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With all due respect, you're taking this "King James" thing too far.
Being a great player and one of the best talkers in the league doesn't mean every half-baked idea that pops into your head has to come out of your mouth. If all you want is a new number, say so. If it's more adulation, then just say that. There is enough of both left to go around.
If it's only the number, send a letter to the league office by March handing back No. 23, bring your marketing people into the loop and then show up next season - wherever that turns out to be - wearing No. 6.
It's that easy.
In the meantime, save your breath. Nobody is buying that cockamamie story about you wanting to make sure that Michael Jordan 's contributions to the game are "recognized in some way - soon."
Jordan already has one of the most recognizable faces on the planet. He also owns six NBA rings, every other line in the record book, two Olympic golds, an NCAA championship, a statue in Chicago, a bust in the Hall of Fame and a fortune - I could go on - but perhaps most impressive, his name is, and always will be, part of the conversation whenever and wherever basketball is played.
He's done fine without your help.
And as long we're being brutally honest, the one thing you could do for him is to hang onto your old number. More than a few of us see it on your back and think, "That No. 23 is incredible ... but he's no Michael Jordan."
If it's any consolation, neither is anyone else. Kobe Bryant tried going down that road - copying Jordan's walk, mannerisms and even his speech patterns - but it turned out to be a dead end. It took him a while to figure it out, but you can't be like Mike, either - at least not until you've got a half-dozen championships in the bag.
Being compared to him has to be more depressing still. My guess is that's what prompted this whole episode. You were in Miami the other night, with Jordan in the stands, yet all anybody talked about before the game was the announcement that Heat guard Dwayne Wade had been "hand-picked" by Michael to debut the 25th anniversary model of the popular Air Jordan sneaker line.
So you drop 34 points on the Heat, win the game, and come up with an homage of your own: a petition drive to get every player who wears No. 23 to give it up and retire the number league-wide. Never mind that NBA policy leaves the decision up to each team.
"I feel like no NBA player should wear 23," you said. "Nobody. If I'm not going to wear No. 23, then nobody else should be able to wear it."
Maybe it's just coincidence the dozen other players currently wearing the number are rookies or scrubs; or that a new No. 6 jersey might be the only way to nudge you back atop Kobe on the merchandise-sold list. But the first maneuver makes you look like a bully, and the second like a pawn in some viral marketing campaign.
Then again, maybe it's just part of your preparations for what's already been dubbed "The Summer of LeBron." You'll be an unrestricted free agent then, with an unfettered hand to write your own ticket in a town of your choosing. The higher-ups in Cleveland won't tell you to button it up at the moment because they won't risk aggravating you.
Apparently, you didn't hear the word 'no' often growing up, and there's no chance you'll hear it from the assembly of yes men surrounding you now. But you're a smart kid and besides, it's never too late to exercise a little self-control.
So do the rest of us a favor: no more carrying on about how you want to honor Jordan by taking off No. 23, or how you plan to begin honoring Julius Erving by putting on No. 6. More than a few of us see that number even now and think of Bill Russell first.
That's the problem with your whole plan.
There are great players in every era, but nearly every one of them won a few titles before they began regularly holding court. You're in the headlines almost every day, but you've been to the NBA Finals exactly once. As Magic coach Stan Van Gundy tried to explain, a little perspective in such matters goes a long way.
When Van Gundy heard about the plan to retire Jordan's number, he started making up a list. Even the shortest one would have to include Russell, Wilt, Kareem, Oscar, Dr. J, Magic and Bird.
"There were guys who could play the game before Michael. LeBron James didn't grow up watching those guys play," Van Gundy said.
"Pretty soon our players will be wearing 373. All the two-digit numbers will be taken."
The great thing about being a kid is that by Tuesday night, you'd already moved on to another topic - offering to save the Cleveland Browns.
"If I put all my time and commitment into it, if I dedicated myself to the game of football, I could be really good," you said.
No doubt.
But the next time the temptation to talk about yourself arises, remember - leave a little oxygen for the rest of us.
Lebron is delusional. He refers to himself as "King James," and is too good for handshakes and allowing the world to know he got dunked on. He has zero rings and thinks the entire NBA should listen to what he has to say...
And people think Kobe is arrogant, Lebron outpaces him in that area already...
No one currently wearing #23 deserves it. Lebron and J-Richardson are the only two successful players that come to mind... and if they're willing to give up the number then the other 10 or so scrubs who wear it should be ashamed to want to keep it.
That being said, I don't necessarily agree with it. Retiring your # league wide should be limited to players like Jackie Robinson. MJ's an icon and will get his though... i'm sure an award will be named after him later on (Podolof's MVP trophy could be a candidate). But LeBron has a point. If Gretzky's number is retired league wide... why isn't MJs? If the league can't/won't do it, what's so bad about him starting a petition to 'unofficially' retire it (ala Mario Lemieux)?
