Home Is Where The Heart Is

This one feels different, much different.

When Lebron James first joined the Cleveland Cavaliers, he effectively had no choice. The worst team with the number one pick in the NBA draft gets who it wants and James was the biggest no-brainier pick in the history of the league.

When he left it was a crotch kick, a punch to an unexpected gut of a city that always seems to get an unexpected punch. That same desperate, lost, hurt that was felt when Art Modell pulled the Browns out of Cleveland was its logical antecedent. To literally lose your sporting blood put the city in a football wilderness that took, you guessed it, nearly four years to remedy.

When James bolted the first chance he had he left the team in ruins. That may have been exactly why he left. But he took Cleveland’s heart with him and it spent, yep, four years figuring how it could all begin again.

The reason this feels so different is that this times James had a choice. He could go anywhere he wanted and he decided to come back here. You'd have to go back to Bernie Kosar’s manipulation of the NFL’s supplemental draft in order to land in Cleveland to recall an even remotely similar sense of not just pride but of affirmation for the reason that most of us with a choice nonetheless remain.

No longer is there any concern about his basketball future. He’ll finish his career, hopefully another 10 years from now, as a Cav. All the cringing fans used to do when James would wear a Yankees hat is gone forever.  He can follow any baseball or football team he wants. There will be no need to read anything into those kinds of gestures. James chose here not there and it has the absolute feeling of finality, both a prodigal son and favorite son returning, satisfied with his time away and relishing his future on his home turf.

I read James’ decision letter, twice.   It was a master stroke, the likes of which are rare in professional sports. Sure it went through the editing process and sure some of it, maybe most of it, was calculated to put a different spin on what James is really about. Yet it felt genuine. It was fully realized and actualized. It contained no false promises. It just laid it out in rather simple terms and in the process seemingly made fools of all of those who, from a very great distance, thought they understood what he really was all about.

Without saying it directly, James nonetheless laid out the case for why he's not the mercenary many of us, me included, thought he was. It certainly helps that the Cavs have some excellent assets to work with, certainly more than the Heat at the moment. But the pull to come home, to raise his sons in a place with less glitz and more sensibilities, seems to have predominated.

His letter in many ways read like the words of Bruce Springsteen in “Long Walk Home” and it's easy think about what James is telling his own kids at the moment and what other dads in Akron and Cleveland are telling theirs:

My father said, “Son, we’re luck in in this town. It's a beautiful place to be born.
It just wraps itself around you, no one crowds you no one goes it alone.”

That is exactly the way this town has always treated James. He lives just a few minutes from me and he's easy to spot when he's in town. Sometimes alone at the movie theater. Sometimes riding his bike on the local streets. Sometimes playing softball at the local high school. No one crowds him but he knows the people around here have his back.

The other striking aspect of this almost surreal moment in Cleveland sports history is how much James has grown as a person in the last four years. He wrote that his four years in Miami felt like college. He went in a know-it-all and came out a humbler man comfortable with not having all the answers. It's exactly the point of going off to college, or the army, or wherever it is that one goes when they have to leave home in order to grow up.

James is absolutely correct when he wrote that there was nothing to be gained in holding a grudge against Dan Gilbert or the fans who cursed his very existence. Indeed he offered up exactly the right perspective without specifically giving Gilbert a pass for the screed Gilbert wrote when James left. James saw himself in the shoes of those he spurned and understood both their anger and their angst.

I also get though why Gilbert didn't publicly renounce his screed in the last several days. It would have looked shallow and opportunistic. Better to have handled it as he did, per James, face to face and man to man.

For all the criticism leveled at Gilbert, and I've leveled plenty at him myself, you have to give him his due. He overcame his own impetuousness and sprinkled with a little luck when it comes to the ping pong balls has put together enough of a franchise now to at least give fans hope that the team isn't just James and 11 other guys. More importantly though he gained his own perspective about the NBA that was learned the hard way, a perspective that when coupled with James’ maturity, will really serve this franchise well as it pursues it's stated goal of bringing  this town a championship.

There is enough cynicism in sports and life that it's virtually certain that some, maybe many, will try to find the holes in James’ story, the real motives behind the move. But not on this day. There is no way to spoil a win, nor should there be, for fans who haven't seen enough of it.

