'm on 4d my column starts on 4d and uh we're talking about the same thing somehow mine got pushed to the back but hey it is what it is all right wouldn't this be a flabbergasting insanity if after building this breathtaking monument to ego after piling mi mi mi upon more mi mi mi to build a mountain of hype that has no precedent in sports and after planting his flag a top it with a dramatic flourish in a ridiculous made for television moment on espn at 9 p.m thursday the king then made a decision that was unselfish and humble if he decided at the end of this absurd climb to bow the four team that's what lebron james would be doing by choosing the miami heat he would be telling you that he values winning above all else above ego and glory and brand and money and commercials and hometown and fans and comfort and fame it would be an unprecedented decision being made by a two-time most valuable player in his prime and it is crazy that we've arrived here i'm gonna tell you what this is ladies and gentlemen and this is gonna be a theme throughout the entirety of this series this is a time capsule up until 2010 certainly throughout my entirety my childhood the number one accusation levy that players was you guys don't care about winning all you care about is yourselves and money why don't you humble yourself and be part of something bigger than you in order for the ultimate success which is winning and lebron did that he said i'm forgoing the money and i'm gonna go somewhere that's gonna he took a pay cut it's a pay cut right so to come to a place as dan said bow before team lebron says okay i'm gonna be a part of something and how did we respond it was the exact opposite it reminds me of when people say hey defense wins championships defense is the most important part of the game defense defense defense all right ben wallis hall of famer hell no he only ever six points again wait what happened to this thing that we were preaching on my entire life but where i disagree is that he wasn't bowing to team he was going to the team where the me would be most obvious would stand out the most would be most successful so that he can then take off and continue to be him and so yes he needed team but this wasn't about team if it was he would have stayed in cleveland and said i had this team can eventually work it out or he would have stayed in miami after four years and said hey this is my team i won with this team i can continue to win with this team it was for the most part about lebron you're extrapolating forward i'm saying the moment he says i'm leaving my own show to go play with two other guys to be part of team to an organization that's known for being very team centric and to leave money on the table to make that happen because even though eventually they did do a sign in trade originally cleveland didn't want to do a sign in trade so he's gonna have to take less years and less money he ended up getting the same amount of years but still took a pay cut all of that was the sacrifice of self to be part of something greater than what i am he did that and we instantly turned on him and said you loser you cowered all right guys we're going to go back in the time machine it's spring 2010 steve jobs has just introduced facetime oh which by the way a great name for it right facetime you know not a great name personal hotspot they probably should rethink what that's called the calves lost to the cell ticks in the second round that year lebron suitors were the nicks the nets the bulls the clippers the heat and of course the cavaliers they're all preparing pitches including an animated pitch a family guy yeah remember that one we have the sopranos reunion which was quite good here come even if we are in a witness protection program now we just gotta find a place for your friend lebron to live pretty terrible who would have thought that eddie palco and jiv gandalfini could be terrible at acting i know right the writing matters and on june 2nd lebron actually went on cnn with larry king you lean at all to the place you know the best i mean do they have an edge going in well absolutely absolutely because you know this city um these fans i mean has given me a lot in these seven years and then you know for me it's comfortable so i got a lot of memories here and so it does have an edge now there's a story circulating to i don't know it's true so i wrote it down just to make sure not you can tell me that you're gonna get together you with bosh and wade and stottemar and lee and johnson and alan and the witski and all of you sort of is this funny you're gonna feel like a little committee yeah a free agent committee free agent committee no one can stop you you're all free agents the lee can't tell you not to do this right what if you go there and i go here and we go here is that possible um i don't know to that extent but um it would be fun it would be fun to get all the free agents together and you know figure out a way how we can make the league better it took him to get a couple of names into the list till i realized oh he just named him free agents said you and wade and bosh like wait a second right june 2nd you had this larry king and then he said stottemar and then i was like oh okay hold on but you realize the reason that that answer is so telling in retrospect lebron's got an idea of what he's gonna do at that point and since then has gotten very fast at answering any question carefully or lying knowing what the reaction is going to be but he tried to go honest here and so he gave him not to that extent but it could be fun but it wasn't received as any kind of news because everybody was like he ain't gonna do that that's not that's an asinine thing to do he'll never do that you know what's funny i wonder had larry king not been larry king had it been jim gray for an instance if it were someone from sports okay who was doing the interview and not larry king news generalist asking that question and getting that response would have created much bigger waves i don't remember this interview at all well we're gonna talk to jim gray who did the interview and the decision but while all this is happening probably during the time where he did that interview with larry king they were figuring out details on how to produce the decision on espn we talked to john skipper who was president of espn at the time and how he dealt with jim gray for the interview i think that the first time that i heard about the idea of potentially having lebron announce his decision on the air was from a query in