Unless of course everyone just want to focus on hating Lebron for being on ESPN too much. In which case we can ignore the sentiment altogether and talk about what an ego this guy has =P
LeBron James Encourages NBA To Stop Jumping In Honor Of Michael Jordan
WASHINGTON—Prior to Wednesday's game against the Washington Wizards, Cleveland Cavaliers all-star LeBron James announced that he would stop jumping during professional basketball games in order to properly honor recent Hall of Fame inductee Michael Jordan. "MJ jumped a lot. It was his signature. When players jump in this league, whether for a tip-off, a jump shot, or a layup, they're basically copying what Michael Jordan did when he would propel himself upward and lift both feet off the ground," James told reporters in a press conference in which he asked other players to join him in the ground-staying-on tribute. "The fact of the matter is, without MJ changing the game by making his body go up into the air, us young guys wouldn't even know what jumping is." James later scored 38 points against the last-place Wizards with his feet flat on the floor.
I also forgot to add that this clown thinks he could turn around an NFL team with his regal greatness...I would love to see Lebron go across the middle and get a nice welcome to real football...
Just watched Letravel play the Wizards on Wednesday night.
There was a play in which he carried and double dribbled the ball in the same possesion. The refs called him for it and he went on his typical how dare you call me for a violation rant. The replay clearly showed both violations, yet he confronted the refs by getting in their face and was not assed a technical. I though refs were supposed to give out technicals to players for this type of behavior but I guess Queen James gets a pass.
Fortified by the most powerful marketing machine on earth, remarkable athletic talent, youth and a dazzling celebrity so outsized that 30-foot billboards featuring his likeness are commonplace, it sometimes appears that LeBron James can make things happen simply by talking.
He spoke earlier this month about changing his number from 23 to 6 -- an homage to Michael Jordan, he said -- and about how even that individual gesture is not enough to canonize Jordan properly. James said the league needs to retire the No. 23 in perpetuity -- the ultimate honor for Jordan -- as baseball did 12 years ago with Jackie Robinson's No. 42 and hockey did in 2000 with Wayne Gretzky's No. 99.
Phil Jackson, Jordan's old coach and a man who should know better, immediately followed in lockstep, telling The Associated Press that Jordan did as much for basketball as Gretzky did for hockey. Jackson added that the only potential drawback might be Magic Johnson and Larry Bird possibly having hurt feelings.
The next retired number needs to measure up to the significance of Jackie Robinson's No. 42.
At best, James' suggestion is a well-meaning but ill-considered -- perhaps even unconsidered -- and forgivable lapse from a kid born, for goodness' sake, in the mid-1980s. For his history-challenged generation, the world began with Jordan. The world before MJ for them is nonexistent, the world after permanently altered.
At worst, however, it is a heinous example of how the king of the sunglasses-indoors, friend-of-Usher crowd has no historical perspective. LeBron's thinking is as morally empty and narcissistic as those Nike ads that pay him so much money. James is apparently so utterly clueless about the reasoning for baseball's mass-retiring of Robinson's number and the history of his own league that he doesn't seem the least bit embarrassed to imply that Jordan and Robinson exist in the same historical context.
And to this, we are all witnesses.
In 1997, on the 50th anniversary of Robinson's integration of the major leagues, Leonard Coleman, then the president of the National League, devised the idea to retire Robinson's number. It was a bold statement to recognize the boldest unifying step this country had taken. The United States as a nation was not integrated until Robinson integrated it. The military was not yet integrated. Segregation was legal, not just in the South but in many parts of the North and West as well. In some places in the South, even city record books documenting births, deaths and marriages of African-Americans were kept separately.
It was common practice for department stores to refuse to allow blacks to try on clothes because store owners were convinced whites would not purchase a piece of clothing that a black person had previously worn.
"What Robinson did was take black people from the background and he put them in the foreground," the late Leonard Koppett, one of the best journalists of his era, told me years ago. "For white people, black people lived in the background, even in places like New York. You saw them. You walked past them. They were part of the wallpaper of your life. Jackie changed all that. From that day forward, when he came on the field, black people were present. Now you had to see them. You had to hear them. You had to pay attention to them. He did not integrate baseball. He integrated America."
To understand this, you have to have a world view that begins before 1984. You have to think about the impossible, about the things in life that generations who came before never thought they would see. About a time when even the most forward-thinking people in this country could not envision a world without slavery, about a time that survived for nearly 100 years after abolition when it appeared that segregation was going to remain a maddening, intractable given.
Most people, black and white, simply could not see a future beyond the separation, past their historical and persistent grievances, past the hate. Most of the country, especially African-Americans of a certain generation, could not envision an American president who was not white and male.
