LeBron James and Steph Curry had a ‘healthy grudge’ – Olympics offer something new

July 17, 2024

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LeBron James and Steph Curry had a ‘healthy grudge’ – Olympics offer something new

Follow our Olympic Games coverage in the run-up to the Paris Olympics.

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — LeBron James was genuinely happy to see Stephen Curry in the ballroom of the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas on the eve of Team USA’s training camp.

Born in the same hospital in Akron, Ohio, nearly four years apart, they co-created the last great NBA rivalry and formed the league’s C-suite as its two most famous, most respected, most decorated active players. They would work together for the first time as co-CEOs of the U.S. Olympic team, outside of a meaningless All-Star Game.

“It’s about time, it’s about time,” James, dressed in a denim jacket and a rag, said to Curry, dressed in a plain white T-shirt and black vest, when they met on the evening of July 5, with cameras rolling and a microphone above their heads.

It was almost a year ago, in late August 2023, that James Curry called to ask if he would be interested in joining him on the Olympic team. Granted, at the time of the call, there was no Olympic team yet. USA Basketball was busy with the FIBA World Cup, a separate team and event altogether, and it’s not typically up to the players to determine who makes the 12-man U.S. national team roster.

But a player of James’ or Curry’s caliber? If they say they want to play for Team USA, they won’t be told no.

James, 39, has played 21 NBA seasons, is the sport’s all-time leading scorer, a four-time champion (on three different teams; no one had led three franchises to titles before James), a four-time MVP and a record 20 All-Stars. James co-anchored the 2008 Redeem Team and is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, as well as USA Basketball’s all-time assists leader. He is, and has been for years, widely regarded as the “face” of the NBA.

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Curry, 36, has spent 15 NBA seasons changing the way the game is played — not just in the NBA or America, but around the world. He revolutionized the game with a relentless aerial assault of 3-pointers, making (and shooting) more of them than any other NBA player in history, though to call him simply a great shooter would be an understatement. Curry embodies greatness as a winner (four NBA championships), a performer (two-time MVP, 10-time All-Star) and as the steward of the Golden State Warriors dynasty.

The sight of both of them wearing an American uniform at the same time, on the same training fields at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, on the campus of New York University in Abu Dhabi or on the world’s biggest sporting stage, the Olympic Games in Paris, remains a surreal sight for anyone privileged enough to see it, including their teammates.

“It’s just cool, I’m not going to lie,” said Tyrese Haliburton, a Team USA guard at the tender age of 24. “It’s pretty cool for me, just like when I was a kid, just watching those guys play in the finals every year. I think the more time I spend with them, the more stories and stuff I’ll hear, and that’ll be really cool because those are things I probably wondered about when I was 15, 16.”

Will Haliburton hear about the time James and Curry didn’t like each other? Unlikely, but it happened.

Perhaps measuring the relationship in terms of “likes” and “dislikes” is the wrong metric. When Curry was a star at Davidson University, leading the small school to a run through the NCAA tournament in 2008, James, already an established megastar, attended one of Curry’s games. When Curry was a rookie with Golden State in 2009-10, James invited him to his home in suburban Cleveland on a night off before the Warriors and Cavs. Curry said he could occasionally ask James for advice.

LeBron James congratulates Stephen Curry after the 2017 NBA Finals. The two stars met in four consecutive Finals from 2015 to 2018. (Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images)

But from 2015 through 2018, James’ Cavs and Curry’s Warriors met in the NBA Finals every June. The first three of those series were notably tense, and that stress spilled over into how James—and those close to him—felt about Curry at the time, and vice versa.

In 2015, James’s star-studded Cavs took a 2-1 series lead, only to be outscored and outlasted by a healthier, deeper Warriors squad. The following year, Cleveland became the only team ever to overcome a 3-1 deficit in a Finals and win; James led the comeback. And then Curry brought Kevin Durant to the Warriors, and though they defeated Cleveland in five games in the subsequent Finals, the series hinged on Durant’s 31 points in Game 3, including a game-winning 3-pointer over James.

From the end of the ’15 Finals until the Cavs’ nanosecond win in ’16, those close to James frequently laughed at Curry’s rising star, suggesting that Curry was unfairly escaping the scrutiny James was constantly subjected to. In honor of the 2016 championship, James hosted a Halloween party the following October featuring cookies decorated as tombstones, with Curry (and, to be fair, other Warriors stars) engraved on the treat.

On the other hand, those close to Curry often pointed out how much drama seemed to follow James’ teams, whether with the Cavs or even before that in Miami. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2016, Curry’s Warriors played their first game in Cleveland since winning the ’15 Finals there seven months earlier, and Curry infamously remarked about the visitors’ locker room: “Hopefully it still smells like champagne in there.” After the Warriors’ 2017 win, Curry was caught on cellphone video at Harrison Barnes’ wedding mocking James as a dancer — with James’ soon-to-be former teammate Kyrie Irving laughing hysterically.

Both Curry and James acknowledge that there was some tension between them, but that it has since dissipated.

“It was like a healthy grudge against someone who gets in your way,” Curry said. “But through it all, there’s obviously the utmost respect for who he is as a person and as a player and how good he is and the challenge of beating him and solving that problem every year.”

James nodded in agreement when a reporter suggested that there was an apparent rivalry between him and Curry years ago, though he said the idea that “they’re supposed to hate each other” was a false media narrative. James went on to explain why he wanted to make sure it never got to that point between him and Curry.

“The game of basketball doesn’t last forever,” James said. “You don’t want to waste the opportunity to have a relationship with someone.”

Team USA gives LeBron James and Stephen Curry a rare chance to be teammates. “There’s obviously the utmost respect for who he is as a person and as a player,” Curry says. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

James said he and Curry “understand” that NBA fans, and the media for that matter, of a certain age still view how players should conduct themselves toward each other through the lens of the Larry Bird-Magic Johnson rivalry of the 1980s, or Michael Jordan’s disdain for virtually all opponents when he dominated the 1990s.

“A lot of you may have grown up in the Bird-Magic era and we’re not supposed to like each other, but I’m also (aware) enough to know that Isiah (Thomas) and Magic hugged and kissed on the floor too, because it was just mutual respect,” James said. “They say Michael never spoke to any of his opponents, but I’m also smart enough to know that he and Charles (Barkley) had a lot of conversations during the ’93 finals and also played golf against each other.

“So I don’t want to lose those moments (with Curry).”

James and Curry have said over the past two weeks that they’ve enjoyed watching each other train, seeing how each superstar operates and learning more about who they are (or, more accurately, who they’ve become since those Finals battles) off the court.

Durant, another Team USA superstar, said the relationship between James and Curry is stronger because of the tensions of the previous decade, when they drew record television viewership in June and otherwise controlled the center of the basketball universe, with separate headquarters in Cleveland and San Francisco.

“He’s not the young Steph anymore, and he’s not the Source that you looked up to — you become competitors,” Durant said, explaining how he viewed whatever existed between James and Curry. “I think that respect level goes up even more. I think they’re better friends now than they were when they went through that experience, competing with each other and being rivals, if you want to call it that.

“You could see that, you could see how much respect they had for each other.”

It’s (swear word) time.