LeBron James has had quite an impressive tenure with the Los Angeles Lakers, but it was with the Miami Heat that he was at his absolute best. James delivered on the court time and time again for the Heat, and it turns out he was coming through for his teammates off it as well.
Eddie House was teammates with James on the Heat from 2010 to 2011, and he hilariously revealed on his Straight Game Podcast how the superstar ensured that the team started serving better food to the players on flights.
“I’ll give y’all a real LeBron story right here,” House said. “This s*** was funny. This where s*** changed on our plane. This before you got there, Mike [Bibby]. So I think we flying from Indiana. It’s always seemed like we coming from Indiana every time some s*** happened when I was with the Heat. So we coming and we get on the plane.
“We sit in the front where we gonna play cards and s***,” House stated. “We gonna play booray and s***. So I’m in the front where the card table is at. And I’m over there eating some Lay’s potato chips. I’m eating that s***, and he put his s*** down, he look at me, he say, ‘What?’ I was like, ‘Oh yeah, go ahead and grab you a bag of chips, too.’ He was like, ‘What?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, go look at the food.’
“He went over to look at the food,” House continued. “And then he came back, he said, ‘Oh, hell no.’ He said this s*** loud as f***, ‘LeBron James don’t eat no dog food.’ And I bulls*** you not. The s*** they was serving was some bulls***. That’s why I was eating Lay’s. I was like, ‘Man, I’m just going to eat these Lay’s potato chips, man, ’cause that s** right there do not look good.’
“Had you on the toilet or throwing up, one of the two,” House added. “And from that point on, I swear we had A1 s*** after that… I shout him out for that one right there, ’cause he helped the whole team out with that, ’cause we had some bulls*** that night, and it should never have been like that. You should never be eating like that.”
Considering House said this was before co-host Mike Bibby joined the Heat in March 2011, we’re talking about the very beginning of James’ time with the team. He, of course, had arrived via a sign-and-trade with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010.
James wasn’t going to tolerate anything short of the best on and off the court, and the Heat listened on that instance. House will forever be grateful to him for all the great food he got on team flights afterward.
Things didn’t always go the way James wanted on those team flights, though. Heat icon Dwyane Wade revealed that team president Pat Riley banned chocolate chip cookies, his favorite snack, at one point. Wade claimed that was the first time he had an inkling that James might leave the team.
James later confirmed that Riley did indeed ban those cookies. He was disappointed by that, and you wonder whether this did play a role in his departure in 2014.
James returned to the Cavaliers that year, having won two titles, two Finals MVPs, and two MVPs in his four seasons with the Heat. He had led the team to the NBA Finals in all four years and was a near-unstoppable force back then.
Riley recently stated he wishes James had stayed for about a decade. The Heat haven’t won a title since he left, and you’d imagine that definitely wouldn’t have been the case if he had been there beyond 2014.
