With the sports world on a pause and everyone encouraged to continue social distancing to stay home and flatten the curve of the spread of coronavirus, there have been some unprecedented giveaways of content from various leagues and channels. ESPN is one of those, moving up the release date of their “The Last Dance” documentary about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. But even before that, they have been sharing more and more classic footage from their archives on their YouTube channel.
Among the classic footage that ESPN has released on YouTube is LeBron’s first appearance on ESPN, when his St. Vincent-St. Mary’s squad upset the previously No. 1 ranked Oak Hill Academy, who had just seen Carmelo Anthony go to Syracuse. You can see the type of environment that surrounded LeBron’s games, being played at Cleveland State because their high school gym couldn’t contain the demand.
I’ve got to shout out my colleague and fellow hoops junkie David Lieberman for alerting me to the ESPN archive of LeBron footage, which we will certainly be revisiting during the NBA hiatus.
