The King and His Heir
Sonny Giuliano: Ya know Dalton, when we were brainstorming topics to possibly write about for the start of Bingeable, one of my suggestions was LeBron James Jr., and to my surprise you didn’t even ask me what specifically I wanted to write about. So before we get into what I wanted to discuss here, I have to admit that I’m very curious what it is that you are expecting this back and forth to cover.
Dalton Baggett: I honestly had no specific direction in mind when you mentioned Bronny James, I just know he shares a name with LeBron and it is always interesting to discuss anyone named LeBron with you. Especially the basketball players.
You being the LBJ expert, you’ll have to take point on this one, but I’ll start us off with a question for you:
Do you think LeBron James Jr. will have more or less pressure going into the NBA than Bron Sr. did?
SG: Well Dalton, it’s fitting that you tossed this question my way because this is the concept I actually hoped to talk about with you. I don’t want to dive right in and answer that question with a simple “more” or “less” right away. Allow me to build the hype for what will ultimately be my answer, because that’s truly what this question is about … Hype.
The answer to this question is complicated, mostly because there is no question that Bronny James, just like his father, will face more pressure than any high school basketball player rightfully should. It’s a certainty that this wouldn’t be the case if his name was Bronny Smith, or Bronny Lewis, or Bronny Glover. But because this is the son of LeBron James that we’re talking about, there is going to be a spotlight shone on him, based on pedigree alone, that just isn’t on other superiorly skilled amateur hoopers.
Now before I continue, I want to get something out of the way: it’s actually remarkable that, at fourteen years old, LeBron James Jr., is as skilled as he is. I assume that you, Dalton, have seen highlights of Bronny’s games, and likely anybody reading this has as well. In case you haven’t, give this a quick watch:
If Bronny James ends up playing professionally at all, regardless of if he’s literally and figuratively the second coming of LeBron James, it’s the equivalent of lightning striking the same place twice. There is no shortage of father/son duos who have played in the NBA, and each one of them amazes me. The Bryant’s, Curry’s, Barry’s, Walton’s, Thompson’s … it’s ridiculous. It’s proof that genetics are an amazing thing.
And as crazy as it is to say this about a fourteen year old, Bronny James will more likely than not end up playing in the NBA. It’s certainly no guarantee, but he’s a consensus top ten player for his eventual graduating class, and there is a familial foundation here that literally no other high school athlete in the world has working in his favor. But here’s the truth about the situation, and my answer to your question … No matter how good Bronny James is by the time he’s a Senior in High School and regardless of the fact that he’s LeBron James Sr.’s son, it is actually impossible that the pressure/expectations/hype on/for Bronny will come close to matching that of his father.
Rather than elaborating on why I so definitively believe this, I first want to send this back to you and ask you two questions:
1. What do you think of the fact that Bronny James and countless other high school ballers before him have risen to internet stardom before they even finished going through puberty?
2. When was the first time you remember hearing about LeBron James. Sr.?
DB: The first thing I’d like to mention is how funny it is to me just how heavily LeBron Sr. is featured on that mixtape. He has almost as many highlights on the bench as Bronny has playing, and that’s fair I guess, he’s the GOAT.
That observation also leads me into my answer to your first question. This is one of the few times where I don’t necessarily think that the internet is to blame for the rise or fall of players before they’re even allowed to see an R-Rated movie.
You don’t have to look any farther than this father/son combo to examine this point. Presumably Bronny James will continue to get bigger, better, and faster. He will have hundreds of mixtapes made of him, and he will be a star before he inevitably ends up at Duke. Now, that’s a lot of pressure for a freshman in college, let alone high school, but let’s not forget about LeBron Sr.
Like you said, LeBron’s hype was exponentially higher than his son’s is or will be, and that was without the hype-beast that is the Twitter we know today. The internet was not the same back then, and LeBron relied on ESPN to get his name out in the world. They televised a 17 year old LeBron’s high school basketball game just because he was in it, which will never not be crazy. It’s a miracle LeBron turned into the man he did, because it could’ve gone terribly wrong, as it has for so many others.
