I know I’ve written a lot about this over the last month… but it’s always so enticing isn’t it? At least if you’re a fan of a sports team… that big name guy that has put himself on the open market. You start to want the image of that guy you have in your minds eye for your own team, your own city… feels like partial ownership on a fragment of his career, his legacy… but some things are better not to have happened… and this isn’t sour grapes… I just feel a need to explain that my change of heart here isn’t being brought on so much by anything basketball related as it is from having been sickened watching “The Decision” the other night on ESPN, the self-propelled one-hour globally televised show where Lebron James ended all of our tense speculation and announced what team he had decided to go to in this, his free agent year. I’m so pissed at myself for having given a shit. I truly am. I feel dirty.
This post has very aptly been placed in my “World Circling the Bowl” category as I ponder whether or not this sort of supremely narcissistic, self-aggrandizing spectacle is where we’re headed as a society? Where’s the outrage, the sponsors dropping him like a hot potato, the Tiger Woods treatment? And where’s ESPN in all this? Could they really have pulled this off with a straight face if they didn’t actually buy into the shallowness in the first place?
Particularly hilarious was the fact that all the proceeds from the show are to go to the Boys & Girls Club of America, representatives from which surrounded James in the ESPN studios… and even though he had an hour to say anything he wanted to… he made no mention of them at all, choosing instead to be the cool guy in the room as Jim Gray, the now completely neutered lap dog, gushed through Lebron’s highlight reel while occasionally interspersing a marshmallow question for the king… Do you bite your nails Lebron? Even folks who hate Pete Rose… hate Jim Gray more… In a just society Gray’s unimpressive career would now be effectively over, but I’m sure we’ll see him again and again, off into the future… cause once you’re on TV you’re always on TV right? He might as well have been a coffee stain on the chair. A curious choice by Lebron to reveal his “big decision” to… but you only live once right buddy?
So anyway, if Lebron was a Chicago Bull right now… I wouldn’t feel that great. It would feel as though we were sold a defective bill of goods… thought we were buying one thing but instead got another. I used to like Lebron and now I don’t. I don’t feel the same contempt as I feel towards Bill Walton’s broadcasting skills or Bill Laimbeer’s defense… it’s worse than that… towards Lebron I feel indifference. I’m disappointed that the seemingly nice kid out of St. Vincent St. Mary High School back in 2003 let himself get swallowed so completely by the “media machinery designed to create, reward, nurture, and worship self-obsessed assholes” as Matt Taibbi put it in Rolling Stone. “The Decision” really represents the point where a person who has been blessed enough to certain riches, literally and completely no longer gives a shit who thinks what about him. The proverbial middle finger. How else to explain this level of blind insensitivity?
And to the Miami Heat… all that potential, all those possibilities and expectations… they bring a lot of pressure, a lot of weight. They complicate the fluidity that good basketball is when played well in relative anonymity… So best of luck with that.