bill simons mailbag however it was not a query that we really pursued in any significant way the trail to the decision really started through a phone call from aria manuel who said i was at the leger game i was sitting talking to jim gray and we have a great idea for you and that is lebron should announce his decision as to which club he's going to go play for on abc first thing i said to arry was yes i'd be interested if you have lebron and he says he will do it we'll talk about doing it but if we do it it's going to be on espn and i have never actually understood why there was so much aghastness i don't think that's actually a word but you know what it means there was so much aghastness at espn about what a bad idea it was because we were basically letting a player dictate to us the news i remember exactly my response and it never got a good answer which was would you be happy if you cut your television on one night and saw lebron james announce on tnt or fox or somewhere else where he was going we were the world-wide leader in sports journalistically speaking dan i didn't think that this was anything to complain about journalistically i thought it was just more eyes on it if they did this in a private room it would just be the same way a professional journalist would do it so i'm curious if you thought the our special was just sort of a blight on journalism i legitimately remember this as one of the times i most immediately had my mind changed by something or someone that i had conviction about before arriving at the conversation because i'm looking at what john skipper says there and i understand him shrugging and saying why is everybody being so precious while espn's empire is built around us being so precious about sports we care about this thing and we care about it unreasonably so unreasonably that me a logical person who fancies himself on the side of the athlete especially the black athlete and at the time of this decision my reaction should have immediately been some form of how cool and fun and entertaining is that given what my whole career has been about like let's be fun and entertaining about this but my initial reaction was who the hell does he think he is and it was innate and it was a reflex and not until eric ride home the producer of pardon the interruption just said to me but isn't it fun that i just sort of had to be like well what was i doing there what did i just do that my visceral reaction to change was to object to it when i don't fancy myself that in many other ways in sports but is his question was what was the lack of journalism integrity in this because as i see it and this goes back to my long-standing theory that the things that we call news are not actually news him telling us where he's going to play was not news i get it was newsworthy but it's not news in the sense of this had he not had a decision had he not sat down with jim gray had he not leaked to michael wilbarn had nobody leaked it to the media had there never been a press release had there never been a parade that yes we did and all that stuff how would we have known the bronzes of miami he player game one when he's wearing a heat jersey you would have found out one way or another so all he did was reveal something we were going to find out as such there isn't a journalism aspect to this that has to be a journalism integrity to it it is a fact that was going to happen regardless and here's the other part if he were a winner at this point if he had won multiple championships and he announces this would people have said does he think he's bigger than the game because at the time i was laughing at people when they said that i think jack mcmullin was on espn saying who does he think he is and i'm like he's lebron bleeping james he's the biggest name in the game just look at how everybody else is waiting to make their free agency decision based on him he is the game right now so what's the problem with celebrating this decision generally speaking the journalist is taught you report on the story or the side of the story you're not in bed with your partner on the making of the story but like the difference what's the difference if you set up an interview with lebron and you do it quietly or you set up an interview with lebron and he sets up the surroundings okay look i'm arguing on behalf of journalism here but a different time and newspapers these old things that they used to throw yesterday's and get your news in your bushes right we couldn't look could find one that's correct my wife needed some to clean up some throw up with some pets the other day and i could not find a miami herald anywhere around you know they have paper towels they don't want to waste the good stuff but i'm a journalist i should have some newspaper somewhere around where it should be more valuable than to pick up poop you're not supposed to be in a business partnership i understand that there are televised sponsorships throughout sports but back when newspapers did this stuff there was a separation between the capitalism and the editorial like i'm maybe it's irrelevant in sports maybe we shouldn't be so serious around the toy department on this but if you keep going higher and higher up you're supposed to keep the business of this and the news of it apart from each other you're not supposed to go into partnership in the telling of the story we've talked about this on the dan lebron's talk show a lot when we talk about documentaries and documentaries particularly where the subject of the documentary is listed as an executive producer and so you're telling a story but because they are in bed in the way that you're described right now it impacts the way the story is told right was michael jordan really perfect or was this a lot of stuff made to make everyone else denigrated and to lift him up this isn't a story being told it is literally a transaction being revealed there's no story there's no narrative there's no framing he's going to miami and so for me there's no part of this where esbn or jim gray or anyone else involved in this is compromising in any way because they're not telling a story they are merely allowing themselves to be the vessel through which he announces not unlike had they gotten a leak from someone close to the camp or a press release or as i said they saw him walk out on the court in the white red and say oh i guess he's a miami heat player it's funny you should mention that because john skipper actually said that jim gray was kind of the biggest controversy in all of this