LeBron James meets his Darkest Hour

In 1940 England met its darkest hour. Winston Churchill rallied the British people to fight the Nazis with the sacrifice of "blood, toil, tears and sweat."

LeBron James faces something similar. Okay, it’s not life and death. This is the NBA not World War II. But LeBron James, superstar leader of the Cleveland Cavaliers, has been called upon to lead his team from the depths of depression, The Cavs have experienced a spiritual meltdown—and its under LeBron’s watch.

I learned about the Cleveland Cavaliers meltdown in their game with the Houston Rockets. The Cavs got whipped by an embarrassing score of 120-88 a few nights ago.

The Cavs massive loss to Houston Rockets revealed the dispirited Cleveland team has serious problems. The fans feel immense respect for LeBron James He brought the city a NBA championship in 2016. This put an end to a 52-year professional sports title drought.

LeBron won back Cleveland fans and the entire city when he returned to Cleveland after winning back-to-back championships with the Miami Heat. Lebron was praised as a societal leader. He wanted to return to Ohio, his home state, to help lift the morale of the citizenry.

LeBron showed selfless devotion to a cause beyond himself with his decision to return home. And the he led the team to a NBA championship in 2016. That achievement elevated King James to near Saint status. But being King is not bad.

LeBron’s past glories add greater angst to the struggle happening now Cleveland. The Houston game felt like a blowout from the opening minutes and stayed that way the entire game. The Rockets superstars, James Harden and Chris Paul, put on an offensive show. The Rockets looked like the Harlem Globetrotters with the game almost won from the opening tap.

LeBron James experienced naked humiliation in front of the home crowd. Cleveland had no defense. They had no defense. They looked out of sync and over-matched in every aspect of the game. But the secret was in the team’s body language—and that included LeBron.

LeBron's nonverbal cues showed a auperstar looking disoriented at the very place he usually dominates the competition. LeBron is the one who takes over games. Against the Rockets he seemed vanquished. His troubled expression showed a frustrated man with a sense of desperation. One of the announcers, Jalen Rose, wondered if the Cavaliers team have become toxic.

And maybe the most troubling... as the Cleveland team broke from a huddle LeBron spoke a few inspirational words to his teammates but concluded with strange advice: “Be in the moment… Enjoy the moment.”

The breaking of the huddle to New Age self-help phrases shocked me. If a NBA guy playing in an ESPN televised game for a national audience is not already “in the moment” you have to wonder where they are…

If LeBron is going to have his Winston Churchill moment he will transform toxicity into team play.

Makes you wonder about LeBron himself. He may be thinking beyond Cleveland. LeBron’s mojo for Cleveland may be gone. He took on a lot to become a societal leader, maybe too much even for a bionic superhero, a star like no other.

Lebron playing for another team! In another city! Another state! A change could bring welcome relief. LeBron... 33 years old. Late career. Lebron has to find a way to make basketball fun again. Not like that Rockets game.

Super Bowl 52, according to Marshall McLuhan

NFL football is America’s most popular sport. Super Bowl 52 baby! The game, New England Patriots versus Philadelphia Eagles, will be played in front of 70,000 fans at US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. A domed stadium protected from the Minnesota elements. The real audience, however, the group that matters to advertisers, stays home and is watching the game from a couch. Advertisers will pay $7 million or so for a 30 second ad. Just to get those eyeballs on their products.

The Super Bowl has become a national holiday. Legions of football fans will visit the supermarket in the days prior to the game. Mountains of beer, dips, chips, hot sauce, guacamole, burgers, hot dogs and all kind of BBQ meats will fly off the shelves. Fans stocking their freezers like a prepper the night before the apocalypse.

Football has supplanted baseball as the national pastime. Marshall McLuhan, the media guru, saw it all coming. Football’s rise, he suggested, was connected to its compatibility with the TV medium.

It is the inclusive mesh of the TV image, in particular, that spells for a while at least, the doom of baseball.

