Mike Burke
Cumberland Times-News
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Just to show you we all can be wrong about somebody, we’ve come to find LeBron James really isn’t the self-absorbed ingrate we all assumed he was before, during and after The Decision.
Not at all. In fact, LeBron is a very sensitive, understanding and selfless young man; so much so that he told J.R. Moehringer in the September issue of GQ Magazine, which hits the newsstands Aug. 24, that the people of Cleveland ... LeBron remembers Cleveland? Oh, that’s right, he was making mental notes ... that the people of Cleveland shouldn’t give up hope for ever seeing him in a Cavaliers uniform again, because the seven-year contract he just signed with the Miami Heat has an escape clause after the fourth year.
Thus, Moehringer, a graduate of Yale and the 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner for Feature Writing, but who no doubt will soon hear the words, “took LeBron’s words out of context,” was told by LeBron, “If there was an opportunity for me to return and those fans welcome me back, that’d be a great story.”
Human sacrifice is a great story?
And only if the same Cleveland fans, who are still burning LeBron jerseys only because they can’t get to his house, welcome him back?
Hello in there, LeBron. What color is the sky in your world?
“Maybe the ones burning my jersey,” he said, “were never LeBron fans anyway.”
And in Cleveland, that would likely be just an uninformed minority, right?
So here’s a guy who hasn’t played a single game with this new team and already he has a possible target date to end his exile to South Beach. Wow. The heck with putting LeBron’s name up there with Michael Jordan’s; he transcends Jordan.
Joseph Brodsky, John Calvin, El Cid, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann ... LeBron James.
Just a misunderstood genius whose convictions led him away from the motherland to do what he feels is right.
And I’m gonna fly jets.
This guy really should have gone to college for at least a semester to perhaps learn about how to interact with others. Now is it healthy for a city to invest all of its emotions in one basket, particularly when that basket is a professional athlete? Of course not, but you’ll have to forgive Cleveland for this one as the basket they chose was a professional athlete who wore his so-called loyalty to Ohio on his sleeve — when his sleeves were covering tattoos that say “Beast,” “HERO,” “KING,” “JAMES” and “Gloria.” Not to mention “CHOSEN 1” on his back.
LeBron James doesn’t care about other people, nor does it appear he cares about himself as a person, but rather as a self-serving entity who is incapable of understanding his own emotions, much less those of people who long carried an attachment to him because he was a symbol of civic pride for them. And really, that’s all LeBron James lets us believe he is — a symbol. A symbol of what, I couldn’t begin to guess, but it’s certainly not anything anybody outside of Miami seems to find appealing.
For the millionth time, it’s not that he chose to leave Cleveland for Miami through free agency, it’s not even that he allowed his people to convince him a prime-time television special was the way to do it. It’s his complete lack of sensitivity that makes him so unappealing — unappealing when he left Cleveland and failed to offer one word of thanks to the Cleveland fans for all of their blind faith, and unappealing in tossing a bone Cleveland’s way by saying he just might come back if, of course, he’s made to feel welcome.
So he does still hold affection for Cleveland. No, man, not at all. It would just be a great story, because as LeBron makes very clear to Moehringer, he’s from Akron, not Cleveland.
“It’s not far, but it is far,” he says. “And Clevelanders, because they were the bigger-city kids when we were growing up, looked down on us ... So we didn’t actually like Cleveland. We hated Cleveland growing up. There’s a lot of people in Cleveland we still hate to this day.”
All of whom, no doubt, will be delighted to welcome him back.
Bet all of the lighter fluid in Cleveland on that.
Mike Burke is sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News. Write to him at mburke@times-news.com
