On He Who Shall Not Be Named, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Hamburgers

I don't know what will happen in Cleveland on Thursday night. I'd like to think nothing out of the ordinary will take place. I'd like to think that some people will jeer, and some people will laugh, and LeBron James will pour in 46 points and we will move on to the next overscrutinized twist in Miami's Season of Overkill. But since we have arrived at this crossroads, and since there is much navel-gazing taking place,* allow me my own indulgence.

I have stated this before, but I lived in Akron from 1995 until 2000. Those years happened to coincide with the modern heyday of Cleveland. I was young, and I would often find myself in a car on weekend night, hurtling up I-77 toward the Flats or the Warehouse District or Tremont to see a concert or to drink far too many beers. I was an outsider, but it seemed to me that Cleveland was the place you went when you wanted to experience urbanity; Cleveland is a small large city.

Akron was not that place. Because Akron, even as it was undergoing its own brief renaissance, even as it constructed a minor-league baseball stadium downtown, even as nightclubs sprouted up around it, felt like something much less urban. Akron is a large small city; you'd see the same people in the same places night after night, and there was something kind of comforting about it. Akron, my friend David Giffels** once said, has one of everything, but only one of everything. Akron, my friend Chuck once wrote, could be the Springfield we know from The Simpsons. Inexplicable things happen in Akron, news stories that capture the national imagination for their sheer weirdness. Akron incubates a great band approximately once every generation (Chrissie Hynde, Devo, the Black Keys), and Akron breeds serial killers, and Akron boasts an unimaginably great hamburger franchise, and now Akron has produced the most purely talented basketball player who ever lived. If Cleveland resides in some ignominious corner of the nation's cultural framework, Akron is an ignominious afterthought for Clevelanders. This is a town that identifies itself through several layers of inadequacy; whatever it produces is seen through that filter.

I don't know where I'm going with this, except to say that in some perverse way, it makes sense that LeBron James would continue to identify with Akron while dismissing Cleveland. One is a city of underdogs; the other is a forgotten place. At some level, they can't blame LeBron for leaving town. You can only go so far in Akron before you've done everything.


*Of course, much of this navel-gazing is well worth reading. Here is one well-crafted piece from Bill Reiter of Fox Sports, about Akron and its complex relationship with Cleveland how LeBron straddles both worlds. And here is another from my friend/noted raconteur/reporter/writer extraordinaire Wright Thompson, about the city of Cleveland.

**If there is a human being more loyalty to Akron, more of an understanding of what it means to live in Akron than David, I haven't met him.

On The Decision

 1.  I lived in Akron, Ohio for five years. And then I left. I was 22 when I arrived, and 27 when I departed, and I'm not going to lie: It was a bizarre place to be a young and single and unmoored. The first piece of advice I received from a co-worker when exploring places to live was that a certain township to the south of Akron had no property taxes; at that point, I didn't even know how property taxes worked.

So I guess what I'm saying is that there's an inherent hypocrisy to me criticizing anyone for leaving Northeast Ohio, because I once left Northeast Ohio myself. It wasn't the place I wanted to live my life--though my memories of it grow fonder as the years pass--but it is the place where several of my friends live their lives, and quite happily. Many of them were born there, and many of them have never left. And yet none of them expected LeBron James to stay at home. They have been conditioned to presume the worst. They have been conditioned to believe that nothing good ever lasts.

2. Maybe it was my own naivete, but I thought they were wrong. Even as the Miami rumors built to an inevitable pitch, I kept thinking it was all a ruse. LeBron was different, I thought. LeBron is not like me at age 25--a transient, in search of something bigger. LeBron is one of them. He came of age in Akron. At heart, he was a nativist; this was what set him apart from every other high-profile athlete of the modern age. He wouldn't possibly grind his hometown into his heel like this. Beneath the unavoidable bubble of egotism, his loyalty to his hometown and his sense of humor and his inherent showmanship made him appear surprisingly self-aware. And so I had a theory: The television show, the rumors flitting about on Twitter, the whole ridiculous years-long free-agency parade...it was a ruse, and once LeBron chose Cleveland, he would reveal that this had all been an exercise in media criticism, a statement on our own misplaced mores and outsized passions. Once LeBron said, "I'm staying in Cleveland," it would all make sense. It would become the biggest Rope-a-Dope since the heyday of Muhammad Ali. It would be a thumb in the eye of New York, a fist in the face of Chicago, and the greatest victory for Cleveland since the heyday of Otto Graham.

