LeBron James totally wasn't trolling the Warriors with that Ultimate Warrior shirt, you guys
Hey, remember when LeBron James stepped off the Cleveland Cavaliers’ team plane after his team’s vanquishing of the Golden State Warriors to win the 2015-16 NBA championship wearing a blue T-shirt bearing the image of the Ultimate Warrior? It sure seemed like a pretty clear wrestling-themed shot across the bow at a Dubs team that had talked plenty of smack when they were one win away from back-to-back titles, right? Like a committed twisting of the knife after the James-and-Kyrie Irving-led charge to become the first team in NBA history to come back from a 3-1 deficit in the Finals to win it all?
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Well, sports fans, we’ve had it all wrong, according to the King. In an interview with Business Insider, James insists that his garment choice had nothing to do with giving Stephen Curry and company the business, and everything to do with insufficient foresight in packing for a business trip:
Well, it’s funny, because my wife bought [it earlier]. She asked me who my favorite wrestlers of all time were, and I told her, “Sting, ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, Ultimate Warrior, The Undertaker, and Ric Flair.” Those are some of my favorite guys ever [from when I was] growing up.
So, one day I get home from practice, and there are these T-shirts laying in my bedroom, and my wife purchased them from a store. So, throughout the whole playoffs, I was kind of — you guys might remember, one time, I had the Undertaker shirt on — so I packed them all throughout the playoffs.
And the shirt that I had on to come home in, I wore in Vegas, and my teammates sprayed me with champagne, and it got soaking wet, so I had to throw it in the trash. And the only other shirt I had in my bag was my Ultimate Warrior T-shirt. That was the only one because all our bags were underneath the plane. So the only one I had was the Ultimate Warrior T-shirt that was packed in my travel luggage. And that’s what I put on. You can ask any one of my teammates. No one believes — everybody thinks it was set up that way, but it really wasn’t. But It kind of worked out that way.
Asked whether he’d have worn that shirt if the Cavs had lost Game 7, James insisted he would … “or I could have did the J.R. Smith and not wear a T-shirt.” Man, oh man, would I have loved to see the steam that came out of folks’ ears if LeBron had come back after losing a Game 7 with either no shirt on or wearing a wrestling T-shirt. The takes, my dear boy. Just think of the takes!
LeBron seems pretty stunned that “no one believes” he didn’t “set up that way.” I think I can explain why: because the one shirt you packed in your carry-on bag was a shirt proclaiming you to be the last Warrior, the one who is left standing after all of the other Warriors have been laid low. Had the Cavs been playing the Oklahoma City Thunder in the championship round, and James hopped off the plane wearing a shirt reading “THUNDER KING,” people would have been like, “Oh, man, that is a pretty blatant troll job,” even though we all also know that LeBron’s favorite character in the expansive “World of Warcraft” MMORPG universe is Lei Shen, The Thunder King, the powerful tyrant introduced in the “Mists of Pandaria” expansion. (Like, no doy. Read a book.)
Sure, the thing on your shirt might just be the thing on your shirt, but it’s understandable that people would put two and two together and come up with four running shoulderblocks, gorilla presses and big splashes to the opponent you just took down to win it all. This is why, whenever I travel on business, I make it a point to wear nothing but my finest Honky Tonk Man and Rick “The Model” Martel T-shirts. Nobody could ever confuse those with a sneak-tip diss of the many enemies against whom I wage high-stakes battle every time I touch down.
We eagerly await the next installment in LeBron’s Fitsplanation series. I’ve got my fingers crossed that he’ll tell us those hats really aren’t about throwing shade at those who said he’d lost a step and couldn’t deliver Cleveland’s first pro sports championship in 52 years, but rather just an earnest expression of his lifelong appreciation for both Jim Henson’s disruption of the puppeteering game and the eternally rejuvenating properties of a cup of Oolong.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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