they wanted a prime time special they had as a bit of a rationality we're going to raise money we're going to raise money for the boys and girls clubs so they controlled the timing the other thing they controlled was jim gray jim gray had been standing apparently with arie at the game they were talking about it they at some point ran it by lebron he said yeah i would maybe do that call skipper and see what he says i did ask arie about jim gray i said we'd rather have bob lee do it or we'd rather have jeremy shaft do it we'd rather have an espn person do it and they said nope if you're going to do it we're with jim gray when the idea came up he was there when lebron agreed to do it so jim gray's your host if you want to do it that probably was the most controversial thing i said yes to and it wasn't my preference either however despite that he is getting unfairly blamed and then people criticized jim gray it was clear nobody at espn wanted him to do it they insisted on it i didn't think there could be more of a professional than jim gray but when skip mentioned bob lee there i was like he actually had an option there here's the thing that gets me about that chris bosh and dwayne wade announced their decisions live on espn as well it just happened to be something that they were controlling mike will bond did the interview had lasted about 15 minutes it was the day before maybe two days before the decision i can't imagine what the fans in toronto thought at the time but nobody was discussing them when chris bosh made it it's not the crime it's a criminal how famous is the criminal no one remembers bosh and wade doing that no one cares they're not as famous not as important had lebron made a decision to go to a team not cleveland but also not with two other hall of famers do you think the reception would have been milder no didn't matter that it was with wade and bosh it did matter a little bit that dwayne had won a championship though because then it felt like riding the coattails of somebody who had already done this and i'm just going to learn from this guy they're not going to follow me there were a lot of blind spots by everyone around what sports does to people here john skipper corporate a man overseeing media empire business would not understand as lebron didn't maverick carter didn't the emotion of sports and how things can go wrong around optics around mythology around race around the freedom of an athlete that would leave and then the owner of the cleveland cavaliers would send a racist missive to everybody as if a slave had run off of a plantation and who the hell does lebron james think he is that he can just run out of what i own i don't know if skipper had a blind spot or needed to recognize a blind spot because at the end of the day for espn it was a massive cool he said it best would you feel better if you watch him do it on tnt and the answer is resoundingly no the only regret i would have is on john skipper is shit we should have put on abc the numbers would have been bigger it would have been a much bigger deal than it was on cable tv but as far as the blind spots of all the other parties involved not the least of which dan gilbert who did as you said came across like an owner not an nba owner but an owner of another time in terms of how much obligation he desired from lebron james and you could read it in his comic sans manifesto it is dripping with i own you boy that was unmistakable and for me and i know i'm i'm skipping ahead it is to this day why i don't understand why lebron ever went back i'm not saying he should have stayed in miami i'm saying i said i go back there to that man without that man doing a very public and very groveling apology to this day i don't understand it lebron james is better at forgiveness than he is at basketball that's yeah that's the same a lot right there his career is ridiculous what we are presently doing in interviewing this man is asinine like the amount of things that he has accomplished in his role in terms of excellence where sideline reporters go you're the tom brady of the game is he not is he like you're absolutely i mean there's no question about it he's a hall of famer in both basketball and boxing a 12-time emmy award winner covered 22 super bowls to me the most important detail is he interviewed mike tyson several times including the one interview where mike tyson claimed he broke his back he's also the author of a author of the memoir talking to goats the moments you remember and the stories you've never heard it's jim gray jim thanks for joining us here good to be with you guys how you doing is he i'm doing great hey dan how you guys doing i think my favorite jim gray story is how he met a young snoop dog when he was a kid at a going to dodgers world series was it no he was in a parking lot when the raiders moved to los angeles and elsa goon doni would take the bus up from long beach and he was just a young kid i don't know 12 or 13 years old and i saw him in the parking lot eight or 10 times i finally said why are you always out here and he said you know i'm just kind of hanging out just want to meet a few of the guys maybe become a ballboy do something so i took him inside one day introduced him to al davis introduced him to frank hawkins and mike haines and how we long and he didn't ask for anything when al met him he says we got to get that that yellow and black off of you we're silver and black around here and he gave my hat gave me jersey you know didn't think much of it about i don't know 18 years later i was broadcasting on nbc one of the finals games for the lakers 2002 or 2003 with coby and shacken i went over and introduced myself to snoop dog i said snoop it's nice to meet you happy for all your success he said oh no you've been meeting me a long time ago i'm that kid calvin brodus i was out in the parking lot and you took me inside an elsa goon don to meet the raiders and i said oh my god you never know who you're talking to guys you never know i remember dan when we used to do the sports reporters too right when you were starting with jack ford and that whole gang over at the espn we had a lot of laughs back at the beginning of your broadcasting career well jim he wasn't very good on that show anyway so true you were also in los angeles around 2010 when lebron james was in free agency but before that you had gone to uh maverick carter and discussed the possibility of getting an interview with lebron after he makes his decision can you tell me where you were how that came about and