Dallas fans might be surprised to learn that during the NBA strike in 2011, Cowboys Owner Jerry Jones offered LeBron James a contract to play football.
It might have been the ultimate stunt hire, but apparently Jones was ready to give James a one-year contract when the NBA was on lockout during a pay dispute, the New York Post reported.
The Post noted that James’ agent, Maverick Carter, recently said that James still has the unsigned contract that Jones offered him as a memento.
“To be honest, it actually was,” James said when asked about the offer on the Uninterrupted’s WRTS: After Party. “I had no idea how long the lockout was going to be and myself and my trainer, [Mike] Mancias, we really started to actually train to be a football player when it came to October and November. We started to clock our times with the 40s, we started to add a little bit more in our bench presses and things of that nature. We started to add more sledding to our agenda with our workouts.”
But the whole plan was abandoned because the NBA lockout ended only a month later and James went back to his basketball routine.
The idea isn’t as strange as it may seem. James was an all-state wide receiver as a sophomore in high school and even caught the eye of recruiters from Notre Dame and a few other schools. But after suffering a wrist injury, James turned his attention to basketball and quickly went No. 1 in the 2003 NBA Draft.
James also claimed that he often dreams about football.
“Never having the ability to finish my high school career of playing my senior year, I have dreams all the time about playing football,” he said. “It’s crazy, because I never actually run on the field in my dreams. It always gets to the point where I’m either in the locker room or getting dressed or talking about it or seeing the fans. As soon as I’m about to run on the field, something else happens in my dream.”
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