NBA epic showed us best of sport — and a worthy king
Two years ago he was the most derided man in sport.
Now? LeBron James is probably the most revered.
And best. And possibly most gracious, grounded, rounded, complete, too.
Sport doesn’t get better than last week’s NBA finals.
Those who’ve sugar-coated the brutality in Breffni last Sunday as “intriguing” and “absorbing” — as they tend to most Ulster football eyesores — should watch the Miami Heat-San Antonio Spurs series sometime.
It too was an absorbing tactical battle, as anyone who followed how Greg Popovich managed to make LeBron look a merely decent player for almost five full games saw.
Three of the games went right down to the wire: from Tony Parker’s fingertips beating the shot clock to win Game One, to Ray Allen’s must-make three-pointer that brought Game Six into overtime, up to Tim Duncan’s missed chippy and LeBron’s pull-up jumper in the closing minute of the decisive Game Seven.
And yet as high as the stakes were, as long as the series was — 341 whole minutes — and as huge as the men on both teams were, we can’t recall a single cheap shot or act of blatant gamesmanship.
When the respective camps offered platitudes about the other following the final buzzer, there was nothing tokenistic about it, only absolute sincerity. Popovich embraced James and Dwayne Wade as if they were his own players (which they once were, when he was an assistant to the US Olympic team). Wade ran to Duncan to pay his respects and commiserations. The first words James and Wade and his current coach Eric Spoelstra offered in media interviews were to give credit to their opponents. “First-class organisation,” said James, “first-class players.”
It can be easy to be a good sport after a game. We remember commentators glorifying Benny Tierney congratulating his old St Mary’s teaching college classmate Peter Canavan moments after Armagh were defeated by Tyrone in the 2003 All-Ireland final, as if that atoned for the ill-tempered 70-minute foul-fest that had preceded it. Miami and San Antonio showed how a real contest can be: fierce, ferocious, yet sporting.
In James it also featured probably the standout figure in world team sport right now; Lionel Messi can be his only genuine rival to that claim. Two years ago, after announcing The Decision to leave Cleveland and bring his “talents” to South Beach and then losing to Dallas in the finals, he was viewed as an egotistical choker; all talent and mouth, no heart. He was the butt of night talkshow gags. Why can’t LeBron shop at the dollar store? Because he only has three quarters.
How that perception has changed. Because he’s changed. He’s admitted that defeat to Dallas humbled him and upon reflection, he erred in how he bade farewell to Cleveland. A month after licking his wounds, he flew to Houston to be tutored in the arts of the post- game by Hakeem Olajuwon. YouTube it sometime; it’s fascinating and humbling to see one of the world’s most astonishing athletic specimen look at times like a novice dancer, trying to follow Olajuwon’s footwork. But by James’ own assessment, he had under-performed in the fourth quarter because he hadn’t enough “game-changing plays”. By developing some moves closer to the paint and the basket, 2012 would be different. And so it would, as Miami’s supremacy over the Oklahoma Thunder in last year’s finals proved.
In truth, James has long been an outrageously hard worker. After losing his first NBA finals, the 2007 sweep to the Spurs back when he was in Cleveland, he recognised he wasn’t an adequately reliable outside shooter. So just like his childhood idol Michael Jordan insisted Warner Brothers had to build a bubbledome and fly in NBA stars so he could scrimmage during the shoot of Space Jam, James would have his shooting coach Chris Jent flown to China when he had obligations with Nike.
For six seasons straight now his shooting percentage has increased, to the point he is one of the most reliable shooters in the league from 18 to 23 feet, and 40% now from three-point range, when back in his rookie year he was 29%. LeBron James was always an astonishing basketball player. Now he is a masterful one.
We cannot see him overtaking Jordan as the greatest. No one else will ever transform the sport — arguably sport itself — like that No. 23 did. The LeBron template of constant improvement was first devised by Jordan himself. What LeBron could prove to be is the most complete. Not even Jordan could defend all five spots, guard both a Parker and a Duncan.
And what’s frightening and inspiring is that he feels there’s more room for scope. Already he’s identified that in the offseason he wants to improve his free-throw return from 73% to somewhere in the 80s.
Last week on their tour of America, Irish rugby performance coach Enda McNulty claimed the best are invariably the most humble. He’s right. And right now over there and all over the world there’s no one more humble or better in sport than LeBron James.