how the decision came about afterward maverick carter was at the game with aria manual who's the head of wme and they were sitting courtside and it was one of the early rounds and i knew that lebron was going to be a free agent i had interviewed him when he was in high school and i had done his first game on espn against the facromino kings so i just went over to maverick and arian said you know i'd like to be the first guy to be able to interview lebron after he decides where he's going to go and we started talking i said you know why don't we just do a tv show call it the decision and aria manual turned to maverick and said that's a great idea that's brilliant and maverick said okay let's do that so i didn't hear from them for a few weeks or whatever the passage of time was they called back and said we're going to do it where do you want to do it i said i think nbc because i had been on nbc for quite a long time and had left espn and maverick said no it probably should be on one of the nba carriers which was turner espn he then contacted john skipper and the powers that be over at espn and that's how it all came about jim i'm curious because like you said you weren't at espn but lebron's team was adamant that you did the interview how did that work out and what were the details for the ground rules if there were any there were no ground rules but the reason they were adamant is because it was you know i had given them the idea so i can't speak to any of the other inner workings because i wasn't privy to it did you know though that you were doing something groundbreaking controversial like how'd you come up with the idea it's fairly audacious to have the ego of hey let's do something totally different let's do it with me well i just kind of threw it out there this was back in the day when guys were going on podiums and putting on hats when they were going to college and that's how they would reveal where they went that's what i was kind of thinking is you're gonna have a press conference anyway why not control it and do your own but it's audacious jim but everyone reacted like before it was even aired everyone reacted with what who does this person think he is not you although i thought that lebron well that's because it had never been done before and if you look back at it now you know david stern was adamant against this i believe david stern called john skipper and tried to get the whole show killed and may have even gone beyond him to the powers of b i believe it was bob iger at the time at disney and tried to have this not done because he didn't think that this would be good for the nba he didn't think it would be good for lebron but it was lebron taking control it was player empowerment i mean it was the curt flood moment really for the nba he was going to control his own destiny on his time and do what he wanted to do how he wanted to do it with dewayne wade and miami heat and with bosh that threesome and you know super teams had been formed before but not in this fashion and the thing that was overlooked and part of it's my fault you know we never pointed out that we gave millions upon millions of dollars to the boys and girls clubs and changed the trajectory of tens of thousands of kids because it's the biggest donation that's ever been made and it just kind of looked like we were at the boys and girls club i didn't mention it when they threw it to us at about 28 minutes after the hour i don't believe that any of them had mentioned it in the studio so you know it was a charitable endeavor nobody profiteered off of it except for the boys and girls club because john skipper turned over all the time to lebron and maverick and and those guys and it all went to charity so it was groundbreaking and changed the whole paradigm of free agency and how guys control their own destiny jim to that end i'm curious because i do remember the press release ahead of it saying that hey and the proceeds are going to go to the boys and girls club but obviously the decision itself inherently was going to anger at least four markets right because what if you had said i'm saying cleveland new york chicago miami and whoever else was going to be la was going to be upset said i'm going to la yep so there's always going to be the majority of the markets that were in the sweepstakes going to be upset with the decision regardless of the money goes to charity or not was that ever discussed or how top of mind was that like guys there's going to be a lot of angry people today because of whatever answer comes out of lebron's mouth well i didn't have any discussions with them about it and and i didn't know i didn't know the results i intentionally did not want to know because i didn't want to be somebody who might slip on sport center or in an interview before so i did not know what the decision was until the bron said it to me on the air you could feel the tension in the air when leon rose and everybody walked in we met at a house in grenadies connecticut and then we all drove over together to the boys and girls club nobody really said anything during the ride and then when we got out you could just tell there was pensive anticipation it wasn't uncomfortable but nobody was jumping up and down so i had a feeling that he wasn't staying in cleveland but i did not know where he was going and i didn't know for sure jim there's this idea that lebron did wrong by the fans of cleveland by this because he sort of needed to give them a heads up which is impossible to do right whether you do this in a small press conference or a live television show you're going to break the news to the fans live at that time but i'm wondering what you saw from lebron you mentioned there was a pensive sort of air to it but he himself did he seem like somebody who was as he said making a difficult decision and potentially hurting a large fan base well i'm sure it was a very difficult decision and he was pensive and again this wasn't a whole big celebration but i can't tell you exactly what he was thinking you'd have to talk to him about it and he's done a few interviews and a show about it since look he was taking control of his own circumstance and whenever anybody in a circumstance like this it doesn't matter when joe neymeth leaves the jets when joe montana leaves the 49ers none of these things when tom brady left the patriots people are upset they have a romantic feeling about what these guys are doing and the cities they're doing it for in the community they painted lebron as a bad guy and as a villain for