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Lauren Perdue turned down LeBron James’ dinner invite because of a ‘curfew’

Jay Busbee
· Senior writer

When you're an Olympian, you never know who you're going to meet just hangin' around the ol' village ... or who's going to invite you to dinner.

Lauren Perdue is one of the United States' top swimmers, and on Wednesday she swam the first leg of the 4x200 women's freestyle relay. That's nice and all, and she'll likely take home some hardware, but her primary notoriety is coming from a couple of tweets she sent out last week.

Just before the Games began, she tweeted, "Lebron James just invited me to dinner...Um wuuuutttt?!?" Around that time, the photo at right showed up on Perdue's Instagram account. That is most definitely LeBron, trendy dork glasses and all.

[ Photos: Swimmer Lauren Perdue ]

On Wednesday, just after her relay, she gave the full scoop to the Charlotte Observer. Before the Games began, the "Dream Team" hung with the swimmers in a kind of Avengers-meets-Justice-League American hero summit. In the course of that, LeBron did indeed invite Perdue to dinner.

"He was kind of joking," Perdue said. "But he was basically like, 'Would you like to come eat with me at the dining hall?' And I said, 'Um, I'm sorry, I have a curfew.'"

Hey, to be fair, LeBron never went to college, so perhaps to him the "dining hall" is this mystical, exotic locale not a vast, noisy world of free cereal where your head rings from last night's overindulgence.

[ Related: Kobe Bryant's wife mad for shirtless picture at Team USA party ]

Look, you can attribute all kinds of motives to this if you want. Still, LeBron is after all engaged, and the Olympic Village is a rather public place. But at least LeBron kept his shirt on, unlike other Dream Teamers we could name. ('Sup, Kobe.)

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