Everybody hates LeBron
By Lena Potts
Right after the 2017 NBA Finals, if you googled LeBron James, you saw three things: 1) thinkpieces on how he deserves better, has been misrepresented, is a victim, etc; 2) anti-LeBron vitriol- people celebrating, more than the Warriors win, his loss; 3) speculation that he will be moving to Los Angeles in 2018, once again leaving Cleveland in search of championships.
The passionate tweets and thinkpieces you see defending LeBron are less defending his skill- everyone knows he’s the best player in the game, don’t @ me. They’re defending against the schadenfreude, the pure joy people have in his loss. Because while the general sentiment includes recognition of his immense talent, he is not very well-liked.
There’s a level at which this is unimportant. LeBron James is the best- he doesn’t have to be likable to get endorsements like others might. But he’s also made purposeful attempts to craft his own image that have, unfortunately for him, either backfired or been largely ineffective. Instead, his image almost exists outside of him and the realities of his actions. He and his talents have become so larger than life that, after 14 years in the league, our decisions about his personality are less based in himself and more in what we expect from and project onto King James.
I see LeBron’s attempts to craft his own image as a trilogy. There’s “The Decision”, “The Decision 2”, and Trainwreck. While he’s participated in his own image curation in other, smaller ways, like social media, he’s been far less effective at it than many of his peers. These three moments represent his most active moments in the image-making process, and act as perfect examination points for how his own image slipped away from his control.
“The Decision”- The beginning of a bad reputation
The televised, 75 minute ESPN special, titled “The Decision”, where James announced he’d be leaving Cleveland to chase rings in Miami, did not go over well. While Miami celebrated, Cavs fans, who had built King James up as their hero, burned jerseys en masse. Regardless of whether you can justify LeBron’s move to Miami (which, you can- it’s the nature of the league and professional sports in general), people love martyrs and sacrifice. When you’re as good as LeBron James has always been, when you’ve been hailed as the King since high school, you can either be a savior or a villain- there’s very little between. It’s much easier to be a savior to Cleveland, his hometown, experiencing a decades long championship drought, than a newly created dream team in Miami. People don’t even like Florida. LeBron picked rings over Cleveland, and no matter how reasonable, it was an unpopular choice.
On top of the move itself, the bloated television special was not a good look. LeBron has never been shy about his skills, and has always flirted with the confident/cocky line. But “The Decision” came off as obnoxiously arrogant. The announcement that James would be “taking [his] talents to South Beach” came a whole 30 minutes into the special. “The Decision”, raised $2.5 million for the Boys & Girls Club, but that wasn’t enough to save LeBron from our general distaste for cockiness, naked ambition, and infidelity. He wasn’t lovably confident anymore, and his overwhelming skill couldn’t save him from the perception that he was, well, kind of a dick.
The Decision 2- A little redemption
You can go home again, and he did. James announcing he was going back to Cleveland brought some redemption- everyone loves a good homecoming story. And no one can deny that his love for Cleveland, the city, seems incredibly sincere. This time, Miami fans were mad, but they got two championships out of it so, whatever.
Ditching the extremely extra TV special, LeBron announced his return to the Cavaliers in a Sports Illustrated article, titled “I’m Coming Home”. Hilariously, the word “decision” does not appear once in the article- it’s enough to make you wonder how hard they worked to avoid it.
But, by this point, James had won two championships with Miami, a polarizing team that carried some stigma of being perceived as an artificially constructed superteam. After he announced that he was going to Miami for rings, there was no winning the public. When he won in Miami, those fans rejoiced, and Cleveland (and by extension, the rest of the public who felt the poor Ohio town was cheated by big bad Bron) was only made more spiteful. Had he lost, the public’s schadenfreude would have been overwhelming- people want to see confident, boisterous, talented people lose, especially after they announce that they will win.
Trainwreck
When someone mentions the 2015 film Trainwreck, LeBron James is not the first thing that pops into your head. But hear me out. LeBron’s role in Trainwreck was incredibly purposeful, and he used it as a platform for the image he wanted to portray. In it, James is hilarious, charming, and incredibly self-aware. The film came out after his first season back in Cleveland, which saw the Cavs rise from a dreadful four years to the NBA Finals, and includes roughly a billion jokes about LeBron’s love of Cleveland and Ohio. It also has James joking about himself, his fame, fortune, and talent, and truly makes LeBron one of the best jokes of the film.
