The Myth Of LeBron James

[swerb]

Wow ... what a column. Talk about some classic excerpts:

By 1985, however, Bron was almost a year old when the Browns squandered a 21 point first half playoff game lead against Dan Marino. You can’t feel too badly about that one, though. The prize for the other Cinderella team that year was to get housed by the best single season football team I’ve ever seen. The 21 point fiasco was merely a warm up act for the upcoming tragedy in three parts. We know it like we know ourselves. The Drive. The Fumble. The “what’s-that-rubber-band-on-Bernie’s-finger” game. Three up, three down in our Super Bowl shots to the same inferior horsed faced team. The most beloved group of players in my time as a Cleveland sports fan came away from three trips to the penultimate goal with nada more than the limitless unconditional adoration of millions of die-hard fans, and a few car dealerships after retirement. Our regional Ohio hero, Bernie Kosar, who rigged the system to play for us after having enough common sense to grow up in the Mahoning Valley and NOT be a Pittsburgh fan proved to be mortal and gone within four more seasons.

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1997 had to be the year. An underachieving Indians’ team did the unthinkable in the clutch: Sandy Alomar hit a miracle home run to beat the heavily favored and heavily hated Yankees as their untouchable closer was slamming the door. A shaky World Series opponent had us on the ropes, but had been beaten back by this team of destiny, and now we stood but two outs from the long awaited Cleveland sports title that no one born after 1964 had ever seen. I can still recall standing there in front of the television, pacing. It was surreal. So this is what it was going to feel like? This is what I’ve waited for and believed would happen someday? This is why I’d spent thousands of hours of my life being a fan so it could lead up to this one moment? Years of cheering my heart out for the ridiculous and the sublime got me to that moment. Steve Holden and Webster Slaughter. Mike Phipps and Brian Sipe. Braylon Edwards and Paul Warfield. John Bagley and Terrell Brandon. Don Ford and Mark Price. Jerome Whitehead for a number one pick. Jack Brohammer. Ron Brown and Tom Sklandany. Mack Mitchell and Dave Puzzoli. Hanford and Minny. Fritz Peterson. Ernie Camacho and Lenny Barker. Super Joe. Class acts like Duane Kuiper, Bernie, Byner and Campy Russell. Dooshbags like Keith Hernandez and Andre Rison. Pete Franklin, Bruce Drennan, Bob Kravitz and Doug Clarke. Hal. Oh my God, I can see my house from up here.

Banjo hitters, Mesa meltdown, Grover in a coma, I believe it’s getting serious. Extra innings. Gut wrenching loss. Who let that Aztec priest in my house and what is he doing to my chest?

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Boston fan used to whine about the Red Sox through two Celtics dynasties, a Stanley Cup, and multiple recent Super Bowls. Up yers Chowds. Pain? What do you know of pain? Gimme 6 Bill Buckers and a dozen Bucky Dents for the Celtics’ ’84 title win alone. Cubs’ fan? You cheesy poseurs. You get MJ, a Sox title, and the 46 defense. A pox on you, HBO, as well. I got your goat right here. I can go on and on about whining fans of single teams in other cities that co-habitate with championship franchises and how hypocritical they all are. Buffalo fan gets a pass. Y’all’s teams suck. Bad. San Diego fan gets no love as they live in America’s most beautiful city. But both y’all have only had two franchises for most of this time frame, having only had cups of coffee with the same NBA franchise.

The national media and commentators bring these incidents up in isolation sometimes. Occasionally, a few who lived among us connect the dots as Steve Kerr did last week. But they don’t know. They can’t know. They haven’t lived the whole TCE.

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Let’s put this in the proper perspective. Watching LeBron James do what he did that Thursday night in Detroit in Game 5 against that media hyped “great” defensive team wasn’t a spectacular basketball performance. It transcended that. It wasn’t even really about athletics. What he did was reach a level of human perfection that is not even considered to exist in the realm of the possible. What he did was legendary, mythical. We weren’t watching Bron on the court, we were watching Achilles on the plains outside the walls of Troy. We were watching Michelangelo paint the ceiling. We were listening to Lincoln say a few words to consecrate the final resting place of thousands of young men in south central Pennsylvania. We were watching greatness and perfection that should not exist in the reality of our human condition. It was beyond any reasonable expectation to achieve, beyond even our ability to witness with credibility. And yet we were all witnesses.

And he topped it in game six.

When LeBron James subjugated his own accomplishments for those of the team the next game, he somehow he managed to step up even from his personal perfection the previous game. When he gives yet another post game interview where he comes off as level headed, confident but not cocky, well-spoken but with real perspective, you marvel at all he’s accomplished and the man he’s become given the challenges of both his immense obstacles and great blessings that seem to otherwise shape the maladjusted young men who seem to disproportionately represent today’s professional athletic superstars. LeBron James is as differentiated by his character as much as by his talents and accomplishments. I am so proud he’s one of us.

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The Cavaliers will be world champions soon. Believe it. The Chosen One will deliver us safely across the shore where we will rejoin Otto Graham, Lou Groza, Satchel Page, Lou Boudreau, and even Ray Chapman. Swing low, oh sweet chariot, carrying us all forth to witness rim jarring posterizations and impossible fade away treys, coming forth to take our long suffering asses home to that long awaited championship Promised Land.

