The backlash to LeBron James’ ‘Decision’ feels really silly now

On July 8, 2010, LeBron James walked through the gym at the Greenwich Boys & Girls Club as one of the world’s most beloved athletes, Cleveland’s ray of hope in an ocean of despair. James paid for the right to one hour of ESPN’s airwaves to tape “The Decision.” It reached 13 million hungry viewers, the majority of whom would inevitably be disappointed that he wasn’t joining their team. In Cleveland, police prepared for riots, in case he did the unthinkable.

When he did, uttering the most poorly-worded sentence of his career — I’m not going to say it — he became one of the most scorned men in America. James was joining the Miami Heat, forming a superteam with all-stars Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

Cleveland underwent an ugly catharsis. Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s infamous letter to fans, furiously typed up in Comic Sans font, called James a narcissist, a coward, a traitor. Jersey burning became a mass ritual. The money raised for The Boys & Girls Club was a $2.5 million footnote. Esquire writer and Cleveland native Scott Raab wrote a book about James that year. It was called The Whore of Akron.

On Dec. 2nd, 2010, James went back to Cleveland for his first game as a member of the Heat. Former Cavaliers general manager David Griffin described the reception to Jeff Zillgitt of USA Today as “vile as anything I’d ever seen.”

On Nov. 21, 2018, James will enter the Quicken Loans Arena for the first time since his second departure from the team, this time as a member of the Lakers. The reaction, thanks in no small part to the fact that he led the Cavaliers to their first title in franchise history in 2016, will be very different. He is now the redeemed hometown hero, in a world that feels centuries removed from The Decision, back when one could still over-leverage their brand enough to mutilate it.

The Decision was the worst mistake of LeBron’s career. If it happened eight years later, would it even register as a mistake?

The old heads hated it. David Stern implored ESPN not to move forward with the special. But the new kids were watching, taking notes.

In The Soul of Basketball, Ian Thomsen wrote that “Stern would engage in philosophical arguments with [Adam] Silver over the values of The Decision. He would warn his deputy against being ‘too nice’ about a show that had turned into a comedy of errors. Silver, in turn, would remind Stern that for all of the criticism ESPN had received for its amateurish production, the network remained proud of the high rating it delivered after two years of speculation about LeBron’s future.”

“I intellectually knew that all of the speculation about LeBron was getting us inches and feet that we would not otherwise get,” Stern told Thomsen. “But I didn’t have a gut reaction in that direction. My reaction was that it detracted from the game.”

Stern, here, thought good basketball and good entertainment were mutually exclusive. Silver saw the relationship as symbiotic.

Paul Pierce and the 2010-2011 Celtics wanted to teach LeBron a lesson. This summer, Paul George, whose free agency was packaged into a three-episode ESPN series, took a lesson from LeBron. Nobody batted an eyelash.

Back in 2010, TNT’s Charles Barkley said teaming up with Wade instead of trying to beat him took LeBron out of GOAT consideration. James was accused of stacking the deck. Six years later, Kevin Durant signed with the Warriors the summer after his former team, the Thunder, blew a 3-1 lead against them in the Conference Finals.

Durant took another page from LeBron’s book by signing multiple one-year deals, putting himself on the right side of a power imbalance that has triggered consternation in the Warriors’ locker room and may have cost teammate Draymond Green $120,000 last week.

Of course, LeBron wasn’t only booed in Cleveland. On the road, fans of teams that had no stakes in LeBron’s free agency relentlessly attacked him when he touched the ball. The Heat were the NBA’s super villains.

It wasn’t just about what he did, you see. It was about the way he did it. He broke Cleveland’s heart on national television. He sounded like an egomaniac, referring to himself in the third person, possessing the gall to think the location of his employment warranted a television special. It was a garish spectacle, the moment when the commercial largess that augmented the league finally threatened to cannibalize it.

That was the idea, right?

OK, now go back and watch the special. LeBron’s interview is 10 minutes long, which I understand is enough time to refresh your Twitter feed at least 107 times, but I’m sure you can find some clothes to fold. Here, I even dropped in this nice convenient link in for you:

So. This is utterly boring television.

LeBron hardly sounds like an egomaniac. In fact, he sounds nervous, filling the dead air with “um”’s that have since been eradicated from his vocabulary, shifting in and out of his chair when host Jim Gray asks if he still bites his fingernails.

The center of the basketball universe’s Herculean fame is concealed inside a striped purple and white shirt, grey pleated pants, and beige shoes. He looks like a marketing major interviewing for a contracting gig, and he’s hitting on all the necessary talking points. His heart will always be in Cleveland, where the fans watched him grow from a boy into a man. In a perfect world, he would have stayed. His mother told him to do what he thought would make him happy. He listened. It was tough, but he harbors no doubts about his decision. He’s excited to join his best friend Wade, and praises his new teammates selflessness and he’s ready to sacrifice, because in the end, it’s all about winning.

LeBron’s free agency in 2010 happened in July, but unofficially marked the turn of the decade. It was the moment that separated the scripted reality TV theatrics of the 2000s from the real-life theater of the internet, where the speculation and hate played out. Two days before he announced he was joining the Heat, LeBron sent his first tweet.

James understood his influence and brazenly forced fans to sit through his free agency, unearthing a truth many weren’t quite ready to deal with back then: he could wield control over us. He knew it. He used it.

Several social media platforms, online shopping binges, celebrity apps, group chats, and phantom phone vibrations later, we have learned to register the shiny objects that brands throw in our direction as the mere byproduct of participating in the attention economy. It is governed by a generation of millennials whose live-and-let-live ethos and defeatism in the face of the 24-hour news cycle have combined so that even the heights of celebrity excess produce nothing more than a bunch of memes and confused shrugs. By today’s standards, The Decision is the sporting equivalent to President Barack Obama wearing a tan suit to work.

LeBron leveraged all his power into one moment just because he could, while logos for his sponsors lined the backdrop of the set where he set the terms for the NBA’s future. The question, eight years later, has morphed from why would he do that to, well, who wouldn’t?