Sports: LeBron, Summer 2010

July 10, 2010, was one of the most important days in the history of my favorite pro sports organization, the NBA. LeBron James made the decision about where he will play basketball, possibly for the next five or six years, in the prime of his career. LeBron is an Akron native who had revived sports championship hopes in the oft-tormented city of Cleveland; he produces stat lines and highlight reels not seen since the days of Michael Jordan; he is a global star, and few current American athletes are at his level of fame. Still, despite back-to-back seasons with the best regular season record in the league, his team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, failed to reach the Finals; and when they had broken through the year before, they were promptly swept by the San Antonio Spurs. All eyes in the basketball world rested on LeBron James, the crown jewel in an off season with a large number of marquee players up for grabs.

Prior to this decision, I had mixed feelings about LeBron James. Touted as the next Michael Jordan when he was still in high school, I was skeptical about all the media attention devoted to him (admittedly, this was perhaps due to not wanting to see another player eclipse my favorite). When he was drafted by the Cleveland Cavs, I was somewhat pleased to see a potential superstar come to play near where I lived, but he was still not of any special significance to me. As he rapidly improved in the NBA, comparisons popped up about who was the best player in the league, LeBron or Kobe Bryant, the best player on my favorite team. While I am also not the biggest fan of Kobe, this comparison sparked some resentment of LeBron in me; still, it was nothing unusual. Once the Cavs became one of the elite teams in the East, starting with an impressive Eastern Conference playoff run in 2007 (and ended in short order by the Spurs in the Finals), the media also began to flaunt how good of a teammate LeBron was, creating one of the most fun atmospheres in basketball and making everyone around him better. I didn't see this. Sure, there was lots of joking and smiling, and the team was doing quite well - but it didn't seem completely sincere to me. It felt like, and feel free to call me cynical, a superstar methodically cultivating his image with little or no belief or depth beneath it all (and honestly, Kobe has done much the same thing in the past). In 2009, the Cavs dominated the regular season and swept through the first two round of the playoffs. Then the whole thing began to come crashing down.

The Cavs were shocked by the Orlando Magic, a squad that clearly played much better as a team and quickly got LeBron to resort to trying to do everything himself. Following the Cavs' defeat, LeBron stormed off the court, not shaking hands with his opponents (as is customary at the end of a playoff series). In a bid to get LeBron even more help to finally get a championship, the Cavs acquired Shaq in the off season, a move that most analysts predicted would make the Cavs unstoppable. And the Cavs again wound up with the best regular season record in the NBA last year, and got through the first round of the playoffs without difficulty. This time, the Cavs lost to the Boston Celtics, a team that many thought was washed up. After winning Game 1, the Cavs got trounced in Game 2 at home by 18. James bounced back with 38 points in throttling Boston in their own arena, seeming to eliminate questions about a supposedly bad elbow. A Game 4 victory would have put the Cavs in full command of the series, but instead Rondo played like the series' superstar, outshining a timid LeBron James.

Then came disaster. The Cavs were completely destroyed in Game 5 at home by 32 points, thanks in large part to LeBron James' atrocious effort, perhaps the worst superstar performance in a crucial postseason game. In fact, teammate Shaq, a former superstar who is now all but washed up, outplayed him. After the game, LeBron commented, "I missed a lot of open shots that I normally make... you don't see that out of me a lot so when it happens, it's a big surprise." It was little wonder that many fans in attendance at LeBron's last home game as a Cav booed him on his way out. The Cavs lost the series in Game 6; while the box score shows both a close game and good statistics from LeBron, this is highly misleading. I have never seen a player, let alone a superstar, so obviously quit on his team as LeBron did in the fourth quarter of Game 6, especially in the last few minutes. As the score shows, victory was theoretically within the Cavs' reach until the last minute or so. But you wouldn't have known it if you only watched the players and not the score board. LeBron's teammates quickly collapsed due to their leader's inaction, surely shocked at his apathy. I, like LeBron's teammates and fans, was completely shocked by the superstar's performance. Sure, I was no big fan of his, but I believed he was at least loyal and would compete as hard as he could until the end.