what we're giving away a ton of money for switching teams i mean you know he didn't do anything that caused the reaction now could it have been handled better might there have been some other steps that could have been taken to have made things easier for the folks in cleveland and not to have upset the other cities new york and the other places that he had visited and didn't end up going yeah perhaps sure but hindsight is always 2020 but there was no malicious intent you know then dan gobert released a statement that was you know good god come on you're on a professional sports team you're a multi multi billionaire and you're that hurt that had no grace and no dignity that was quite atrocious quite frankly and he set the tone for lebron to be booed and to be treated poorly for a long time and i don't think it's right i don't think it's right to this day now obviously cooler heads have prevailed lebron went back he won a championship paid in full not unlike the 76ers you know we owe you one the brawn paid that up and that everybody's happily ever after and the brawn has gone on to you know become the scoring champion when all these other championships and so on and so forth and been a great player so i guess everybody probably right now isn't anywhere near with the passage of time where they were with the emotion of the moment but jim i don't blame you at all for having a great idea and executing it and groundbreaking and pioneering and stepping off to the side of it but if you don't think that that was all made worse the reaction from dan gilbert not merely from lebron leaving but him having to watch him tell you before he told him you absolutely made that worse by doing it that way but it's not your job to make it better you're not responsible for that but you're absolutely complicit sir well to the degree that dan gilbert didn't know i think that's been refuted as well i believe that rich paul has stated that he called dan gilbert before the television program went on the air so he may not have heard from lebron but he heard from his representation bingo you got a call from his agent and he's telling jim gray on television before he tells me well you'd have to ask lebron and rich and maverick and randy mims how often did dan gilbert talk to lebron when he was playing for him on the team what was the relationship then well dan that's true and i love what he and lebron did i love that he pioneered and shook the system up i love that he did something journalistically pioneering and while he says there were no profiteers here oh no gonna have to correct you on that espn got an awful lot of eyes that night that don't result in direct money and you guys change the sports paradigm together and you did it without working at espn i'm just saying that you're a partner in everything that happened here and you get out scott free which is beautiful well i don't know what scott free is that there was an avalanche of criticism toward me but that's okay it's all right what are they mad at that they didn't have the opportunity to do it what are all of the other journalists mad at what question wasn't asked what wasn't answered i'm curious what was the backlash specifically what were the things that you were hearing and not necessarily from fans but from other journalists or from media pundits well they didn't like it and that's okay you know they're all entitled to their say they can say what they want they have their opinions and that's what they're paid to do and they felt that they probably should have had their opportunity to ask the questions or that you know that this wasn't conforming with what had gone on all the time up until that time but mike did because said something for me if you have no successes you have no critics so that's okay that show was a huge success it's the highest rated show to this day and you can ask mr skipper it's the highest rated show in their history not game not live event the highest rated show in their history to this day and it's not even close so people were interested in this and so let the critics have their say it's okay i'll take the success of it and the success is huge because it changed everything jim i'm curious did you give lebron or anybody a heads up on how or when you were going to ask the question of where he was going no none of this was rehearsed we had a brief meeting at that home very brief maverick lebron and i they didn't ask me to submit the questions they didn't want to know what the questions were i said i'm going to do a little background and then we'll get to it and then we'll discuss your decision and they said fine i have a couple of questions that are specific that may be difficult to answer on the fly but you said it its success was huge it changed everything there is no disputing that if you had to rank it where does it rank in your career on things or moments that you're proud of because it changed everything well i don't know that i have a ranking order but the tyson airbiting was the best interview i ever did you bit him was that a retaliation for the eye when you bit him in his ear regardless of what i did he bit but me for two fights but you got to address it mike and that's because nothing like that had ever happened before why did you do that though mike i mean was that the proper response look at me look at me look at me i gotta go home my kid will be scared of me look at me man what are you gonna do now in terms of your career mike nothing like that has ever happened since there's the heavyweight championship of the world i better not screw that one up because even though we were in the early days of the internet you know that this would be played and replayed forever and ever and having done tens of thousands of interviews it's probably the only time i walked away where i said you know what i couldn't have done better i didn't stumble i wasn't interrupted by the director i didn't think of a question that i shouldn't have asked i walked away thinking you know that's about as good as i can do and thank god because i wouldn't want to have lived with not getting that one right well i've got one better here than the one that you're saying is the best one you've ever done i don't think it's even the best one you've done in boxing you're really sick this week what was the problem i broke my back what do you mean by that you broke back it broken what a vertebra well spinal did that inspire me no i did it um by motorcycle accident the doctor discovered i would do my sit-ups 2,500 a day with my 20 pound