Critics loved the move. The New Yorker’s headline claimed “LeBron James is the Funniest Person in Trainwreck”; Rolling Stone and Slate agreed. But the movie otherwise received lukewarm reviews and by no means became comedy cannon. His brilliant and truly humanizing performance was not enough, in an oft-forgotten, just ok movie, to overcome more than a decade of reputation and hype surrounding him. By the time Trainwreck premiered, LeBron’s image was already its own beast, so far removed from LeBron that a picture into his actual personality wasn’t enough to overcome it.
What LeBron doesn’t do is work overtime to create an accessible, positive public image. He doesn’t do what Steph and Dwyane do- 1) work in tandem with their wives to create an image, and 2) carefully curate social media accounts that portray them as loving husbands, all-star dads, and charitable rich people.
LeBron’s Insta has 31.3M followers, far more than Steph Curry’s 16.8M or Dwyane Wade’s 9.4M. But Steph is married to Ayesha Curry, who has become a celebrity in her own right, and has 5M followers. Wade is married to Gabrielle Union, who was famous before he was even in the NBA, and who boasts 8.4M followers of her own. LeBron’s wife, Savannah Brinson, who he has been with since high school, has 659K followers on Instagram- her base largely comes from being the wife of someone very famous, rather than her own brand.
This year, LeBron has posted 60 photos or videos (at the time of writing)- 5 featuring his children, 2 featuring his wife. Steph, by contrast, has posted 67 times- 2 of his kids, 12 featuring his wife. D-Wade, the ultimate family man, has posted 135 total pics or videos, 9 photos of his kids, and a whopping 18 featuring his wife. I imagine these men love their families very sincerely, but social media as good as theirs is coordinated and is part of a bigger PR strategy as well. LeBron’s is unmanicured, as though there isn’t an assistant or PR person helping to handle the account, like it doesn’t have an agenda.
The Currys and the Union-Wades use their social media as a team tool. Steph’s bio on Instagram is about Ayesha’s new business venture; family photoshoots are a centerpiece of Dwyane’s feed. Both of their wives feature photos of the men and their teams, celebrating big games and posting about family vacations. They boost their husbands up, and feed into the idea that, as a unit, they are living some sort of relatable dream. This is so effective that we’ve collectively forgotten about the Dwyane Wade cheating scandal from three years ago.
Social media is, to sound foolishly obvious, a crucial medium for today’s celebrities. Increasingly, it has taken the place that magazine covers held 10–15 years ago in shaping the public perception of celebrities. Where headlines on Star Magazine, and Entertainment Tonight’s reporting on those headlines, used to be crucial to a celebrity’s image, now, they (or their publicists) hold it themselves, right on their phones. LeBron’s unpolished use of social media doesn’t hurt him, but it surely doesn’t help him show us that he’s the funny, likable guy we saw in Trainwreck.
People like to see him lose because he’s great. It’s not really about a rivalry, even the players know that. We don’t love LeBron because of his talent or his attitude, and, at the end of the day, he doesn’t ask us to. He doesn’t chase our love and build his likability like some of his peers do, either because he doesn’t want to, or, I believe, because he’s never quite caught onto how.
By this time, I worry it’s too late. It feels like his image is far away from him- it’s a machine that keeps turning now, no matter what he posts. Had he acted, effectively, after “The Decision”, to turn his image around, he could have. Instead, he leaned into his villain role and dominated in Miami. He got the rings, and in doing so gave up the opportunity to be the good guy. And now, while he dabbles in the large scale venues of image creation, like movies, he’s years behind on the truly impactful tools that give you the power to personally craft your own image, like Instagram. For the viewer, then, it doesn’t really matter that he tries to bring Cleveland a championship and stars in snappy comedies. That the rumors he’d be leaving Cleveland were instant show what we want to think of him- we want him to be the bad guy. So many people will still rejoice at his Finals loss and crack jokes about his hairline, because he’s the best in the world and he pulled a dick move 7 years ago.
Also, we would never hear silence from Laker fans again if they got LeBron, just sayin.
