When he was a kid, LeBron James’s favorite sport was football, and there was a time when some who watched him play believed he could’ve become an All-Pro tight end with his size, quickness, and hands. It wasn’t meant to be; James gave up football at age seventeen despite being an All-State wide receiver as a junior in high school. Yet here he was in an NFL locker room holding a championship trophy.
The Oakland Raiders locker room to be exact. That was where he was about two hours after winning his third NBA title and the third time accepting the Bill Russell Trophy from the man it was named for as Finals MVP. He’d come there with a bottle of Moët champagne in his hand and a cigar in his mouth, part of a stash of goods a member of the Cavs front office had secretly been sent to buy in case they needed them for a locker room party. More than $4,000 worth of ski goggles and cigars were sent by owner Dan Gilbert with orders not to breathe a word of it to general manager David Griffin, who would’ve seen it as a jinx.
James was in the locker room because that’s where the NBA had set up a favorite annual tradition of postgame photos with the Larry O’Brien Trophy. Every member of the team got to take them for posterity. James wanted three. One with his wife, Savannah, sons LeBron Jr. and Bryce, and infant daughter Zhuri, who had been a special guest with James at his postgame interview session. He wanted one with his mother, Gloria. And one with his three closest friends: business manager Maverick Carter, agent Rich Paul, and right-hand-man Randy Mims.
As James waited his turn, Richard Jefferson came up to him. After fifteen years as a pro, Jefferson had just won his first NBA title and emotionally announced after the game that he’d be retiring. He was later talked out of it and signed a two-year deal to stay in Cleveland. James ended up re-upping too, signing a three-year, $100 million contract the following summer.
“I have tons of friends that have won championships. I’ve seen the videos from the portrait room. I’ve seen the pictures. It only made me wonder more if I’d ever get my chance,” Jefferson said. “This is everything that I’ve always dreamed it would be. Imagine what it must have been like for LeBron? Making this all happen. The championship. The comeback. The joy. And doing it in the place he grew up?”
In the moment, Jefferson asked James, “Tell me, was that the most stressful game ever?”
“It was close,” James said, recalling his 2013 Finals Game 6 victory with the Miami Heat in overtime after Ray Allen made a shot just before the buzzer to save the team’s season.
Thinking of Miami, James was brought back to something else. Something that happened nearly two years earlier when he’d decided to leave the Heat and come to Cleveland to chase the dream he was living at that moment.
“When I decided to leave Miami—I’m not going to name any names, I can’t do that—but there were some people that I trusted and built relationships with in those four years who told me I was making the biggest mistake of my career,” James said. “And that hurt me. And I know it was an emotional time that they told me that, because I was leaving. They just told me it was the biggest mistake I was making in my career. And that right there was my motivation.”
James hinted at a secret motivation for a long time but refused to reveal it. Even now he held back, though it was a serious hint he was referring to Heat president Pat Riley, the man who challenged him not to run out the first door when Miami lost in the 2014 Finals.
“I knew what I was doing,” James said. “I knew what I was doing, and I mean, tonight is a product of it.”
Just then Paul walked over to show James his phone. Kyrie Irving was giving his press conference and talking about seeing James’s mastery in the deciding game.
“I watched Beethoven tonight,” Paul said, reading Irving’s words about James.
Irving had delivered too, his partnership with James succeeding under the greatest pressure. As James was weeping with joy and hugging family, Irving found his father, Drederick, and sister, Asia. As he hugged them he didn’t quite feel a sense of joy at first.
“I was waiting for more questions about ‘What about you shooting on this possession?’ Or ‘What about you doing this or that?’ I was done,” Irving said. “I was so defensive that I didn’t celebrate right after we won. I just hugged my dad and my sister. My dad is looking at me like, ‘What’s wrong?’ I’m telling him, ‘I’m waiting for someone to come up and say something to me about what happened during the game.’”
Irving’s defiance about his critics didn’t last. Soon he was in the locker room and grabbing his phone. He FaceTimed with his hero, Kobe Bryant, who had been texting him and encouraging him during the postseason.
