Lebron James is currently one of the most hated sports figures of the modern era. He is in many respects a paraiah on the same grounds as Barry Bonds. A large part of this is due to his own selfish and arrogant actions, and there have been plenty of those. However Michael Jordan, one of the most celebrated athletes in the history of basketball was also extremely arrogant. Locker room reports of Michael punching and verbally dressing down other players and making outrageous demands never permeated the media or tarnished his legacy. Why is this so? Because the media loves to tell a good story and Michael, unlike Lebron was a master at giving the media a digestible story for the American public. Lets examine the original "Big 3" which are considered to be Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson. Ask any basketball enthusiast and they can tell you these three players basic stories. Michael Jordan was a kid nobody believed in, he was cut from his high school basketball team and even after winning the NCAA championship at North Carolina was passed over as the #1 pick in the NBA draft in favor of Sam Bowie because he just didn't have what it took to beat the Lakers/Pistons/Celtics. People doubted him all his life. He went to the Bulls and won three straight championships. Then his father died in a bizarre unexpected fashion and he took a leave of absence. The doubt came back once again. Jordan could never come back and return to his greatness. Two years later Jordan was back and proceeded to win three more championships before retiring. It's a story made for TV and media people ate it up because they knew we the people would eat it up so the media ignored other less flattering images which did not fit the narrative.
Moving on to Larry and Magic. They played each other in the title game of the NCAA Tournament. Every year it was a constant debate over who was better. It was a bitter rivalry that resulted in fights, riots. You could not find two more perfectly different people from the media's perspective. Larry Bird was a white "Hick from French Lick" that came from a poor working class white family in Indiana. Magic Johnson was the west coast style and flair representative of the "African American" style of basketball. It again was a perfect story for the country at the time and especially the media. Magic would win a championship, then Bird would come back and beat him next time and on and on. It was like Clash of the Titans.
Coming back to Lebron. What is his story? Largely one of personal triumph which has yielded no championships or moments of triumph for his teams. He's a kid that was proclaimed the next great one at the age of 16. He was crowned King James and the Chosen One. And yet 8 seasons into his NBA career he has failed to win a championship. Something all of the Big 3 had done by then. So now the media has turned to the only story they feel will sell papers. And that's that Lebron is a spoiled child who was given everything and made nothing of it. As I started off saying he has brought a lot of this upon himself by hiring childhood friends as his PR people who do not know what they are doing. However in many respects Lebron is doing many of the same things the Big 3 did but because he has failed to fit what the media framed as the expectations of him these personal failures are now magnified and scrutinized in a way the media would never have done for the other legends of the game.
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