Twenty years ago today, The Post’s Mike Vaccaro and Mark Hale went to Trenton, N.J., to cover a high school showcase featuring a heavily hyped phenom by the name of LeBron James. Now, after James became the NBA’s all-time leading scorer on Tuesday, they look back on that incredible night in 2003 — and how it foretold the basketball history to come.
Early on the afternoon of Feb. 8, 2003, if you’d walked to the box office at Sovereign Bank Arena in downtown Trenton, asked for two tickets to the hotly anticipated Liza Minelli concert in a few weeks’ time, you could still get choice sets, right on the floor.
If you wanted to see Cher in June? Plenty of good seats still available.
But if you were looking for ducats for that evening’s main event, you received a sad look and a few helpful words from the woman at the ticket window.
“Nothing left,” she said. “But if you want to walk that way” — she pointed in the direction, down two snowy streets, where scalpers were known to ply their wares — “they might be able to help you. But it’ll cost.”
Today, LeBron James is a 38-year-old mega-star, who already has won four NBA championships and just became the all-time highest scorer in the history of professional basketball, surpassing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s holy-grail number of 38,387 points.
Twenty years ago, he was an 18-year-old high school senior for St. Vincent-St. Mary High School, the most celebrated prep player of that season, one of the most hyped ever, every bit as much as Abdul-Jabbar himself back when he played at Manhattan’s Power Memorial High School under his birth name, Lew Alcindor.
The world wasn’t quite as intimate in 2003 as it is now. This was pre-Twitter. LeBron was celebrated for his talent, and there were cameras at all his games. You could tell he was an excellent player. But few things are ever the equal of the hyperbole. A lot of us went to Trenton eager to remind the world of that.
And, well …
Put it this way: here is the lead of my column in the next morning’s Post:
TRENTON — Well, it turns out all the hype and all the hyperbole surrounding LeBron James really was disgusting, and wrong, and misleading, and completely out of kilter. It turns out that all the noise, and all the clamor, and all the commotion was totally inappropriate, absolutely detached from reality.
You bet it was.
As it turns out, the hype wasn’t nearly loud enough. The advance notices were far too muted, the hysteria way too contained, the raves ridiculously conservative.
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If you happened to be one of the 9,000 chosen ones who witnessed James live, in person, inside Sovereign Bank Arena, watching with wide eyes and slack jaws, then you know exactly what you saw.
You saw the very future of basketball.
And his name is LeBron James.
Yes. That was borrowed from Jon Landau’s forever description of seeing Bruce Springsteen for the first time at the Harvard Square Theater in Cambridge, Mass., in 1974. But in the same way Landau couldn’t contain himself in the May 22, 1974 edition of Boston’s Real Paper, it was impossible to do so in the pages of the Post.
It wasn’t just that James was otherworldly good that night — scoring 52 points on 22-for-33 shooting. In one surreal 5-minute, 11-second section that closed out the first quarter he scored 20 points — capped by a 35-footer at the buzzer.
He was great. But he was beyond great. The Beatles were a great band. But it wasn’t just their music that caused stadiums of young girls to practically pass out with glee during the early years of Beatlemania.
This was the same thing. Late in the second quarter, after LeBron had made another extraordinary play, a 10-year-old ball boy who’d been sitting wide-eyed under one basket could stand it no more, ran on a dead sprint toward LeBron — only eight years older, remember — and jumped into his arms, a spontaneous burst of joy that was equal parts unsettling and spectacular.
After the kid ran back to the baseline, LeBron mouthed, “Now that was awesome.”
Less awesome was what happened after the game, when one of the referees walked over and asked for a picture. But that’s what that night inspired. It was like watching the young Springsteen, the young Lennon and McCartney. He wasn’t just as good as his press notices, he was better. And stronger. And with an irresistible charisma.
A few days later, I called Rick Pitino, then in the beginning of his tenure at Louisville, who was nominally recruiting James so couldn’t speak for the record at the time.
“If he played college basketball, which he won’t, they’d have to do what they did when George Mikan played when they widened the lanes, or like Kareem when they outlawed the dunk,” Pitino said. “You can’t ask future coaches, lawyers and accountants to play against a guy like that. It’s unfair.”
Twenty years later, there are nights when it still seems unfair, even at 38. But at 18? Those of us lucky to be inside Sovereign Bank Arena really had seen the future of basketball. And what a remarkable ride it’s been.
— Mike Vaccaro
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it. And you can probably lose the “I’m not sure.”
Prior to that night, I’d probably have said that the best high school athlete I had seen in person was Keith Bulluck, with whom I went to high school. If you remember, Bulluck was a first-round NFL draft pick who eventually enjoyed a 10-year career as a linebacker, including several standout seasons with the Titans. So you can imagine how remarkable a football player he was in high school (he was an elite basketball player, too). I’m very proud that my high school produced Bulluck, a standout athlete and kind person.
This was something else altogether.
The game was as fitting an expression of the “man against boys” trope-becomes-reality as I’ve ever seen or heard. James’ physique as a high schooler had been a buzzed-about topic. The hype was accurate. He was physically different: bigger, stronger, just utterly dominant.
He was a completely different level of talent from everyone else on the court — more advanced, more skilled, more spectacular.
From my story:
Sebastian Telfair, James’ buddy from Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, sat courtside next to his coach, Dwayne Morton, prompting a reporter to ask, “You guys don’t play till tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah,” Morton replied. “But the show is tonight.”
Prior to that game, the James story was exploding — he had been suspended for accepting two throwback jerseys — so The Post sent me to Akron, Ohio. At the time, I was 24 years old, only a few months into a full-time general assignment sports reporter role at The Post. I remember I went to James’ high school and talked to a range of people while in town — from other students at St. Vincent-St. Mary to the school athletic director to a cab driver to the father of James’ best friend Maverick Carter. With James poised to return from suspension and with that game taking place in Trenton, I flew back home to cover it. My editor said something like, “Well, you’ve covered it so far, you might as well cover the game.”
As it turned out, it became as special and as unique an assignment as I would ever end up having. When I think about events I covered during my 11 years as a reporter, some of them jump out: the Giants’ Super Bowl 42 run … Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit … an Astros six-pitcher combined no-hitter at Yankee Stadium … Roger Federer winning the US Open. But I’d rank sitting courtside to chronicle this LeBron James 52-point high school performance at the very top of the list.
I pretty firmly consider James the best basketball player ever, ahead of Michael Jordan. And it’s pretty amazing that he was touted the way that he was and then became what he became.
— Mark Hale
