LeBron James lowered himself into a cold tub the size of a large Jacuzzi at a practice facility at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas last month.
He had just finished a session with the U.S. men’s basketball team ahead of his first Olympics in 12 years. As the icy water got to work on his 39-year-old muscles, he thought about the first time he ever crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
“I was, like, super intimidated and super scared to just be out of the country,” James said.
He was 15 and had joined a group of basketball players from Ohio for a trip to Italy. They stayed with local families and did some sightseeing. He smiled at the memories, fuzzy as they were.
He had been hesitant to go, but his high school coach, Dru Joyce II, recalled in an interview telling James he needed to “see how big the world was.”
In the decades since, the world has changed, and so has James.
At the Paris Games, he is playing in front of — and against — people from around the globe who grew up dreaming of one day seeing him in person. During James’s two decades in the National Basketball Association, the sport’s popularity has exploded internationally. A fascination that began with greats like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant has been supercharged during the James era. Because of advances in technology and lucrative media rights deals, teenagers in countries like the Philippines, Uganda and Brazil can easily watch his games. His was the best-selling N.B.A. jersey in the world last year.
Now, far removed from the teenager who was frightened to leave the country, James is basketball’s global ambassador, his presence marketing the game better than anything else. On an Olympic roster replete with All-Stars, James is the unquestioned star as the team prepares for its quarterfinal matchup against Brazil on Tuesday. His otherworldly talent, unique personal story and career longevity have meant that fans around the world have spent 22 years voraciously consuming content about him. Some of them love the game because of him. Some don’t love the game, they just love James.
How far does his influence stretch? Vinícius Júnior, the star soccer player for Real Madrid, said in an interview that he didn’t follow basketball when he was growing up in Brazil but that James “was a bit of a superhero for me,” and served as inspiration for his own athletic exploits. It is a sentiment other stars echo. In 2018, Luka Doncic, who grew up in Slovenia and now plays for the Mavericks, waited outside the Lakers’ locker room after his first game against James to retrieve a jersey James had signed for him. And members of the U.S. Olympics team elected him as the team’s male flag-bearer. They revere James not just for his on-court success, but for his longevity, his philanthropy and his business acumen.
James did not always think in those broad terms. Not long after the trip to Italy, Nike began courting him. Lynn Merritt, a longtime executive with the company, immediately envisioned James as a global phenomenon. A teenager who grew up in Akron, Ohio, James didn’t want that to be his focus.
“If you take care of business out on the floor, then everything will end up happening organically,” he said of his mentality then. “I’m not trying to be a global star. I’m trying to be an unbelievable basketball player and represent my family and represent my last name with the utmost respect. Nike’s going to do what Nike’s going to do.”
Merritt decided to ease him into it. James played on the U.S. men’s basketball team in the Summer Olympics held in Athens in 2004, after his rookie season in the N.B.A. Before the Games began, the team played throughout Europe. When Merritt arranged James’s first trip abroad with Nike — to Tokyo, Beijing and Hong Kong in 2005 — he didn’t want to overload him with business. He focused on fun interactions with fans: camps, clinics, store visits.
“He didn’t have a clear understanding of what a global icon was,” Merritt said.
During the trip, James and his now-wife, Savannah, walked on the Great Wall of China. Fans would show up to events holding or wearing his jerseys from high school or from his N.B.A. team at the time, the Cleveland Cavaliers. They brought the Sports Illustrated cover he appeared on in high school. Some attended events in multiple cities, hours apart.
“That was the first time I realized people really are following and want to be a part of my journey,” James said.
After he won a championship with Cleveland in 2016, Nike staged a re-enactment of the championship parade in Guangzhou, China. Twenty thousand fans attended.
Freddie Sun, 32, grew up in Qiqihar, a city of about 4 million people in northern China. He was first drawn to basketball by the Chinese star Yao Ming, who was drafted into the N.B.A. in 2002, one year before James. But Sun loved James’s unselfish style of play, his personality and his signature shoes. In 2006, he convinced his parents to buy him a pair — the LeBron 4.
“If I don’t get them, I will regret it for the rest of my life,” Sun told them.
He has bought every new release of James’s signature shoes since.
Sun has cooled a bit on the N.B.A., in part because of an episode from 2019. Daryl Morey, who was then the Houston Rockets’ general manager, posted a tweet in support of pro-democracy, anti-China protests taking place at the time in Hong Kong. Morey’s post put in doubt a pair of N.B.A. games between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Brooklyn Nets set to be played in Shanghai and Shenzhen, a city in southeastern China. The Chinese government wasn’t pleased with the league’s response, leading to frosty relations that have since thawed.
Sun lived in Shanghai at the time. Morey’s post and the N.B.A.’s response upset him, but he still wanted to go to the game. He thought tickets might be easier to get given the scandal. They weren’t.
The fans loved James, who was playing with the Lakers, and he played to the crowds, but it was an uncomfortable trip for him and his teammates. James now says that all he remembers from the trip is how angry people were and wondering how the team could leave the country.
In a news conference after returning to the United States, James had said that Morey “wasn’t educated” about the situation before he made the post. At the time, James said he meant Morey didn’t understand the effect his words would have on the players who had traveled to China.
