National Basketball Association

LeBron caps descent into tabloid hell

Published Jul. 15, 2010 3:58 p.m. ET

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What the hell happened?

Two years ago all seemed perfectly right in the world of sports. Brett Favre had retired as a Packer. Tiger Woods was reeling in Jack Nicklaus. Alex Rodriguez was ringless, a perennial playoff goat. Kobe Bryant hadn’t won a title without Shaquille O’Neal. LeBron James was 23 and seemingly on the verge of carrying the Cavaliers to the Promised Land.

The games still seemed paramount. The water cooler was a happy place.

But then everything fell apart.

Favre became a Minnesota Viking. Tiger became a punch line.

A-Rod became, ack, a playoff hero. Ditto Kobe.

The heroes were becoming villains and the villains were winning championships. But that was all prologue to The Decision. The Day the Music Died.

In the eyes of most fans (with the obvious exception of Miami’s legendarily fair-weather ones), The Decision was The Disaster. Three chums had gotten together and decided to destroy the competitive balance of an entire sport.

This wasn’t about indebtedness to the game that made them rich or doing something for the fans who pay their salaries or cementing their place in history. This was about stacking the best guys in the gym on the same team so they can run the court as long as they want. It was about three guys who wanted it to be easier, more fun, less work. And, specifically, about one guy who came to believe – erroneously, perhaps – his celebrity was suffering for not having won a title.

The basketball ramifications could hardly account for the near-universal nausea brought on by the Courtship of the Uncrowned King.

Something bigger happened here. The dam, already cracking against the weight of Favre’s perennial paralysis and Tiger’s perpetual priapism, finally burst. And LeBron has been swamped with a flood of revulsion.

Hardcore sports fans, red-faced and rumpled, have begrudgingly accepted the fact that athletes have become celebrities, but they’ve never liked it. Now, with LeBron abandoning his hometown fans to burnish his brand on starry South Beach, the celebrification of sports has burst just like a supernova.

And in response it was as if the entire sports fan universe (outside Miami) barked in unison, “Take your global brand and shove it!” (For LeBron this may have been a basketball decision, but for Team LeBron every decision is about French fries, soda, sneakers and jerseys in China.)

We, as fans, no doubt have ourselves to blame for inviting and reveling in these tawdry spectacles that now make us want to take a Silkwood shower. But I think we just hit our saturation point.

We’ve gone from “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth” to “I wanted to do what was best for LeBron James.” (Really? No s---.)

Being a fan took a serious hit last week.

Maybe living vicariously through the athletic achievements of dudes we’ll never meet couldn’t be described as cool. But there was a certain cred guys had for being fans.

The new guy at work comes in bitching about the 0-2 curveball the closer hung the night before and you know he can’t be all bad. At the water cooler, on the subway, at the bar, the guys who really care about sports have always had a special bond.

Irrational? Yes. Dorky. At times. But it sure beat those dizzy broads waiting breathlessly for the latest dish on Sandy and that bad boy Jesse James.

Now? What’s the difference?

Lindsay Lohan is taking her talents to jail. LeBron James is taking his talents to South Beach.

Bristol and Levi got engaged without telling Sarah. LeBron and Miami eloped without telling Cleveland.

Tiger paramour Joslyn James works a stripper pole and it’s a bigger story than what’s-his-name winning the U.S. Open. (Graeme McDowell.)

TMZ Sports will have all the latest.

About a month ago a buddy of mine and I were doing what married guys do: eating our preferred combinations of meats, cheeses and breads and complaining about our wives.

My buddy told me he had come home to find an issue of People magazine on the table and promptly castigated his wife. “What’s this doing here? Stupid people read this magazine.”

But that was last month. When sports fans could still pretend to maintain some superiority over the daft subscribers to People and Us Weekly.

Once LeBron turned the NBA into The Bachelor (with less production value) we couldn’t really defend our vice any more. My wife popped her head into the living room during The Decision and she could have said, though she didn’t, “Stupid people are watching this.”

Yup. Nine million of us apparently.

And we were all watching when Brett Favre called a press conference to tearfully retire.

And when Tiger staged his does-being-sorry-I-got-caught-count-as-contrition live read.

And when Brett un-retired.

And when Tiger returned.

And when LeBron, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh appeared in The Embarrassment, being introduced together in Miami the night following The Decision.

Turns out we’ve been subscribing to an idiotic celeb magazine all along.

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