“All I was thinking in the back of my mind was Mamba mentality,” Irving said, using Bryant’s nickname to explain his thought process before the game-winning shot. “Just Mamba mentality. That’s all I was thinking.”
There was another piece of business for the Cavs once they all got into the locker room. Their championship puzzle. They flipped open the case, and as the team stood around screaming, Ty Lue had the honor of putting the sixteenth piece into place. The final golden niche was in the shape of the state of Ohio. Lue slammed it in with both hands.
The room quickly filled with smoke as the cigars started smoldering and the champagne started flowing. Security guards tried to stop the smoking—it was against the law to smoke in the building. The Warriors had left the Cleveland visitors’ locker room smelling of champagne the year before; the Cavs would leave the Oakland visitors’ locker room smelling of smoke.
It wasn’t the first cigar of the week for Mike Mancias, James’s trainer for the previous ten years. His wife had gone into labor with the couple’s first child the day after Game 6. It lasted twenty-six hours before his son, Malcolm, was born. After they shared their moment with their son, Mancias’s wife, Heather, said, “Go, go to Game 7.” Mancias had missed the team charter but boarded another plane, one for Cavs employees, the morning of the game and made it to the arena in time to put James through his pregame stretching routine. It was his first Father’s Day.
Gilbert and fellow owners Nate Forbes and Jeff Cohen were walking around with magnum-sized champagne bottles with each of their names and the team logo engraved on them. They had been a gift when James returned to the team, but the men agreed to save them until they could be used to celebrate a championship. Gilbert bought the team in 2005, and he’d spent more than $850 million in salaries and luxury taxes, built a $25 million practice facility, and fired five coaches and two general managers to get to this point. He’d earned a celebration.
But the postgame party in Oakland was nothing compared to what Gilbert had planned. After the Cavs won Game 6 to even the series, Mark Cashman, the team’s equipment and travel manager, started planning what to do if they won. He secretly arranged for a pit stop and kept it quiet.
As the team began to pack up and head to the airport down the empty streets late on a joyless Sunday night in the East Bay, the flight crew on their plane filed a new plan with the destination being Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport. Cashman had booked buses to meet them at the private jet terminal and take them to XS Nightclub inside the Wynn hotel complex.
They landed at 1 a.m. and a short time later walked into the club to see a giant screen congratulating them on their championship, a line of cocktail waitresses wearing James jerseys holding up a sign that read “We Believed,” a custom cake shaped like the Larry O’Brien Trophy, and two giant tubs with twenty-five bottles of high-end champagne. A lot of time and effort had been put into a party that might never have happened. The Warriors, meanwhile, had to cancel their planned championship celebration for a third and final time.
Kevin Love arrived holding a WWE-style championship belt over his shoulder. Matthew Dellavedova was wearing the Tommy Bahama shirt from the Lil’ Kev ad. James was wearing a shirt with “RWTW” splashed across the front. It stood for “Roll With The Winners.”
After a few hours at the club, the team went to Allegro, an Italian restaurant off the casino, to have some pizza before going to Cleveland, where they’d be met at the airport by around 20,000 fans.
It was in this same hotel James had made his final decision to go home to Ohio two summers earlier, beginning a journey that was even more difficult than he could’ve imagined. He never could have foreseen the battles with David Blatt, the struggles to mesh with Irving, that he’d find a partner in J.R. Smith of all people, that veterans Richard Jefferson and Channing Frye would be inspirations, that a gritty little Aussie named Dellavedova would help along the way, that he’d lead the greatest comeback in Finals history with three consecutive hero performances sealed with the defining play of his career, a blocked shot of all things. Or that he’d be right back at the Wynn soaking in a championship. It didn’t feel like full circle, it felt like the end of the adventure of his life.
“It’s not even relief, it’s just excitement,” James said as he closed his eyes and tried to sum up his feelings in the moment.
“I’m coming home. I’m coming home with what I said I was going to do.”