he's just fun to root against. he's like a bad guy in pro wrestling. he says a bunch of things that make you want to boo him out loud. he almost forces his opponents into the role of the good guy, the one you have to root for cuz that's the direction your internal compass naturally points you in.
he started off well enough. he was the hometown hero in the underdog city of cleveland. it almost seemed meant to be that he would win a championship there and everyone would live happily ever after. and then things took a dramatic turn in a different direction. much like when the good guy in pro wrestling decides he's had enough and turns bad, lebron james did it in a huge way. he did it on a national stage in an hour long televised special on espn. he captivated a whole country and did what bad guys do, took the easy way out. he left town to go play with other superstars. he didn't care what the fans thought about it. lebron was gonna do what lebron wanted to do, and that was win championships whether people chose to love him or hate him.
so i find it almost impossible to root for him or the miami heat now. they won a championship. lebron got his ring, and it's reignited my passion for rooting against him. i'm not taking anything away from lebron james. in my humble opinion, he is the most talented, most dominant dude in all the nba right now... and the way things are looking, he may hold that position for a few more years. but he still can't ever erase the fact that he had to leave a team to do it. as good as he is, he wasn't good enough to get it done in cleveland. he didn't cheat, but he took a shortcut.
and that's the thing, lebron's not a cheater. he's not even really a bad dude. he just plays one on tv. if you look around the world of professional sports, it won't take you very long to gather a rather extensive list of names of REAL bad guys, people who have committed awful crimes off the field. there's dog fighters and killers, drugs and violence. there's even pure evil like jerry sandusky.
there's a whole cast of characters who do real bad things and are way more worthy of being hated on in comparison to lebron james. i could never say that i really hate lebron james. but in the world that is basketball theater, he makes a great heel. he's fun to root against. it doesn't make him a bad human being. but if you're gonna watch basketball, you gotta pick a side to root for and a side to root against. lebron's made that decision easy for me.
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It's funny that you make your comparison to Lebron akin to a heel in wrestling. I always rooted for the heels. The pretty baby faces got boring to root for after awhile. It was like being thirteen years old and still forcing yourself to believe that Santa, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy was real.
Say what you want about the bad guy in general. It's the crowd you should be concerned with. The mob is fickle and it loves a winner. Furthermore, everyone hated Stone Cold Steve Austin until he he hit Jake the Snake with a Stone Cold Stunner at King of the Ring PPV and kicked off one of the best marketing ads in WWE history with his Austin 3:16 quote. Everyone also hated this Samoan cat/ex-CFL football player/3rd generation wrestler by the name of Dwayne Johnson until he started speaking in third person and calling everyone a "jabroni."
Yet everyone is mad at Lebron for wanting to go play with his friends and win. Everyone in Cleveland is mad at him for not carrying not only the team but an entire city on his back even though the only way to win a basketball title is if the entire team gets in on it and let's face it. Cleveland pretty much proved there was no one else on that team that was playing champion-caliber B-Ball. Yet others have taken shortcuts before and no one said shit. Kobi going to the Lakers. Shaq following suit. And don't get me started with the F'N Yankees! Yet Lebron is the bad guy. LOL!
You say he took a shortcut. I say he upgraded his arsenal. You say po-TAY-toes. I say po-TAH-toes.
All hail KING JAMES!
the closest heel turn i can compare it to is shawn michaels. cleveland was marty jennety flying through the barber shop window. yea, the rockers were fun to root for, but they weren't getting the job done. marty was dead weight and michaels knew it. look at hbk's career after... totally flourished, goes down as one of the all time greats.
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