My Decade with LeBron James
LeBron James has been in all of our lives since February 12, 2002 when the then high school junior graced the cover of Sports Illustrated with the words “The Chosen One” splashed across the page in all caps. At 16 years old he was already being touted as the “next Michael Jordan” and you can pinpoint the first time those words were used as the start of one of the most inexplicably polarizing careers in sports history. Why is it so inexplicable? On paper LeBron should be one of the most universally beloved athletes of his generation. He’s the best on the planet at what he does, has stayed relatively controversy free, brought a championship to his hometown, and built a school!
Why is he so polarizing then? Why do so many sports “fans” hate LeBron James? Well, there are a lot of ignorant assholes out there. Ignorant assholes like me! You see, I was a LeBron James hater until fairly recently. I let my own lack of understanding and failure to appreciate greatness cloud my judgement and rob me of the chance to truly enjoy watching the greatest basketball player of all time. So, what changed for me? A man named Sonny Giuliano came into my life and helped me to see the light. If LeBron James was a religion, then Sonny performed my baptism. Now, we’ll take a journey through my decade with LeBron James. The ups, the downs, and all the embarrassing Facebook statuses in between. Sonny and I started working together in 2014, so I’ll be marking time as BS (Before Sonny) and AS (After Sonny) so we can see how his influence affected me over the years.
This piece will focus on the most recent decade of LeBron’s career and my relationship to it. This is because I just wasn’t paying much attention to LeBron from 2003 to 2010. I remember the Sports Illustrated cover, and I remember some of the ESPN hype, but I just wasn’t paying much attention to basketball outside of whatever Allen Iverson or the Orlando Magic were doing. I had very selective sports viewing habits back then. No, my relationship to LeBron and the conversations surrounding him started on July 8th, 2010.
The Decision — 4 BS
I watched The Decision along with everyone else, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how I felt about it at the time. I wasn’t invested in LeBron James, the Cleveland Cavaliers, or the Miami Heat. Later on, in many debates I had about why LeBron was bad (el oh el) I would cite The Decision as a reason to hate the guy. I would say things like “It was so pompous and arrogant” or “He abandoned an entire city just to be a jerk.” But the truth is I didn’t actually care that he left Cleveland for Miami. I had just started drinking the LeBron hater Kool-Aid and would use anything I could to prove the dumb points I was making.
When it comes down to it sports are about entertainment, and The Decision was certainly that. 13.1 million people watched the program and it raised 6 million dollars for charity. Realistically, the only people on the planet who were right to be upset with LeBron were Cleveland Cavaliers fans. This obviously felt like a betrayal to them and he could’ve handled how they all found out about it a little better. Despite their rightful anger, Cavs fans were quick to forgive LeBron for The Decision when he came back to Cleveland and brought the city its first championship in 52 years. If they can get over it, everyone else should too.
3 BS
This post isn’t even clever, it’s just a terrible, terrible joke. It’s not even a joke, it’s just a statement that I posted on the internet that nobody laughed at but me. Not to mention, the overall idea here is demonstrably false, but I go more into the LeBron isn’t clutch debate more in the next section. (He is indeed as clutch as they come). I would just like to mention that I had the audacity to post this when they lost game 4 of the 2011 playoffs but were still up 3–1 on the 76ers. In the short game recap I just watched, I saw LeBron get one of his patented backboard blocks, and hit a fade-away jumper, both with 2 mins or less remaining in the game. I was truly insufferable.
2 BS
Apparently I had caught the Clippers/Heat game from the previous night and was still feeling some type of way about it the next day. Let me use the same format as my Facebook post to address it.
Things I learned from this very embarrassing Facebook Post:
1. Blake Griffin and Deandre Jordan were definitely monsters at this point in time. That checks out. In this specific game Deandre Jordan posted 8 pts, 11 rebs, and 6 blks, while Blake posted 20 pts and 12 rebs. Both solid stat lines, and I’m sure there were some highlight dunks in there. I stand by this statement.
2. This seems unfair. Even if I was still hating on the Big 3, it wouldn’t be right to just blanket-statement the whole Heat team like this just because I was a little salty. My apologies to James Jones, who seems like a very nice dude.
3. This is just not even a little bit true. There are thousands of players who choke more than LeBron James. Actually, it’s almost ALL of the players. Because here’s the thing, LeBron is in fact extremely clutch. A couple of moments in his career have been fodder for haters to craft a fictitious narrative to the contrary. He is statistically better than Kobe and MJ at game-tying/go-ahead field goals with under 10 seconds left in the postseason and regularly ranks near the top of the league in points in the clutch. On this night in 2012 he did have a bit of a rough free-throw night late in the game, but he also almost had a triple double, so I probably should’ve just kept my mouth shut.
4. It was, objectively, very good to be a Heat fan during this time.
2 AS
My Facebook posts about LeBron were (mercifully) few and far between, so this post brings us to 2 years After Sonny and he still didn’t have me converted to the Church of Bron yet. Apparently in his delightful Top 50 players post about Kyrie Irving, Sonny said some things praising LeBron James. I felt the need to once again tell everyone my opinion about LeBron when I shared the post. This was selfish of me. I made the post about me when I should have just been praising Sonny’s hard work. It just goes to show that harboring negative feelings about LeBron can manifest in all sorts of terrible qualities in a person. Learn from my mistakes!
2 AS
There it is folks, the exact moment in time that I became a LeBron fan. This post belongs in a museum. It’s like looking at the Colosseum. A piece of history that will live on through the ages as empires rise and fall and the Earth eventually roasts us all alive. After Sonny’s almost 3 years of constant insistence that LeBron is the best basketball player of all time, the straw that finally broke this camel’s back was his Top 50 Players in the NBA piece that put LeBron at #1. The words were weaved so wonderfully, the syntax stitched together so sublimely, that he accomplished what was once impossible; I was turned from LeBron hater to LeBron stan in just 2 years, a feat that should surely be recognized by Guinness.
I can now appreciate LeBron’s brand of basketball like it should be: as art. Watching LeBron play basketball is like getting to watch Van Gogh paint, or Lin-Manuel write a Broadway musical, or Adam Driver do literally anything. There will be statues of LeBron in Cleveland, Miami, and Los Angeles. I’m glad they will bring me joy rather than a spike in blood pressure.
3 AS
No matter how fully I give myself to the Gospel of LeBron, I will never give up my theory that he can’t palm a basketball. There is a lack of evidence supporting my theory, and plenty of evidence to the contrary, but alas, I persist. In this way I still have a foothold in the LeBron hater community; Choosing to be willfully ignorant to mounting evidence that their beliefs about LeBron are not only wrong, but embarrassing too. In this case ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s a prison.
To those who still aren’t convinced, please keep screaming into the void. Just make sure you’re getting your blood pressure checked regularly. I’ll be on the right side of history, appreciating the GOAT while I can.
