LeBron James, King of Narrative

“I’m not promising a championship,” wrote LeBron James in the 2014 press release-cum-open letter in Sports Illustrated that heralded his return to the Cleveland Cavaliers. “I want to win next year, but I’m realistic.” Of course, nothing about James has ever been realistic. One crucial fact—the otherworldliness of his ability on the court—has occasioned a science-fictional life. His acquaintance with an absurd, ever-intensifying celebrity began in high school, and, in response to that fame, and to the varied fruits of his talent, he has been trailed ever since by an antiphony of hosannas and heckles, overstated in both directions. The Sports Illustrated essay was an admirable attempt to curb expectations, but the terms of the basketball-watching public’s engagement with James have been clear for far too long: we have seen nothing quite like him, and so we accept from him nothing less than the heretofore impossible. Nike notwithstanding, there are no mere “Witnesses” to James’s greatness. We have waited, worried, praised, parsed, criticized, kvelled, but never been content simply to watch. This—a kind of mutual activeness—is the real joy of fandom in the LeBron Era: James is a rich text, a better subject for exegesis, for a kind of participatory reading, than any player before him. (In this respect, at least, he bests Michael Jordan, comparisons with whom, in the coming weeks, are inevitable. Jordan was a great individual player who then became a “winner,” and an exceptionally “ruthless” competitor. But, while Jordan’s competitiveness has occasioned some retrospective psychological profiling, he was not, during his playing days, laid out on the Freudian couch the way James has been.)

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