LeBron's loss

I watched the Dallas-Miami game with my buddy Joe Posnanski last night. He, of course, was so elequent about it that I'm probably not going to add much to the discussion. And we both saw what everybody else saw: LeBron James, creator of the Miami dream team, focal point of the whole NBA season, on the floor in the fourth quarter with millions of people watching and a title up for grabs, desperately trying to hide.

He could not give up the ball fast enough. He could not have guarded more passively. (Dirk Nowitzki blew by him on a key basket late in the game and LeBron let him go like it was the lunchtime run at the Y.) In the biggest moments, the man with the tools to be the greatest player in history was the worst player on the court.

I'll admit, I was rooting against LeBron. He dumped Cleveland in a cruel way and started counting off trophies for his new team before they had won anything. The word "comeuppance" was meant for what happened to him in this series.

But it shouldn't have happened this way.

If you're going to lose, LOSE. Shoot 2-for-20. Foul out. There's no shame in failure built on effort. But to shrink from the moment, to so clearly deflate under pressure... that's a different kind of stain. It won't wash out.

Since LeBron was 16 years old, people have told him he was going to be the greatest basketball player on Earth. For the last four or five years, at least, a lot of people have said he already is. When he's great -- making outrageous jumpers, locking down the other team's best scorer, streaking down the court like a cross between a defensive end and a ballet dancer -- there's never been anyone better.

He is King James, the anointed. As he told the Miami fans before the season, the Heat would win "not one, not two, not three..." championships. They would have a roomful of trophies. And he would be the best player on the best team.

But where you truly discover yourself in life is when it goes off-script. The Mavericks were not ready to grant LeBron his destiny. Miami lost a game they should have won, then another and another.

I don't know what's in LeBron James' head. But I suspect he had already played out the movie in his mind. He had already seen the ending, where he held up the trophy in front of his adoring fans. And in the real world, where that was not happening, he simply could not understand.

Dwyane Wade and the rest of the Heat players kept trying. They knew that you can write your own script on the fly. LeBron acted as if the game were already over. He seemed to decide it was not his time.

And so, instead of playing like a king, he was just another witness.

The Friday Wrap

Here's a recap of the last seven days here at the ol' paragraph factory.

A guy who grew up in Charlotte wrote a cool book about the vocoder. (Plus DVD extras!)

Now you have to remember if you're in the Orange Zone or the Green Zone. (Several readers made a smart suggestion: The recycling bins should've been orange or green, depending on what zone you're in. But you'd still have to remember which week you take out recycling. Maybe they could've stamped a calendar on the lid.)

LeBron chose away over home.

A quick follow-up on that... NOBODY looked good after The LeBron Show last night.

LeBron showed all the emotion of an insurance adjuster and seemed to have no idea how deeply he was crushing Cleveland fans by renting ESPN for an torture session of kissing them goodbye.

ESPN chucked its credibility and spent an hour kissing LeBron's ring. Well, he doesn't HAVE a ring, but you get the point.

Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert wrote a letter hammering the guy he loved and coveted up until the very minute LeBron decided to go somewhere else. It must have been a blast to write, but conveniently fails to mention that Gilbert just finished getting rid of the Cavs' coach and general manager -- so much for loyalty -- and also fails to understand that he sounds like a ninth-grader who got dumped a week before the prom. Which, in a way, he is.

The only people who came out of the whole thing with unadulterated happiness are Miami Heat ticket scalpers. Good news, Junior, that college fund's back in play.

A few of the things I linked on Twitter (@tommytomlinson):

RT @Pogue Did the Jetsons predict the iPad, FaceTime, and streaming video news sites in 1962? http://bit.ly/bQJByg

Alvin Greene's stimulus idea: Alvin Greene action figures. I'm beginning to think this is performance art. http://bit.ly/chSbD0

Gator walks into a building at LSU. (Insert SEC joke here.) http://bit.ly/aGN4hd

Not sure I agree with all this from the great @williamfleitch... but damn, is it well-done. http://bit.ly/aWm0Gl

Former co-worker @tTribble helped come up w/the awesome cover for the Cleveland P-D today. http://bit.ly/cgf3Kx

Finally, some music. Smashing Pumpkins are coming to Charlotte next week. It's about a decade past their glory days in the post-Nirvana era, but I saw them when they were here in 1997, and they were really good. Here's a clip of Billy Corgan doing an AC/DC cover on the street in Italy. You'd never know from a Smashing Pumpkins show that Corgan can be charming and goofy... but he is here.



