More than basketball. More than sports.
LeBron James is going back to Cleveland. He’s going home. But he’s also authoring a unique American sporting life with the best chapters yet to come, and basketball is just a small part of it.
For decades sports have been starved for a high-profile athlete willing to step out of the confines of his role. Someone who would dream big, dream dangerously, whose ambitions outside the game somehow matched what they could achieve on the field of play where so often they made things look too easy.
The standard in this regard has always been Muhammad Ali, even if he stumbled into his role as an athletic and social icon nearly accidentally. He’s revered as The Greatest not necessarily because he was the best heavyweight of all time—and it’s debatable—but because when the times he lived in required him to demonstrate the courage of his convictions he didn’t flinch. He allowed himself to stand for something bigger that anything he could do in the ring.
He changed his faith. He changed his name. He stood up to his government. He was great.
LeBron James’s times are different. He’s not about to be drafted to fight a foreign war. It trivializes Ali and what he stood for to compare James leaving South Beach for the shores of Lake Erie.
But edges of the picture touch. James is declaring himself willing to be the man for his times. He’s spoken out about rogue NBA owner Donald Sterling. He made gestures of support after innocent black teenager Trayvon Martin was shot while wearing a hoodie. There’s something beyond a commercial brand there.
In describing himself, LeBron always works in some version of his signature catchphrase: “I’m just a kid from Akron, Ohio.”
It’s a model of understatement. What he really means is he’s a living story of a survivor from the growing American (and global) underclass. He was born to a troubled, poor, teen single mother in a corner of the United States that is quickly fading off the map—a place the global economy has determinedly left behind and that seems beyond repairing in any grand sense.
It’s a winner-take-all world, and Akron and Cleveland and much of Northeastern Ohio has been left behind.
In that context, by any proper measure LeBron James is a kind of miracle or fable. Really? The most famous and gifted athlete on the planet materialized from a place and circumstance that generally breeds only misery?
In that context, “Just a kid from Akron, Ohio” isn’t a throwaway line—it’s a mission statement.
James left Cleveland in 2010 in the worst way possible. He blew it. He tore his contract with the people he cared for most. He left for Miami—perhaps the U.S. city that is Akron’s most glamorous, glaring opposite—and humiliated those left behind in the process.
He deserved the right to leave. He was a free agent, and like a kid who wanted the chance to go away to college—exactly the analogy James made in his open letter announcing his return to Cleveland on SI.com—he wanted to experience life elsewhere. But he made a fool of himself and countless others when he televised The Decision.
But leaving—if not the manner of it—served its purpose.
“These past four years helped raise me into who I am,” he said in his letter. “I became a better player and a better man. I learned from a franchise that had been where I wanted to go.”
But he never really left Northeast Ohio. He kept his mansion in Bath Township, about 30 miles south of Cleveland, and returned there in the summers. His wife is from Akron. His agent, Rich Paul, is from Akron. He keeps as his closest advisors high school friends from Akron. He wants to raise his kids there.
All of which makes James believable when he cites doing something through basketball that will resonate for his community, rather than just hunting down Michael Jordan and his six NBA championships.
That’s a narrow goal and one that might not be attainable anyway. Jordan’s record of competitive excellence might already be unreachable. The Chicago Bulls star made it to six NBA Finals and won all six. Six time he was the Finals MVP.
As remarkable a player as James has been already in his career, he’s lost three NBA Finals in five tries. He’s stumbled at key moments in a way that will always allow doubters to say, “Michael never did that.”
But James can eclipse Jordan in more meaningful ways and his return home is a massive step in that direction.
Jordan didn’t introduce the idea of the professional athlete as a flinty-eyed, revenue-generating machine, content to win titles, smoke cigars, play golf and insulate his palace with hundred dollar bills. But he perfected the image. His unwillingness to embrace broader social causes forced a reconsideration of what it meant to achieve athletic immortality.
Ali made athletic superstardom seem worthy and noble. Jordan made it seem like a hell of a lot fun, but otherwise a bit of an empty pursuit.
James has raised the stakes. Four years ago he put himself in the eye of the public hurricane and barely survived. He emerged a champion and a husband and a father, if not any better at making quick decisions.
And now after keeping the world waiting he’s chosen to come back to a place that people leave and to openly accept the responsibility of using his status to make it better.
“I feel my calling here goes above basketball. I have a responsibility to lead, in more ways than one, and I take that very seriously,” he said. “My presence can make a difference in Miami, but I think it can mean more where I’m from.”
For all the off-court drama and on-court brilliance and future promise for more, that’s the most exciting thing about LeBron James coming home.
He’s a basketball player, sure, but he’s got so much more to give, and he’s willing to try.