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Just 21, but LeBron has aged to perfection
Young Cavs star carries maturity well beyond his years
LeBron James has it all: personality, talent, vision, values, work ethic and a healthy dose of athletic arrogance unspoiled by at ude, writes columnist Mike Celizic.
Jeff Roberson / AP
COMMENTARY
By Mike Celizic
NBCSports.com contributor
Updated: 12:58 a.m. ET Dec. 28, 2005
LeBron James turns 21 Friday. For most people, that would be a milestone. But for him, the celebration will probably be quiet and scandal-free, because in many ways, LeBron James has been way older than 21 for a long, long time.
Three full years ago, he was in high school, living, as he had from when he was born, a semi-nomadic life with his mother, herself just 16 years older than he, and no father that he could ever remember. Home was the part of Akron where bad things happen to kids both innocent and otherwise, the part that is so hard every day to escape, the part where despair and hopelessness reign.
He had talent. We knew that. But we’ve seen plenty of others who have had worlds of talent at similar ages and never knew what to do with it. Or, if they did, they brought so much baggage with them to the arena, it was difficult for the paying customers to cozy up to them.
In any event, we expected that it was going to take time for him to grow into the NBA. That’s just the way it is. It’s a man’s game and he was just a kid with a lot of talent. Even Kobe Bryant took four years to really hit stride. It was unfair to expect anything different, even from a man saddled with the le of the next Michael Jordan.
So now it’s two years and a couple of months since he debuted with Cleveland, and the one thing we know is he’s not the next Michael Jordan. He’s already better than Jordan was at the same age. He’s not the next anything. He’s the first LeBron James.
And we’re the lucky ones who get to watch him, the generation that years from now will get to say we were there when LeBron James got his start.
James isn’t just a good player or a star. The youngest player to score 4,000 points in the history of the game, he’s already the game’s brightest star, a kid who can not only do things on the court that the rest of us can’t even dream of, but one who can step into a commercial and play multiple roles as if he were Eddie Murphy. He’s already hit the sky, and that’s not even close to his limit.
The NBA has been desperate for a star who could bring people to the game the way Magic and Michael and Bird did. LeBron James is that man.
Three years ago, I would have said it was possible, the same way it’s possible that Osama bin Laden will walk into an American Embassy and turn himself in, but I didn’t think it was likely. My reasoning was simple: No one had ever erupted fully developed in the game before. There was no reason to suspect he would be the first.
He was poor. He had no father. He grew up in the hood. And he was getting millions of dollars dumped into his lap by people who weren’t ever going to tell him anything but exactly what he wanted to hear.
All I had to do was put myself in his shoes to know that isn’t a scenario likely to produce a happy ending.
Think about what you would have done if, when you were 18 years old, someone had handed you millions of dollars and told you that you were a Master of the Universe.
I’ve run that scenario many times through the intellectual flea market that passes for my consciousness, and I never come out intact. I know what I was like at 18, and it wasn’t anything that could have handled money and fame without something bad happening.
I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that. The law may say that we’re adults at 18, but that doesn’t make us grown up; it doesn’t confer maturity on us. It takes time for that.
That’s why I was more than a little worried for LeBron James when he was in his senior year of high school and heading for the NBA. He did some things that year that suggested he might not be ready for what was ahead.
There was the incident with the freebie throw-back jerseys that got him kicked out of the state tournament and his reaction to it, which was essentially to claim en lement. He was taking advice from a friend of his mother, and the fear was that it was just a hustler who was going to take him for all he was worth. Then there was the Hummer his mother, who never had two nickels to rub together, magically was able to purchase for him.
Rules, it seemed back then, weren’t for LeBron James. And when you thought about him going into the very adult world of the NBA, you wondered how he was going to cope. Would it be all about him? Would he be one of those guys who thinks he doesn’t have to listen to the coach or do the work or show up on time? How long would it be before there was an incident with a woman or drugs, a wrecked car, a fight with a teammate who was getting too much spotlight for James’ liking?
None of it happened. From the first time James set foot on a professional court, his only goal has been to be the best team player he can be, to be a winner. He’s done nothing wrong. Nothing.
There have been no fights, no speeding tickets, no string of offended women, no hangers-on with rap sheets longer than War and Peace, no squabbles with teammates. It’s his third season in the league, and he still hasn’t even made Whiner of the Week.
He went to Athens and found a spot on Larry Brown’s bench during the Olympics. Carmelo Anthony had the same experience, and Anthony whined and complained during the entire Olympic tournament. James just took his seat, listened to his coach, and tried to be better.
Like so many kids who grew up as he did, he fathered a child not long after he signed his first contract. Unlike so many of those kids, he didn’t wander off to father a few more, but took up housekeeping with his son LeBron Jr.’s mother, Savannah, and applied himself to being the father he never had. Unless the Cavaliers are on the road, he comes home to his son and his son’s mother every night.
He fired his agent last year, and that seemed like a bad sign, especially when he put three of his high-school pals in charge of his businesses. But so far, there have been no stories of wild parties, huge posses, absurd spending on shiny objects and money thrown away. Instead, he talks about earning more as a businessman than he does as a basketball player, and he seems on his way to doing that, too.
James is incredibly independent and sure of himself. Unlike most 18 year olds, he never went out in search of himself. He was right there all along.
He credits his mother, Gloria, with all of that, with teaching him to be strong and not to fear anyone or anything. I’ve never met her, but she must be one incredible woman.
But a strong mother and strong values aren’t enough to account for what James is. A lot of people have been raised in a similar way and haven’t come out as good.
It’s like his talent. The New York playgrounds are full of stories of kids like James who had more talent than God but never got off the streets, never turned it into cash, never survived the demons that lie in wait for us all.
The only way to explain someone like James is as the one person who gets all cherries on a cosmic slot machine. Every baby that’s born is a pull on the lever of that machine, another roll of millions of genetic tumblers. This is natural selection at work, chromosomes combining, genes mixing, the tumblers coming up differently on every roll.
The goal is to have them all click into place, but when you look at all the possible combinations, you see how hard that is. Add in the influences of environment and parental example and the wonder isn’t that there aren’t more LeBrons in the world, but that there is even one.
So many things can go wrong. You look at the wreckage of promising careers through the history of sports and you see so many people who had all the talent in the world but didn’t make it to the very top. That’s because talent is just one of the factors involved. To be the very, very best, it also takes a work ethic, a sharp mind that can work in the three dimensions of space and even in the fourth of time.
Great basketball players, like great running backs and quarterbacks, simply see more of the field of play at a time than their lesser colleagues, and for them it moves more slowly than for the common press of humanity.
Vision and that special sense of space is separate from talent. There have been plenty of players who could create their own shots, but very few who could create shots for others as well.
And even that isn’t enough. We’ve seen no end of players who have the vision and the skills and the size and the speed and the quickness but lack a work ethic. Or they fall into the bottle or form too close a relationship with drugs.
Some great talents were so warped by traumatic childhoods that they can’t cope with success. Others assume an unwarranted sense of en lement, as if the fact that they can do anything they want on a court or field means they can do anything they want anywhere.
Some are too timid to take a game by the throat, too frightened to take the shots that really matter. Others are so arrogant, they forget that they are a part of team and assume the game exists only for them.
LeBron James has the whole package — personality, talent, vision, values, work ethic and a healthy dose of athletic arrogance unspoiled by at ude.
He’s already done more for charity than most people do in a lifetime, and he takes public stands on real issues in a way that Jordan and Tiger Woods never did. He’s a great player, and, at least so far, a great human being.
And now he’s officially a man.
Happy birthday, LeBron.
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