We have had plenty of polarizing athletes in our midst. We just said farewell to Muhammad Ali, after all, and there has never been a sports figure who more thoroughly forced people to choose sides than Ali.
But where you stood on Ali, in many instances, spoke more to how you felt about his position on social and societal issues than what he did inside a boxing ring. There is a sizable faction, many of them ex-veterans who took the step forward at their induction that Ali famously refused to, for whom Ali was forever poison, and understandably so.
Barry Bonds attracted wild extremes, first for his personality and later for his dabbling with PEDs, but he never lost San Francisco, which cheered him defiantly to the end. Kobe Bryant was entangled in a rape case, and he was greeted rudely in opposing arenas and lost millions in endorsements, but even before the case was dropped, Los Angeles reserved for him a huge benefit of the doubt.
Alex Rodriguez? Sure, he hears it on the road. He’s still filleted in Boston, where he nearly played. But even in a market as hard on its own as New York, he has found safe harbor at Yankee Stadium. That was true before his suspension and remains ever so now, in his career twilight.
LeBron James, though …
Well, honestly: We’ve never seen anything quite like the extreme extremes that have shadowed him through his career, specifically in Cleveland. Born in Akron, which is an easy 40-minute hop along I-76 West and I-77 North, he has been the King of Northeast Ohio since he was 16 years old.
Monday, when he and his conquering Cleveland Cavaliers teammates stepped off an airplane at the Atlantic Aviation hangar at the IX Center, there were 20,000 fans already jammed there (some of whom began arriving at 1 a.m., 11 hours earlier), waiting to greet their NBA champs, waiting for a glimpse of the Larry O’Brien trophy (which James carried carefully and triumphantly, like a secular Ark of the Covenant), and that was just a fractional preview of what awaits the Cavs, and the city, when they hold their victory parade Wednesday.
“CLEVELAND!” James bellowed into a microphone, to the adoring masses.
It was a touching scene.
And it was utterly surreal if you happened to have been inside Quicken Loans Arena on the evening of Friday, Dec. 2, 2010. Now, in the telling of the Prodigal Son tale that LeBron has woven, most of the memories and the news clips focus on the night five months before that when James had revealed his intention to bolt South Euclid for South Beach, the burning jerseys, the chilling shock.
Still, that night in July was about sadness and loss.
By December, it had morphed into anger, genuine fury, rage you could hear and feel and touch. I was at Shea Stadium the night John Rocker returned after slandering … well, just about everybody. I was at Madison Square Garden the night Pat Riley returned, five months after he’d engineered his own flight to Miami. I’ve been in Boston and in The Bronx for any number of primal Yankees-Red Sox encounters.
I’ve never heard sports sound angrier than it did in Cleveland on the night of Dec. 2, 2010. Or uglier.
There were signs everywhere (“Merry Quit-ness!” “The Lyin’ King,” “Queen James”) and there were chants (“Akron hates you!” and “Scottie Pippen!” being two that can safely be published here). As the night progressed there were shouting matches and fisticuffs between Cavs fans and the puzzling minority who thought it wise that night to wear Heat jerseys.
And it only got worse as the game played out (the Heat won in a slaughter, 118-90) and as James scorched the scorebook (38 points and eight assists in 30 minutes) and as a few of his old Cavs teammates joked playfully with him (“I’m quitting sports forever,” one disconsolate local said, defeated, when he saw that exchange).
It was as uncomfortable a night as you could ever have at a sporting event. By the end everyone was spent and more than a little saddened. Even LeBron.
“It’s nothing personal between me and the fans,” he said. “It’s never personal. They’re frustrated and I understand that. I’m frustrated, too. We never did accomplish here what we wanted to.”
Of course, Monday afternoon at the Atlantic Aviation hangar, it was only personal. It was only visceral. And you had to figure, mathematics and probability being what they are, that a few dozen of the same people who greeted the king and his disciples there had also had tickets to the Q 5 ½ years earlier. Maybe more than that.
From messiah to pariah to messiah. It’s been some kind of journey for LeBron James. We’ve never seen one quite like it. Hard to imagine we ever will again.