When Amen and Ausar Thompson were nine years old, they believed in magic. Not the kind found in fairy tales, but the kind that could turn a skinny kid into a giant. Their spell was simple: the number 69, scrawled again and again across their bedroom.
Not sixty-nine as in a date, not as a joke. Just the digits. To them it meant one thing—six-foot-nine, the height of the man who seemed larger than life: LeBron James.
A Ritual for Growth
The Thompsons didn’t come from a family of giants. Their mother stood 5’6”, their father 5’11”. By genetics alone, the NBA was a long shot. But kids don’t calculate odds; they invent rituals.
Ausar remembers it clearly: “We wanted to be tall. So we wrote 69 all over the bed. That’s how tall we wanted to be. Looking back, it’s weird.”
Amen, laughing beside him, added: “We didn’t even write inches. Just the number. Because LeBron was 6’9.”
LeBron as North Star
LeBron James has been in the league for over two decades, yet for the Thompsons he was never just a player. He was a blueprint, a monument, a destiny to chase.
They didn’t quite touch the holy number. Amen now measures 6’7”. Ausar, 6’6”. But in a way, that never mattered. They had already stretched themselves into something beyond expectation.
From Scribbles to Stardom
Drafted top-five in 2023, Amen landed in Houston, Ausar in Detroit. Their numbers on paper—14 points per game for Amen, 10 for Ausar—don’t yet scream superstardom. But anyone who’s watched them knows: they tilt the game. They disrupt. They electrify.
Even LeBron himself has taken notice. “They’re different,” he said earlier this year. “Pure athleticism and love for the game. You can’t teach that.”
A Circle Completed
Those childhood walls once carried a number, repeated like a prayer. Now, the brothers walk into NBA arenas as proof that belief—no matter how strange, no matter how childlike—can bend the future.
They never hit six-foot-nine. But they touched something greater: the same court as their king, with the same fire in their veins.
And maybe that was the real magic all along.