3. One of my close friends, Ryan Jones, once wrote a book about LeBron James. He also wrote this piece in the hours before the announcement, and managed to put my upcoming book into a modern context in a way far better than I ever could. "They might not see it, because they don’t live in the same world the rest of us do," Ryan wrote of LeBron's handlers. "Or they might agree and not care, because they’re committed to doing this their way, all the way, trusting that history will eventually prove them wise."

I was at the beach last week when it happened. I watched it on a tiny, standard defintion television, and for that, I am grateful. Outside of live reality television, I have witnessed few events more uncomfortable than The Decision. The thing is, I didn't blame LeBron for doing it. I didn't blame him for doing it because I presumed it was all part of an orchestrated fake-out, that it was more of a comment on what sports have become than an unironic and tone-deaf event. I didn't blame LeBron because I presumed he knew that history would prove him wise, because he had his mind made up all along.

About that, I suppose I was correct.

4. "Remember MORE THAN A GAME?" my friend Bob wrote from Akron the morning after. "Practically the first event that is recounted in the film is LeBron deciding to not play for the public school (Buchtel), but instead going to St V.  Anyone who has a kid playing sports in a public school is familiar with the phenomenon - the gifted athletes running off to the moneyed schools.  In GAME, LeBron even says that he 'knew it would make a lot of people angry.'  And that he was going to play with his friends. To do 'what was best for him. To win.'"

There's no way an athlete or a fan can grow up in Northeast Ohio and not feel the weight of losing. It trickles down. It's in the bloodstream. My guess is LeBron felt it, too; maybe that self-doubt is what made him choose to escape, to take an easier path, to embrace almost certain victory. (He was a Yankee fan, after all.) At 25, every male is conflicted, and LeBron was, too: He loved his hometown, even if his hometown had trouble loving itself. He could either attempt to alter that self-image almost entirely on his own, or he could do what people have done for years now: He could escape. And it is to his credit, and to his blame, that he presumed the worst.

On LeBron and Home

Chris Broussard--whom I worked alongside at a once-proud newspaper in Akron, many lifetimes ago--has written an insightful piece for ESPN.com today about LeBron's decision to accept the MVP trophy in his hometown, and what that might mean. Broussard's take: LeBron is staying. I tend to agree. I tend to think that outwardly, more than any major sports star in recent memory, LeBron is something of an unmitigated goofball; whereas Jordan generally embraced showmanship when it contributed toward his cold and mercenary aims, LeBron--perhaps even moreso than Magic--is willing to embrace showmanship purely for the sake of narrative tension. (That's why no one would be truly surprised if LeBron's elbow injury is, in fact, a ruse to render this postseason more interesting.) LeBron is one of the first megastars of the reality television era, and I tend to think this whole free-agency gimmick is a way to build up the narrative stakes. I tend to believe that LeBron wants, in his heart, to re-sign with Cleveland; I tend to believe that the only way he signs somewhere else is if Cleveland somehow (idiotically) forces his hand or otherwise "disrespects" him*, and he has no choice but to go elsewhere in order to maintain his dignity.

Honestly, I lived in Akron for five years and I heard only one other person speak about Akron the way LeBron did in his press conference. That person is my friend David (who wrote this excellent book), and David has lived his whole life in Akron, and at this point, I can't imagine him ever leaving. If LeBron stays, even if he never wins a championship, he immediately becomes the most beloved athlete in the history of one of the most storied sports towns in America, a place where sporting success really does subsume everything. In New York, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, he becomes another cog in the machine. And in LeBron's head, I don't think that narrative is nearly as compelling.**

*What exactly I mean by this, I'm not sure. I just know contract negotiations are odd things.
**Disclaimer: Just in case you're reading this in November 2010, and LeBron is playing in a backcourt with Derrick Rose, let me state: I could be competely wrong about all of this.