I suspect many feel like Gus Sinski at the mound talking to Billy Chapel as he was throwing a perfect game in “For Love of the Game.” Collectively we would be saying “we don't stink right now because of you. We’re the best team in [basketball] because of you, right now, right this minute because of you. We’re not gonna screw it up, we’re gonna be awesome for you. “

Let's hope he remains awesome for us. He’s off to a perfect start.

Lingering Items--Eternal Souls Edition

There's nothing like a redemption story. It's a yarn older than the written word, more beloved then a tale of true love and continues unabated in every form of entertainment today. It's nice to believe in the power of redemption evens when it's mostly just a dramatic device contrived as an efficient if not accurate way to convey complexity either the writer, the reader or both can’t fully understand.

Witness, if you'll excuse the reference, the common theme of LeBron James' capturing of his long sought after NBA Championship. Nearly every sportswriter with a breathless thought has defined the Miami Heat's triumph as the personal triumph of James as if he were a member of the Lost Tribes of Israel who suffered long and hard and made it out of the desert alive.

Some suffering. James is one of the richest athletes on the planet. He lives a life of opulence and privilege borne of his outsized athletic skills. That was true before the playoffs started and remains true today and for the foreseeable future.

But attaining the championship he previously couldn't is more a result of attrition than redemption. It was just James' turn in the barrel. The Heat's path to the finals was clear and easy, relatively speaking. The Oklahoma City Thunder's was harder and longer and their fatigue and inexperience showed in the end.

James already lived his redemption story anyway when he signed his first pro contract. It was the real triumph of overcoming the very long odds of his upbringing. Having long since arrived he long since surrendered any candidacy in the redemption sweepstakes.

Let's all be honest with one another about this. James was always going to win an NBA title at some point. He's the best player on the planet, he still works hard at his craft, and he makes those around him better. It was always just a matter of time. Now or next year or whenever.

The other reason James' championship can never be a redemption story though is far more central to the ultimate narrative. For redemption to work the protagonist has to reclaim his soul. That hasn't happened here because James remains soulless having sold himself for his quest. He's no Jabez Stone and he doesn't have Daniel Webster on retainer even if he was. The devil drives a hard bargain and never renegotiates.

James is a forever man-child perpetually caught up in an adult world he doesn't fully understand. He commands an audience because of fame and fortune but he'll never fully have their respect because children are mostly seen and rarely really heard.

There is no real chance that James will ever fully gain the perspective one needs for real individual growth. Fame and fortune obscure. Look at Michael Jordan. It hasn't yet occurred to him that he is the worst owner/basketball executive in history not named Isiah Thomas. Fame and fortune obscure.

James will go on to win a few maybe several more titles and earn more and more individual accolades. But they will never change the essential nothingness of his being.

It's not really that James stiffed the Cavaliers and did so like a total putz. That was just the gating charge when he entered the land of souls departed. It's that James divested himself of the value system he so richly earned by avoiding all the crap that life threw at him early for the fast track to a phony Promised Land.

Pat Riley, the NBA's Gordon Gekko in looks and outlook, was certainly a far more attractive option then a muddling Danny Ferry. And while Ferry probably did lack the chops to put all the pieces together it's not as if James wasn't complicit in Ferry's difficulty. Let's never forget the long shadow James cast on the Cavs franchise and how his every twitch and quirk set off alarms inside the Q.

The irony is that James isn't lazy. He works on his game in the same way every truly great athlete does. Perfect, to his way of thinking, is never the enemy of good.

And yet James just couldn't abide things not happening for him quickly enough. So he sought a shortcut, a stack decked and if that cost him his soul, so be it.

In certain ways James is like Roger Clemens another rare talent for whom great was never great enough. Clemens used more nefarious means to cheat the system but he was seeking the same kind of edge as James did.

Indeed there are plenty of characters thought the history of sports that sought a similar path. It's as old, too, as a redemption story.

There's no reason to begrudge James his accomplishments because rare is the goal achieved without some compromise. But James will always have to live with the fact that his goals weren't nearly as earned as they could have been.

**

Speaking of redemption stories, the Penn State apologists can begin theirs in earnest now that Jerry Sandusky has been convicted on 45 of 48 counts of child abuse. There will come a point this season, maybe the next, when someone isn’t writing about Penn State’s resurgence as a respectable university after if put Sandusky and his sick exploits in the rear view mirror.

