Inside the inflated ego that is LeBron
Posted by fundater2000 on 08 Jul 2009 at 01:37 pm | Tagged as: Uncategorized
LeBron’s back in the news again. He apparently has joined a billionaires club.
‘Like “Fight Club,” the first rule of the Allen & Co. conference is that you don’t talk about the Allen & Co. conference. The event is closed to the press, and attendees are discouraged from acknowledging whether they’re attending.
Basically, a “summer camp for billionaires” where they discuss the future path and influence of the media. Among the luminaries expected this year: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Sumner Redstone, Mark Zuckerberg, Thomas Friedman, Owen Van Natta (CEO of MySpace), and all four major sports commissioners, among many other powerbrokers whose names you might not recognize but could easily buy and sell you.
In between rafting, knitting, yoga, chess and bridge (Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are big bridge players), big deals are known to have been hatched during the conference’s 26-year history.
The most famous marriage with roots in Sun Valley was Walt Disney Co.’s deal to buy Capital Cities/ABC Inc. in 1995, which came out of a random meeting in the parking lot of then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner, CapCities board member Buffett and the company’s CEO, Tom Murphy.’
So, now I guess LeBron is one of The Man? This is not going to be good for his already overinflated rare large ego…and who hasn’t been shy about his desire to build a business empire and become a billionaire himself. What with his recent movie, his endorsements, his game on the court, a TV show still supposedly in the works, and his own company, this is just another step on his way to worldwide domination.
And there’s this story from Chris Chase at Yahoo Sports’ The Dagger:
On Monday, Jordan Crawford, a sophomore at Xavier reportedly dunked on LeBron during a pick-up game at the LeBron James Skills Academy. Garry Parrish of CBSSports.com wrote that one high school player said, “it was bad”. LeBron must have agreed, because he had Nike officials confiscate the two videos that were taken of the dunk. (Parrish blames Nike, but reading between the lines it seems like the censorship was orchestrated by LeBron himself.)
Ryan Miller, a freelance photographer who was working at the camp that day, told CBSSports.com:
“LeBron called [Nike Basketball Senior Director Lynn Merritt] over and told him something,” Miller said. “That’s how I knew his name was Lynn. LeBron said, ‘Hey, Lynn. Come here.’”
A few minutes later, Miller’s tape was confiscated.
Connecting the dots, it seems clear that LeBron didn’t want video leaking out of him getting dunked on by a college sophomore, so he told a Nike official to get the tape. It was an understandable reflex move (gotta protect the image), but it also unnecessarily makes a mountain out of a molehill.
The Crawford dunk would have been a temporary embarrassment for LeBron. Let’s say the video was put on YouTube. It blows up for a bit, dominates blogs for 36 hours, everyone has a good chuckle and then it’s forgotten about.
But by censoring the tape, LeBron turns the dunk into a legend. On video, it’s just a dunk. Without video, the jam can reach mythic proportions. Because nobody can see it, the story of the dunk will grow in stature with each telling. Today, it was a simple two-handed slam. In a few days, it will be a 360-degree windmill. By the time Crawford makes his Xavier debut in October, he will have jumped off LeBron’s shoulders, flipped in the air, slammed the ball home with his left pinkie and then handed LeBron $3.99 for his dry cleaning.
Without the video, we’ll never know. Although, given his past history, I think it’s safe to say that LeBron probably walked off the court without shaking Crawford’s hand.
Why seize the tape? So some kid dunked on you…Courtney Lee did in the Eastern Conference Finals this year, you gonna seize that tape too and mind-swipe all of us who saw it? It makes you human, being not of Krypton isn’t a bad thing, you know.
What is up with you, LeBron? He had a rep as a decent down to Earth dude, but starting with the whole childish refusal to shake hands with the Magic when they knocked his ass out of the playoffs this year, there’s more and more signs that he’s an egotistical ass.
Say it ain’t so, Brony…
Say we ain’t ‘witnessing’ you turning into another egotistical, self-important diva ala Brett Favre and Terrell Owens…we got enough ass-clowns like them in sports (let alone the world), we don’t need anymore…
