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Burned To A Crisp - Good Article On Lebron
Awesome article in the Chicago Sun-Times about how Lebron knew about this the whole time. Read this
http://www.suntimes.com/sports/morri...ssey09.article
LeBron devalues himself, cruelly betrays Cleveland, deceives rest of us
July 9, 2010
BY RICK MORRISSEY Sun-Times Columnist
Feeling betrayed? Feeling as if you've been had, played, used, misled?
Feeling as if men in hazmat suits should arrive to decontaminate you?
You should be feeling that way, fool. Join the rest of us suckers who thought LeBron James cared about a challenge.
As his one-hour, prime-time ode to self-indulgence clearly showed, all James cares about is his legacy. He cares about winning only as it pertains to what it can do for him. He's going to Miami, which will have three of the top 10 players in the league in its starting lineup.
The NBA has just turned into a farce, friends.
No amount of words from James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh will be able to convince some of us that Thursday night's announcement wasn't a done deal weeks ago, months ago, years ago.
''I think I decided [Thursday] morning,'' he said.
Sure you did, LeBron.
The intrigue, the splashy free-agent interview tour, the pained facial expressions of indecision on the faces of Wade, Bosh and James -- all of it looks like something out of a bad summer-stock production.
''The Decision,'' as ESPN and James' team pompously titled it, didn't look like a decision at all. It looked like a wink and a snicker.
''The Deception'' is more like it.
Even by NBA standards, James' self-importance is stunning and, in his case, extremely disappointing. He was supposed to be different, better. A caring guy, we were told. Complex, too.
Well, no.
People are always talking about the journey being more important than the destination. There's no journey here, or if there is one, it's a blink of an eye, and a bought blink, at that.
When James wins his first title in Miami, what will he say about the fait accompli as he hugs Wade and Bosh on the court? That he can't believe it's happening? That so many doubters had said this day would never come?
Those will be the emptiest words on record.
No matter how many titles James wins, they will be devalued by the fact he needed to join ranks with Wade and Bosh to do it.
Had he remained in Cleveland and won a title, he would have been called an American hero for staying true to his team and his state.
Had he come to Chicago and won a title, he would have gotten high marks for pushing a young, talented team over the hump. Any feeling of accomplishment he feels in Miami will pale compared with how he would have felt in winning with the Bulls.
Had he gone to New York and built a champion with Amar'e Stoudemire, he'd have gotten major props for rolling the dice.
But this? This is a playground game in which the best players unite to own the court on a Saturday afternoon.
Where's the accomplishment in that?
Getting a ring with Wade and Bosh won't make LeBron any more a winner than if he started wearing an "I'm a Winner" T-shirt. He'll be the superstar who had to grab onto someone else's shirttails to win.
In that way, Wade and Bosh are the ultimate performance- enhancers.
Don't kid yourselves: The Heat will win multiple NBA titles. It's true it'll have very little salary-cap space left after paying James, Wade and Bosh. But they don't need special players to make this work. All they need are good-enough players to go along with the Big Three.
James called going to Miami ''the best opportunity to win and to win now and to win into the future.'' He's right, but what, in the end, will it really mean?
Historically, the Heat won't be in the same league as Michael Jordan's Bulls or Kobe Bryant's Lakers. There will be an invisible asterisk next to James' titles: *Used free agency to form an All-Star team.
Bulls gave it a shot
As for the Bulls, they tried and ended up looking like an afterthought in all of this. Don't blame them for it. They offered James the truest version of a team. He wouldn't have had to rationalize his decision had he joined Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah, Carlos Boozer and Luol Deng. Even Cavaliers fans might have understood the talent and the challenge.
What LeBron did to Cleveland on Thursday night was cruel. He didn't stop at stabbing the city in the heart. He had the cameras rolling as he kicked at the lifeless body. It wouldn't have mattered if he had picked the Bulls, the Knicks or the Nets. There was no need to torture Cleveland with the buildup and the TV special. None.
He used kids from the Boys & Girls Club of Greenwich, Conn., as human shields during Thursday's announcement and mentioned that his mom wholeheartedly supported his move to Miami. All was sweetness until you realized poor Mom was going to need a full-time security detail in Ohio after LeBron outed her as a Heat sympathizer.
But on this night, if not on most, it was all about him.
Of playing with Wade and Bosh, he said, ''I can't say it was always in my plans because I never thought it was possible.''
Sure you didn't, LeBron.
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