LEAVE LEBRON ALONE!!

Like many little boys coming of age in the ’50s and ’60s, I had an love affair with Westerns and cowboy culture. Actually, “had” is the wrong word. “Stagecoach” is still one of my favorite movies, and it wouldn’t be uncommon to come in the crib and catch me in the middle of a “Gunsmoke” marathon. And, also like many little boys infatuated with Westerns, I wanted to be a cowboy. Since there weren’t many five year old Black cowboys in the late 50s, and early 60’s, I pretended as best as I could; funny lil cowboy hat and holsters with plastic guns in em whenever and wherever I could. (I think I tried to wear em to school) But, these memories produce an uneasy contradiction for me. While I value the memories of walking up and down Wright Street, pretending to be a cowboy, I feel a certain way about the fact that, by playing “Cowboys and Indians” a game where the lil kids in the neighborhood pretended to be cowboys chasing down and killing Indians, and by rooting against the Indians in many of the shows I watched, I was playing for the wrong team. As a kid I didn’t realize this, but as I grew older and learned about some of the things that really happened in the wild wild west, and to the American Indians, I grew angry at the fact that American culture had denigrated the Indians and that I happily took part in that denigration. I imagine the folks still reading this are probably wondering how exactly am I gonna to tie LeBron James into this story about me! A few of you all may even already be upset at the thought that I’d dare compare LeBron’s plight to that of the American Indian. If you are one of these folks, chill. It ain’t that serious. What is serious though is the fact that, like me rooting against the Indians, I believe that those passionately rooting for LeBron to fail will be on the wrong side of history. Twenty years from now, I have no doubt that even the most zealous members of the anti-LeBron fan club will be thinking to themselves “Wait…why was I rooting so hard against this dude?” Being on the wrong side of history don’t necessarily mean that these people are rooting against a person who will eventually become a champion. Whether the Heat beat the Thunder in the Finals or not has no bearing on my argument. My point is that in time, history will show that today’s popular narrative…..”LeBron represents everything wrong with sports/celebrity culture”, was false, and we were fools to believe it. His situation has created a kind of a paradox where people are rooting against what they feel he represents, while at the same time, rooting for others who show the same exact same qualities! Damn!! For instance, I watched game seven of the Eastern Conference finals at a sports bar here in Indianapolis. Maybe 90% of the people there were clearly rooting for the Celtics. The hated Boston Celtics. A team that won a championship a year after three of the twenty best players in the league decided to play together there. Dammit….let me repeat myself: These were the Boston Celtics. I was in Indianapolis. If you’re familiar with sports at all, you know that Indianapolis and Boston now have a fierce rivalry, despite Larry Legend. They’re becoming about as close to a modern day version of the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s as you’re going to get. Yet, despite the years of hate between these cities, the majority of the fans in this bar were rooting for the Celtics, just so that LeBron would lose. Believe that shit?? They could have given two shits and a fuck about K.G. and Rondo and Ray and Doc. One of the bartenders was so anti-LeBron that if Paul Pierce sent him a text saying “Man, your daughter got some good pussy.” he probably would have replied back “Beat LeBron and you can fuck my wife too!” Now, saying that it’s wrong to root against LeBron don’t mean that you have to root for his ass. You don’t have to be a fan of him or his game. And, if you’re a fan of Kevin Durant and the Oklahoma Thunder, you obviously want LeBron and the Heat to lose because you want your team to win. The wrongness comes when a plot or story makes you want a person to fail, regardless of who would benefit from that failure. Also, fans of the “OKC represents everything right with sports” bullshit, listen the fuck up. The funny thing about sports storylines is that they tend to be completely random and usually false. Ten years ago, Kobe Bryant was advertised as the “anti-Iverson,” the picture of what’s right with sports and how to play the right way….and you see what happened to him. After Kobe’s twinkling star fell, LeBron became the Anti-Kobe, the one who played the right way and respected the game the way it should be respected…and you see what happened to his ass. Today, Kevin Durant is the new golden boy, the anti-LeBron, the one who does and says all the right things and doesn’t even have any noticeable tattoos. I’m not suggesting that Durant will be found to be the opposite of what the story currently says. But, like with the Cowboys and the Indians, maybe the difference between who’s “good” and “bad” isn’t as clear as we want to believe.