weight and one day i couldn't move anymore and i exacted doctor what's wrong he said um believe it or not is wearing your back is broken slightly you can't disagree with me that was unbelievable you know we did another we did several of these things where he wanted to eat linux luis's children my style is impetuous my defense is impregnable and i'm just ferocious i want your heart i want to eat his children praise be to i mean there's there's a whole bunch of them we're doing the life story on mike tyson on netflix the documentary a three-part series on netflix and i'm the producer on that so we look forward to that but mike tyson one time guys threatened to kill me said i'll kill you and i'll kill don king and then 20 seconds later he kissed me on my cheek and i'm still trying to figure out what's more disturbing jim i'm curious if i had a time machine i went back in time to right before the decision airs and i talked to jim gray and i said hey what do you think the long lasting legacy of this event is going to be would you have said oh it's gonna be big it's gonna be a huge thing or would you have correctly foretold that this is gonna change the way we look at free agency forever i think i would have said it would have changed free agency forever but not in the way that it has and not to the degree and to the dynamic that it did so i thought it was it was unique and different and i thought it would change things but i didn't think it would live this life or have this legacy i would not have predicted anything like that no how did it rank in terms of times you've had nerves before doing something because you've mentioned being in front of the world with the heavyweight championship but your idea coming to fruition and you were walking into a room you kind of knew that all the eyes were on you because of something you specifically had just conjured i wasn't nervous i was apprehensive kind of like every time you go on the air until the first word comes up but i've been nervous i've interviewed the last 11 presidents of the united states and nelson mandela i'm nervous then because when you have the attention of people of the stature of the free world and you're taking their time that's nerve-wracking i don't recall dan being nervous for this you know i was anxious because a i wanted to know where he was going and b it was a big thing so i knew a lot of people were watching but you know i've done several olympics and nba finals and super bowls and if you start thinking about all the people that are watching you know no one would ever speak a word when you're just talking to the cameraman and just talking to whoever it is you're interviewing it's a lot easier so i don't recall being nervous there was a little you know i was anxious in the car because you can see the apprehension that everybody had so i don't want to downplay it and say there was no anxiety or tension or nerves but it wasn't overwhelming it wasn't like that kind of a situation because i didn't know what was going to happen so i was still just curious but by the other aspect of it didn't affect me afterwards you know it was his life where he was going jim i'm i'm enthralled with my time machine i want to go back again to jim gray right before the decision you didn't know where he was going but in your heart in your gut where do you think that's a good question that's a good question i kind of thought new york because we were just outside of new york i kind of thought maybe that's why we're here in grinach but i wasn't sure and i wouldn't you know right i don't gamble but i wouldn't bet on it but i kind of thought maybe the nicks were you rooting against cleveland just because you're like that's that's less interesting it's just less interesting i used to do the play-by-play for the cleveland cavalier so i was not rooting against cleveland that was for cleveland and i loved gordon gund uh their former owner who was a blind man who had done a feature whip on nbc and he hired me to do the play-by-play and i was very fond of the city of cleveland and my time there so i was not rooting against cleveland i felt bad for cleveland tens of thousands of interviews is crazy to think about but it's even crazier that jim has not aged throughout all of that it's the same crazy sound exactly it's unbelievable he came out of the womb that way looking exactly like that glasses and all as someone who's heard my voice age over the years i'm amazed jim your voice sounds exactly the same it's comforting thank you it's too bad i don't work for you guys you know if i had bosses like you guys that would be great jim thanks so much for the time really appreciated thank you guys thanks for having me on appreciate it thank you jim uh you're to blame you're entirely to blame it's all your fault i'll take the blame put it on me thank you finally an admission finally i badgered him into sir you're complicit sir you're complicit you got it talked him down thank you jim thank you guys take care be well all right so let's do this it's thursday night 2010 about 915 steward scott let's now send it to jim gray in greenwich connecticut naturally with the king so what's new what's been going on with you this summer uh man this whole free agent experience i'm looking forward to it what have you thought about this process um this process has been everything i've thought um and more you know and that's what i did a few years ago i put myself in a position to have this this this process where i can hear teams pitches and figure out what was the best possible chance for me to ultimately win and to ultimately be happy a couple of wild details there there was a 13 year old donovan michael outside there witnessing this apparently lebron had dinner with kanya west the night before which made me wonder he had to know right like kanya had to find out the answer to this and if he did how the hell did he keep it quiet you have kanya asking questions to lebron as opposed to just talking about himself the whole time i mean that's a good point did he even know lebron was making this decision the next day i'm not sure i don't think he's a sports guy dan i'm curious it was an hour long special did you think to yourself at all how were they going to fill that time because people just want to know two words no i was dreaming of scenarios that anyone would want in the world of programming that would keep people around for hours before those two words like you could have milked that for a telethon that would have grown from 10 million people to 100 million