1. A few weeks after the 2008 Summer Olympics, Someone Who Knows Things told me the following rumor: LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and Chris Paul became such good friends during the 2007 Olympic trials, and then during their 2008 Olympics excursion in Beijing, that they actually made a pact in China to play together. You know, like one of those pacts in a chick flick where two friends agree to get married if both of them are single when they turn 40.As the rumor went, the 2010 free agents (LeBron, Wade and Bosh) would sign with the same team (at that point the Knicks if they created enough cap room), then Paul would join them in 2012 (or sooner). I thought this was the craziest thing I had ever heard -- so crazy, I only mentioned it once (in a November '08 column). It reminded me of being in my mid-20s in Las Vegas, gambling in the wee hours with my single high school buddies, then all of us drunkenly saying, "We should all pick one city and live there, we'd just go out and kill it every night!" Then you wake up the next morning and forget it was ever discussed. So even if the China rumor was true, that didn't mean it was actually going to happen. Or so I thought.
2. Fast-forward two summers: If LeBron says the word "Miami" tonight, does that mean the rumor was true? Or at least discussed by those guys? Because how could anyone make up something that loony? In 2008, you and I could have sat in a room for 10 hours trying to make up the craziest possible sports rumor and never come up with "Bosh, LeBron, Wade and/or Paul all made a pact in China to play together" without throwing in some improbably bizarre addendum like, "And they did so right after covering up the shooting of Jayson Williams' chauffeur." Was the rumor accurate? Did they stick to their guns? Will we ever find out the truth? Because if they did make a pact, that means …
3. Stephen A. Smith wins the Woodward & Bernstein Award for reporting last week that Wade/LeBron/Bosh in Miami was "done." I thought it was ridiculous. How could it be "done"? Bosh and LeBron were committing to an owner, president and coach without meeting any of them?
My guess at the time: Smith got word that Miami was in the lead, took it and ran with it, then hoped he was right. If he was right, he became the big winner of the summer of 2010. If he was wrong, he could always claim that he WAS right, but that something got screwed up and things changed. I busted his chops a few times on Twitter about it; when he reported one week later that Bosh might be heading for Houston, it sure seemed like Smith was talking out of his butt like Ace Ventura. But if LeBron announces Miami tonight? Then Smith is vindicated and I'm giving myself the byline "William J. Simmons" in my next column as an apology. Although …
4. I'm still not crazy about any report that says "done" unless it's definitely, 100 percent done.
Quick tangent: I like the engagement-ring corollary for all sports reporting. If a friend calls me and says "I'm engaged," I always want to know if they actually got the ring. Give her the ring, you're engaged. If not, "Let's get married" may have been something thrown out there during a drunken dinner, right after sex, during a makeup session after an argument … who the hell knows? I want to see that ring. Once you get the ring, there's no going back. You're locked in. You can get out, but it's almost impossible, and even worse, you might have a one-carat diamond whipped at you at 65 miles an hour.
Had Smith said, "I learned tonight that Miami is the prohibitive favorite to get all three; someone would have to go back on their word for this not to happen," then it played out the way it had, he would have been the Nostradamu-SAS of this thing. But he tried to get engaged without the ring. Still, he gets a partial credit for sniffing it out. Nobody else had the Miami scenario. And if Smith DID have accurate intelligence and it WAS done, then that means the guys panicked and concocted every event these past eight days -- every waffle, every leak, every extra meeting -- just to throw us off the scent.
Did they willfully snooker the general public? Four red flags indicate they may have (assuming LeBron signs with Miami, of course).
7/9/2010 1:05 AM
