Patience is key…
I used to live in Cleveland. I was born and raised in the area. I love the city, the people, the attractions and pretty much everything about it. I embrace its negative image that many people who have never been there have created for it. If nothing else, it keeps those kinds of judgmental shitheads out of my home town. I don’t like to see horrible things happen to my city. I don’t think anyone does. But, on my birthday last year, July 8th 2010, Lebron James tore the heart out of me and a city that had previously done nothing but worshiped him for his entire life via a 1 hour special on ESPN that he personally named “The Decision”. If I ever become an actor and have to get myself into a pissed off mood for the camera, I know that I can always think back to that evening.
Patience is key…
Over the past ten plus months, I have been forced to endure the sight of the Miami Heat run through their competition. Competition like the Celtics and the Bulls and Magic who were previously able to hold Lebron in check. But now, along side of Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, who really could stop him? So Lebron James will get a ring. And it is time for me and some fans to accept a few inconvenient facts….
Patience is key…
Lebron will win multiple titles with the Miami Heat: This is a very hard pill for a Cleveland sports fan to swallow but it is going to happen. Any team that has Lebron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh in the starting lineup will win multiple titles. It is a simple matter of mathematics. There is simply not enough high powered talent left in the league that could team up and deny them of their multiple titles. In basketball, if you have three of the best 6 players on one team, they won’t be stopped. As bad as it may be for the integrity of the NBA product to have the most hated franchise in sports win multiple titles, it is going to happen. There isn’t an international All-Star team that could be assembled who could get in the way of the abomination that is the Miami Heat.
Patience is key…
Lebron James is never going to stop taking shots at Cleveland: Lebron has joined forces with two of the best players in the league. He no longer needs to be the best player in the world in order to win night in and night out. One of the three just has to be that guy once every three games and they will be fine. Therefore, his stock as a great basketball player is on the downswing. He will likely never win another MVP trophy again. After all, how could anyone justify a single player being the most valuable player on a team where he has more help than he knows what to do with?
Lebron also irreversibly tarnished his image on July 8th. Anyone who lives outside of the Haitian Slums in Miami realizes how much of a dick move “The Decision” was. Most people can’t get themselves to understand how a human being could possibly be brain dead enough to think that that would have been a good idea for more than eight seconds. The spectacle took a level of arrogance that has never been seen before in organized sport. It introduced pure hatred into professional basketball. So if you team his regression as a basketball player along with the thermo-nuclear destruction of his public persona you have a recipe for a lot of pissed off sponsors. There are a lot of people at companies like McDonald’s and Nike and ESPN who need Lebron James to be “liked”. They literally have invested hundreds of millions of their dollars in people liking him.
So what do you do when you have an image problem at work? You pass the buck. It is the easiest way to get the heat off of you. People have been doing it for centuries. If Lebron James blames the Cleveland Cavaliers ownership and his former players and the city of Cleveland for not getting him enough talent, or not trying hard enough in the playoffs or being spoiled by his greatness, enough times then it will eventually stick. Unfortunately, one complete dickhole of a move usually leads to another. Eventually Lebron will be able to deflect the pressure on himself back onto Cleveland. He has all of the resources of Nike and ESPN and ABC and Disney and McDonald’s to help him do so.
Patience is key…
The Cleveland Cavaliers are not going to win an NBA title before Lebron does: I am terribly sorry Mr. Dan Gilbert but this was one of the dumbest statements anyone has ever made outside of the nut house. I do understand how pissed off you were at the time you made this statement and I can appreciate your team spirit. I think the Cavs can turn it around in about three years and be back in title contention but I think the Heat are going to win the titles for at least two of those three years. There is just nobody left who can stop those three shitheads in Miami.
Patience is key…
Why do I keep saying that patience is key: From a Cleveland fans perspective, the short term is going to suck…. a lot. We are going to have to sit and watch one of the biggest pieces of shit the world has ever seen win multiple titles with two of the other biggest pieces of shit in the world along side of him. But it is going to get progressively better as the years go by.
