LeBron will never be a winner

(Editor's note. Fedor is awesome.)

LeBron didn’t have to make this move. Let’s go over the points one by one.

1.) CAN YOU WIN IN CLEVELAND: Should Gilbert have fired Mike Brown and Danny Ferry after 2008? Absolutely. But in the meantime, he gave LeBron total run of the building, including allowing his titanic entourage access to everything. Opinion is divided on how much effect LeBron had on the roster, although it is clear that he recruited the washed-up Ben Wallace; what is clear is that Dan Gilbert was prepared to give LeBron everything moving forward from THIS year. So yeah, sure, Jordan had a better front office, but when did that front office really swing into action? Six years into his career. LeBron’s in year seven. This isn’t someone like Garnett, a tenacious defensive player struggling on a godawful franchise over which he had no control for over a decade. This was one of the three most recognizable athletes on the planet, worth half a billion dollars at the age of 25. It’s not as though LeBron was like Garnett and needed the fame, or like Kareem and needed a big market, or needed more endorsement money. He does nothing in Miami that he could not have done in Cleveland except get a better chance to win this year, and this year only, before the lockout. To say that a 25 year old man who was about to be given total control of a basketball franchise would “never have won” is laughable, especially when the city, the owner and the commissioner were hell-bent on getting him a championship to sell merchandise and increase everyone’s bottom lines.

2.) WHAT HE DID TO THE CITY OF CLEVELAND: Reams have been written on this. I can’t add anything to it except that this wasn’t a scripted wrestling “heel” turn that needed to happen. It was the most spectacularly ungrateful thing to a city that has put him on a pedestal since the age of 14. You can say he didn’t want it, but if that had been the case, he wouldn’t have played and made a fortune off of their adoration. Adrian Wojnarowski may have said it best, when he said “Leaving never would’ve been easy, but he went out of his way to humiliate them. Now, Clevelanders truly see it for themselves: He was a fan of the Cowboys, the Yankees – never the Browns and Indians. He was a frontrunner.”

Whatever vendetta LeBron had with the front office, why did he go out of his way to do that to his fans? The “motivation” theory just doesn’t hold water – if you watched his announcement, there’s no way that he or anyone thought this thing through well enough to calculate that this “had” to happen to drive him to the next level. Jordan was universally adored from moment one, but he wanted to beat the hell out of everyone too. Kobe was motivated to win without Shaq; he just wasn’t mature enough to do it and didn’t have the cast until these last two years. No basketball superstar in history has ever changed their mentality. In a sport that you play from the age of six, you are either wired a certain way or you aren’t. And LeBron’s reaction to Gilbert’s remarks and his genuine surprised at Cleveland fans burning his stuff means he genuinely thought he was loved enough to put on this absurd three month drama, poison his team’s chances for next year, hold a press conference in his own city while ESPN fellated him, announce this decision and walk away unscathed. You either have it or you don’t, and LeBron genuinely isn’t a killer. He’s not going to get it because everyone hates him now; especially since the remaining 9% of the population that follows basketball will forgive him if he starts winning.

This brings me to my final point, which is

3.) WHAT MAKES A WINNER: Winners don’t just follow the same rubric that came before and wait to be anointed. Winners make their own goddamn rubric. Take boxing. Everyone prior to Ali was compared to Dempsey. No one called out their opponents and then destroyed them like that. No one had the breathtaking audacity to make people hate them and then back it up. Ali was a symbol of race, religion and unparalleled confidence; not since Jack Johnson had anyone so violated the code of conduct in professional sports. At the time, he redefined what it meant to be a winner. But now, forty years later, it’s been done to death. Every chest thumping moron with heavy fists tries to channel “float like a butterfly,” and instead looks like a wannabe trying to make a name for himself by leeching someone else’s schtick. The only people they impress are the insecure and the easily swayed. Contrast that with someone like Fedor Emelianenko, a man of dignity and faith who respects his opponent, gives back to the community and lives an austere life devoted to his family and hometown. He’s got the most incredible record in MMA and has beaten every champion of his time, and been a man to emulate in both victory and defeat. Will he ever be as known as a Lesnar or an Ali? Certainly not in America, and probably not worldwide. But had he signed a contract with the right people, you’d better believe he would have been known. And he wouldn’t have changed his style to fit what a winner was “supposed” to look like. I know who I’ll tell my children to emulate, and who was the real winner.

Jordan won six titles? Great. He apparently defined what it means to be a winner in basketball. But ironically, Jordan is an abject failure in life at everything except dribbling a ball. He’s a failed gambler, a failed husband, a failed community man, a failure at every other sport he tried, a failed investor and a failed parent. He humiliated himself with his late-career dalliances in Washington, proved himself to be totally inept and management and gave a Hall of Fame induction speech that should be required reading for all of the lunatics who keep his fame and cash flow alive, and in doing so keep alive the NBA culture that ignores every form of debauchery and off-court asshattery in favor of titles and money. If that’s the greatest winner a sport has ever had, it is a sad, sad sport. And yet everyone keeps trying to catch him. Why? I’m unsure. Even if you do catch him in rings, the comparison will be endless. So why not invent your own standard?

LeBron had a chance to do what few people get to do – actually redefine what it means to win. Highly accomplished rich black athletes are everywhere in sports. What’s LeBron going to do now, get more points? More rings? Throw better parties? Have more illegitimate children? How on earth will that make him any different than any other zillionaire sports asshole? Instead of raising a generation of young men, many of whom, like him, don’t have father figures, to go to clubs and have sex with groupies and spend money in obscene ways on “friends” whose sole virtue is their existence, he could have broken the mold. He could have shown how a man can use his money well in a depressed community, how honor is more important than victory, how, even in a league where everyone around him is behaving a certain way, even the “heroes,” he was strong enough to change the game off the court as well, something Jordan could never do. Sure, maybe the sycophants who consume merchandise from the NBA wouldn’t have appreciated something like that today, or maybe even ever. But he was one of the rare few who could have tried, who had a shot to pull the NBA and its fans back from the me-first pseudo-alpha-male model of instant gratification that has come to embody a pathetic, unsustainable way of life for an entire generation.

So it goes without saying, therefore, that, after Thursday’s “Decision” and the way he handled it, no matter what he wins now he’ll never be a real winner.