This is an interesting perspective because this is a guy who is/was very close to Lebron's situation and knows the ins and outs. They did just write a book together. Interesting read....
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May 19, 2010
LeBron’s Next Leap
By BUZZ BISSINGER
Philadelphia
WHEN I first met LeBron James in 2008, I was in awe. He was 23 at the time and I was 53, yet it seemed as if the ages were reversed. He had been a basketball legend for years. As we embarked on a book project together, he had an affable poise that contrasted with my own babbling efforts to build rapport. I ascribed to him a worldly wisdom.
I did not see him as the young man he was. I put him on a precarious pedestal, as if he had already reached perfection athletically and emotionally, when of course he hadn’t. Initially at least, I did exactly what the metropolitan areas of Cleveland and Akron, Ohio, have done: looked on him as a god, without fault or foible.
Which is why I believe LeBron James has to declare free agency and leave the Cleveland Cavaliers. Not simply for the pursuit of a championship ring, but for his own emotional and professional growth.
Although I have long predicted that he will go to the New York Knicks, the more I mull it, the more I understand how difficult it will be for him to leave Ohio. For all that his life has been a tremendous heaping of can-you-believe-he-did-that, personally James has been anything but adventuresome. I can’t think of an athlete so firmly attached to his roots, almost as if he is terrified to leave home.
As I got to know LeBron James and the people from his childhood who helped form him, what struck me was how his life had been spent within very narrow borders. He not only has lived in Akron since birth, but he has also played either there or in nearby Cleveland all his life — Amateur Athletic Union ball as a pre-teenager, high-school ball, pro ball (he never went to college). Given the difficulties of his youth — poor, no father and a mother who was 16 when he was born — it may be obvious why security has been paramount.
When I was with him, he liked going to a bagel shop in Akron where he knew he wouldn’t be hassled because everybody there had known him for years. He liked strolling into the gym of his old high school, St. Vincent-St. Mary, and talking to his former coach and mentor, Dru Joyce. It was almost as if he was still a student there. He is guarded about whom he lets in, and virtually all of his friends and professional confidants are childhood and high-school friends.
LeBron James’s relationship to his community is profound: he built a palatial house in the Akron area and just finished his seventh season with the Cavaliers. But I believe those roots have become golden shackles. He is too loved, and therefore too coddled and too easily forgiven.
His play in the fifth game of the N.B.A. playoff series this month against the Boston Celtics, a 120-88 trouncing, was bizarre and inexplicable. In missing 11 of the 14 shots he took, he simply looked as if he had given up, astounding not only for James but for any professional athlete competing at the level of the playoffs. It was inexcusable, whatever the circumstance.
In a place like New York, the tabloids would have screamed “LeBomb James!” In Cleveland, there were a few boos, but they amounted to nothing compared to the desperation of the fans to keep him for next season and beyond. In such an atmosphere, human nature inevitably takes over: you stop constantly pushing yourself because there is no real incentive, particularly when you have so many good nights on the basketball court and keep your fans satiated.
James is of course a great player. But he is not the greatest player in the history of the game by any stretch if you define greatness, as you should, by winning it all. He has never shown anything close to the killer mentality and step-it-up of the players he is most compared to, Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson. He is not in the same category as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Or Kobe Bryant.
It may be that James’s innate affability (there are few things better in all of sports than watching him interact with children) will prevent him from ever developing that refuse-to-lose attitude. But James basically has not been challenged as an athlete since he was a sophomore in high school and had a coach named Keith Dambrot. Now the head coach at Akron University, Dambrot was tough, brilliant, relentless and did more than any other coach to make James into the player he is today.
That was roughly a decade ago. Since then, James’s mind-boggling talent has intimidated coaches into submission. Like me, they have been in awe. They have been afraid to coach him, even though Dambrot has called him the most coachable player he has ever had, and doubts that he has changed very much.
The rumors and speculation are rife, and nobody, including me, really knows anything. Will he stay in Cleveland if Dwyane Wade, the Miami Heat superstar, joins the Cavaliers as a free agent? Will he go to Chicago if the University of Kentucky coach John Calipari takes over the Bulls?
I believe LeBron needs to be in a place that is bigger and more dynamic than even he is, and the only possible place is New York (though as a Philadelphian it pains me to say that). He needs to have the right supporting cast, which the Knicks could provide given the space they have freed up under the league’s salary cap. He needs a coach who will get in his face and has the credibility to back it up. He needs the personal growth.
The hysteria over his coming would be incredible at first, just as it was when Reggie Jackson and Alex Rodriguez joined the Yankees. If he played well, the hysteria would continue. He would own the town. But if the team struggled, he would hear about it, just as Jackson and Rodriguez heard about it. If he ever turned in a performance like the one he had in Game 5 against the Celtics, he would never be allowed to forget it — which, in the long run, would only help his game further develop and blossom.
Yes, he is a god in Akron and Cleveland. But sometimes worship, as genuine as it is, can create a false sense of invincibility. The result: all he and his teammates can do now is watch the Celtics advance in the playoffs.
LeBron, take the chance. Just go and never look back. In the greatest city in the world, you will never regret it. It is time to leave home.
Buzz Bissinger is the author of “Friday Night Lights” and the co-author, with LeBron James, of “Shooting Stars.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/opinion/20bissinger.html
"winning is more fun... then fun is fun" -Thibs
