NBA news: Looking at LeBron's words

Photo by Keith Allison

Welp, that's that.  LeBron James is coming back to Cleveland.  What is significant for everyone, though, is the way it happened.  Not in a TV special on ESPN, but in an essay, in Sports Illustrated--the paper of record, as it were, for the sports world.

Athletes and people in sports in general don't always trust words.  They tend to look at words like they do shot attempts: they are things you try to use, and there's a certain percentage of success.  With practice, too, you can get better at using them.  But hitting upon the right one is just a matter of being at the right place and the right time.

They are often frustrated and often resentful of the way that media members seem to have an opposite approach: these people look at words like print, as writing, as stuff that once it is said, gets set in stone.  They seek to extract quotes from them, things that they can get on paper and then take apart, deconstruct, criticize, comment upon.  They seek this out, instead of looking at the actual performance on the court or field, instead of actually analyzing the actions, the decisions, the moves that are most dear to the heart of athletes and which they have practiced for ages.

Thus athletes are always trying to take things back, trying to wiggle out of saying things, trying to give themselves room to say two conflicting things, or give platitudes that can't really be used in any way.  In a way it is a form of deception, but it is often much more simply a way to render an opponent helpless, to make them confused, to make them unable to embarrass the athlete.  It is a way to make them more like silence, which is much more of a friend of the athlete than words.

But LeBron James trusted words this time to convey what he was thinking, feeling, doing.  From the piece--which he calls an "essay," but which is something of a letter, something of a monologue, something of an interview, something of a blog post, something of an actual article--he expresses a different attitude about words:

I’m doing this essay because I want an opportunity to explain myself uninterrupted. I don’t want anyone thinking: He and Erik Spoelstra didn’t get along. … He and Riles didn’t get along. … The Heat couldn’t put the right team together. That’s absolutely not true.

Words, it turns out, are things that you can put out there to prevent misunderstanding.  To communicate your true intentions.  They are things that get across what you actually are saying.  They may not always be things that communicate what you want them to say at that moment, but they are there, and they are better used than not used, or used without any actual intention of conveying what you mean.

Most significantly, they aren't always things that you have to give in response to questions, to proddings by the media.  The most surprising word in that sentence is "uninterrupted."  In it, it conveys a completely different attitude towards what can happen when you don't speak: rather than seeing it along the lines of the average athlete, LeBron is saying that silence it is actually something that can take over your expression of yourself.  The absence of speech isn't really any guarantee that people will value your actions more than your words.  Speaking, communicating, is not some optional part of life that you can just eliminate.  It is not something you can run away from.

The original "The Decision" special in 2010 seemed to operate without any sense of this possibility.  It was set up as a kind of interview, press release, announcement, and rally all in one. To James, this may have seemed the natural thing to do--he has always possessed a strangely un-self-centered view of his own identity, as if decisions for him were more the product of crowdsourcing or teamwork than his own agency.  To communicate a decision, to announce it, in response to a query, rather than to declare it yourself, is a bizarrely passive way to go about the business.  Thus the resultant mess: what we really saw was a man surrounding himself with interlocutors who would ask him all the right things, who would prompt him without mercy, who would celebrate what he was doing, and eventually broadcast, represent, the decision to the world somehow.

This is different.  James is trusting language, is engaging in language more like a person than a player merely.  He is showing that words are an opportunity to define ourselves alongside our actions.  He is showing that they are a way to define ourselves, rather than let other people define us.  It is a remarkable shift, alongside everything else that this decision means for the world of basketball and for professional sports.