James, during a recent episode of his talk show The Shop, presented by Uninterrupted, revealed that when he and longtime partner Savannah James were married in 2013, there was a pair of uninvited guests in attendance.
“Mav know,” James began, referring to business partner and SpringHill Entertainment CEO Maverick Carter.
“We had two wedding crashers… that no one knew,” James continued. “No one.”
Speaking with Carter, former WNBA star Lisa Leslie, NBA contemporaries Draymond Green and P.J. Tucker and The Shop co-creator Paul Rivera, James said the pair made themselves at home at the couple’s San Diego ceremony, which concluded a three-day celebration boasting around 200 guests, according to the Associated Press (AP).
But after rubbing shoulders with basketball and pop culture royalty, the wedding crashers slipped up.
“This how they got sniffed out,” James said. “I had a celebrity friend walk by and they called them [by] their real name, that none of us call them.”
Approached by a security guard, the crashers claimed they were with an invited guest. That invited guest denied those claims, leading to a swift ejection.
“They got put out,” James recounted. “Walked out with a plate and everything.”
While James expressed surprise that the duo was able to maneuver their way into the venue, however, this was not his first wedding-crasher experience.
A year prior to his own, and seven years after Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson split the limelight in 2005’s Wedding Crashers, James inadvertently found himself in the middle of another couple’s special day.
Just after James won his first NBA title in 2012 as a member of the Miami Heat, the 18-time All-Star met with former Sports Illustrated feature writer Lee Jenkins at the Ritz Carlton in Coconut Grove, a neighborhood in Miami.
“This Jewish wedding was starting to percolate in the area,” Jenkins told Complex in 2018. “I might have talked to him for 45 minutes—and I’m sort of wondering when this wedding [is] going to get going.
“All of the sudden people start coming down and seeing him. They’re pointing at him and guests are banging on the windows and they’re all in their tuxes in everything,” Jenkins added. “He walks out into the wedding and everybody kind of raises a glass to him…he just said, ‘You’re getting rings, I’m getting a ring,’…and took a picture with the bride and groom.”
Now, a decade later, James is still chasing greatness. As it currently stands, the four-time NBA champion ranks second on the NBA’s all-time scoring list, just 1,325 points behind all-time scoring leader Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Coming off a 2021-2022 season which saw James score more than 30 points per game, it is only a matter of time before the future hall-of-famer etches his name in the NBA record books—again.
Newsweek reached out to Uninterrupted and the Klutch Group for comment.
