After his Cleveland Cavaliers lost Game 1 and 2 of the NBA Finals by a combined 48 points at Oracle Arena, LeBron James sought out a means to keep his teammates motivated and focused while facing adversity.
Prior to Game 3, the four-time league MVP played a snippet of Apple founder Steve Jobs' commencement speech to Stanford University in 2005, according to ESPN's Ramona Shelburne.
Jobs, who died in 2011 as a result of complications from his pancreatic cancer, told a story about how a calligraphy class helped him conjure up the fonts and interface used in his first Apple computers.
"Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later," Jobs said in his speech.
"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
Forward Kevin Love had actually been using Jobs' words as inspiration weeks prior to LeBron's motivational tactic, according to Shelburne. He would write the quote "stay hungry, stay foolish" on his shoes to remind himself to play loose, contribute, and not worry too much about his statistics as long as he was giving a maximum effort.
"I had just ordered a shirt from a company in Akron with that Jobs quote," Love said. "And then (LeBron) played that (speech) like two days later. I came up to him and was like, 'It's so crazy you played that with all the chaos that was going on with our team, being hungry, but being down in the series.'"
The Cavaliers would go on to win Game 3 on their home floor by 30, and take the series in Game 7 to end the city's 52-year title drought.
