On Lebron James

The Miami Heat are a basketball team. They are abnormal for multiple reasons. For one, they are very talented. They have three members of Team USA at their peak playing together. That makes them exceptional. It makes them very good, and perhaps spectacular.

But that’s not why they’re important. They’re important because they’re a cultural phenomenon with oddly shaped wings. Before they had a season together, before they had won any championships, before they had won (or lost) any games, ESPN hired a team of columnists to cover them full time. They hired stats expert Tom Haberstroh and former Cavs beat writer Brian Windhorst to cover every cough and sneeze. Bethlehem Shoals of FreeDarko.com fame writes about them (almost) daily. Deadspin covers every game. Or damned close.

The Spanish have an expression, “Morbo,” to describe a morbid fascination that a person, event, or group might have that piques your interest, regardless of whether you might typically interested in such a thing. The Heat have “morbo.” Mucho morbo. The interest surrounding the team defies standard classification of when you’d objectively want to cover a sporting event. They don’t have the best record. They don’t draw the best crowds. They don’t have a great history or a loyal fan base. They’re just three superstars who defied expectations and decided they wanted to play with each other in South Beach. And that’s what they did.

And people hate them. Not just die-hard fans, or traditionalists, or folks from Cleveland. Fans boo them as if they were Nazis or something. It’s worse than after Kobe had the rape allegations in Eagle. Way worse than Gilbert after he drew a gun on a teammate. Infinitely worse than Melo after he got a DUI.

You have to wonder why something this trivial makes people so upset. I mean, viscerally angry. Thinking about your ex-girlfriend sleeping with another guy angry. The Heat are to your average basketball fan what Obamacare is to Tea Party supporters. It’s deep, it’s irrational, but it’s real. We can forgive Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson for running into the stands and swinging at fans who may or may not have thrown beer at them, but we can never forgive Lebron James. We can forgive Ray Lewis, who may or may not have been involved in a murder, but we can’t accept what the Heat have done.

Why?

Maybe it’s because we’re jealous. We can’t just leave our crap jobs, our crap cities, and go to a nicer place, party with cooler people, and make the sex with the hot women. We can’t just ditch or current colleagues and replace them with more competent ones. We can’t just change the terms of our employment and tell our boss make us ice cream sundaes every day lunch, employ our friends, and shine our shoes. But Lebron James? He can. And he did. He didn’t stick out a bad or mediocre situation out of loyalty to people he never met. He made his life better. And people hate him for it.

And that says a lot more about the people who hate him than it says about Lebron James.