Grantland

October 26, 2012 12:00 AM ET
LeBron's Quest for Immortality
By Bill Simmons

At the relatively tender age of 28, he stands alone on the mountaintop, unquestionably the most famous athlete on the planet and one of its most famous citizens of any kind. We've heard it so often that it's now a cliche, though nonetheless accurate: He transcends sports."
— Sports Illustrated

You thought that was about LeBron, didn't you? Nope. Jack McCallum wrote that about Michael Jordan nearly 21 years ago, in December of 1991, as the lead paragraph of the magazine's "Sportsman of the Year" feature. When Danny Biasone's 24-second shot clock saved the NBA in 1954, the same year of Sports Illustrated's launch, it inadvertently positioned the magazine as the mainstream media's stamp of approval anytime an NBA star either revolutionized the sport or transcended it. In 1956, they dubbed Bob Cousy a "creative genius" and "nothing less than the greatest all-round player in the 64-year history of basketball." In 1963, they celebrated Bill Russell's brilliance and called him "the most remarkable basketball player of our time." And it just kept going from there. Five years before Jordan's 1991 coronation, Larry Bird adorned the magazine's cover with the headline "The Living Legend," which featured a barrage of gushing quotes and wondered if Bird's supremacy had surpassed even Russell and Kareem. As usual, Bird was the one who ended up putting everything in perspective.

"All I know is that people tend to forget how great the older great players were," (said) Bird. "It'll happen that way with me, too."

Now we're doing this dance with the latest object of everyone's affection, LeBron James, the best basketball player in 20 years. We spent nearly nine years picking him apart before he flipped the narrative, borrowing the finest qualities of Bird, Magic and Jordan and blending them together into a superstar smoothie during last year's playoffs. When his team needed him to score, he unleashed the most complicated inside/outside game since Jordan's second prime. When they needed him to create shots for teammates, he found them wide-open over and over again. When they needed rebounds, he pounded the boards like Barkley or Moses in their primes. When they needed to slow down an opposing scorer, he guarded that player and the player stopped scoring (no matter what position he played).

LeBron James churned out 44 minutes a night, every other night, for eight straight weeks without ever wearing down. He played two of the greatest two-way playoff basketball games in the history of the league: Game 4 at Indiana (40 points, 18 rebounds, nine assists) and Game 6 at Boston (45 points, 15 rebounds, only seven missed shots), then threw on a Larry Bird 2.0 costume in the Finals, destroyed Oklahoma City in the low post, liquidated the media's absurd "LeBron or Durant?" argument and averaged a triple-double in the deciding two games. I called it a "virtuoso basketball performance" at the time, but really, it was more of a watershed athletic achievement — no different than Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile or Carl Lewis trying to jump 30 feet. You shouldn't be able to play basketball like that.

For the first time in a long time, someone made the sport of basketball feel like a Little League game with one of Those Kids — you know, those oversize five-tool freaks who seem like they're 20 when they're really just 12. I will never forget sitting next to my father during Game 6 of the Celtics series, both of us getting shamed into silence because LeBron couldn't miss, waiting for him to sweat, waiting for him to tire, waiting for any sign that he was human. It just wasn't happening. The last time I felt that helpless during a sporting event, Jordan and Pippen were ripping through a pathetic Celtics team in the mid-'90s — they were playing at such a high level, we couldn't help showing our appreciation by cheering them when they finally came out. What else could you do? When were we going to see something like that again? Two guys covering the whole court? Two guys playing that beautifully together? What if we never saw that again? Didn't we have to acknowledge it? Didn't we have to let them know that we knew?

LeBron peaked in a similar way during those last two and a half playoff rounds, and really, you couldn't blame him if he coasted from here — his hunger satiated, his point proven, the monkey pulled off his back and subsequently stomped to death. Everyone handles this moment differently. Jordan (1991), Magic (1987), Walton (1977), Hakeem (1994) and Bird (1986) returned more inspired than ever, but it was the worst thing that ever happened to Shaq — after his 2000 title, he realized his immense physical advantages allowed him to enjoy his summers, use regular seasons to work himself into shape, then take over when it truly mattered. And he was right — the Lakers won two more titles that way, even if they left another three on the table.

Wilt suffered as well: After briefly embracing controversial things like "teamwork" and "unselfishness" and defeating Russell's Celtics and winning his first championship in 1967, he couldn't maintain the momentum. He measured his own worth by numbers, not team success. The following year, Wilt went overboard with the "unselfish" gimmick, desperately tried to lead the league in assists (he did), then mysteriously stopped shooting in the second half of an eventual Game 7 loss to Boston. They traded him to Los Angeles a few months later. So much for Wilt "getting it."

So there's definitely a fork in the road with the "Year after The Year." The good news? There's an overwhelming amount of evidence that LeBron is heading toward that Jordan/Bird/Magic direction. When we were taping a television segment for ESPN last week, Magic Johnson mentioned how LeBron's "off the court" was catching up to LeBron's "on the court." In other words, he gets it now — that there's a cause and effect between how you spend your offseason and what actually happens during that season. We finished the segment and spent the next few minutes bull****ting about LeBron. Magic mentioned that LeBron could taste it now; he could tell by their phone calls over the summer. He believed Pat Riley's impact was so much more underrated than anyone realizes, that Riley has a way of just staying in your ear, appealing to you as a friend and a competitor, never letting up, never letting you stop thinking about what's next. Riley wouldn't push it that hard unless he thought LeBron wanted it. And Magic thought LeBron wanted it.

"It's like eating steak if you've never had steak," Magic said. "Once you taste it, you want more of it."

After LeBron spent his first eight seasons regarding the low post with genuine disdain, it took a humiliating 2011 Finals series for someone blessed with Karl Malone's body and Jordan's footwork to change his thinking. Once upon a time, Bird started the trend of using every summer to add one new weapon to his game, something Magic quickly copied, and then Jordan, Hakeem and Kobe used to their advantage the following two decades. Why wasn't LeBron following suit? For years and years, that was the easiest way to criticize him. As long as someone with LeBron's basketball intelligence refused to use what should have been his biggest advantage (an inside/outside game), then we couldn't believe in him. We wondered if he was destined to become the next Shaq or Wilt, someone with all the talent in the world who just couldn't harness those prodigious physical gifts … and even worse, didn't totally care.

yellowboy90 wrote:

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