He used to be one. There were a variety of reasons, all of them reasonable and at the same time utterly bullshit, because that's the nature of fandom. Allegiances to teams and players are mostly arbitrary, usually determined by geographic location, who your parents root for, or because when you were six you thought that team had a cool name or uniform. That's how we decide who to root for and who to root against. And because we care so much about these arbitrarily chosen teams, they become an extension of who we are, and we feel we are an extension of who they are. So when a great player comes along and dominates your team, we take it personally. It's idiotic, pointless, illogical, and yet completely accepted by the masses.
The "we" I'm talking about is pretty much everyone outside of Miami and LeBron's family. Me personally, I hated LeBron because he burst on the basketball scene as the next Michael Jordan. No, strike that. He was meant to be greater than Jordan. "The Chosen One." He even wore the same number as MJ, 23, while he played for Cleveland. As a Bulls fan who grew up idolizing His Airness and witnessing the sheer destructiveness of the Bulls teams of the '90s, this trumpeting of James as someone who was sure to surpass Jordan's greatness was an affront to everything that defines me as a Bulls fan. You degrade my player, my team, my city, you degrade me by extension. Or at least that's how I used to think.
James took the NBA by storm when he arrived in Cleveland. He lived up to the hype: The Akron Hammer, the one who had what it took to carry the Cavaliers to the Finals. Time and time again I watched him beat the Bulls. So not only was he replacing MJ, he was rubbing it in my face. So I began rooting for his failure. When he made it to the Finals for the first time and lost, I felt a great deal of schadenfreude. As he continued to wrack up wins and playoff appearances, that schadenfreude grew. As long as he never won a ring, he'd never equal Jordan. That's all that mattered. Idiotic, pointless, illogical, and completely accepted by Chicagoans and nearly everyone outside of Cleveland.
LeBron left Cleveland in a poor manner, that's not even a debate. Up until that point, the hatred of James was based purely on that bullshit nature of fandom. But then he publicly humiliated Cleveland, leaving a midwestern city for the glitzy, sunny locale of Miami. Now that's just unacceptable, and almost enough evidence to reasonably hate on James. Almost. So he went and joined his friends in Miami in hopes of finally winning an NBA title. His decision was motivated by a desire to win, fair enough. But then Miami held that stupid parade/pep rally where James went on about winning, "not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six," championships. Notice he implied winning more than six rings, the number that Jordan has. I took that personally.
With a new Big Three down in Miami, the desire to see LeBron fail seemed to grow. Joining with his superstar buddies in order to win championships felt like cheating somehow. A type of loophole for collusion. In the days and months after The Decision, a number of former NBA stars came about how they wouldn't have teamed up like that: Bird, Magic, and Jordan. MJ said something along the lines of wanted to beat them rather than join them in order to prove how good he was. And so I ate that up, believing it with the furor of some evangelical eating up a fiery sermon.
LeBron and the Big Three culminated their inaugural season by losing in the NBA Finals to the Dallas Mavericks, a team whose superstar player (Dirk Nowitzki) and owner (Mark Cuban) seemed to deserve a ring more so that James and company. Unlike the Heat, the Mavs' roster wasn't built New York Yankees style: Paying top dollar for the best players. Dirk chose to re-sign with Dallas the previous summer, so he had the loyalty factor LeBron no longer had, and the Mavs themselves were a team, not three superstars and some roster fillers. All this made Dallas's victory even sweeter, because I'm stupid like that.
Then something weird happened: He won. They won. And the rapture didn't even occur.
One you accept the fact that there will only ever be one Michael Jordan (or one Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain), it gets a lot easier to not hate on LeBron.
There's been a lot said and written about LeBron throughout his career. We like to look at sports as more than just a bunch of guys doing things with bats and balls and hoops and helmets. We like our sports to carry a narrative, a live-action story we tune into night in and night out. And as with all stories, there have to be plots, settings, protagonists, antagonists, happy endings, and sad endings. But because the lens with which we sports fans use to look through when cheering on our team or booing another one is a bullshit lens, the characters and their roles are bullshit as well. Inevitably, James ends up cast as a villain: A selfish, disloyal antagonist whose failures strengthen our self-esteem because we like to live through those good guys who defeat James on the court.
I'll probably go back to hating on LeBron once the next season kicks off, only this time with much less ammunition to rely on when trying to portray him as the bad guy. Truthfully, though, there are no bad guys or good guys in sports (unless you're some legitimate asshole like Pacman Jones or Jerramy Stevens) because, once again, it's all arbitrary. If you're only crime is beating my team, I don't really hate you. I kinda hate you, but deep down not really. I only sorta hate you because I'm supposed to, because you're ruining the narrative of a happy ending for the good guys.
So congratulations, LeBron James. You finally did it, and I can't reasonably say I hate you for it. You earned it. Good for you.
