There was a time when a retired basketball player's business portfolio meant car dealerships and a restaurant with his jersey on the wall. Then agave happened. Over the past decade, tequila has become the unofficial second career of American sports royalty, and the two biggest names in basketball history are at the center of it — not as paid faces on a billboard, but as founders and owners with skin in the game.
In 2019, Michael Jordan joined forces with four fellow NBA team owners — including Jeanie Buss of the Lakers and Wyc Grousbeck of the Celtics — to launch Cincoro Tequila. The name fuses cinco (five, for the five founders) and oro (gold), and the positioning was luxury from day one: sculptural bottles, an añejo aged in whiskey barrels, and an extra añejo priced like a serious single malt. It was not a vanity project; it was five people who had spent their lives competing agreeing to compete in a new category.
LeBron James took a different route into the same category. He came in as an investor and public champion of Lobos 1707, a tequila and mezcal house founded by Diego Osorio and launched in 2020, with heritage branding built around a family story and a Pedro Ximénez wine-barrel finish on its añejo. Where Cincoro sells polished luxury, Lobos leans on la familia and the pack — lobos means wolves — which fits the way James has always framed his teams.
Five owners who spent their lives competing agreed to compete in a new category: gold, but drinkable.
Why tequila, and why athletes
The athlete-agave alliance isn't random. Tequila spent the 2010s repositioning from party shot to sipping spirit, helped enormously by George Clooney's Casamigos selling to Diageo for up to a billion dollars in 2017. That sale was the starting gun: proof that a celebrity-founded tequila, done credibly, was one of the most valuable assets in the drinks industry. Athletes — who understand brand discipline, long timelines, and the difference between endorsing something and owning it — were perfectly positioned for the follow-up wave.
There's a cultural fit, too. Premium tequila is a moderation-friendly spirit: the whole ritual is built around sipping something slowly and neat, or building one excellent drink rather than six careless ones. For professionals whose bodies are their business, a category whose flagship serve is two ounces over a single large cube makes a certain amount of sense.
How to drink like the club
You do not need a founder's allocation to drink well here. The three serves below are the modern tequila canon: the margarita, still the most-ordered cocktail in America; the paloma, Mexico's own favorite; and ranch water, the Texas highball that became the unofficial drink of off-duty athletes everywhere because it is essentially electrolytes with a kick. Use a 100% agave blanco for all three — the mixto stuff is where hangovers come from.
- 2 oz (60 ml) blanco tequila, 100% agave
- 1 oz (30 ml) fresh lime juice
- ½ oz (15 ml) agave syrup
- Optional: salt half-rim
Shake everything hard with ice, strain over fresh rocks. The agave-syrup version (created at Tommy's in San Francisco) skips orange liqueur and lets the tequila lead — the serve premium houses prefer.
- 2 oz (60 ml) blanco tequila
- ½ oz (15 ml) fresh lime juice
- Pinch of salt
- Grapefruit soda to top (~4 oz / 120 ml)
Build in a tall glass over ice, stir once. Mexico's true national highball: bitter grapefruit, salt and agave. Fresh grapefruit juice plus soda water works even better than flavored soda.
- 2 oz (60 ml) blanco tequila
- ¾ oz (20 ml) fresh lime juice
- Sparkling mineral water to top
The West Texas highball: tequila, lime, fizzy water, nothing else. Light, dry and dangerously sessionable — the off-duty athlete's drink of choice for a reason.
The scouting report
If you're buying one bottle to understand the athlete-tequila era, make it an entry blanco from any credible 100% agave house and taste it neat first. What Jordan's and LeBron's ventures really sell is the same thing their careers sold: the idea that excellence is a repeatable process. Whether that survives the pour is for your palate to judge — but the category they helped legitimize is now the most dynamic in spirits, and the drinks below work regardless of whose name is on the label.
Prefer the same flavors without the alcohol? Chapter 6, Zero Proof, Full Throttle, covers Lewis Hamilton's non-alcoholic agave spirit and a zero-proof paloma that goes toe-to-toe with the original.
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Next — Chapter 03 / 10Whiskey After the Whistle