The Frictionless Lives of the Meek

Dear LeBron,

A couple weeks ago I was talking to my grandma on the phone while she watched the last few holes of Tiger Woods’s victory at Bay Hill. He was up by five strokes, in position to get his first win since that moment more than two years ago when his status as one of America’s most beloved athletes evaporated overnight. (You can relate to that, of course.) Anyway, my grandma was giving me play-by-play as we talked, and when Tiger got to eighteen, victory in hand, she said, “Well, I guess he’s been in the penalty box long enough.” I thought that was a brilliant comment. Tiger has been in the penalty box long enough. And so have you, LeBron. In fact, maybe you—who committed no sins against morality, but only against humility—have served more time in the penalty box than you even deserved. America’s system of checks and balances worked: You orchestrated an act of extreme and oblivious arrogance and we the people held you accountable for it—wishing ill on your performances for an entire season, cheering Dirk when he put you in your place. But that’s all behind us now, or should be. We’re deep into another season, a season in which you’ve played incredibly, up there with almost any season by any player in history. In the course of one game against Portland you guarded all five positions. You also rode a bicycle to a game against the Bulls in late January, when the Miami Marathon shut down the streets. Yes, your bike said King James on it, but still: You rode a bike to a game against the other top team in the East and had 35 points, 11 boards, and 5 assists. How can we hate on that? (If I had any advice for rehabilitating your reputation, it would be this: Sell all your cars and SUVs and start riding your bike everywhere.) And your game’s hard to hate too. I mean, how can we continue to hate on a guy whose biggest flaw as a player might be that he makes the unselfish pass too often? After you took your talents to South Beach, I never would’ve imagined I’d say this, but you deserve better from us, LeBron.

Frank Lloyd Wright Doin' Work

Dear Kobe,

One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite books—This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff—is this: “All my life I have recognized almost at a glance those who were meant to be my friends, and they have recognized me.” I love this, the idea that friendship is a destiny that you’re aware of right away with some people, and that you can choose to accept or reject it, like Flannery O’Connor’s idea of grace. And the line can also be related to sports fandom. Maybe you don't know this, Kobe, but all our lives as fans, we recognize almost at a glance which athletes we believe we could be friends with, given the right circumstances. This recognition often informs our cheering, in fact. Like with the last Rockets team to make the playoffs, I could’ve seen myself being friends with Yao for sure, plus Scola and Battier and even their teammate and now yours, the humanitarian formerly known as Ron Artest. (One of my buddies and his wife ran into Scola and Battier at karaoke one night in Houston; they took a picture with Scola, who was wearing a giant t-shirt with Kurt Cobain’s face on it, which proves my point.) And in the current NBA, there are all sorts of dudes I believe I could be friends with: Durant (both of us nerdy UT alums), Roy Hibbert (both of us Parks and Recreation fans), Blake Griffin (I enjoy those commercials), and your teammate Luke Walton (Grateful Dead), just to name a few. And here's the thing, Kobe: though you are an interesting and super-intelligent guy, I have never once thought I could be friends with you, under any circumstances. Yes, you made that great reference to Black Swan (a movie I still haven’t seen) last season while talking about Pau. Yes, I’m impressed with your ability to give interviews in multiple languages. Yes, your turnaround fadeaways are truly a work of art. Yes, you’re one of the greatest players of all-time (and we all secretly want to believe we can relate to greatness). But you’re also kind of an asshole, Kobe. I’m not going to cite all the reasons I think you’re an asshole, except to say that it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the rape trial (for which you were acquitted, after all) or the prima donna stuff I read in The Last Season. No, it has much more to do with the way, earlier in your career, whenever you got knocked down on a foul, you would sit up and cross your arms while making the most arrogant face possible, and then keep this pose even as your teammates held their hands out to pick you up. That's what I mean by asshole, Kobe. And besides your beautiful fadeaways, this is the image that I believed defined you as a basketball player.