National Sports Journalism Center

This thing with LeBron James, won’t it be grand?

It’s now 4 o’clock and I’m waiting for the news because this is another of those wonderfully absurd things that we’ve come to love/hate about American sports.

Maybe Jim Litke of the Associated Press won the sportswriting theme contest. The waiting for LeBron went on so long that it gave Litke time to remember Gerald Ford coming off the bench to replace Richard Nixon. "Our long national nightmare is over," the new president said in 1974. This week Litke wrote that James finally knew where he’d sleep next year. "His long national nightmare is coming to an end."

I rise in applause for the AP man’s wickedly clever send-up. "This much attention for a guy who has yet to win a championship – let alone a game in the finals – is wrong on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to begin," Litke wrote. But he knew when the hype machine began devouring its young: "Sometime in the early 1990s, right around the time cameras turned up in high school gyms to broadcast ‘signing ceremonies,’ giving kids with an already bloated sense of self an unhealthy dose of more."

Not to mention Sports Illustrated using LeBron on its cover at age 13.

Not to mention ESPN turbocharging the boy king’s carriage ever since.

Not to mention the cheapskates who pay Asians pennies to make megabuck shoes in LeBron’s name.

The inimitable Charlie Pierce, in his blog for the Boston Globe, wrote, "Somebody’s going to have to tell me about what, precisely, I am supposed to be outraged when tonight’s corporate branding extravaganza explodes across my television screen and we all learn where LeBron James will be playing his basketball next year. . . . Am I supposed to be offended by the marriage between corporate America and professional sports? The longer marriage between corporate American media and professional sports? . . . Or the even longer marriage between unreasoning hype and American sports? I decline to be offended by any of this because, frankly, I know enough to come in out of the rain and do not play with my toes in the oatmeal."

Maybe we could feel badly for the Cavaliers. They heard James’s promises and saw no results, and his might-stay/might-go tease went on for two years, most infamously this spring even as he did his famous Houdini trick, making himself disappear in full sight late in Game 5 against the Celtics. Cleveland’s pain has only been exacerbated by His Highness’s extended fit of egomania this summer.

The faux-melodrama reached such heights that a friend sent me an e-mail he received this week from his 13-year-old daughter. She is a Lakers fan who was clearly discomfited by the thought that her heroes would be threatened by an conglomerate of all-star mercenaries. She wrote:

"Bosh and Wade to Miami.

"Boozer to Chicago.

"Amar’e to New York.

"LeBron to ??? I really hope he doesn’t go to Chicago or Miami.

"PLEASE GO TO NEW YORK.

"Any thoughts?"

**

I’m calling a timeout here for a digression about LeBron’s newest best friend, the Wizards’ point guard John Wall, the University of Kentucky freshman who was the No. 1 pick in the recent NBA draft.

There has been criticism of Washington Post reporter Eric Prisbell for a section of his powerful profile on Wall. By Prisbell’s account, he discovered that Wall’s father, imprisoned in the boy’s youth, had been convicted not only of burglary but of murder. During a long interview, he broke that news to Wall, who said he did not know it. Some readers were offended at what they saw as an ambush tactic designed to put Wall in a dramatic trap.

But, Prisbell wrote, Wall took the news calmly, even with a certain grace. My first thought was that Wall had to have known about his father’s crime. If not from playground buddies, surely he would have heard about it in the poisonous jungle of recruiting; someone, I reasoned, would have used that information to gain an edge in the chase for Wall. But I had a second thought. If a recruiting rival of Kentucky coach John Calipari knew of the murder, the news surely would have been leaked and we’d have known it before Prisbell uncovered it in a newspaper’s archives. The fact that the dark news had never surfaced has persuaded me that Wall, in fact, did not know.

To Prisbell’s credit, the news was reported straight-forwardly deep in the long profile and was used with sensitivity when, in lesser hands, it might have been used as a sensational lead that obscured the greater story of a young man whose life has been transformed by basketball.

**

It’s now 8:26 p.m. and though the young Lakers fan directed the question to her father, I will offer one thought – which is that for all I care, James could play in Timbukfrickin’tu.

Bad enough to read the whither-LeBron stuff for months.

Worse, this ESPN thing.

It’s now 8:41. At ESPN.com, LeBron is the big story under the marquee "ESPN, EPSN3, Radio: LeBron James, ‘The Decision.’ 9 ET."

It was to be a one-hour television show. Obama might not get an hour on the oil spill, but we’re getting an hour with a man who wears short pants at work.

Back to Charlie Pierce: "Can’t we all just accept this for the absurdist spectacle that it is? That business about ESPN Magazine’s having learned from ‘independent sources’ about what was going to happen on ESPN? That was tremendous. This is going to be the best comedy on television this week."

To those of us who were grumpy about the television aspect of the absurdist theatre, apologists for America’s loss of perspective pronounced the TV presentation OK because, hey, look, all the advertising money would be donated to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

One grump of my intimate acquaintance – me – was unimpressed by this alleged act of charity. It was hype of the most cynical nature. Here’s why I say that. James’s future had been up for debate for at least two years. In the last two weeks, it dominated all sports media. The chatter effectively raised the value of his brand by, let’s guess, a multiple of ten. And it was all done without James spending a penny.

It would be nice, one grump thought, if James put his accountants to work on figuring out how much money he would make in sponsorships from this night forward.

Then give that money to the Boys and Girls Clubs.

At 9 p.m. tonight, I left the house to walk the dogs.

On my return, I was saddened to learn that James had not signed with Oklahoma City.

Dave Kindred’s next book will be "Morning Miracle," an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed at Twitter.com/DaveKindred and facebook.com/people/Dave-Kindred/509353295