Frankly I’m not sure that Penn State can ever be redeemed. Shouldn’t it be scarred for life for its complicity in the long term abuse by one of its more trusted employees? Most certainly each of Sandusky’s victims will be forever scarred so why should Penn State ever get a pass?

For those who always rushed to protect Joe Paterno by claiming he had done what he could to stop Jerry Sandusky, how in anyway has that view been vindicated now that Sandusky is a convict? It hasn’t. If anything that view becomes even more discredited when you consider the mountains of evidence that were stacked against Sandusky and realize that because Paterno hardly lifted a finger to have it stopped, the abuse continued long after it could have been stopped.

In so many ways Paterno was a virtuous soul. He did place great emphasis on academics. He worked hard to build the stature of Penn State. For so many and for so long he supposedly stood for what was right about college athletics.

But Paterno was never the country bumpkin character that he liked to fashion for himself when it was convenient to do so. More than anyone else, Paterno was well aware that all his good non-athletic deeds for the university gave him almost unchecked power on that campus. And Paterno wasn’t afraid to utilize that power when he needed it to ultimately advance the cause of his beloved football team. It’s been thoroughly documented, for example, how Paterno kept his misbehaving players out of the scope of normal university discipline. His greater good was always far more narrow then he'd admit.

So when Paterno supposedly reported the Sandusky allegations up the chain, Paterno had every reason to believe nothing would come of it unless he specifically gave the word to make something of it. That word never came and Sandusky continued in his employ subject only to a whisper campaign while he quietly went about abusing more vulnerable boys.

Penn State doesn’t get another chance. Paterno was complicit and so was the rest of the university administration. If the new administrative crew really wanted to show its worthy of some level of forgiveness then it would start by proving how much more important institutional integrity really is by abolishing the football program completely and take whatever other steps were necessary to reduce the importance of any remaining sports. They’d wash Paterno off the books completely and take down whatever statutes they erected.

It’s nice that Paterno had a positive influence on so many young men. But this isn’t a balancing act. You don’t get to cite those figures as a counterbalance because the unthinkable, unimaginable horror that Sandusky’s crimes visited upon all those victims trumps all.

If you want to understand how sad, how truly pathetic this will all become, just wait until the university finds it completely appropriate to play the victim card for itself. It will pay out millions to settle lawsuits and then use that blood money as some sort of proof that the university community has suffered enough. It hasn’t and it never will because money will never give these victims back what they lost most and it will never erase the insidious way the university and its most important employees allowed such atrocities to continue for years.

**

As a follow up to my column last week about Scott Fujita, it’s been interesting that Fujita has gone back underground, perhaps realizing that his mouth is his own worst enemy.

The other interesting thing is to listen to union chief DeMaurice Smith call for a new investigation into the Saints’ bounty case. That makes him an even bigger hypocrite then Fujita, if that’s possible.

Smith didn’t participate in any aspect of the first investigation. In fact, he specifically refused to participate in the investigation and actively encouraged the players to likewise not participate in it. If there was only one side of the story that was heard, all the blame for that goes to Smith.

But Smith has sensed, wrongly but that’s another matter, that public opinion is such that the average fan doesn’t think there was enough evidence to suspend the various coaches, administrators and players. The average fan, I think, doesn’t much care either way. No one’s going to march on NFL headquarters in New York because Jon Vilma’s been suspended.

Smith gave decidedly wrong headed advice to his members on this issue and now is deflecting by trying to put the heat back on Roger Goodell.

The NFL has certainly put together a strong case that the Saints had in place a bounty system and that all that have been suspended deserved to be. There isn’t one particularly smoking gun so much as it’s the evidence’s cumulative weight that matters. That said, there were arguments to make in rebuttal that never got made because of another failed strategy by the union.

Goodell will rule this week and for the most part close the book on this latest NFL scandal. Smith can grouse about the decision because that’s what he’s paid to do but hopefully the players’ whose lives and paychecks were adversely affected will eventually come to realize that those adverse affects were due in some part to the bad advice they got from Smith.

**

Since we’re on a litigation theme, this week’s question to ponder: Even though he was acquitted of lying to Congress, does Roger Clemens’ silence since that verdict came down tell us more than a guilty verdict ever could?