(Photo: Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE/Getty Images)

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me (Extraterrestrial Edition)

1. Where Amazing (Finally) Happens

There is nothing in the world quite like the National Basketball Association, which is why most of us have a love/hate relationship with said entity. For six months, thirty teams travel from one major airline hub to the next, laboring through eighty-two glorified scrimmages, only to emerge from their cocoon of indifference one day in mid-April, acting as if they felt this way all along. The NBA playoffs are utterly transformative: Suddenly, elbows are being thrown, and the children of French pop stars are hurling insults at beleaguered cities.* The Nuggets stop pranking each other. Kobe becomes Frowning Kobe. LeBron becomes Hyperdrive LeBron. Everyone is suddenly serious, and combative, and the commissioner deals out unwarranted suspensions. There is no reason** the NBA regular season should not be cut back to 50 games, or even 35 games, the length of the college season.

2. Alien$

If you didn't watch this performance on Saturday Night Live--and there's absolutely no reason why you should have...well, I can't exactly recommend you watch it now. It's like a Weird Al video, if Weird Al had a sex change and donned spandex. But there is a moment at the 3:10 mark when this curious, financially obsessed Scrubs character pauses the action, steps into a shower of lime-colored lasers, and declares, "Did anyone ever stop to think maybe we are the aliens?" If Carl Sagan had grown up listening to Aqua and joined a sorority, this is what he might have become.

Also, brushing your teeth with a bottle of Jack Daniels seems like it would not do a commendable job of preventing tooth decay.

3. The Red Sox Are Mediocre Again

Which means single-game tickets should be available in approximately 2016, once the final pink hat is disposed of in a trash can on Lansdowne Street.

*Speaking of which: I enjoy a manufactured controversy as much as the next rabid media mob, but this Joakim Noah thing is ridiculous. And it's not ridiculous because Noah insulted Cleveland--I lived outside of Cleveland for five years, and much of what he says is absolutely correct. It's ridiculous because, well, he's insulting Cleveland. This is the best he can do? There's got to be a cultural statute of limitations on insulting Cleveland, and I believe it expired with the April 1977 issue of MAD magazine. If a guy is going to mouth off, at least come up with some new verses. David Stern is missing an opportunity on this one: He should fine Noah $10K for Unoriginal Taunting. That will set a precedent. Even if won't help the city of Cleveland.

**Other than money, the only reason that matters.

On Tall People

My latest ESPN column, exploring the logic (or perhaps lack thereof) behind the dearth of tall players in the NFL, can be found here. In keeping with the unexpectedly Cleveland-friendly vibe of this here blog, it is part of larger package about whether a certain very tall Akron-born individual (pictured) could make it as an NFL wide receiver.

This package was not my idea, but I think it is an intriguing one. As you can probably tell, I do not think it is humanly possible to engage in LeBron overkill at this moment in time; in the late 1990's, when I covered the PGA Tour, it was entirely justifiable to write a story about Tiger Woods every single day of a six-day tournament. (In fact, that's probably still true.) This was what interested people; this was what they wanted to read. The demand for profiles of Davis Love III was not exactly overwhelming. So I suppose if "media bias" consists of writing a greater number of stories about athletes that interest a greater number of people, then yes, media bias does exist. Alert the blogosphere at your leisure.

Anyway, let us all agree on an objective truth: In the NBA, the star system exists for a reason; in no other realm can a single individual become so clearly responsible for his team's success, especially in the playoffs. There are four teams remaining, anchored by four outstanding players; and while Carmelo Anthony has become the most weirdly fascinating superstar of this era, anchoring a team that plays like a ridiculously talented AAU squad; and while Dwight Howard is no doubt capable of strangling a crocodile with his bare hands, I would continue to submit that LeBron James is the most captivating athlete in the NBA, and Kobe is a close second, and the only people (beside ironic hipster contrarians) who might legitimately be able to say that they'd find an Orlando-Denver NBA finals more intriguing than LA-Cleveland are Walt Disney*, George O'Leary and John Elway.**

That said, it may happen anyway. In which case, it will be time to re-evaluate everything I've just said.

*Presuming there is basic cable in cryogenics facilities.
**And you should know that the author owns zero (0) pairs of Nike sneakers, and finds puppets kind of intimidating.