Lebron & Carmelo...Can't Believe They've Been Battling For 10 Years!

Posted on ESPN.com 2-23-12 In the summer of 2001, LeBron James returned home from a week in Colorado Springs, Colo., where he'd been the youngest player to take part in a USA Basketball development camp.

It was mid-June and school had just ended. James was 16 years old, pimple-faced and sporting a long, unkempt hairstyle. Though he was already turning heads as a major talent -- he would capture the attention of scouts and journalists for the first time later that summer at the ABCD Camp in New Jersey -- he still was a relative unknown.

He'd met a few really good players in Colorado. Guys like Deron Williams, Raymond Felton, J.J. Redick and Shelden Williams. But when he went back to Ohio, there was only one player he was really talking about: another young star who had made a name for himself in high school circles but was headed for stardom.

"I kept telling all my friends how good this Carmelo Anthony guy was," said James, who will see Anthony again Thursday night when the Heat host the Knicks. "I did not know then that we were going to put him on our schedule."



What followed was one of the most memorable and talked about high school games in recent memory. A game that was 10 years ago this month.

"Has it been 10 years?" James said. "Wow."

After that summer, Anthony, who is a year older than James, transferred from his high school in Baltimore to Oak Hill Academy in Virginia. James' high school, St. Vincent-St. Mary in Akron, Ohio, ended up agreeing to play Oak Hill in the featured game of a high school showcase the next February.

It was a matchup that was pieced together and promoted to sell tickets. It worked. More than 11,000 showed up at the Sovereign Bank Arena in Trenton, N.J., on a Sunday. What happened then still lives strongly in the memories of people who were there and on YouTube, where the highlights have gotten nearly 1.5 million views over the last decade.

"It felt like a Magic Johnson versus Larry Bird moment because LeBron was the best junior in the country and Carmelo was the best senior," said Tim Rogers, who covered the game for the Cleveland Plain Dealer