Nike

Introducing the king before he had a crown

LeBron James came out of high school with more pressure on him than maybe any athlete before. The hype was unreal. Magazine covers. National TV games. A $90 million Nike deal before he’d played a single NBA minute. And with all that attention came the skeptics. Critics said he was too young. Too image-conscious. Too much hype, not enough substance. People were waiting for him to fail.

We had a chance to change that conversation. Not by arguing with the doubters. By showing them who LeBron actually was.

The insight was that LeBron wasn’t one-dimensional. He was wise beyond his years. Business-minded. Playful. Fiercely competitive. A kid from Akron who happened to have generational talent. As LeBron himself put it: “It goes back to the four characters who I feel like I am, on a day-to-day basis.” If we could show all those sides, we could shift the narrative from hype to something real.

I led The LeBrons campaign for Nike. Inspired by Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor, we created a family of four LeBrons: Wise, the old-school elder known to cut a rug to Rick James. Business, slick and smooth in a tailored suit. Kid, candy-obsessed and prank-loving. And Athlete, the driven competitor everyone already knew. LeBron played all four. The “Swimming Pool” spot became an instant classic. Wise’s line about Michael Jordan training in a pool went viral. Kid’s cannonball became a meme before memes existed. It was funny, fresh, and showed a side of LeBron no one expected.

Over 20 million views. A shift in how people talked about LeBron. The campaign eventually expanded into an animated web series. Nearly two decades later, the spots are still parodied on TikTok and widely regarded as some of the greatest basketball commercials ever made. We didn’t just introduce an athlete. We introduced a future icon.