15 years ago: Little could stop LeBron James in Greensboro
A crowd of 16,220 came out Jan.
20, 2003, to watch the first N.C.
Scholastic Classic, featuring James and his Akron (Ohio) St.
Vincent-St. Mary basketball team.
The Fighting Irish beat Reynolds 85-56, and that crowd remains the largest for a high school basketball game in North Carolina.
James scored 32 points for the team that was ranked No.
1 in the nation by USA Today.
Roy Turner, one of three referees who worked that game, remembers it "vividly." Turner famously called a foul on St.
Vincent-St.
Mary's post player Sian Cotton that prevented what undoubtedly would have been a highlight-reel dunk by James.
"He just sort of took an arm-bar and flipped the kid from Reynolds off the baseline," Turner said of Cotton.
"I took my whistle out of my mouth and told them both.
'Clean it up.
Keep it legal.' He looked at me like, You're obviously not talking to me. I look out at the top of the key and I see the ball being dribbled by Reynolds, and about 3-5 seconds later (Cotton) flips him again completely out of bounds.
I look out at the top of the key and the ball's being passed across.".
That's when James made his move – and Turner made his.
"As soon as I blew my whistle," Turner said, "LeBron breaks for the ball and nobody in the Greensboro Coliseum can hear me blowing the whistle down on the baseline.
I can't eat that, even if I want to.
I tell people all the time that if I could suck the air back out of the whistle, that would have been a great time to do it.
So, I blew my whistle again and by that time (James) had already cleared the top of the key and is rolling through the jump circle with nothing in between him and the goal but about 55 feet of maple.".
And that's how Roy Turner stopped a LeBron James dunk that day at the Coliseum.
"I've gotten a lot of criticism and I've gotten a lot of play out of that," said Turner, who was athletics director at Southeast Guilford at the time.
"… At the NIAAA (National Interscholastic Athletics Administrators Association) conference, you have to share something about yourself and the other 20 people in the room have to figure out who it is.
I put in that I stopped a LeBron James dunk.
Anybody who had seen me would go, 'There's not any way you physically blocked a LeBron James dunk.' ".
Turner later moved to Wilmington Ashley as AD before retiring in 2015.
He is the regional supervisor for North Carolina's Eastern Basketball Officials Association, which provides officials for high school games, and shares his experiences with young officials.
"It's a very fond memory.
I had an opportunity to be on a very big stage with somebody that truthfully at that time I did not know might be the greatest of all-time.".
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