It's one thing for the Bulls to retire No. 23 and honor Michael Jordan in the United Center. It's something else to ask the entire NBA to do it.
The Robinson challenge, given this environment, was not simply to prove he could play baseball at the major league level, but to prove the two races could coexist. Play nine innings together, take showers together, eat dinner, play cards and laugh together -- and ultimately serve side by side as Americans in the same units of the armed forces, which occurred a year after Robinson broke baseball's color barrier. None of these simplicities -- they seem like simplicities now -- was a given in 1947.
The Brooklyn Dodgers were considered pioneers; but during the first years of integration, it was standard for the white players to shower first before the blacks were allowed to enter.
What Robinson did, in effect, gave the nation a new life even as it killed him. His journey broke him. His hair was snow white by the time he was in his 40s. He was a diabetic. He was legally blind before he died in 1972 at age 53.
This, and not his steals of home or winning the MVP in 1949, is why his number -- and no other -- is retired by Major League Baseball. And it's why no other number should be retired by any sport. This is why James looks so uninformed today. This is what happens when you practice your crossover more than you study your American history.
Neither Jordan nor Gretzky carries the same historical significance as Robinson does, and to discuss this issue solely in terms of athletic achievement is to warp the conversation. The name of the game here is history, the impact on history. Jordan sold, and still sells, a lot of sneakers, a lot of Gatorade and lot of underwear. What Jackie Robinson did, in one sense, is more impressive even than the election of Barack Obama. American society -- black, Latino, Asian, but especially white -- chose Obama to be president. Robinson was forced on a society that for the most part did not want him, either as a teammate or as a symbol of coming change.
These concepts are a little more important than Jordan's buzzer-beater over the Cavaliers.
With the increasing conformity of sports, where the spontaneity of a song in a given arena quickly becomes a canned, ubiquitous jock jam, it's easy to cheapen and make a gimmick of an important gesture such as retiring a number. I called Coleman, whose idea it was to retire Robinson's number in the first place, about this. Recognizing the political minefield, he declined comment, probably wisely.
When NHL commissioner Gary Bettman retired Wayne Gretzky's No. 99, it spoke of an odd, desperate opportunism, a way for a troubled league to honor its best player. More than Jordan in basketball, Gretzky is a historic figure in hockey, for the argument can be made that his 1988 trade to Los Angeles opened an entire new chapter in the history of the NHL: It helped bring the large-scale, warm-weather demographic to the game. Now, the league is in Miami, Dallas, Phoenix and Tampa in addition to L.A. and Atlanta.
The words on Jackie's gravestone say it all.
But even the retiring of Gretzky's number indirectly undermined the Robinson tribute, for the Gretzky effect was on the economics of hockey rather than the social landscape. The NHL's new "Hockey is for everyone" ad campaign might be directly related to Gretzky making the sport ubiquitous, but Gretzky did not change American or Canadian society. He and Jordan are similar in that regard: They are the greatest practitioners of their sports, but hardly the most revolutionary. Gretzky might have played hockey better than anyone else, but he did not change how the game is played. In terms of historic significance, Bobby Orr, a rushing, tempo-changing defenseman, far outweighs Gretzky.
James apparently doesn't even understand his own sport's heritage. Jordan might have been basketball's greatest player; but, like Gretzky, he did not change the way his game is played. Wilt Chamberlain -- not Michael Jordan -- is the most dominant individual ever to play the game of basketball. Along with Bill Russell, Wilt revolutionized the sport. Rules were changed because of Chamberlain. Players were drafted differently because of Russell.
Perhaps we can call Jordan basketball's greatest champion because his teams had to play additional rounds in the playoffs to get to the titles, but Russell nearly doubled Jordan's championship total, 11 to six, and Russell's teams won eight in a row (1959-66). Jordan didn't even revolutionize the aerial game. Elgin Baylor and Connie Hawkins and Julius Erving were responsible for that.
James advertises his ignorance even further when he says he wants to change his number to 6 -- the number worn by Russell and Erving -- without acknowledging that both players altered the history of the game in a more profound way than Jordan did. Outside of winning games, Jordan is known for his cosmetic contributions -- his sneakers, his long shorts, his shaved head -- and for being a Nike sycophant. Unlike Robinson, he was allergic to any and all forms of political courage.
We know James is part of the "Me" generation, for whom anything that occurred before last Thursday might as well be ancient history. But if he is going to speak, let him do so armed with respect. Respect comes with education and knowledge of the history of your surroundings. Instead of changing his number, perhaps LeBron should change his reading habits.
I don't know, Jordon was a world wide phenomenon, so to say he hasn't made a real impact to this world, albeit maybe not race relations like Jackie, is taking the argument too far.
Memo to LeBron James
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