Report: Infamous LeBron James Confiscated Video Leaks and Still Owes $500

LeBron James somehow finds himself under the spotlight each and every day, even if it’s about an infamous story from 10 years ago. On Wednesday, Uproxx released a retrospective article with Jordan Crawford, a basketball player with the Sichuan Blue Whales in the Chinese Basketball Association.

The piece showed a moment from 2009 in which Crawford dunked on James during a camp basketball game. The entire situation was captured on video that was later confiscated by a Nike representative.

According to Crawford, Nike reps were joking with the college players before the game about a $500 bounty for anyone who could manage to dunk on James. However, Crawford never received his money. And he didn’t even have a proof since the video was confiscated because “videotaping of after-hours pickup games at the camp is not allowed.”

Ryan Miller, who filmed the video, said that he had been capturing footage all day without any complaints from the Nike representatives. So, it was clear that the tape was confiscated because of Crawford’s dunk.

Back in 2009, Crawford was a 20-year-old college student at Xavier who was on a mission to make his name known. And he kind of did, although briefly. As it turns out, having a sophomore college student dunk on James was fairly big news, even in the age before Twitter and Instagram were present.

“I didn’t think it was a big deal,” Crawford said in the article, “until I got back to my room that night and people who weren’t even there were already hitting me on my phone.”

Imagine, if this dunk took place today, it would have been one of the top trending stories on Twitter. Back in 2009, however, the only footage available was captured by journalists that were on hand for the game.

And the infuriating thing is that Nike allegedly didn’t pay up after Crawford dunked on their star athlete. This is not good publicity, that’s for sure.