Always a Follower, Never a Leader

The reactions to the Dallas Mavericks winning the NBA Championship, or more likely, the Miami Heat not winning the NBA Championship, are about as expected. You can’t just take a dump on an entire city and its fan base the way LeBron James did on Cleveland and not expect a little backlash.

And for however thoughtful James can appear to be at times, he does have a tendency to become his own worst enemy at just the wrong time, which only feeds the beasts. His press conference afterward was classic James: poorly masked irritation mixed with a healthy disrespect for anyone who doesn’t agree with him and wrapped in a giant tortilla of egomania.

It’s true as James said that once those people who feel good about James losing will eventually have to return to their own lives filled with their own problems while James goes off and lives what he views as a better life. But it’s the underlying premise of it all that eventually will come back to teach him another hard lesson.

James didn’t have the best upbringing and the remnants of it are still ever present. He had no father and his mother had her own problems to deal with. He floated from family to family just looking to belong. He often found himself around people with money but had none himself.

So it doesn’t surprise that so much of how James measure himself against others is on a material scale. He lives in a house in Bath Township that is more on the scale of a hotel than on the scale of the 3,500 square foot houses that surround it. He has a collection of cars he garages separately. He’s got every material good his little heart always wanted but couldn’t afford. He jets around the world, has countless other celebrities as friends and his occupation amounts to shooting a ball into a hoop.

But the suggestion that an abundance of material goods is the only path to happiness is too ridiculous to spend much time debating. I suspect that even James would admit to being content for long stretches of time earlier in life when money wasn’t ever present.

And even if that weren’t ever true for James, it is true for many, many others. People have a way of making the best of almost any situation.

It’s not like James’ life is unencumbered, no matter what he’d have you believe. Generally speaking, the more overhead you take on the more problems you take on as well.

It also can’t be any fun to constantly deal with your own mother and her predilection for public flameouts. As his celebrity grows his circle of true friends probably shrinks. There’s always someone looking for a piece of him, from every worthy charity you could think of to every acquaintance he’s ever made who’s now down on his luck.

And then there is the abject failure he’s had as a professional to reach the only goal that really matters: championships. Division titles are nice. So too are MVP trophies. But until he wins a title, he’s Charles Barkley.

As much fun as it is to celebrate James’ comeuppance for the way he handled the business side of his basketball life, there is a larger point that is being missed and that goes back to that same upbringing. The story as written is that James failed because he once again couldn’t lead a stacked Heat team to the championship. The story that doesn’t get written enough is that James is never going to lead any team to a championship because he’s not a leader in the first place. He’s the most talented follower professional sports has ever seen.

Much has been made about James’ fourth quarter failures in the Mavericks series and indeed in the larger sense James did consistently come up short in that regard. He had a total of 18 fourth quarter points in 6 games and according to the Elias Sports Bureau had the biggest single drop off between regular season scoring average and finals scoring average in NBA history.

Surely much of this should properly be attributed to the Mavericks’ defense and James gave them the proper respect. But if you were looking for anything more from James as to why he wasn’t able to help his team more, he wasn’t offering. Where once all he wanted was just to belong he now lacks the self-awareness to recognize that he’s still on that same search.

Instead, he bristled at any questions about his performance, particularly in those crucial fourth quarters, by suggesting that his other contributions, such as his defense, were being overlooked. It’s akin to the argument that right now Indians fans shouldn’t focus on Shin-Soo Choo’s lack of offense because he’s still a fine defensive player.

But Pat Riley didn’t make a mockery of the NBA’s free agency system just so he could get James to play really nice defense while another team, this time the Mavs, won the championship. He bought and paid for James because he damn well expected James to live up to his 30 ppg average and then some when it was really needed, like games 4, 5 and 6 against those Mavs.

Ah but what Riley and everyone else puzzled by James’ passiveness continues to overlook is that they can pay James a king’s ransom for now and evermore but that isn’t going to fundamentally change his make up. James is passive and deferential. He doesn’t possess the single-mindedness of purpose that Michael Jordan did. James has always just wanted to fit in while someone else drives the car.

