Legendary: What LeBron ain’t (yet)

Published 3:38 pm Sunday, March 31, 2013

Editor’s Note: The following is commentary from sports correspondent Reid Kerr. He can be contacted at snowfire51@gmail.com. His website is ReidAboutIt.com.

I don’t like LeBron James.

I’m stating this up front because I feel like a lot of basketball fans agree with me, and also because many of us can’t exactly explain why.

When LeBron came out of high school and went to the Cavaliers, he was spectacular. He somehow managed to lead Cleveland to the Finals and, regardless of the sport, that should qualify you for sainthood. He became a free agent and won a title, plays hard every night, seems like a nice guy and has never tried to make us listen to an awful rap album. He’s unquestionably the best player in the league and maybe one of the best of all time.

So why don’t we like him?

Sure, Heat fans love him. Amazing how many of those have popped up over the last three years, eh? You don’t see a lot of throwback Harold Miner jerseys at those games.

For the rest of us, we’re still dealing with a couple of issues. We’ll always be unnerved by “The Decision,” a supreme moment of televised narcissism cloaked in a charity fundraising effort. We’ll always feel like he went to Miami because he wanted the easiest road to a championship and playing with Dwyane Wade was the best way to take the pressure off himself.

But it’s been more than two years since then. At some point, we have to admit we’re not still hung up on the way LeBron left and took his talents to South Beach. Otherwise, we wind up like jilted lovers, crying over old letters and waiting for the phone to ring. We’ve got to move on.

By the way, for a fun experiment, take your phone’s weather app and compare the average temperature on any given day between Cleveland and Miami. It wouldn’t be a hard decision for most of us to go south, either.

The problem I think many have with LeBron stems from our nature as sports fans. Sports are a struggle, a battle to claim dominance, to ascend to the championship level. We want the highlights; not just dunks. We need real emotional moments that transcend just watching a mere sporting event.

In sports, there’s good and then there’s great. And then, beyond both is legendary.

The legendary moments can’t be induced, they have to happen organically. Our hero must overcome circumstances beyond their control to triumph. Just winning a championship isn’t enough. The Baltimore Ravens just won a Super Bowl. It was a good game, but there wasn’t the one single dramatic moment we all crave. We’ll have another Super Bowl next year and this one will fade like so many others.

Some moments are so legendary they have their own identity, spelled in capital letters. They become the proper nouns of sports, the events so big they raised a nation or crushed a city. The Miracle on Ice. The Shot. The Catch. The Shot Heard ‘round the World. The Music City Miracle.

LeBron James is great. There’s absolutely no debate about that. He’s the best player in the league by far and he could be the greatest ever when he’s done.

But he’s not legendary. Not yet. He hasn’t had that one moment where the world takes notice. You can’t be legendary with the Vegas odds firmly behind you. You have to overcome. Just being the best isn’t enough.

Legendary isn’t Troy Aikman being deadly efficient. It’s Emmitt Smith beating the Giants with one arm hanging limp from its socket. It’s not Tim Duncan being steady for over a decade, it’s Reggie Miller scoring eight points in 8.9 seconds to beat the Knicks.

It’s the moments you can still close your eyes and see, or recognize just from the announcer’s call. It’s Brett Favre throwing for four TDs and 399 yards the day after his father died or John Elway getting spun like a top trying to score a touchdown in the Super Bowl at the age of a hundred-and-seventeen. It’s Kirk Gibson’s pinch-hit, Carlton Fisk willing a ball fair in the World Series and Derek Jeter’s flip to the plate. It’s Christian Laettner, Brandi Chastain and Kerri Strug.

And it’s Michael Jordan, over and over again, and that’s the figure NBA players are compared to for now. Jordan has the Flu Game, the playoff buzzer-beaters against Cleveland, the Championship after his dad died where he lay on the locker room floor clutching the ball and crying, and many other highlights that dot his career, all emotional moments even casual sports fans understood. We watched them happen and we knew we were watching something extraordinary.

LeBron, for everything he’s done, hasn’t had that legendary moment yet, and so the old-school guard finds him lacking against MJ. He took a bad Cavs team to the NBA Finals and didn’t win, then he took a loaded Heat team there twice and split the two. You could argue his time with the Heat is just as notable for losing a championship to the Dallas Mavericks as it was for winning against Oklahoma City. When he won his first title, the look on his face was more of relief than of celebration.

He’s supposed to win. Vegas believes it. He just ripped off a 27-game winning streak, but it’s the NBA regular season, which is about as important as a Quiddich box score.

By going somewhere where he’d be favored to win a championship every year, he’s never the underdog, and sports love an underdog. If he wins? Eh. He was supposed to. He’s the best player in the league and he’s supposed to be winning games. His ability and the team around him just serve to undermine his own accomplishments.

There may come a time in a few years when LeBron has to overcome. Perhaps it’s after the “Big Three” era ends and he has to put a team on his back again. Maybe it’ll be some emotional trauma off the court that puts the world behind him.

Until then, he’ll still be the best in the game. He just won’t have that signature moment that sports fans crave, that single highlight that overrides “The Decision” and lets him take his rightful place.