people if you just kept stringing out those two words for about 24 hours they couldn't go long enough teasing that i don't think i talked to you guys about this i know is did talk to you about this earlier but where were you when the decision happened i was so scared i was legitimately how like where were you physically like where do you i was in a dark mental space i remember where i was physically because i was in a boog shambi's apartment when i say it was a dark place i don't know why this was but i do remember that boog shambi was not home for some reason i was at his apartment for reasons i cannot remember and i was physically in an actually dark place because i was scared i had reported locally that it was going to happen on the radio lebron was coming to miami that i was hearing it from restaurant owners and so i needed to see it happen but i after talking to a nwayne and a whole bunch of people afterward none of us were actually sure wade included that it was going to happen everybody was kind of worried that lebron would get to the moment and not be able to execute the thing that he was executing and so i was scared that i had reported something that was going to be wrong well let me set up everything that had happened already because we already had the dwayne wade and chris bosh announcement right the day before yet steve and a reporting that lebron james is heading to south beach you have alan haun of newsday scooping the world apparently and reporting at the night before or overnight and greg codi tweeted that the heat are canceling a full page welcome ad in the herald so you're getting mixed signals all over the place by the way there's a separation of business in editorial how does he know that well he didn't he got it wrong didn't he greg codi's reporting is about an editorial page that would suggest that lebron wasn't coming to miami greg codi famously got it wrong or he just reported a panicky organization that said ah let's get this out of there because it's going to look stupid if he says new york so we know that the heat knew but they weren't sure we know that dan gilbert was alerted by rich paul that lebron was minutes minutes before though like sec it was literally seconds before dan gilbert got mad that way not just because lebron left it's because he had to watch it on television the indignity in motion of that letter was a billionaire scorned okay so rich paul knew randy mim's knew maverick carter knew savannah new savannah new gloria james knew right the moral the story is you want to keep a secret just don't have everyone knowing the secret so really it comes down to the miami heat and the way in wait and on all those people but you guys are telling me they knew but they were like i'm not sure though i wouldn't bet my mortgage on it he made it ridiculously awkward for everybody involved no more awkward than those actually at the boys and girls club let's listen to jim greg cut the silence here and have lebron make his announcement you're still in nail biter i have a little bit not not a blade we've had everybody else biting their nails so i guess it's time for them to stop chewing the answer to the question everybody wants to know lebron what's your decision um and this fall man this is very tough um and this fall i'm going to take my talents to south beach and um join the miami heat miami heat that was the conclusion you woke up with this morning that was the conclusion i woke up with this morning dand you remember what your actual emotion was immediately after hearing those words from lebron relief relief oh i got it right relief he's and never mind the next whatever four to seven years that would happen you want relief because you want to be right not surprising that i would want to be right that's true not surprising that my narcissism would grab me in this moment to want me to be extra right but the reason that i'm telling you that i was afraid and perhaps i'll shock you in saying this steven a smith has admitted that like me after he reported that he's never been so scared because he's never been so scared because being credible on these things is important and lebron had a power to sway his mind you don't want your credibility in front of people to not be trusted at least i didn't want that and so the first thing was just okay because i'd been scared and then after that it was just real happiness on behalf of the city i care about because i knew i mean shit we built those studios at the cleveland er espion hurried up and built those studios at the cleveland er because that was coming down here and i knew what that meant for local business look it's the cleveland studio's it's the heat index you got brian winhurst and kevin arnevitz and tom haveston none of these guys are local to the area and now they're all assigned just one beat that's never happened before and i don't think it'll ever happen again there won't ever be a team even as i can sit here and say the warriors are a better dynasty than the heat was it will never rival what happened when lebron came here with wade and bosh because it signaled an arrival of hey it's okay to be hyper focused on just one thing it was all right for a massive percentage of espion's nba reporting budget to be devoted to just one team and i don't think i've ever seen that in any sport on any level in this country not in american sports in japan they'll follow a player around giant contingents well and internationally and soccer they will do it but it's hard to imagine that ever happening again in american sports you know my favorite part about that sound the two claps the two claps because they thought he was going to say new york it was like hot and then the waiters he didn't say new york and you can hear the gasp of the people in attendance some of them kids some of them adults realizing oh he didn't do it in grenish connecticut because he's staying here this actually had nothing to do with it the other part that was interesting is the phrasing right i'm taking my talents to south beach some people thought it was just poor english but other people recognized oh kobe bryant used those exact same words when he announced he was entering the nba kobe bryant have decided to take my talent to uh no i have decided to skip college and take my talent to the nba not as scared ason even the uh was something that you could argue lebron probably borrowed because he gave you the the drama with the uh there but it is interesting like you could tell how nervous he was you could tell when jim gray