This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture, and politics—and how they all bleed together.
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I.
At the turn of the century, not long after his fifteenth birthday, LeBron James played for the state championship. He was a freshman in high school, he was already 6-foot-5, and even then it was obvious to anyone with working eyes that there was something kind of crazy happening here. LeBron scored 44 points in two games that weekend in Columbus, Ohio, making 16 of his 22 shots, clearing space for his teammates, and finishing off an undefeated season for an Akron-based Catholic school called St. Vincent-St. Mary. Some of the reporters seeing him for the first time refused to believe he was actually a ninth-grader. They compared him to former Ohio State stars like Jimmy Jackson and Clark Kellogg, and even that projection felt like an audacious leap. And yet what I remember most from being one of those reporters at that tournament is that the buzz didn’t seem to affect LeBron much at all.
“I have read all that,” he told reporters, when they informed him of the nature of his own press clippings. “But right now I just want to be LeBron James.”
At that moment, early in the year 2000, I was on the verge of leaving my first job in Akron, Ohio, and LeBron was on the verge of arriving from Akron and becoming one of the most famous people on earth. In the months and years to come, he would land on the cover of SLAM Magazine, and then land on the cover of Sports Illustrated; he would blossom from a prospect who drew comparisons to Jimmy Jackson and Stephon Marbury into the greatest young talent of the modern era, if not the greatest young talent in the history of modern sports.
The expectations for LeBron following that coming-out weekend in Columbus continued to stretch and expand over the course of the next couple of years. Many times, in many pursuits, from basketball to football to chess, those weighted expectations are enough to break the will of a prodigy to pieces (the friend he once appeared on the cover of SLAM Magazine with, a Brooklyn point guard named Sebastian Telfair—who I also wound up reporting on after I moved to New York City—had neither the talent nor the temperament to handle fame like LeBron did). But the thing I remember about my very brief overlap with LeBron was that he seemed to possess a sophisticated understanding of the nature of 21st-century fame long before any of the rest of us did. He was cool and self-aware and supremely confident; he had already taught himself what to say and when to say it. It wasn’t that he lived in a silo, but unlike so many prodigies easing into to a colossal level of fame and expectation, he managed to keep the public ideas about him separate from his own identity. He knew that his talent would soon be co-opted and twisted in an accelerated media universe, and yet he also knew, perhaps more than any other athlete in an age of remarkable cultural change, that the story was ultimately his to tell.
II.
There were moments, of course, when LeBron lost control of the narrative, but for the most part, his career played out in a way that felt as if he was almost deliberately adhering to some kind of classical storytelling template. First there was the serendipitous landing in Cleveland; then there was the Decision to leave home and set out for a more glamorous existence while also embracing the role of the villain; then there was the return of the prodigal son, and the winning of a championship in Cleveland, and then there was the move to Los Angeles to embrace a more classical idea of fame itself. Over time, it grew from a tight tale into a Homeric epic, but at every step, you could feel the way LeBron had carefully manipulated the narrative to fit the proper plot twists. He became an entertainment mogul himself; he had an innate understanding of how storytelling worked, and he was his own best subject. He was the prodigy who actually lived up to his daunting potential, in part because of his colossal talent, and in part because he understood what people expected and calibrated that with his own desires.
And that is why, I think, his latest move—and perhaps his final move as a professional basketball player—was, at least on the surface, so utterly vexing. This is why LeBron James finishing his career in the city of Philadelphia is going to take some time to fully get our heads around.
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