Speaking of ESPN, I watched it every morning before school and I still can’t recall when LeBron ended up on my radar. It’s impossible I never heard of him, but honestly my first recollection of the phenom was this:
SG: I doubt you are alone, Dalton. I imagine that S.I. cover was when LeBron was put on most people’s radar, myself included. In fact, the day I saw that cover — one day before my tenth birthday — was when I decided LeBron James would be my favorite basketball player. I like to think this story is unique to me, but there are like thousands of other hoops fans who made the same proclamation as I did. However, before I elaborate a bit on the absurdity of the idea of a High School Junior being on the cover of Sports Illustrated, I want to chime in with a quick, paragraph-long story that is unique to me.
Back when I was in High School there was a website called Section V Talks Back. It was a forum where people in Western New York could log on and talk about/debate the local high school sports scene. The popularity of Talks Back peaked around the time I was a Junior in High School. At the risk of sounding braggy, my name was mentioned on the now-defunct website pretty frequently as one of the few players in Genesee Region in contention for Regional Player of the Year. I know this mostly because I was told by others about the conversations taking place there, but also because I couldn’t resist going to Talks Back and seeing what people were saying about me.
Here’s where I bring all of this together …
When LeBron James was the same age as I was when I was at the height of my Talks Back fame, HE WAS ON THE COVER OF THE MOST PROMINENT SPORTS PUBLICATION IN THE ENTIRE WORLD AND IT ONLY TOOK FOURTEEN WORDS FOR MICHAEL JORDAN’S NAME TO BE MENTIONED FOR THE FIRST OF MULTIPLE TIMES IN THAT PROFILE.
What the hell is that? How is putting the weight of literally the loftiest possible expectations on the shoulders of a seventeen year morally right? How was everyone so desensitized to how ludicrous this was? And it wasn’t just Sports Illustrated. LeBron was on the cover of Slam Magazine — with a glorious mini-fro — before the start of his Junior season. During his first televised High School game he was compared to the Williams Sisters, Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant, and Jay Bilas called him the greatest high school basketball player he’d ever seen. He signed a $90 million contract with Nike before he even selected in the NBA Draft, and he was mentioned in a G-Unit song before he ever played in an NBA game.
As you said, it is an absolute miracle that LeBron James turned into the man he did. And I don’t mean miracle like, “Wow, that’s pretty nuts that he turned out to be such a great basketball player.” I mean miracle like, “And after Jesus turned the water into wine he turned to his disciples and said, ‘This is a cup of my blood.’” The fact that LeBron has worked his way into a GOAT conversation that was supposed to be reserved for only one man — the man he was compared to nearly twenty years ago now — is straight-up once in a lifetime sort of stuff.
DB: I cannot believe you just humble bragged about being “one of the few players in Genesee Region in contention for Regional Player of the Year” right before you mentioned LeBron being compared to MJ in Sports Illustrated. You then proceeded to say that LeBron is basically Jesus and I have quite a few questions about the way you think of yourself. I respect the attempted flex though.
Your hubris aside, I agree with your all-caps sentiments. Sports media will ride with someone like Bronny until the day the internet stops caring. What happens if Bronny crumbles under the pressure? What if he loses his touch between now and college? What if he decides he doesn’t want to deal with all of the bullshit his father did and just quits basketball altogether? The media and twitter would abandon him. Obviously I don’t think the oldest son of LeBron James would ever want for anything, but this same thing could happen to someone who doesn’t share blood with basketball royalty. They’re told they’re great until they aren’t. I’m still riding the high from getting all A’s on my report cards in high school and my parents telling me how proud they were. Imagine the whole world thinking you were the next greatest thing and then abandoning you overnight. It would be incredibly difficult to come back from that, and the therapy alone would cost a fortune they don’t have because they didn’t make any money playing basketball in college.
Bronny is going to be OK no matter what, but someone else might not be. The media has never learned a lesson, and I don’t think it’s going to start now.
SG: Sure, Bronny is going to be “OK” in the grand scheme of things, but if he ends up just “OK” in the NBA — a one in a million accomplishment — the media will treat him like he’s just a front-runner to win Genesee Region Player of the year, and that’s a problem.