made that statement that's what you woke up he just repeated the exact same thing because he wasn't ready to say anything but there was a question later that when people talk about oh he didn't really think about the fans in cleveland he didn't give them the proper answers i stated myself they didn't listen or watch the entire interview because later he gave a great answer when jim asked him if you ever want to go through this again ever want to go through this again uh this is this is tough um it's very tough because you feel like you let a lot of people down um you've you've raised a lot of people's expectations also um but it was a tough decision um because i know how loyal i am um and one thing my mother told me um when i was going through this process and what ought to be help me make my decision is um you have to do what's best for you and what's going to make you happy um at the end of the day because no one can live with the consequences or anything that comes with your decision besides you and once i heard that from my mother i'm the person i'll always look to for guidance um it was easy that should have been the speech he practiced and answered when jim gray asked him the initial question and then said hey i'm going to my having said that yeah it's crazy because first of all i look at him and i see brawny he's so young he looks like his son and in that there's a little bit of that innocence of oh man i'm doing something i shouldn't be doing like a little kid as opposed to a grown man i do whatever the hell i want right even though that's essentially was he's a grown man a free agent announcing i can do whatever i want it's my right there still seems to be a level of like i'm in dangerous ground here the other thing and i want you to as miami people to react to this i remember so many people in miami after celebrating like maybe a week later like well actually the arena is not in south beach so i'm dismayed like you guys were so hung up on that and i'm like nobody cares about your geography it was a cool way to say i'm going to miami he wasn't going to south beach you've got to get those details right it's such an interesting appraisal to both see brawny in his face and to have a mean say out loud man he looked like such a big kid there well yeah because he was and he grew into the adult voice we all watched it like i know i don't want to infantilize a 25 year old but for that moment anybody would be a kid like you're walking into everything freedom adulthood like i know we think of him as mature beyond his years because 16 years old exceeded every expectation but that be scary for anyone so interesting to me in that answer though and in the symbolism of everything that we're talking about here because we started with those articles that embarrassed us and the idea of team what is team so he goes from one kind of team in cleveland to a different kind of team that he builds in miami the team goes from i'm responsible for the whole organization to a team of three and then once i do that you know what i'm going to choose a team of one my team the people i told that secret and they didn't tell anybody it's going to be one it's not going to be 12 it's not going to be three it's going to be me and my team holy fuck dude that guy did it he told us he was going to do it and he did it okay you want to laugh at me now i have an article from you in here that i've been reading while he talks and i didn't read it when it came out i'm embarrassed on your behalf reading some of this but i'm not you're not no no because i'm honest with myself and where i was in the stage of my career i had been a columnist for three years at the time and never really dreamt of being like a voice of my hometown in the sports section it's absolutely insane and in this part of my career i was protecting the reader protecting my people if you will so that part doesn't make me cringe anymore i just you know it's like i mean said it's a time capsule that just puts me back there oh but when i say cringe and maybe i'm doing too much ego in this because yes of course you're going to be proud that you get your name in a byline and you get to give your opinion on the big sports story of the day and it's nice that you have gratitude about that but holy shit were you wrong well i cannot be proven wrong is it if you'll allow me because we did it for dan i got to do it for you too right and so we'll start with the headline nba better off if lebron plays elsewhere still cannot be proven wrong all right well he's defensive fast he didn't even write that one that was that was the editor wrote that headline all right so like dan's article it starts with a bunch of questions which okay yes i just bad writing by us if i may if i'm just i'm looking right now at is he if is he saying he's not embarrassed by this don't know don't jump ahead don't jump don't jump ahead i've just got one front phrase no no you'll get you'll get your funny phrase it for okay let me let me let me just start with what's better for a league singular dominance or legitimate rivalries with unpretentious results what's better for an organization nightly chaos or precise focus what's better for a city a foreign king commandeering the hearts and minds of its people or continuing a healthy relationship with a familiar leader who has put in time and work to win over those people if you choose the first option to all three of those questions then you should use every last available prayer you have that lebron james announces thursday night that he will join dwayne wade chris botch in miami next season if you prefer the second options then you probably have the right idea and then this is the kicker this team this league this city doesn't need lebron james wearing a heat uniform i've got worse than i've got something that echoes more embarrassingly than that it's also a question that he's asking what's better for everyone involved a team around wade and bosh that might include what what what a brendon haywood no no i wrote it you did right i wrote it the tear of free agents brendon haywood was right there right there no he wasn't shot me i know we had money that summer brendon haywood wasn't on our board you did find there one sentence in there that embarrased me a little bit here's your favorite park it's the homework the next episode we're talking about loyalty and more propaganda we're going back to sports illustrated with the article i'm coming home from 2014 and maybe we'll read an actual book which i don't think the bron really does