Cleveland is the Castle
In the ever-present interregnums of Super Bowl LVI, the play-money clearinghouse known as Crypto.com chiseled itself 30 seconds of public attention to present the basketball legend LeBron Raymone James.
James — Bron Bron, LBJ, the King, if you please — had seated himself on the bedspread of his adolescent home in Akron, Ohio, regaling a self from 2003 with tales of modern technology.
“Man,” grunts the young LeBron, with a verdant jersey draped across his back and a sweatband as his halo, “the future is crunk.” But young James wants to know something else about the future: Is this kid from the shores of Lake Michigan enough? Is he worthy of his reputation as “the chosen one”? “Can I live up to the hype?” he asks, earnestly.
The short answer, which goes unspoken in the crypto pitch, is yes. 4 championships, 3 MVPs, and a stockpile of records later, James has lodged himself among the high trinity to ever play upon NBA hardwood, overcoming every doubt and exorcising every demon to have stalked his renown for the last 19 years. What’s more, he’s done so as the leading scorer and passer for every franchise on which he has ever played.
This year, however, the King and his castle have been abandoned by the winds of fit and fate, and his current team — the Los Angeles Lakers — sit at the very edge of the NBA playoff picture for the 3rd time in James’ four Laker years. In that light, and in the brighter light of LeBron’s reception in Cleveland during the NBA’s recent All-Star weekend, my mind has started to wander to the seasons he spent with his hometown Cavaliers — not just what Cleveland meant to the King, or what the King meant to Cleveland, but what it meant for the King to mean so much to Cleveland in the first place.
When LeBron has held the power to choose his place of employment, he has often chosen places besides Cleveland. Two out of three times, he’s chosen sun-soaked franchises with decent histories and rosters he could rebuild in his own image. Yes, Northwestern Ohio lacks the history of Philadelphia or Boston, the culture of San Francisco or New York, the touristic selling points of Miami or LA. LeBron, twice at the height of his powers, left a pair of Cleveland teams that couldn’t give him what it would take to win a championship — he was well within his rights to do so.
But Cleveland played host to his finest hours, strangest defeats, most visceral moments: His chasedown block, on Andre Igoudala, to give the Cavs their only NBA championship; his otherworldly dissection of the Detroit Pistons in the 2007 NBA playoffs; his carriage of his fellow Cavs in 2018, and their utterly bizarre Finals series against the Golden State Warriors. As the tide of the American economy trickled elsewhere, and the Rust Belt became shorthand for a kind of graceless decline, LeBron reigned as an Atlas, balancing the world of a city forgotten.
In Miami before and Los Angeles today, James was — James is — a rock star, a global brand, one of three players worthy of mention in NBA’s best and most ridiculous debate. In Cleveland, he’s all that and more, a son made good in a city that can’t give him everything he wants, anymore than he can give it everything it wants.
If you follow basketball, you probably know the purest possible version of the LeBron James story: A young phenom rises to expectations and finds what he’s looking for and becomes one of his generation’s greatest athletes. But Cleveland has so often defined James’ career by what it isn’t — geographically monogamous, professionally unblemished, personally uneventful — that it would feel incomplete, somehow, for him to finish his on-court sojourn anywhere else. Cleveland, for better or for worse, was — is — home, the place where all the King needed to be great was all he had that wasn’t.
