That title may sound like hyperbole, but then you read the latest from Yahoo! Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski and... Well, see for yourself:
Is LeBron James The Personification Of Evil?
...it’s clear James is influencing Wade. With Udonis Haslem out for the regular season, the locker room misses one of its vital voices. Now, Wade is struggling on the floor and James is the devil on his shoulder, whispering that he doesn’t need to be accountable...
Indeed, if we’re talking about the devil, figurative analogies are about as concrete as the comparisons get. So, yeah: LeBron is the devil, according to at least one journalist. It’s a new watermark in the flood of LeBron backlash that’s engulfed the media ever since LeBron’s free agency escapade this past July.
Mind you, I’m no LeBron apologist, but the spectacle of supposedly unbiased, irrational LeBron-hate is every bit as ridiculous and captivating as any of LeBron’s behavior the past few months. And it’s high entertainment.
But where I’ve gone on record admiring the work of someone like Scott Raab, it’s a little creepy to see a writer put forth this stuff as unbiased analysis. Or, you know, journalism. Where Raab’s work is essentially memoir, this other stuff is full of un-sourced speculation being used to crucify someone in a supposedly unbiased setting. To wit:
- “[Cavs’ coach Mike] Brown praised James’ character publicly when he would’ve preferred to have been truthful about James’ narcissism. James defied Brown in public and private, disregarded his play calls to freelance his offense, and belittled him without consequence within the Cleveland Cavaliers.”
- ”the NBA witnessed a predictable play out of the James-Maverick Carter playbook on Monday morning. They planted a story and exposed themselves again as jokers of the highest order. They care so little about anyone but themselves.”
- “The fundamental problem for Spoelstra isn’t that James doesn’t respect coaches – he doesn’t respect people. ... He treats everyone like a servant, because that’s what the system taught him as a teenage prodigy. To James, the coach isn’t there to mold him into the team dynamic. He’s there to serve him.”
We could continue on, but it’d amount to quoting nearly the entire article.
In fairness, a lot of this analysis rings true. Given the symbiotic relationship between James’ representation and ESPN reporter Chris Broussard, it’s not hard to guess where Broussard got his off-the-record, insider-quotes from in yesterday’s story about Eric Spoelstra’s suddenly unstable job security. But just for the record, that doesn’t make LeBron evil, and it certainly doesn’t make him responsible for poisoning Dwyane Wade’s supposedly immaculate virtue. LeBron’s left people like me and Scott Raab plenty of room for derision, but this demonization is taking it a few steps too far.
There’s a difference between connecting the dots and painting a completely separate, much darker picture. We can paint LeBron as unsympathetic without turning him into the NBA’s Lord Voldemort.
If you’d like to pretend a character like ‘Bron is new in sports and somehow dangerous, ignoring other spoiled athletes and former prodigies that have overcome entitlement to win titles, then that’s fine. Go ahead. Bemoan LeBron’s dominance of the current landscape in sports and read between the lines to cite AAU hoops and “prodigy culture” for the downfall of civilization and civilized behavior among athletes. It makes for an entertaining story. Just don’t pretend its objective is objectivity.
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