The Soul of Basketball: The Epic Showdown Between LeBron, Kobe, Doc, and Dirk That Saved the NBA

340 Pages·2018·3.74 MB·English

by  Ian Thomsen

CONTENTS
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: The Fairy Tale
The Bastard
The Decision
The Game
The Tradition
The Entrepreneur
The All-Star
The Trade
The Odyssey
The Higher Calling
The Immigrant
The Conflict
The Twelfth Star
The Finals
The Sheriff
The Triumph
Epilogue: The Way Forward
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2018 by Ian Thomsen

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
[email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Thomsen, Ian, author.
Title: The soul of basketball : the epic showdown between LeBron, Kobe, Doc,and Dirk that saved the
NBA / Ian Thomsen.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017050919 (print) | LCCN 2017046213 (ebook) | ISBN 9780547746890 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780547746517 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: National Basketball Association—History. | Basketball
—United States—History. | James, LeBron. | Bryant, Kobe, 1978– | Rivers, Glenn. | Nowitzki, Dirk, 1978–
Classification: LCC GV885.515.N37 (print) | LCC GV885.515.N37 T56 2018 (ebook) | DDC 796.323/64—
dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050919

Cover design by Brian Moore
Cover photographs © Mike Ehrmann Getty Images (LeBron James); Jeff Gross Getty Images (Kobe
Bryant); Elsa Getty Images (Doc Rivers); Ronald Martinez Getty Images (Dirk Nowitzki) Author
photograph © Stan Grossfeld
v1.0318
For Jacqueline
Christopher
Maureen
I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no
path, and I will leave a trail.
—Muriel Strode

Jazz music explains . . . what it means to be American. Which is that it’s
a process. And democracy is a process. It’s not always going to go your
way. Sometimes you have to play that riff and listen to what somebody
else is playing. Jazz believes in freedom of expression. But it also
believes in people communicating with each other. A lot of times things
might not work out. But there’s always another time.
—Wynton Marsalis
PROLOGUE: THE FAIRY TALE
“S
o,” asked the interviewer hired by LeBron James to interview him in
front of a live TV audience, “does the team that you’re going to, that you’ll
announce in a few minutes—do they know your decision?”
“Uh, they just found out,” LeBron replied.
“They just found out?” Even LeBron’s accomplice looked surprised.
“Yeah.”
“So the other five, on pins and needles, they don’t know. They’ll be listening
to this?”
“Right,” LeBron said.
LeBron, 25 years old, was the most precious free agent of the new lucrative
era that had been pioneered decades earlier by Michael Jordan. A half-dozen
franchises of the National Basketball Association had convinced LeBron to
consider playing for them, and the other twenty-four teams were unmistakably
envious. At 6 feet 8 inches tall and more than 260 pounds, LeBron was on his
way to becoming the most versatile star in the short history of the NBA. Already
he had been named the NBA’s Rookie of the Year, an All-Star for the ensuing
six seasons and the league’s Most Valuable Player the past two years.
In prime time, on national TV, LeBron was about to announce which lucky
franchise would be given the opportunity to pay him more than $15 million
annually.
“Do you have any doubts about your decision?”
“Um, no,” LeBron said unconvincingly. “I don’t have any doubts at all.”
His body language betrayed his words. It appeared to be occurring to LeBron
just now, on TV screens throughout America, that he was not yet everything that
he was cracking himself up to be. LeBron had been hailed since adolescence as
the second coming of Michael Jordan, and yet he had not come close to leading
his hometown team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, to the NBA championship. That
was the problem with this outlandish production, which he had created for
himself. He looked anxious.
“Would you like to sleep on it a little longer, or are you ready to make this
decision?”
All around the country people were yelling for LeBron to get to the point. His
made-for-TV event had been on the air for close to a half hour already.
“I’ve slept enough,” said LeBron. “Or the lack of sleep.”
“I’ve slept enough,” said LeBron. “Or the lack of sleep.”
His curious vanity show, titled The Decision, was meant to take advantage of
the public interest in his future. LeBron would insist that he produced his TV
special to raise $2.5 million for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, which was
admirable indeed. But there was no doubt that he also viewed this reality-based
infomercial as a chance to grow his own brand commercially. He paid up front
for the national airtime on ESPN, and he took personal responsibility for selling
the commercials and sponsorships in order to leverage his fame and extend his
reach further into the entertainment mainstream.
As many as thirteen million Americans were drawn to watch The Decision by
its promise of betrayal. Was LeBron putting his fans in Cleveland through
needless angst before announcing that he would re-sign, after all, with the
Cavaliers? Or, even worse, had he chosen the cruel gimmick of this self-serving
TV show as a vehicle for abandoning his hometown team in favor of a more
glamorous destination—the New York Knicks, the New Jersey Nets (themselves
on the verge of relocating to chic Brooklyn), the Chicago Bulls, the Los Angeles
Clippers, or the Miami Heat?
LeBron’s decision was being driven by his desire to win at the highest level
and define himself as an NBA champion. But his conceit of The Decision was
burying that lead. LeBron, inexplicably, was taking himself out of context in
order to satisfy the prime-time format of reality TV.
So why was he choosing to cast himself as the villain? The cynicism of his
fiasco was inconsistent with the high-minded devotion to teamwork that he had
shown throughout his brief career. Never mind the surprise announcement that
he was about to make: LeBron’s active participation in his own demise would
emerge as the real twist of the show.
It was being broadcast from a suburban Boys & Girls Club gymnasium that
had been chosen for him in Greenwich, Connecticut, an hour north of
Manhattan. LeBron had grown up playing in gyms like this, and he should have
felt at home amid the two-toned cinder block, the stale smells and muted echoes.
But he would find no comfort here. By the time he arrived via private jet, the
little gym had been taken over by LeBron’s corporate partners. The warm brown
glow of the basketball court was blighted by the black-curtained stage on which
LeBron and his co-host sat facing each other. There were hot lights and wires
and strangers everywhere, all under frenzied pressure to synchronize the details
of a live broadcast that was doomed to fail. The local children who normally
might have been playing in the gym had been propped up on rows of shallow
bleachers to serve as the TV backdrop to LeBron, alongside a banner that read
“Great Futures Start Here.” The boys and girls sat in fidgeting demonstration
that LeBron was doing all of this for them rather than for himself.
A dozen years earlier LeBron might have been sitting down there looking up
A dozen years earlier LeBron might have been sitting down there looking up
to his hero, Michael Jordan, for inspiration and guidance. But then, Jordan surely
would have known better; he never would have made the mistakes that LeBron
was making now. As LeBron sat high upon the throne of a director’s chair, the
scene told a story all its own, of how LeBron’s fame radiated out and reshaped
the order of everything that mattered to him. Too late he would realize that he
had hired in the cameras and microphones without knowing how to explain
himself. He was exploiting his dream before he had fulfilled its promise.
The interviewer, behaving as if everything was going terrifically, smiled his
big smile and said, “Are you still a nail biter?”
LeBron looked wounded. He was aware that his nervous habit, as televised in
close-ups during the timeouts of Cavaliers games, was viewed as a symptom of
his failure to live up to the expectations that had been shadowing him since he
was 16 years old. “I have, a little bit,” he said in his deep, resonant voice, trying
to smile back while squeezing his long fingers into his lap. “Not of late.”
“You’ve had everybody else biting their nails. So I guess it’s time for them to
stop chewing. The answer to the question everybody wants to know: LeBron,
what’s your decision?”
On this night of July 8, 2010, the tension within LeBron was shrinking his
eyes. “In this fall—” He stopped abruptly. “This is very tough,” he went on with
newfound sincerity, as if suddenly asking himself what he was doing and how he
had come to this strange place in his life.
But then, just as quickly, LeBron was reverting to the script. “In this fall I’m
going to . . .”

