Lakers' LeBron James Reveals When He Realized He Was 'Pretty Special' on Video

It didn't take long into his organized sports career for Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James to understand he was a different kind of talent.

Appearing on Complex's 360 With Speedy, James said he "thought I was pretty special" in his first year of youth football and basketball. He saw at the time he was bigger and faster than his peers in addition to "doing s--t that I just, I shouldn't have been doing."

The 21-time NBA All-Star also pointed to his runner-up finish in a national AAU tournament as an eighth-grader as a time when he comprehended his immense potential.

"At that point in time in that tournament, I was like doing things that I hadn't did the summer before," he said. "I had finally started dunking in games. We started winning games that we wasn't supposed to be winning."

In his famous piece on James from 2002, christening the teenager as "The Chosen One," Sports Illustrated's Grant Wahl also cited that AAU tournament as a turning point in LeBron's basketball career. That's when his profile reached a national level, and he was widely considered a generational prospect within a few years.

Plenty of teenage prodigies have flamed out in the pros or simply failed to reach the heights that were expected of them.

James not only recognized his innate abilities as an athlete but also made the most of his gifts. LeBron is the rare example of when a young star is hyped up to a historic scale and actually lives up to the billing.