DOPE ARTICLE
After morning practice, after the media session, LeBron James went to the locker room and iced, then got pulled for a random piss test, so now he’s late, which he does not like being. Also, he’s tired. There’s a chef here at the warehouse, where Tupac and Snoop and Jay Z keep the rhythm, and hot lights shine over racks of clothes and shoes to put on, which he loves—he loves this shit—fashion is his candy, just ask Randy, to whom he has handed his phone to take photos. He wants pictures of himself in the outfits, maybe to tweet, which he also loves. But he’s tired, that’s the thing. Sluggish. And so right in the middle of a sentence about chicken and hot sauce, which the chef just handed him, he switches gears, and his eyes pop wide, and his mouth goes rubbery, and, enunciating perfectly, he booms: You might be deep in this game, but you got the rules missin / Niggaz be actin like they savage, they out to get the cabbage / I got nuthin but love, for my niggaz livin lavish.
People seem used to it. None of his handlers give pause. But it does seem a little…dissociative.
Motherfuck the rest, two of the best from the west side / And I can make you famous / Niggaz been dyin for years, so how could they blame us?
He loves to sing. He refuses to have anything to do with coffee. Singing is his coffee. Rejuvenated, he dances in the outfits for the camera, clowns like he always did back in high school, gets every bored person here happy.
He would like to be an actor. A comedy actor. He’s shooting his first movie, Ballers, with Kevin Hart. The other thing he would like is to play in the NFL. “Some days I want to be a singer. But my voice? Then the next day I want to be Picasso.” He would like to be a billionaire. “If it happens. It’s my biggest milestone. Obviously. I want to maximize my business. And if I happen to get it, if I happen to be a billion-dollar athlete, ho. Hip hip hooray! Oh, my God, I’m gonna be excited.”
I’m tight grill when my situation ain’t improvin / I’m tryin to murder everything movin.
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He’s ten years into this insane career. Probably ten more to go with the NBA, he figures. So it’s about halftime. It’s something to think about. “My drive to be the greatest basketball player ever is very high.” Everything right now is fantastic. A Miami mansion, a beautiful wife and two sons. Cars. More money than any other American athlete besides Floyd Mayweather, God love him. Sportswriters are having orgasms: The King is going for a three-peat with the Miami Heat, he has won four of the past five NBA MVP awards, his right arm is as fast as a helicopter blade, and he could notch a triple-double every night if he wanted.
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Controlled exceptionalism, the most gifted ever? The game seems so easy he’s left challenging only his own efficiency. They say he’s Michael Jordan for a new generation. Or maybe they’ll say Michael Jordan was the LeBron James of his generation, same difference, history will not bother splitting hairs. “Dr. J couldn’t do what he does. Magic couldn’t do what he does,” says Heat president Pat Riley.
Being excellent at absolutely everything like this, it carries responsibility. Off the court, on the court, it weighs on him. All those people wanting more points out of him. They pay to see a superhero, and the superhero should shoot the ball, create lanes into which he can explode into everlasting glory, like Baryshnikov performing consecutive grands jetès, like Pavarotti achieving nine effortless high C’s in one aria. (Seventeen curtain calls for that one.) People who pay to see history being made expect history to be made.
“Like, I could average thirty-five points a game if I really wanted to,” he says. He is beautifully handsome, solid and smooth as a sycamore. “But then—it wouldn’t be me,” he says. “So I don’t know if I could do it, because of my instincts. I see a teammate open—even if I have a great shot—I see a teammate open for a better shot, I gotta feed him. It’s like, my mind sometimes be like ‘Shoot it,’ but then—my instincts, you know?”
He is thoughtful. He is a man who chews on ideas this way and that, enjoys the texture. The battle between predisposition and will. It’s something to think about. “This thing is about more than just basketball,” he says. “I can play basketball with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back. The way my mind, my mind starts working, we could probably be here for like…it could be like midnight. Someone will have to turn my switch off.”
One of the things that bothers him is when people say, “You’ve changed.” First of all, he hasn’t. He still has his instincts. He still has Akron sitting in him like a bag of cement.
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“Winning is my drug,” he says. “Winning is my ice cream. Like my kids. They want more. ‘More! More!’ They just want more.”
Actually, no. Right now Bryce, who is 6, is staring down at a melting bowl of something beige in a shop minutes away from the family’s mansion in Miami’s Coconut Grove.
“Yo, what’s the matter?” says James, six feet eight, 250 pounds collapsed into an itty-bitty ice-cream-parlor chair, motioning to his son, who is not complaining, who is sitting alone, silent, and not easy to notice amid the swirl: customers, cops, some of James’s handlers, ice cream scoopers, a floor mopper, and his wife, Savannah, in yoga pants, a yellow tee, eating salad from a Tupperware container she brought, exercising mother power well-wrought. “I said now!” she barks at 9-year-old Bronny, who actually, technically, prefers later. The family is background. James is foreground. Everyone gets it. Daddy is working, tossing out quotes to one enraptured person or another, about this game and that game, to dunk or to pass, to stay in this city or go to that one (no, he has no answer about Miami), to sell a sneaker, a TV, a hamburger. Savannah is not the type to do some wife dance for the enraptured people. She will avoid making eye contact if she can get away with it. She’s the serious one. He’s the funny one, the charismatic, cool one. They got married last summer, having been together since high school in Akron, since way before he became King James.
“You don’t like your ice cream?” James calls to his son.
Bryce looks down at the melt, up at his dad. Demoralizing. Hard to admit. A dud of a flavor choice. “I don’t like it,” he says.
“Go get something else!” James says. “Try something else. You ain’t got no complaints!”
Fatherhood, he says, is a lot like sports. “Being a leader of my household, a leader of Miami, a leader of Team USA. It’s the same exact thing. You can sense when a guy is frustrated—maybe doesn’t feel involved enough in the offense. As leader you go over to him, you know, ‘How can I help?’ Because at the end of the day, we all have one common goal—and that’s to be great.”