The episode led to some backlash for James from those who thought he should have supported the Hong Kong protesters and spoken out against China’s human rights abuses. James had said he didn’t know enough about the situation to offer an opinion.
“I really don’t speak about too much stuff that I’m not aware or very knowledgeable about,” James said during the interview after practice in Las Vegas.
Sun said he took James’s 2019 comments as a defense of the Chinese people. He feels connected to James in another way, too.
“LeBron is a symbol for myself about my teenager age, or childhood,” Sun said. “If he still plays on, it makes me feel I’m still young,” he said, adding, “But if he retires or something, I have to decide. I’m now a father of a 6-year-old daughter, and becoming a middle-aged man.”
James has been a superstar for so long that some of the people who grew up rooting for him, all across the world, are now stars themselves. That’s the case with Vinícius, the Real Madrid player. He moved in with his uncle in Brazil at age 12, and the two of them together watched as many of James’s games as they could.
“God willing, I can play as long as he has,” said Vinícius, 24, answering questions in Portuguese that were sent via WhatsApp.
Vinícius met James after a Lakers game last Christmas. They hugged and exchanged signed jerseys.
“I was so nervous, anxious, and at the same time wanting him not to show up so I wouldn’t have to express what I was feeling at that moment,” he said.
He smiled broadly during the entire encounter trying to hide the nerves. Meeting other stars is a normal thing for James. They often seek him out.
“A lot of these athletes, they’ve been fascinated with the way I play the game and how I’ve been able to stay at the level,” James said. “But also, they’re even more fascinated with how I’ve been able to run my business and handle things off the floor.”
Vinícius’s adoration is a product of the N.B.A.’s increased availability around the world.
In James’s first N.B.A. season, only five of his games were broadcast on television in Brazil. By the 2011-12 season, about the time Vinícius was living with his basketball-loving uncle, that number had grown to 66.
Brazil is a hub for James’s supporters. According to the N.B.A., there are 16.6 million of his fans in the country, which ranks second in the world behind the United States in generating social media conversation about James.
There are some countries where Stephen Curry’s jersey eclipses James’s in sales, and in Mexico, Jason Tatum’s jersey sold the most last season. But overall in Latin America, James’s jerseys were the top sellers last season.
Rodrigo Lorio, a native of Rio de Janeiro, has four of them — — two Lakers jerseys, a Cleveland jersey and a Team USA jersey from 2012. He has followed James since James was in high school. When the N.B.A. streaming service League Pass became available in Brazil in 2008, he signed up right away.
“I’m one of those guys who really believes LeBron is the GOAT,” Lorio said, using an acronym for “greatest of all time.” He said, in his mind, James is better than Jordan, though he acknowledged that people older than him don’t think that, adding, “And Lebron is a family guy. He never had any issue in his career off the court. I really admire that.”
In an interview, James was careful to eschew most of the credit for basketball’s globalization. He called Jordan the game’s original global ambassador, along with the 1992 U.S. Olympic men’s basketball “Dream Team,” and pointed to former N.B.A. players from Europe like Dirk Nowitzki, Tony Parker, Vlade Divac, Arvydas Sabonis and Šarūnas Marčiulionis. And he noted that the former league commissioner, David Stern, and the current commissioner, Adam Silver, had delivered on their visions to make the N.B.A. more popular globally.
Silver has seen James’s effect abroad. On one trip to Africa, Silver visited an orphanage where children had cut out pictures of athletes from magazines and taped them to the walls — mostly soccer stars with African heritage, but also Serena Williams and James.
James has never been to Africa, but he looms large there. At an athletic complex in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, a group of young men recently took a break from playing basketball to discuss James.
“In a country where basketball might not be the most popular sport, people like LeBron James connect us to the sport in a way few others can, making us feel a part of the broader basketball community,” Souleymane Fall, 22, said.
Leigh Ellis, 48, grew up an N.B.A. superfan in Australia at a time when the only way he could see basketball highlights was to record CNN overnight on a VHS tape and watch it in the morning. Recently, he has been traveling the world playing basketball and has seen plenty of Jordan and James jerseys, with “Steph Curry not far behind.” He thinks James joining the Lakers, the biggest N.B.A. brand, has boosted James’s fame.
Decades ago, Ellis would imitate the moves of players like Larry Bird and Julius Erving. Last year, he coached a camp for children around ages 7 and 8 in Nairobi.
“They wanted to do the LeBron type of stuff,” he said. “Step-back 3, drive inside, dunk.”
At the Paris Games, the youngest men’s basketball player is 17-year-old Khaman Maluach of South Sudan.
“Our generation sees LeBron as the greatest player of all time,” Maluach said.
He started researching James about four years ago. He found a mini-documentary about the 2016 N.B.A. finals and marveled at clips of James’s early years.
Last month, he left his mother five voice notes after South Sudan played against the United States in an exhibition game in London.
“I played against LeBron!”
“I saw LeBron!”
And so on.
Her response showed there are parts of the world where James’s fame has yet to permeate.
“Who is LeBron?” she asked.
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