Fast forward to July 8, 2010. I eagerly anticipated LeBron's 9 PM announcement of where he was going to sign; after all, one way or the other it seemed the future location of the NBA's most talented player would have major implications for the whole league. While ESPN sources leaked that they believed LeBron would choose the Miami Heat, I thought it was surely misleading, whether deliberate or not. They wanted to create hype for this televised event - that they would be televising - and get everyone to think he would sign with the Heat, only to show him commit to another team. And then the words "Miami Heat" came out of LeBron's own mouth. At first I could not believe what I had heard, and shortly after that I felt my stomach churn unpleasantly. And all the pieces came rushing together.

I had felt that all the camaraderie with his teammates had been forced. I had felt that his low key interaction with the media had been hiding a tremendous ego. I had seen how quickly his mood could change, following the Orlando series. And yet, I still believed, or maybe just fervently hoped, both for his sake and for Cleveland sports fans', that he would rise above all of my suspicions and fleeting glimpses of an uglier LeBron. I hoped and believed that he would stay the course in Cleveland, keep building up a team that had been regular season champs two years running, that was slowly getting all the right pieces together. That he would resist the allure of signing with New York, a city where the spotlight on him would be greatest but where there was no short-term prospect of winning; of signing with Chicago, where he would jump into a young, seemingly tailor-made supporting cast yet play in Jordan's shadow; and especially of signing with Miami, where he could bask in the sunshine and forget all his detractors, and dream of multiple championships in an unprecedented alliance with another superstar and a third perennial all-star. Bill Simmons put it perfectly (as he often does) when we wrote: "LeBron was facing one of the greatest sports decisions ever: winning (Chicago), loyalty (Cleveland) or a chance at immortality (New York). I never thought he would pick 'HELP!'"

It is hard to tell what all this will mean in the short term for the NBA. LeBron, Wade, and Bosh obviously form an impressive trio, but aside from a few veterans they've managed to sign, it's unlikely they'll have a great supporting cast around them for the coming season. And the East has now perhaps officially surpassed the West as the stronger conference: the Bulls (with the addition of Boozer and role players), the Celtics, the Magic, and now the Heat all seem to have a great shot at next year's championship. Looking long term, it is difficult to believe that the LeBron-Wade-Bosh core will not become a perennial championship contender. With this new star power, however, they will become the target of not only all other NBA teams, but also their respective fan bases.

As for LeBron James, it's impossible to know exactly how this will affect his legacy at this point. However, I believe several things are certain. One: he will never become the greatest basketball player of all time in this situation (or even be in the conversation). I certainly don't believe that basketball superstars can win championships by themselves, and the evidence is clear on this: Jordan had Pippen, Magic had Worthy and an old but effective Kareem, Bird had a really solid all around team, Duncan had Ginobli and Parker, Shaq had an up-and-coming Kobe, Kobe has Gasol... And yet, in each of those cases, the superstar was clearly the leader of his team, and took his second-in-command and cadets under his wing to heights they would never have glimpsed without him. Now LeBron dumps the team that he had taken to the brink of an NBA championship in favor of joining a player who has already done once what Jordan, Magic, and others have done before. He's saying to Wade: "show me how to do this, it's too difficult for me. I am not willing to do the hard work." What kind of true champion says that?

Second: what he did to Cleveland sports fans was historically brutal and unforgivable. I am not one of the said-Cleveland sports fans, and even I felt something of the evisceration that they experienced simply by being a fan of sports and the NBA. To have grown up just a few miles from your team as a pro, to try to show everyone how much you love playing there and how much you want to win a championship for their luckless fans, to bring that team to the cusp of said championship... and then to obviously quit on that team while still in uniform, to keep them in the dark about your intentions in free agency, and then to broadcast your betrayal on national television... Sickening. Maybe it is *only* sports, maybe it is just business, maybe you're doing what you think is best for your family... but to quote Joseph Welch, have you no sense of decency?

So there it is. LeBron James, perhaps the NBA's most talented athlete ever, with potential to become a true legend, not only renounced his right to ever make such claims, but also committed one of the most deplorable betrayals in American sports history. You've got one NBA fan who will be rooting against you from now on, LeBron, and you can count on me not being the only one.