LeBron James is considered one of the best basketball stars of the modern game, and his main sponsor, Nike, wasn’t too happy with a journalist’s article on him back in 2011, which led to it being scrapped – but it’s now found it’s way onto the web.

For some background information, Nike reportedly paid for the Port magazine writer’s travel expenses and a portion of his fee, so the article of James (which really was more realistic than unflattering) really got their feathers rustled.

Here’s an extract from the postscript of the author:

“I didn’t want a piece like this,” the editor wrote. His magazine “loves and supports great writing but we don’t do essays that are misleading for our subjects.” In an email to my agent, he outlined the sorts of things I should have described to make the piece more “upbeat.” His suggestions included something about the “Beatlemania” that attended LeBron’s visit, “with girls astride walls as LeBron wove through the backstreets—desperate for a glimpse of him.” (Of course, I didn’t see anything like this.) And something about the “new generation of basketball players in London? Basketball has a cultural resonance re music/fashion/streetculture/ cinema—that may have the power and the flair to inspire the disenfranchised.”

This sounded to me exactly like the kind of thing the Nike publicist hoped I would write about. When I refused, the editor agreed to pay the kill fee, as per contract, and the magazine broadcast an edited version of our interview on their website—they cut out me and my questions.

You can check out the full article and LeBron story on DeadSpin.