\u201cYou all loved the 2016 reunion trip so much I thought I\u2019d give ya\u2019ll a little more,\u201d James wrote in announcing the channel.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 YouTube debut is J.R. Smith \u2014 first with his golf clubs, and then, unexpectedly, with his honesty.<\/p>\n
A three-on-three scramble in the Scottish Highlands<\/p>\n
The episode follows six members of the 2016 title team to Castle Stuart Golf Links at Cabot Highlands in Scotland<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 most famous words against him, repurposing the \u201cCleveland, this is for you!\u201d declaration as a running taunt at its author.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n JR Smith\u2019s golf game is the real thing<\/p>\n For anyone who has followed Smith\u2019s 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\u2019s golf team, a chapter ESPN revisited when the reunion trip first made headlines in June<\/a>.<\/p>\n In Scotland, that background shows. Smith is the outing\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n James and Love occupy the opposite lane \u2014 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.<\/p>\n This is not six celebrities hacking around for content. One of them can really play, and the other five know it.<\/p>\n The conversation that gives the video its weight<\/p>\n Somewhere between the trash talk and the wine, the episode slows down, and this is the stretch Cavs fans will be talking about longest.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 or with losing the identity that came with being a professional athlete.<\/p>\n That admission carries differently coming from this group. Smith and Jefferson were never the headliners in Cleveland.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s defining hook, and on the evidence of episode one, that is the right read.<\/p>\n There is also a quieter Cleveland layer here. The championship these six were toasting remains the city\u2019s only one, and the wounds and jokes of that run \u2014 the 3-1 comeback against a 73-win Golden State Warriors team, the shot, the block, the drought that ended at 52 years \u2014 sit underneath every needle these teammates throw at each other.<\/p>\n Not every member of that roster made the trip, either, as Timofey Mozgov made clear when he revealed he never got an invite<\/a>.<\/p>\n What the channel means from here<\/p>\n James, now preparing for his first season with the Philadelphia 76ers, has made no secret of what golf has become for him.<\/p>\n![\"J.R.](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/USATSI_5055952_168386351_lowres-e1684364798512.jpg\")
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