Bruce Arthur, National Post · Thursday, Jul. 8, 2010
No sports star has ever been this cruel, and no city had ever absorbed this calculated a knife to the throat. For LeBron James to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers, and his hometown, is one thing; to do it on a specially arranged hour-long TV special after whipping the hype machine to its zenith — well, at least Robert Irsay was considerate enough to steal the Baltimore Colts away to Indianapolis under cover of night.
Instead, LeBron crushed Cleveland, and left for Miami, and the history of sport was irrevocably altered. He will win titles in Miami with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, eventually. And he will do it as a villain.
This was ruthless beyond measure, callous beyond belief. This was Art Modell with a CHOSEN1 tattoo across his impossibly broad shoulders. This was, for poor misbegotten Cleveland, a villain who had only pretended to be a hero. It’s not often a city’s heart gets broken on national TV.
Usually, this could have been forgiven, even lauded. LeBron is taking less money in his prime, and no superstar has ever done that in his prime. He and Wade are abdicating the role of unquestioned alpha dog — Wade is very nearly as good, and he’s already planted a banner in the rafters, and he is the soul of the Heat, but LeBron is the two-time MVP. Bosh, Wade and LeBron will sacrifice individual stardom — and the free-agent parade aside, ego — for team success.
“Championships are championships,” LeBron said.
Usually, that’s what we want. And it was his right to leave. Nobody is arguing that point.
But the how — the how was unspeakable. Sure, LeBron made some casual apologies — “I feel awful that I’m leaving, and I feel even worse that I wasn’t able to bring an NBA championship to that city,” — but in the next breath he was brushing off footage of his jersey being burned in Ohio and saying, “I know how loyal I am,” and “I wanted to do what was best for LeBron James, and what LeBron James is going to do to make him happy.”
It was a seismic dumbshow, an unearthly farce, and its star appeared hollow at his core. Brian Windhorst, the great reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, said that when LeBron talked about the man upstairs that it was the first time he had heard LeBron invoke God in his seven years in the NBA.
There were signs. Late this season, LeBron announced plans to change his jersey number from 23 to 6, and 23 is retired by Miami in tribute to Michael Jordan. The perfect statement was sent to me by Jared Wade of the blog BothTeamsPlayedHard.com: “For Sale: Cavs #6 jersey, never worn.”
But to ask whether Michael Jordan would have done this — he announced his first comeback, in 1995, with a fax that simply said, “I’m back” — or whether Bill Russell would have done this or whether Magic Johnson or Larry Bird would have done this, whether they would have acted like this, is to at least partly miss the point.
To say this was a cop-out is true. True stars try to beat one another, rather than arranging a grand puppet show and then join forces. This removes the chance that LeBron will be seen as the greatest player of all time, ever. It’s over. Michael Jordan did it with Scottie Pippen and role players. He beat Magic. He beat everyone. He stood alone. LeBron’s best-case scenario is to be Russell.
And the decision itself felt like O.J. Simpson without the white Bronco — or the murder, unless you count the state of Ohio.
But to condemn LeBron for this hour-long monument to himself — to decry his boundless narcissism, his infinite self-regard, his maestro-like command of the media throughout a free-agent process that became the biggest, and most smoke-not-fire-filled sports story in America — is fine, but it requires a sense of perspective.
Everybody is, to one degree, a product of their culture, and this is the result of ours. The American culture, which has seeped into Canada to some degree, is one that made Kim Kardashian famous, and Paris Hilton famous, and the cast of Jersey Shore famous for the most superficial of reasons.
We are addicted to the inconsequential, to the un-serious, to the meaningless. We are addicted to the sugar rush, and the next sugar rush after that. And anybody who complains comes off like the town grump bellyaching about all these newfangled kids these days.
These days, the filter of the media is more easily circumvented or simply co-opted at will. So maybe the contemptuous chorus doesn’t really matter to a man who reached 100,000 Twitter followers faster than Bill Gates.
So yeah, maybe Kobe wouldn’t have done this. Steve Nash wouldn’t have. Kevin Durant, the next great NBA star, wouldn’t have. Shaq might have, if he’d been born 10 years later. We bitched and we kvetched and we made fun of it.
But they showed this live on the JumboTron during a Dodgers game. People watched.
And that LeBron made people watch while he broke a city’s heart — his city’s heart — was despicable. It’ll probably be forgotten in the glare of Miami’s eventual glory, like Oklahoma City stealing the Seattle SuperSonics, or the Grizzlies being taken from Vancouver. A few years ago I asked someone who knew LeBron well whether he would really leave his hometown behind. The answer was considered. “He’s capable of leaving.”
We get the stars we deserve, it seems. Everyone but Cleveland.
