MIAMI — Uncle. He gives. LeBron James can put Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook on the brink all he wants. Some games he’ll never win.
Closing in on an elusive championship won’t alter everyone’s perception. I found that out last week through a barrage of e-mails offering reasons why LeBron should still be rooted against, not for.
Okay, he did declare himself royalty before he ever earned a crown. And, yes, LeBron broke up with his employer and his fans in Cleveland through a television set rather than doing the right and proper thing and calling them first.
If he didn’t become the embodiment of the disconnected, look-at-me professional athlete then, he surely helped his cause in a character-killing moment at the end of last season, when he wilted in the fourth quarter against Dallas. Remember the quote:
“All the people that were rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day, they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I’m going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that. They can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal. But they have to get back to the real world at some point.”
Basically, LeBron was saying, “You are peasants; I am King James.”
In life, these aren’t criminal acts. In sports, where fans help pay the exorbitant salaries of players through ticket and paraphernalia purchases, these are considered crimes against the game. I get it.
But if you could see the thoughtful, introspective and, yes, regretful LeBron who took the podium between Games 4 and 5 of these NBA Finals late Wednesday afternoon you would see authentic change.
“Last year after Game 6, after losing, once again, I was very frustrated,” LeBron said when asked to describe the pain of his Finals experiences, in 2007 and 2011. “I was very hurt that I let my teammates down, and I was very immature. Like I said, last year I played to prove people wrong instead of just playing my game, instead of just going out and having fun and playing a game that I grew up loving and why I fell in love with the game. So I was very immature last year after Game 6 towards you guys and towards everyone that was watching.”
He wasn’t done. He needed to unload, tell everyone that guy wasn’t who he ever wanted to be. “One thing that I learned, and someone taught me this, the greatest teacher you can have in life is experience,” LeBron added.
Durant and Oklahoma City will some year soon have their moment. But these are LeBron’s Finals. This is his time, his championship to finally seize Thursday night in Game 5.
You don’t have to feel differently about him when the moment arrives. But to ignore the transformation in himself and his game is to ignore everything that got him to the precipice of his first title.
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