LeBron James: The most hated guy in sports

Oh, “that was sweet,” said Scott Raab in Esquire.com. The Miami Heat’s loss to the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA finals this week was greeted with a “raucous mixture of public derision and public glee.” Millions of sports fans have rooted against the Heat, and their megalomaniacal young superstar LeBron James, since he abandoned the unglamorous Cleveland Cavaliers and joined two other major stars in glitzy Miami, announcing his choice in a one-hour TV special he pompously called “The Decision.” His new superteam, James said, was virtually guaranteed to win a championship. But in the finals, James choked under pressure, and after the Heat collapsed in the sixth and final game, the 26-year-old multimillionaire contemptuously dismissed the little people celebrating his defeat by saying, “They got to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had today. And I’m going to continue to live the way I want to live.” The big baby thus “earned every dram of vitriol, and validated every critic.’’

Where’s this venom coming from? said Mark Heisler in the Los Angeles Times. You’d think James had done “something like manage the Little Old Ladies Life’s Savings Hedge Fund and lose all their money.” If James often sounds like a pompous jerk, it’s because the media “set him on a pedestal in high school” and have been hyping him ever since. After James froze for seven winters in Cleveland’s Lake Erie winds, said Bob Ford in The Philadelphia Inquirer, he shouldn’t be faulted for seeking championships in South Beach’s warmth. There’s “something a little unsettling” about how much people are gloating that he fell a few games short of his goal.

Maybe it’s because James is such “a fascinating mess,” said Bryan Burwell in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Perhaps the most talented basketball player ever, he’s also “an incredibly immature young man,” ill-prepared to handle the blessing and the curse of his physical gifts. In the long run, his failure in the finals—and the humiliation that goes with it—may actually be just what LeBron needed, said Michael Rosenberg in SI.com. Fans would have hated him forever if he’d won a title in his first year in Miami. Now there’s a chance for a new story line: The fallen star comes back humbled, and the public, seeing his gnawing hunger to redeem himself, decides to forgive him. “We have forgiven far worse.”

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