'The Decision' is still perfect, 10 years later
If you can't appreciate the importance and style of the T.V. special, can you really appreciate LeBron?
Good morning. Let’s basketball.
Skull of a Skeleton With Burning Cigarette, Vincent van Gogh
I have believed this since 2010 and I will believe it for the rest of my life: The Decision was a great idea.
It’s the 10-year anniversary of the T.V. special in which LeBron James announced he’d be joining the Heat. ESPN ran a mini-doc on it Sunday, and Brian Windhorst has a tick-tock of sorts on the days surrounding it. (Wow Bulls, wow.) In Monday’s newsletter, I wrote about Bill Simmons’ odd appearance in the history. I’ll reproduce it here for non-subscribers:
ESPN ran a mini-doc on The Decision on Sunday night. One of the stories told is that the initial idea for The Decision as a televised event came from Bill Simmons via one of his readers. Simmons met with LeBron’s team and top ESPN executives to discuss it during the season but wasn’t involved in its eventual production. Notably, after The Decision, Simmons killed LeBron and his team for doing it, even blaming LeBron’s lack of a father figure in a column. He had never disclosed that he had been involved in the early stages of presenting the idea to Maverick Carter and Leon Rose. Sketchy! On Sunday’s podcast, Simmons basically said they shouldn’t have done it if LeBron was leaving Cleveland, and he assumed it was off after the Boston series that spring. He did not address the fact that he harshly criticized LeBron for doing something that he himself pitched. Sketchy!
This is a journalistic crime of some degree, even as a “critic” or columnist, as Simmons has always fashioned himself. But that 10 years later Simmons remains critical of The Decision and unapologetic about his initial reaction to it is perhaps a bigger indictment. Unlike some centrist LeBron critics who quibble with the tone of the production, the presence of Jim Gray, the painful lollygagging of an hour-long special and the over-the-top celebration the following day in Miami, Simmons straight up says to this day that LeBron should not have done the special at all if he wasn’t planning to remain in Cleveland.
That belies any understanding of what LeBron and his team were trying to do, and it ignores what the media reception to LeBron was at that time, and it ignores what LeBron and his team have built since then.
The Decision was an opening salvo in a seizing of the reins of his own mythology. Instead of leaking his decision to reporters who plainly didn’t like or respect him beyond the four lines of a basketball court, he told the world himself. Instead of letting a team — even Pat Riley’s team — control the narrative, he took it by the horns. His free agency had been multiple NBA teams’ entire existence for years. Respectable, wealthy franchises destroyed themselves for a chance at him. The basketball world hung on every hint. And he leveraged that to tell his own story, and pulled off a relatively enormous shock (despite a couple reporters getting scoops few truly believed).
LeBron is, these days, the ultimate NBA power broker via Klutch, Nike, SpringHill and the Lakers. He wasn’t then. He wasn’t until he took power. And a huge step in taking power was choosing the Heat and choosing how to announce he’d be joining the Heat. You don’t get LeBron’s current status without critical building blocks like The Decision.
Now if you still don’t like LeBron … well, okay, I’ve got nothing for you. But if you like him now and can’t respect how necessary The Decision was to what LeBron has become, I’m not sure you really understand what you like about this guy. And if you still hate The Decision despite coming up with and pitching the idea to LeBron’s inner circle — something publicly unacknowledged until now, 10 years later! — I’m really, really confused about how you view the LeBron mythos.
Without The Decision, the LeBron you know and presumably love does not exist. If you love LeBron in spite of the T.V. special, are you sure you love LeBron at all?
Links
Tyler Ricky Tynes on the moment and movement.
Zach Lowe and Ramona Shelburne report the NBA and WNBA may paint Black Lives Matter on the courts in Florida. Additional ways to acknowledge the movement are in the works, as well.
Lauren Holiday on the time her husband Jrue got handcuffed for … Lauren forgetting her license?
The Raptors’ camp in Fort Myers, Florida is a test run for the bubble. Via Eric Koreen in The Athletic, Fred VanVleet doesn’t really sound very enthusiastic about all of this. Can’t blame him. ($)
How Disney employees will work inside the bubble.
Jonathan Tjarks on the Rockets as a sleeper.
The Cavaliers signed Jordan Bell.
So we already know Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant won’t play in Orlando for the Nets. Wilson Chandler opted out. Now Spencer Dinwiddie and DeAndre Jordan have tested positive for COVID-19. Jordan’s out for the season. Bad vibes for Brooklyn.
Interesting New York Times video on the NBA’s income inequality solution.
The Hawks are working with Fulton County officials to turn their arena into the state’s biggest ever voting precinct. Every team should do this, except the Blazers, since Oregon has compulsory vote by mail.
Mo Dakhil on what J.R. Smith can bring to the Lakers. Haley O’Shaughnessy on that same topic.
Be excellent to each other.
"Every team should do this, except the Blazers, since Oregon has compulsory vote by mail."
So does Colorado!
I think that, perhaps, as a sportswriter, you're simply too close to it to see it. You've spent so much time examining the event, and attempting to make it part of LeBron's narrative, that you're no longer actually talking about it.
I am not a musician, but I know a few. When the subject of guitarists comes up, they do love to go on and on about Steve Vai.
"The technique! The speed! He's a genius!"
To which I respond, "Yeah, I guess. But does it groove?"
It doesn't. It's soulless. I'll take Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, or Steve Cropper over Vai or Joe Satriani every time.
You discuss The Decision as it relates to LeBron's "mythos." His *mythos*! I am a fan of his, and would argue that he may very well be the GOAT, based on the fact that I don't think that MJ himself could have dragged the 2016 Cavaliers to a title.
But The Decision? It was a dick move, made moreso by the fact that LeBron James is not a dick. I do not agree with Bill Simmons on much, but keeping Cleveland fans in a state of torture over the preceding weeks and months, forcing everyone to sit through an hour of Jim Gray, and then raising a giant middle finger to his hometown fans? He didn't need to do that. When he left Cleveland the second time, he quietly took care of the negotiations, and signed with the Lakers. I can't stand the Lakers, but I absolutely respect how he just took care of business without manufacturing unnecessary drama.
If you're going to stay in Cleveland, obviously the less-desirable of locations when contrasted with Miami, maybe you do a stunt like this. Announcing that you've decided to stick with the underdog in the equation would have made a far more compelling impression. Attempts to water down the event by looking at it along with everything that preceded and followed feels like an effort to zoom out so far from the smoking crater, that you can hardly see the impact at all.
The show had no bearing on the career of LeBron James. His actual decision to join Miami, likely made weeks in advance of the show, was all that mattered. I think highly of the man, so my guess is that he got terrible advice, and went along with it.
The legacy of The Decision is that it places a smallness, a pettiness, on a person who has done very few things to indicate that this is who he is. The massive amount of expository about it comes off as an effort to obfuscate what it was: A publicity stunt gone wrong.