With apologies to a great ad campaign, we are not all witnesses. We Cleveland fans are participants soon to be fully delivered from a lifetime of disappointment by one of us. The Chosen One, from Akron, Ohio shall lead us.

Up your butt, Jobu.

[mattvan1]

A great piece, altough the mocking of Jobu was ballsy. Very ballsy.

[consigliere]

A great piece JB.

That said, all this "it is our year" talk is very much like the FU JOBU talk back in Sept 2005. We know how that turned out.

Just sayin.

[Jobu]

Just stopping by to say hello!!!

My ears are burning!


Uhhh... what was it that you guys were talking about again?

[consigliere]

Ya know, if SA management was smart, they'd be handing out Jobu dolls ot t-shirts to all fans in attendance tonight for them to use and show during the game.

If we DO win this series.....we gotta make a t-shirt to sell on the site. I don't know what image to display or words to use, but "F Jobu....and Lucy Too!" come to mind.

[swerb]

[rawdawgexpress]

Here's a passage from a book that I was reading a couple of months ago. It touches on the concept of witness. Which is something we've all been going through in the last couple of years here in Cleveland. I don't want to get all philosophic but here it is.

The book is by R. Scott Bakker and is entitled "The Warrior-Prophet", (which incidentally would be a sweet nickname for Lebron). Italics are his.


"But not all seeing," Kellhus replies, "is witness."
"I don't understand..."
"Witness is the seeing that testifies, that judges so that it may be judged. You saw, and you judged. A trespass had been committed, an innocent had been murdered. You saw this."

"Yes!" the man hissed. "A little girl. A little girl!"

"And now you suffer..... Everywhere... Everywhere we're surrounded by the blessed and the cursed, the sacred and the profane. But our hearts are like hands, they grow callous to the world. And yet, like our hands even the most callous heart will blister if overworked of chafed by something new. For sometime we may feel the pinch, but we ignore it because we have so much work to do." Kellhus looked down into his right hand. Suddenly he balled it into a fist, raised it high.

"And then one strike, with a hammer or a sword, and the blister breaks, our heart is torn. And then we suffer, for we feel the ache for the blessed, the sting of the cursed. We no longer see, we witness.....

Rejoice. .... Yes, rejoice! The calloused hand cannot feel the lover's cheek. When we witness, we testify, and when we testify we make ourselves responsible for what we see. And that- that - is what it means to belong."


The genius of the advertising is not that it told us how to interpret the Myth of Lebron, but that it perfectly described what was already happening. Lebrons's preturnatural skill is so obvious, and he's a local boy come to make a bad situation good. Anyone with a heart who cares about sports or even just good stories has to be moved by that.

Lebron vs. TCE. Not to be cliche but its the unstoppable force versus immoveable object. And this tension is what we all are Witness to- and we all belong to that here in Cleveland. Its really pretty amazing.

But, in truth, I think that we'll get our asses handed to us this series. Because its not just Lebron versus TCE, its Lebron versus TCE and the San Antonio Spurs. I mean, San Antonio is really good, and totally professional, they are tough yet they play a sharp, fundamentally-sound offense. Anyone who saw Suns-Spurs has to say that's the real series. What great basketball.

And our own scattershot offense has the fluid motion of a Rube Goldberg invention. It just isn't efficient enough. But we'll take our medicine and come back next year.


rawdawg

ps
Other Lebron nicknames I like:
"Freight Train"
"Lebron Game"

[MacGregor78]

Woohoo! My first post!


That was a great read. Very well written and definitely described the TCE.

[pup]

June 13, 2007 – With the NBA Finals now even at 3 games apiece, David Stern announces that you will no longer be able to cover one player with more than 2 players during any Game 7. LeBron scores 78 and leads the Cavs to the NBA Championship! The win ends Cleveland Fan’s misery, winning their first league title since 1948, which just happened to be the last time the Chinese Calendar fell as “The Year of the Boar”.


This is from : http://www.swerbsblurbs.com/article_detail.php?id=1179

as well as: “Year of the Boar” t-shirt sales skyrocket.

Go ahead and start printing them up for the store Rich!!

[consigliere]

More like "The Year of the Runner-up"

[Hi Oktane]

More like "The Year of the Runner-up"

A bit of precedence there, no doubt. Something about this playoff run that just feels different. And, besides, no Florida teams in these Finals.

[consigliere]

More like "The Year of the Runner-up"

A bit of precedence there, no doubt. Something about this playoff run that just feels different. And, besides, no Florida teams in these Finals.

Oh, I agree. Verily. I was just funnin.

You are right though, it *does* feel different with what the Cavs were able to do the last four games against Detroit. And, Lebron is awake and will be at the top of his game, which means the Cavs will be too.

Part of me thinks this series will be a classic seven-gamer with every game from Game 2-7 being decided in the final minutes like games 1-5 of the Detroit-Cavs series. And with that, it is a complete toss up who wins. The other part of me though thinks we Cleveland fans are in for a rude awakening and we get toasted in 4-5 games. Thankfully, no more guessing and predicting as the series finally starts tonight. We will see whether or not we can hang with SA.