First off, the new Collective Bargaining Agreement that the NBA is ready to impose is going to lower the salary cap. It is not going to be lowered enough to prevent Miami form having all three players, but it will be low enough to make sure they can’t ever get any better than they are right now. Basically, I really hope Miami is completely in love with Udonis Haslem and Mike Miller as role players because they are going to need them for the long haul. I also hope those two guys never expect to get a raise because Miami has so much invested in their big three that they can’t pay them more then what they get now.
Secondly, it is going to be harder and harder for Miami to attract decent role players. Other then the fact that they won’t be able to pay them as much as everyone else, who wants to go play fourth fiddle next to three of the biggest prima donnas that the sporting world has ever seen? They are going to have to go out and keep getting old men, who have given up trying to win on other teams and want to go to Miami just for the chance at a ring. So have fun with the Zyndrunas Illgauskas’s and Mike Bibby’s of the world.
Thirdly, the pressure on that franchise is never going to let up as long as they have all three of those players. Not a single one of them strikes me as someone who handles pressure particularly well. One thing my good buddy, Mr. Cavalier Austin Carr will tell you…. “Pressure always burst the pipe”. Sometimes it takes a while but it will happen. Lebron no longer being “the man” on a team, relentless media frenzies before and after every game, people booing them in every arena outside of Northern Cuba, people constantly asking Lebron questions like “What would this championship have meant in Cleveland?” “Wouldn’t this have meant more if you had been able to do it yourself and in your home town?” Lebron not being able to take a piss in a Wendy’s bathroom without people hating him for it, the list goes on and on. Eventually, this burden will weigh the team down. Eventually someone will beat them in the playoffs and that loss, teamed with this pressure will tear a whole in that locker room. You cannot have that many ego’s, with that much pressure, and that much riding on everything, with that much money floating around, and not win.
Fourthly, Cleveland has Karma and history on its side. Lebron James is going to play basketball for about another 12 years. He is going to have some ups and downs and win several titles and make a lot of money. But while sports history fades away into the background after time, you being a complete asshole remains front and center forever. So Lebron will never be able to enjoy his empty titles as much as everyone else does. He is never going to be able to go anywhere without people asking him about that decision. Whatever he does from here on out in his basketball career will play second fiddle to the errors of his youth. He is never going to experience what Michael Jordan did when he held the Championship Trophy after killing himself, with limited talent around him, for six years. Any tears Lebron sheds when he wins that title will be for the camera, not because he played though walking pneumonia in the playoffs like Jordan, or with a broken hand like Kobe or played perfect fundamental basketball like Duncan. It will be because he manufactured a championship with his friends. It will be the most meaningless championship in the history of sports. And people will call it this. And Lebron will hate them for it.
Then of course we have the history factor on our side. How well does being a complete douche bag usually work out in the long run when it comes to pop culture icons? Britney Spears is still trying to stop eating hot dogs for breakfast lunch and dinner, Michael Jackson had to spend the last 20 years of his life being shot up with elephant tranquilizers in order to function, Lindsey Lohan is still trying to snort any powder she can find under her sink at the Betty Ford Clinic and Tiger Woods is not even a factor on the PGA tour and watched his entire family move to Sweden as a result. So we, as Cleveland fans are going to have to learn to sacrifice short term joy for a long, entertaining, downfall of the hated one.
So history always has the last laugh and it will with Lebron too. And part of me will be sad to see the downfall of a kid who has been called “The Chosen One” and “King James” since he was 15 years old. Because the intelligent part of me will understand how someone like that never really had a chance to develop a normal logical brain. I will “get” how compassion and the ability to be humble and a sense of personal responsibility could have never been harbored in the brain of a teenager who was given a Hummer on his 18th birthday and was on the cover of Sports Illustrated before he graduated from High School. But I will still smile when it happens because I won’t care. Because he earned every horrible thing that will ever happen to him.
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