James was always the best pure player on any team he was on, from CYO through high school and now as a professional. But until he came to the Cavs, James was never the leader of any of those teams nor was he asked to be. Ultimately, he left Cleveland not because the Cavaliers could never surround James with enough talent to compete for a championship but because in Cleveland the focus would always be on James.

As much as people like to think of James as the center of his own universe, it’s just not how James sees himself. He’s the guy who’d really rather get the assists. If he were in a band, he’d be the drummer. Perhaps he’d be the greatest drummer in the world, but he was never looking to form his own band and insert himself as lead singer.

If James were truly the alpha male of the NBA and had all the leverage the most people attribute to him, then there is no way that a middling role player like Chris Bosh turns his back on him as he did in deciding to go to Miami instead of Cleveland.

Brian Windhorst, writing for ESPN, noted that while James asked both Bosh and Wade to join him in Cleveland, neither player ever gave it any real consideration. Wade flirted with Chicago but wanted to stay in Miami. Bosh told James he was headed to Miami as well. Ultimately, it wasn’t James who made The Decision at all. It was made for him by much stronger and forceful personalities. It was made by Wade and Bosh.

In that context, all of what happened with James in the Boston series last season or what happened to James against the Mavs this season makes perfect sense. It’s convenient to think that James quit but in reality he just lived up to his instincts to play second fiddle and wilted when the spotlight was turned on him alone.

His teammates and his new transient fans in Miami may have expected more but as they will eventually discover, just like his teammates and fans in Cleveland discovered, James gave them all he could.

Lingering Items--All LeBrand All The Time Edition

There's nothing about the LeBron James story that looks any better 24 hours later. Maybe some of the anger has dissipated, but the hurt will linger for a long time for a lot of people.

So much was wrapped up in LeBetrayal that it's hard at times to corral all the thoughts into a coherent narrative. There is the history of all the various sports teams in this town and the generations they've gone without a championship. There is the history of the two cities—Cleveland and Akron—that just screams that their better days are long gone. There are the people in these towns forced to endure the sharpest edges of everything bad, be it the weather, the economy, or just the scorn for well, being who they are.

And yet through it all I wondered what this town's reaction would have been if the situation were slightly different. What if James had been playing for some other former doormat town through the magic of the NBA's ping pong balls these last 7 years and then still gone to Miami even with the Cavaliers making their best pitch for him to come to Cleveland? What if it had been the Cavs, like the Heat and the Bulls, clearing cap space these last few years to sign James and another max free agent, only to find themselves abandoned at the alter? Would the reaction still be the same?

It's an interesting hypothetical. Sure James would have been turning his back on Cleveland and this area, but it would have only been in the same way he turned his back on far bigger media markets like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Cleveland fans would be disappointed certainly, but likely not to this level.

It's one thing to ask the prettiest girl out and get turned down. It's another thing to be married to the prettiest girl for 7 years and have two or three kids with her only to see her walk away emotionless abandoning everything the two of you've built because she likes the beach better.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that I don't think it's ever going to be too harsh to call James' decision to abandon this town a betrayal. It feels that way because that's in fact what he did. He positioned himself as one of us, a guy who understood everything this town stood for and everything it had been through and he acted as if he was the one chosen to turn it all around.

That's maybe too big of a burden to put on anyone, especially a 25-year-old multimillionaire with a lousy upbringing, but gee it never felt that way until Thursday at around 9:19 p.m.

It was James who led Clevelanders down that path in the first place. He may have been playing it cool and close to the vest but in those rare unguarded moments when LeBron wasn't just building LeBrand he'd occasionally let it slip that this was his destiny all along.

Maybe it was all wishful thinking. Most of it probably was. But when you're only given tea leaves to read then all you'll read are tea leaves. And almost every one of them, even to this day, seemed to lead to but one conclusion for everyone around here but James himself.

**

Some of the national writers, those with a vested interest in defending LeBrand in order to maintain their limited access to his idiot ramblings, have come to the conclusion that James owed this town nothing, that he held up his end of the bargain. Really?

James played mostly hard throughout his time in Cleveland and for that he was richly rewarded with millions in salary and even more in endorsements. But that is only part of the bargain.

What those writers fail to appreciate is that two towns, Akron and Cleveland, literally raised James and put him in a position to do exactly what he just did. James may have put in the work on the court, but if it weren't for the people of these two towns, James may not have ever made it to the court. What did James do to repay that? Hold a bike rally in Akron? Have a 3-on-3 tournament? Pass out turkeys at Christmas?

