James: The meaning of ‘The Decision’

“I need a shower,” said Rick Telander in the Chicago Sun-Times, because “LeBron James just made me feel dirty.” Oh, it wasn’t the NBA star’s long-awaited decision last week to jilt his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers and join two other big stars in signing with the Miami Heat. No, it was the way James announced it: in an hourlong prime-time TV special designed to marinate James in as much hype and glory as possible, while inflicting maximum disappointment on those cities—New York, Chicago, and especially Cleveland—that had quite literally begged James to take their $110 million. Our culture has been shallow for some time now, said Jeff Jacobs in The Hartford Courant. But the moment America tuned in to watch a pampered narcissist abandon a blighted American city on the grounds that he “needed to do what was best for LeBron James”—note the obligatory athletic third-person—“we officially became the shallowest, most sports-fixated, most celebrity-obsessed society in the history of humankind.”

Actually, that moment began a few years ago, said Jerome Solomon in the Houston Chronicle, when the country succumbed to the charms of reality TV. If chefs and New Jersey housewives and tone-deaf singers can command the attention of millions, why can’t the best player in the NBA? LeBron James, at least, raised $300,000 for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America by televising “The Decision,” and “we’re supposed to find fault with that?” As for LeBron’s “selfishness,” said Greg Cote in The Miami Herald, he could have made more money by staying in Cleveland. Instead, he’s choosing to share the spotlight with fellow superstars Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami, in hopes of winning a championship. For a supposed narcissist in an age of shallowness and greed, “that’s a little bit remarkable.”

Spare me the Gandhi comparisons, said Jonathan Zimmerman in CSMonitor.com. The heroic “pay cut” James is taking to play in Miami will leave him scraping by on a paltry $18.3 million a year. The real scandal here is not James’ narcissism but the fact that a basketball player could sign a multiyear contract for $110 million, “when millions of Americans aren’t getting paid at all,” 40 million are scraping by on food stamps, and even the middle class is one paycheck from disaster. Cleveland may have lost a superstar, but America has lost something more valuable—“our sense of moral outrage about inequality.”

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