How Steve Jobs helped LeBron James defeat Silicon Valley's favorite team

The passion and fire of Steve Jobs is the gift that keeps on giving.

Unfortunately for Silicon Valley darlings the Golden State Warriors, the Apple founder's words served as fuel for LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, according to a new report.

In an attempt to inspire his teammates, James played Steve Jobs' famous and often quoted 2005 Stanford University commencement address in the locker room, an ESPN report revealed on Tuesday.

Since Jobs' death, the speech has been shared numerous times by business leaders, inventors and startup entrepreneurs alike. But it may come as a surprise to some that the Cavs, seen by many as using brawn versus the Warriors' cerebral style of play, leaned on the words of one of tech's most iconic visionaries.

Interestingly, just weeks before James played the speech for his team, teammate Kevin Love, who suffered a great deal of criticism during the championship series, accessed Jobs' words on his own.

"Love had started reading about Jobs on his own a few weeks earlier," reads the report on the developments inside the team's locker room. "One phrase stuck with him: 'Stay hungry, stay foolish.' Love started writing it on his shoes as a way to remind himself to loosen up."

Those words not only helped Love, but the series MVP, James, deliver sports history.

Perhaps the most ironic part of the story is the fact that much of Silicon Valley has adopted the Warriors, led by "baby-faced assassin" Steph Curry, as its unofficial tech industry sports team. 

But in the end, it turns out the Warriors may have been a little too clever for their own good and could have used some of the legendary passion Jobs delivered in his epic speech.

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