That's all nice, solid stuff but pick a carpetbagging superstar in any town and you'll find them doing likewise. It's all part of building their brand as well. No, what I'm talking about here is the fact that at some point James became the King of the World on the backs of a town that literally raised him from the time he was a a mere king-in-waiting.

There are many individual heroes in the James story, the people who without recognition took in James as he was kicking around from apartment to apartment while his young mother was trying to straighten out her own life. There are the other heroes that showed him every little courtesy along the way, from those who maybe helped him get a good grade in history class to those who grabbed him by the shoulder from time to time and told him to straighten up and keep out of trouble.

There are also the hundreds and thousands and millions around the region that respected his privacy and literally let him be the superstar that lived next door.

That kind of love, that kind of respect demands a response in kind. Instead James became Tiger Woods, the spoiled brat with the otherworldly talent who Big Timed everyone else. My guess is that even now he can't imagine what all the fuss is over in this town.

It's laughable to read the quotes from the other athletes coming to his defense as well. The clueless are always the last to realize they're clueless.

James may not have owed it to this town to stay here forever, that's a debatable point. But he certainly owed it a far more gracious exit than he gave it. You may only get one chance to make a first impression, but it's equally true that you only get one chance to make a last impression. In this case, and no matter what comes afterward, nothing is going to change the way people feel about having a knife stuck in their backs on national television.

**
Establishing his own Twitter account, James used it on Friday to announce, as he headed to Miami and the only adoring fans he currently has left, that the road to history starts now. In a sense he's right. Just not for the reasons he thinks.

The chutzpah it took to send that Twitter message is almost a textbook reaction from someone who so rightly is taking it on the chin. Rather than acknowledge the missteps, the classless execution of a decision he didn't have to make, James instead seems emboldened by the backlash.

It won't always be that way.

There will come a point when James realize that of all the words used to describe him over his career the the most pertinent and the one that stings the most will turn out to be “coward.”

Some suggest that the issue isn't the fact that James decided to leave Cleveland. Baloney. On the most basic level, James is a coward because he chose Miami. He branded himself as the Chosen One and the King but he ended up someone who needed the reflected glory of someone else in order to make the history he now seeks.

What kind of Chosen One, what kind of King, what kind of superstar thinks like that? It's one thing to surround yourself with talent in order to make yourself better, but it's another thing to instead run away from the pressure of being “the Man” and instead become, essentially Dwyane Wade's Scottie Pippen. Anything for a ring, I guess.

Paint it anyway you want, and soon I expect the apologists to come out in force and try to write a different narrative, but none of that will change the fact that James simply doesn't have the guts to effectively lead a team to a championship. And it will be that way in Miami. James will never be seen as the one leading Miami and you can literally see the relief in his face at that fact. Seeking the shelter of a cocoon of a different making, James is now Wade's wing man and will never again be seen as someone that you'd ever want to fully trust with the last shot.

But that's hardly the only reason James is a coward. Mostly he's a coward because he didn't have the stomach to play it straight with anyone, including the owner who placated and catered to his every whim.

I don't buy it for a minute that this whole thing wasn't per-ordained months, if not years ago. James went through the public dog-and-pony show to make it all look legit but in the end it was all just a farce. He never was going to New York, New Jersey or Chicago. He wasn't ever going to stay in Cleveland. He wanted out and just didn't have the guts to publicly say it.

You can make the argument that by putting himself on national television to announce The Decision, James showed a special kind of guts. Hardly.

The camera is faceless. It doesn't blink and it doesn't respond. That's for real live human beings. When Gilbert detailed the classless way that James left town, it becomes all the more understandable why James went on television in the first place.

The same lack of courage that caused him to fold like a deck chair in the playoffs against Boston is the same lack of courage he displayed in running away, is the same lack of courage he displayed in not returning one call that Gilbert made to him throughout this process. See the pattern?

Think about that for a moment. Gilbert and the Cavs bent over backward to accommodate James' every wish. Sure they had a vested interest in doing so, but the fact remains that they did in fact make those gestures. Yet James couldn't even answer one of his 10 cell phones he probably keeps or respond to a simple text?

