Return, if you will, to the summer of 2011—Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Abby Wambach, “Rolling in the Deep,” and so on.
In the basketball world, the Heat were licking their wounds after losing to the Mavericks in six games in the NBA Finals. The loss embarrassed a Miami team that had become one of the most widely hated squads in the history of sports after assembling the league’s proto-superteam the previous offseason.
This was the backdrop for an unbelievable anecdote told by soon-to-be Hall of Fame guard Dwyane Wade in an interview with Rachel Nichols aired on Showtime Thursday night. The subject: forward LeBron James, recovering from the biggest humiliation of his illustrious career.
“We already had this vacation planned. We had this house in The Bahamas,” Wade explained. “My wife and I got there first.”
The house where Wade, James and their respective wives were staying had a large, shared balcony with a pool below. James seemed to take the pool’s presence as a challenge.
“LeBron came in, said, ‘What’s up?’ looked down and said, ‘How deep do you think that is?’” Wade remembered. “I said ‘I’d say, eight, nine feet.’ He said, ‘Let me see.’ Took his stuff off, jumped in the pool from the balcony. I promise you. I was like, ‘This dude is crazy.’”
"I was like, 'This dude's crazy.'" - Dwyane Wade on this week's episode of Headliners, explaining how LeBron jumped off a balcony into a pool after losing the 2011 Finals. This story is, well, listen for yourself ⬇️
— Rachel Nichols (@Rachel__Nichols) April 27, 2023
Full interview is on Showtime tonight & also available streaming pic.twitter.com/BnO14bP1Bf
Nichols pointed out that James could’ve ended his NBA career, to which Wade responded, “He didn’t even think about that. He just jumped in the water.”
And thus—to hear Wade tell it—the Heat’s road to back-to-back titles in 2012 and 2013 began.
