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Pardon The Interruption Has Created A 15-Minute Smash Cut Of Its LeBron James Coverage Since His High School Days

Earlier today, Grantland employed the services of Erik Rydholm, the executive producer of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, who assembled a team of former PTI interns to splice together this: one glorious 15-minute video of Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon making snap judgments about LeBron James throughout his career. It starts way back in 2002 when James was but a boy at St. Vincent-St. Mary’s High School, follows him through career peaks and valleys, and finishes today, with a foreword and afterword from Kornheiser and Wilbon themselves. Enjoy:

And here’s the original preface from Grantland:

We started talking about LeBron James on Pardon the Interruption 10 years ago, when Tony, Mike, and LeBron were all less bald. Now that LeBron has won a title, the dominant question is how historically great he’ll be. Time will wash out many of his early struggles and much of the early criticism he received. We thought it valuable to look back over what onetime Washington Post publisher Phil Graham called “the first rough draft of history” to see not only how LeBron has changed, but how the appraisals of him have, too.

Our thanks to the staff of Dan Le Batard Is Highly Questionable (all former PTI interns), for pulling, logging, and forming a narrative out of hours of old clips. And to the fine folks at Grantland, who made it flow and look pretty and who have cultivated this audience we hope finds some value in watching it.

Clearly, this is all still a work (an awesome work) in progress. But let’s revisit this in nine years or so and see what kind of video we can splice together then.

[Grantland]