Enjoy the weekend, everybody.

LeBron's choice

LeBron James is a father of two who lives in Bath Township, Ohio. It's about 10 miles from Akron, where he grew up, and less than 30 from Cleveland, where he works for a living. He makes as much in salary as the NBA allows, plus millions more in endorsements, and his home is a 33,000-square-foot mansion. But set aside the dollar signs and he's like thousands of others from his hometown. Grew up poor. Didn't go to college. Maybe dreamed that one day, if things broke right, he could load up the car and drive north on I-77 for a life in the big city.

Things broke right. Now, in this awful economy, LeBron James is a rare soul: a 25-year-old with multiple job offers. All he has to do is decide what he wants.

When you were 25, did you know what you wanted?

Because of the way we live now, when LeBron announces his new team tonight, it will be on an hourlong ESPN special, with the main interviewer (Jim Gray) chosen by LeBron himself, all tied into LeBron's new website and new Twitter feed. (This morning's reports -- unconfirmed -- say that LeBron will announce he's playing for the Miami Heat.) Even before the TV special happens, it's being ripped as a giant ego stunt, an overhyped me-fest for a player who, as great as he is, has yet to win an NBA title.

I'm sure LeBron has an ego. But I'm not sure this is about ego. Maybe it's about control.

When you were 25, did you feel like you were in control?

The choices among his suitors seem fairly clear. If basketball -- winning championships -- is the main thing, he has to go to Miami or Chicago. Miami re-signed its superstar, Dwyane Wade, and is adding top-flight forward Chris Bosh. Chicago has dazzling point guard Derrick Rose and just signed All-Star Carlos Boozer. Either of those teams, with LeBron, is an instant favorite to make the NBA Finals.

If glamor is the thing, he has to go to New York. The Knicks have been awful for years; even with LeBron and free-agent pickup Amar'e Stoudemire, they might not be great. But in New York, LeBron can go on Letterman anytime he wants, and get standing O's at the Yankees games, and have a shot at being the biggest guy in the biggest city.

If loyalty is the thing -- and LeBron has a LOYALTY tattoo along his rib cage -- he has to go back to Cleveland. I'm not sure what kind of team he could put together now. Nearly all the big free agents have already signed. Whatever he assembles there would probably be underdogs to Orlando, Chicago, Miami and maybe Boston -- and that's just in the Eastern Conference. A long-term deal with Cleveland might mean three or four years before he has a prime shot at a title. And after 10 or 11 years of NBA pounding, even the best bodies start to break down.

But if he does win it all in Cleveland... it becomes one of the best sports stories in history. Kid grows up rooting for the local team, ends up playing for the local team, and wins a title for the local team -- but not just any local team, CLEVELAND, the city wrecked by decades of epic sports heartbreak. Could LeBron make up for all those times Cleveland fans have wound up doubled over in grief? Maybe only LeBron could.

Here's the thing, though. LeBron got to play for the local team. But he didn't choose to. He ended up in Cleveland because the Cavaliers won the 2003 draft lottery. If the Cavs hadn't won, LeBron could've opted for college. But more than likely he would've stayed in the draft and ended up with Detroit or Denver or one of the other teams with a high draft pick. And now, as a free agent, he'd have a chance to come back home.

As it worked out, he never went away. He's never been away. Even though he's played all over the country as an NBA star and all over the world as an Olympian, he has always lived within a few miles of where he grew up, and from his house it's a half-hour drive to work. Just like all those kids from Akron who grew up dreaming of a big house in town and a good job up in Cleveland.

Those are fine dreams. But other kids dream other things. They get to be 25 and they start to wonder what it might be like to set down roots somewhere else, to unpack your bags in a fresh town, to see how starting over changes you. It's not about rejecting home. It's about forcing yourself to grow by reaching for something new.

LeBron James is still a young man, but he has experienced things most of us can barely imagine. He's already one of the best ever at what he does. Fans adore him. The biggest sports network in the country is handing him an hour tonight to say what he wants to say. Millions of people are waiting for his choice.

And what I keep wondering is: Does he really know what he wants?

Does he dream about it?

And if he does, when he dreams, is he home or away?