A Year Later.....Should We Have Seen The Decision Coming?

With the words “I’ll be taking my talents to South Beach” Lebron James’ image was forever changed. The Decision was a one hour self absorbed special that left a city ruthlessly scorned, with a charity aspect poorly put in to try and mask one man’s arrogance. Now a year later, Lebron James’ image is worst than it’s ever been before. But we have to ask ourselves, how did we not see this coming like a Brad Lidge blown save?

I’ll be the first to admit, I was a HUGE Lebron James fan when he came into the league. I had the Lebron James high school jersey in the days when you weren’t a hipster or complete loser if you wore a jersey, and my email to this day is still “KingJames2004”. But with that said, the season before The Decision I started to notice things about Lebron James that negatively impacted my opinion of him.

First, I started to notice a lot of theatrics during his games with Cleveland. I have no problem with the powder toss, but then he would lead his teammates in dancing like Chris Brown on acid during the middle games, and the theatrics became classless. He even was doing the over-the-top jumping over fans in the stands when running for a loose ball, and add to that the pre-game antics of pretending to shoot a photograph while the team posed like they were at their high school prom and it made you start to wonder about who Lebron James REALLY was.

Secondly, I began to notice a bit of arrogance to Lebron. He started talking about himself in 3^rd person like he was The Rock (Which he isn’t even close to, and if you’re not already following The Rock on twitter then stop reading this right now and go do it). You also began to see the media start to question his performance/his legacy so to say, and you could see in his reactions that it was the first time in his career (I’d go as far to say his whole sporting life) that he had his talents challenged. He got very defensive and had a look of shock and anger that could rival that of Cubs fans during the Bartman incident. Then he got dunked on by Wizards Guard and at that time Xavier player Jordan Crawford at his Nike Camp, and had the tape confiscated like it was a celebrity sex tape scandal.

Lastly, and I think the memory everyone remembers, is his collapse during the 2010 Eastern Conference Finals against the Celtics. Everyone who was watching that series was more confident that Lebron quit than people were that OJ Simpson was guilty. It was like he was a ghost out there on the court. Yeah, there were rumors of off the court issues, but how can you quit on your team like that? It was this moment that solidified to me that there was a huge part of Lebron we had yet to see.

I can say I’m about as surprised as when I found out that Ricky Martin was gay, that the Public Relations disaster that was “The Decision” happened, because Lebron had been giving us bits and pieces of that character for a while. Now a year later he has another decision to make….continue down this PR disaster path or change people’s perception of “The King”.

Please Subscribe via email on the right hand side.