It may take a village to raise a child, but it turns out that Clevelanders all along were just raising the village idiot.

Consider that James didn't even have the courage to call Gilbert directly to say “thanks for all you've done. I know this will be difficult to hear but I'm heading to Miami because that's where I think I will have the best chance to win multiple championships.”

Instead James had one of his guys make that call, a classless move if ever there was one. Adversity doesn't build character, it reveals it. When the Cavs were faced with a tougher than expected Boston team, James' lack of character actually came through. But that was just a prelude to the complete lack of character and integrity he demonstrated in dealing with Gilbert.

Debate all you want what team is a better fit for James in this phase of his career but there is no debate on how he should have handled this whole thing.

Then there is Gilbert. I'm not sure his own advisers probably thought it was a good idea to blast James as he did, but damn it sure felt good to finally hear an owner dispense with political correctness and just let his feelings fly.

Gilbert may come to regret his blast at James, but he shouldn't. And for those who disagree I say, point to anything Gilbert said that was objectively wrong and then maybe I'll listen to that point of view.

**

The other thing I keep hearing is that someone around James should have given James better counseling, should have pulled him aside and told him how poorly he was handling this all.

The problem with that way of thinking is that it assumes the people around him do in fact no better. What evidence is there of that?

James' inner circle is made up of close friends who have been drafting behind him since high school. He's an employee of Nike as well but Nike time and again has demonstrated that they are about the least likely to pull aside one of their own and get him grounded. His agent? Put it this way, an agent doesn't get rich arguing with his client.

Then there is ESPN.

In the pursuit of ratings they let one of their own, taking money directly from James, put the farcical show together and then sold it as “news.” I'd say that Jim Gray should be fired for his role in all of this but first you'd have to fire Jim Gray's boss.

After James' posse, his agent, Nike and ESPN, who exactly is left to tell James what he needs to hear and not what he wants to hear? There wasn't an adult in the room throughout this entire mess so it's really not much of a surprise that this was handled with all the intelligence of a group of second graders trying to stage a presidential debate.

This was always a car crash in the making so no one should be surprised when the car actually crashed.

**
I caught a glimpse on Friday night of some sort of celebration going on in Miami where the Heat was introducing it's new team. Not surprisingly there were only 3 players present, James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. Pretty telling stuff, actually. But it also leads to this week's question to ponder: Why exactly was James wearing a head band?

LeBrand

We are all witnesses. Indeed. Witnesses to the fact that in the end, LeBron James turned out to be Art Modell with a better fashion sense.

Sitting in Greenwich, Connecticut at a Boys and Girls Club and announcing to the world that the Miami Heat is where he’ll ply his trade next, James took a knife, edgy and dull, and carved a 6-inch valley in the middle of Cleveland’s soul.

If you want to be placated by the charity angle to the whole thing, go ahead and be a Pollyanna. James co-opted the good intentions of a worthy charity in order to make himself look better as he sat, cynically, virtually ripping the heart of out a city and explaining, once again, that it’s not about the money it's about happiness..

Remember this: when they say it’s not about the money, it’s about the money. Think of James leaving money on the table by not signing with Cleveland as a temporary thing, something akin to spending money to make money. James is officially a brand now and this is all about giving himself a bigger stage to make even more money off that brand.

Now of course the paralysis by analysis will begin anew, focusing as it will on whether James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh can all share the same ball and who, exactly, will take that last shot in a game that matters.

Then there is the small matter on whether James stacking the deck in his favor in order to enhance his chances at “multiple championships” (the catch phrase of the free agent season if ever there was one) really has the opposite effect on the legacy he's trying to create.

Let me dispense with that one quickly. No, it won’t have the opposite effect. When James’ career is over, it will be judged best in retrospect. And if that retrospective look includes a few championships, no one is going to much care how they were won. Does anyone think that Derek Jeter’s career is somehow less because he plays along side Alex Rodriguez, or vice versa? Scottie Pippen is one of the top 50 or so best basketball players in NBA history and I’ve yet to hear anyone criticize Michael Jordan’s legacy that was forged in large measure with Pippen’s help.

