Lance Stephenson trying to direct Mother Nature into LeBron James’ ear canal is a moment that is forever immortalized in basketball mythology. Now Stephenson is making a funny admission about the incident some seven years later.
The former Indiana Pacers star spoke with HoopsHype this week and admitted that the 2014 ear-blowing episode was entirely spontaneous.
“I didn’t have it prepared,” said Stephenson. “It was all in the flow of the game. Being out there, competing. Everybody in the league is competitive, and wants that one thing; to win the game. Sometimes you do whatever it takes to win the game. That guy is a tough guy to guard, so you got to bring your all, and that’s what I did.
“I didn’t expect it to be shown,” Stephenson added about how the clip went viral. “I didn’t think it was going to be captured. They caught that right in the act of it. That was crazy.”
The image of Stephenson blowing into James’ ear is the lasting one of the Pacers’ heated rivalry with James and the Miami Heat in the mid-2010s. James ultimately had the last laugh as the Heat knocked the Pacers out of the playoffs that year as well as the two previous years before that. But the two players ended up burying the hatchet when Stephenson became James’ teammate on the Los Angeles Lakers during the 2018-19 season.
While the Stephenson-James beef is now in the past, memes live on forever. We will never forget some of the best ones about the ear-blowing incident.
