LeBron James picked a launch title for his new YouTube golf channel that no algorithm could resist: the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers, back together, with clubs in their hands.
The channel went live Saturday morning with a 90-minute debut episode built from the championship team’s 10-year reunion trip to Scotland, a launch Cavaliers Nation covered when the video dropped.
“You all loved the 2016 reunion trip so much I thought I’d give ya’ll a little more,” James wrote in announcing the channel.
Now that fans have had a weekend to actually watch the thing, a consensus is forming, and it is not about the host. The star of LeBron James’ YouTube debut is J.R. Smith — first with his golf clubs, and then, unexpectedly, with his honesty.
A three-on-three scramble in the Scottish Highlands
The episode follows six members of the 2016 title team to Castle Stuart Golf Links at Cabot Highlands in Scotland, where the group split into a three-on-three scramble: James, Richard Jefferson and Kevin Love on one side, with Smith, Channing Frye and Tristan Thompson on the other.
The setup produces exactly the dynamic that made this group beloved in Cleveland a decade ago. Frye gets hot on the greens and spends the round turning James’ most famous words against him, repurposing the “Cleveland, this is for you!” declaration as a running taunt at its author.
Thompson, meanwhile, shows up having essentially never swung a club, which his former teammates treat as a gift that keeps on giving. Scotland contributes its own subplot.
Rain cuts the first day short, and only James, Smith and Frye are stubborn enough to head back out the following morning to finish what they started.
JR Smith’s golf game is the real thing
For anyone who has followed Smith’s second act, his role in the video will not come as a surprise. Smith enrolled at North Carolina A&T after his playing career and competed for the school’s golf team, a chapter ESPN revisited when the reunion trip first made headlines in June.
In Scotland, that background shows. Smith is the outing’s most accomplished player and also its most self-critical, a golfer grinding over every miss while brushing off compliments from friends who would take any one of his bad shots as a personal best.
James and Love occupy the opposite lane — new to the game, visibly invested and furious at themselves in the way only recent converts can be. The gap matters because it gives the video an actual competitive spine.
This is not six celebrities hacking around for content. One of them can really play, and the other five know it.
The conversation that gives the video its weight
Somewhere between the trash talk and the wine, the episode slows down, and this is the stretch Cavs fans will be talking about longest.
Smith and Jefferson open up about life after basketball, both admit they still have not fully come to terms with walking away from the game — or with losing the identity that came with being a professional athlete.
That admission carries differently coming from this group. Smith and Jefferson were never the headliners in Cleveland.
They were the connective tissue of a champion, the role players a city turned into folk heroes, and hearing them wrestle with who they are now, a decade after the parade, is the kind of moment a highlight package never captures. The honest conversations, not the golf, could become the channel’s defining hook, and on the evidence of episode one, that is the right read.
There is also a quieter Cleveland layer here. The championship these six were toasting remains the city’s only one, and the wounds and jokes of that run — the 3-1 comeback against a 73-win Golden State Warriors team, the shot, the block, the drought that ended at 52 years — sit underneath every needle these teammates throw at each other.
Not every member of that roster made the trip, either, as Timofey Mozgov made clear when he revealed he never got an invite.
What the channel means from here
James, now preparing for his first season with the Philadelphia 76ers, has made no secret of what golf has become for him.
“Golf has given me the challenge I need as a competitor,” James told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the launch.
He puts his handicap at around 22 and has framed the channel partly as a vehicle for opening the sport up to inner-city kids who rarely see themselves on a golf course.
The channel is planned as a monthly series, and the early returns suggest an audience is already there — the page picked up 172,000 subscribers on its first day.
For Cleveland fans, though, the business plan is beside the point. James had every option for a debut episode, including any number of A-list golf partners from a sport that has been courting him publicly for a year.
He chose the 2016 Cavaliers. Weeks after his free agency ended with a decision that stung Northeast Ohio, his first act as a content creator was to point the cameras at the six men who shared the franchise’s greatest night — and the result is a video where the biggest star hands the spotlight to J.R. Smith and lets him hold it, one flushed iron and one hard truth at a time.
The next episode arrives in a month. The bar, thanks largely to Smith, is already set.