What will matter, though, is James’ reputation. As they saying goes, it takes a lifetime to build and a moment to lose it. That moment, of course, for James, serious by nature, playful at times, was the exact instant he put that stake in the heart of a city that’s been killed a thousand times over anyway. At least in that, James’ can’t claim he was first. Sports disappointment, with its long and rich history on the North Coast, is about the only thing Cleveland seems to have mastered.

Actually, while Thursday night serves as the convenient marker for when James’ reputation as a the consummate team player took its biggest hit, it’s really been a reputational death by a thousand cuts since the season ended, actually ever since the Cavs were busy falling apart against the Boston Celtics.

James and his team, perhaps out of naïveté or perhaps out of callous indifference, have mostly looked like buffoons, with Thursday night’s “show” being Exhibit A. But yet it’s hard to be too critical in that regard when the adults in the room who should know better, like the executives running a major television network for example, willingly play into their hands by acting as if James and his manager, Maverick Carter, are the two most brilliant marketing minds since McMahon met Tate or Sterling met Cooper.

Truthfully, it will be difficult to ever consider James again in a purely basketball context. Over the last 7 years, basketball fans in general and Cavaliers fans in particular have been treated to some of the best basketball they’re ever likely to see. They’ve had the chance to watch James surmount the seemingly insurmountable hype surrounding him when he came out of high school. In that process, never painful always fun, James has become the best basketball player on the planet.

There’s probably still more upside to James’ game, who knows. But this time the seemingly insurmountable hype James has to contend with is completely of his own making. It’s one thing to live up to your own personal standards. It’s another to create expectations in millions of others that can never be fully satisfied anyway and then spend each and every day trying to do just that. At least we’ll find out whether James really is Atlas.

If you’re a fan of the Miami Heat, and I suspect there’s a whole bunch of folks jumping on that bandwagon about now, it’s going to be difficult to level set yourself. Do you expect the Big Three to win a championship each and every year? Will you be satisfied with three titles? How about two? If the Heat win one title in the next six years, will that be considered a failure? See what I mean?

As well informed as James thinks he’s been in this process, it isn’t nearly as well informed as it could have been. Listening to everyone but relying on no one, James came to the simplistic of all conclusions without the wisdom and perspective that comes with age. At some point, probably long after he retires, James will give an interview from whatever mansion he’s living in then and he’ll reflect on this time in more melancholy terms. He’ll regret the pain he brought to the city that raised him and he’ll likely regret the fact that he gave the city its hobbling on national television.

Just don’t expect that kind of reflection any time soon. For now and for as far as the eye can currently see, James will be resolute in trying to live up to just what he has wrought, without regret and without indifference. Time will change that.

The question is, will time change how Cleveland feels about James? Time hasn’t much tempered the animosity toward Art Modell, nor should it. Whatever Modell’s motivations, he had other options and yet, just like James, chose only what was best for him. So no, I don’t think it will.

Maybe you do only really owe yourself and no one else. Modell and now James certainly think that way. But yet there is a point where you actually become a citizen, where you accept the responsibility of what your fleeting existence on this planet gives you. James isn’t nearly as fully realized as he’d like to believe. I doubt he ever will be.

James can soothe whatever fractured feelings he’s created for himself by staying close to the Akron community, keeping his basketball tournament alive and sponsoring a bike ride, too. He’ll probably make Akron his summer home, mainly because the monstrosity of a house he built in Bath Township is unsellable. The only adapted use for it is a hotel and the street is zoned residential.

But spreading money around like that will only be about damage control, just like his cynical use of the Boys and Girls Club to temper the wrath his ego-fueled free agency created. He had a chance to make a real difference in this community for now and ever more and instead he just proved to be another mogul trying to take the shortcut to success. I’m not sure Cleveland would have been a tougher place for James to win a championship but even if it would be it just underscores that James never really was up to that challenge.

It’s doubtful that most of the locals will wish James well as he and the other two musketeers practice their basketball skills for another town. Indeed, he’ll be booed loudly and proudly every time he comes back to Quicken Loans Arena. But those are just little points in time, snippets in a far larger story that’s only half-written.

The rest of the story is that life goes on for all of us, even James. It's an object lesson, once again, you're best to love the game and not the gamers. And it’s some consolation, I suppose, that just as with Modell, James is still going to have to face up to his kids one day and explain why exactly he decided to sully a once great name. I have a feeling that when that time comes, even his kids aren't going to buy that whole happiness angle.