LeBron had been discovered as a skinny 16-year-old with acne and long,
unmanaged hair who was starring for an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) team
from Akron, his hometown forty-five minutes south of Cleveland. Even then, not
quite a decade before The Decision, LeBron had the makings of everything
anyone could want in a basketball player—size, strength, athleticism, skills and
vision—a point guard with a power forward’s build. He was the most gifted
prospect the NBA scouts had ever seen.
In those days there was nothing not to like about LeBron.
He was devoted to his mother, Gloria James, a troubled single parent who had
given birth to LeBron when she was 16. He was grounded in his closest
childhood relationships, and he remained loyal to those friends even as his own
fame grew exponentially. He was well-spoken and intuitive. As a child LeBron
had been exposed to poverty, crime and negligence, and yet his inclination was
to avoid violence and steer clear of trouble. His mother and he had moved house
a dozen times already when LeBron was invited to live out his fifth-grade year in
a dozen times already when LeBron was invited to live out his fifth-grade year in
the wholesome home of Frank and Pam Walker and their three children in
Akron. Years later the Walkers would recall LeBron’s please-and-thank-you
manners, his shy personality and his desire to oblige. “He wants to be liked,”
Pam Walker would say. For the first time in his life, the Walkers established for
him a daily schedule of homework and chores, and he embraced the discipline.
In high school he could have easily hoarded points for himself, but he wasn’t
one of those gifted bullies who claims to own the ball. LeBron’s ideal was to
share it, in the belief that he couldn’t win unless his teammates won too. Their
happiness made him happy.
The commercial sponsors who had done so well in the 1990s with Michael
Jordan were now, in the new millennium, lusting after the teenaged LeBron as if
he were the surest thing ever. Their confidence in his potential had everything to
do with the revealing nature of basketball as the one sport that provided every
player with the freedom to pass or shoot the ball. The intuitive nature of
LeBron’s playmaking—he decided whether to keep or share the ball at full speed
in the flow of the game—made it impossible for him to fake the commitment to
teamwork that he was expressing.
Anyone with a stake in the NBA could see that the way LeBron played
basketball was an authentic demonstration of the man he wanted to become. He
had the potential to surpass Michael Jordan—to marry Jordan’s scoring and
defensive skills with an evolved desire to create opportunities for his teammates.
Bigger and stronger and every bit as athletic as Jordan, LeBron was expected to
become all things to all people.
What, then, would go wrong? Why, within a decade, would LeBron go on TV
to betray his own values and ambitions?

When Michael Jordan was 25, the same age as LeBron on the night of The
Decision, he admitted to his own chronic fear that an off-court scandal would
ruin the goodwill that he was building on the court. He was leveraging his talent
for basketball in an unprecedented way, and he worried about all of the potential
mistakes that he couldn’t see coming. He had “nightmares of something terrible
happening to me that would destroy a lot of people’s dreams or conceptions of
me,” he said in 1988. “That’s the biggest nightmare I live every day.”
Jordan’s instinct for self-preservation was the result of having assembled his
portfolio of sponsorships from the ground up, piece by piece. By contrast, when
LeBron came into the NBA at age 18, he was rewarded with eight-figure
endorsements before he had accomplished anything of real importance in
basketball. His client list appeared to have been inherited directly from Jordan.