(Understanding Media, p.238)

I remember watching the NY Giants (“the football Giants“). I peering at grainy black-and-white heroes: Y.A. Tittle, the baldheaded QB, Sam Huff, the tough guy linebacker, Frank Gifford, the golden boy running back, and linemen Andy Robustelli, and Rosey Grier. The images have gotten clearer in 50 years and NFL football has risen to the top.

For baseball is a game of one-thing-at-a-time fixed positions and visibly delegated specialist such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age.

In contrast, America football is nonpositional, and any or all of the players can switch to any role during play.

(UM, page 239)

McLuhan explained that football works differently than baseball. Football has more simultaneous action, more moving parts than baseball. The same guy that blocks might also be a running back. Who knows? Tom Brady might throw an interception and then tackle the defensive back who grabbed the pass. Don’t count on it.

Football, as the very image of the new corporate and participant ways of electric living, fosters habits of unified awareness and social interdependence… When culture changes, so do games.

(UM, page 239)

Instant replay will be a big part of the game. Replays can highlight spectacular plays. They will also be used to review  referee decisions. The referee’s decisions can actually be reversed by “the guys up in the booth,” officials not visible to the fans with the power to change decisions made on the field.

The footage is examined with the care of a rabbinical student learning the Torah. The TV sports announcers argue the possible different interpretations…Did he juggle the ball or have control the ball…. Did he stay in bounds or did his cleat hit the white line…?

The discussion animates the presentation. The TV announcers consider the options with great brio and focus—and then we learn the outcome from the officials. Those decisions may get dissected all week-- by the big time ESPN national show hosts and an army of lesser-known, radio hosts fast-talking from across the hinterland.

McLuhan commented that baseball “has been dislodged from the social center and been conveyed to the periphery of American life.” Football, by contrast “goes very well the new needs of decentralized team in the electric age.”

Think about this when you quaff the adult beverage of your choice and/or dip you chop into the hot sauce. Or maybe not.

A-Rod in the Wrong Pond

Read the New York Times recent piece on Alex Rodriguez's struggles with the New York Yankees. A-Rod was a big league ballplayer for nearly ten years, 1994- 2003, when he moved his baseball skills to the town that never sleeps. Rodriguez was signed away from the Seattle Mariners. Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks  signed A-Rod to an enormous $252 million dollar contract to play, a deal that as "big as Texas" and maybe the beginning of the end for the one of the greatest athletes to cross the the chalk white lines. I saw A-Rod play a few times in Arlington in the 2001-2003 seasons. Tom Hicks would position himself just a row or two back from the batting circle but the scrutiny did not effect Rodriguez in a negative way. A-Rod averaged 52 home runs per season and played an extremely graceful shortstop for a guy standing 6 ft. 3 in.. Rodriguez later admitted to taking steroids during the Rangers years but the enormous skills cannot be denied. What has happened in the years since has the feel of a Greek tragedy.

Rodriguez hungered for baseball immortality and legends are built in places like Yankee Stadium. The Yankees always hunger for the best that money can buy and they took the pricey contract off Tom Hicks's hands and brought the superstar to New York. Derek Jeter, a Yankee legend not to be displaced, played shortstop and so A-Rod became the starting third basemen in what should/could have been a great run of Yankee championships. Instead, the Yankees won a single championship in the near decade Rodriguez has been with the club. So what went wrong?

Alex Rodriguez does not flourish under post-season playoffs pressure. The allows two options: 1) play for a second tier team that rarely gets into the playoffs, 2) play for a dominant team like the Yankees and please fans and writers during the regular season but draw their ire during the post-season. The psychological explanation for why a player performs at unbelievable high levels during the regular season but folds into a mockery of his usual capable self is very complicated. Everybody has their level of optimum performance and many people hit a wall of fear, and possibly a collapse, a Peter-principle level of failure. The Peter-principle, though, is based on the notion that we get promoted to our level of incompetence and stay there. A-Rod's talents seems to belie any possible level of incompetence; the guy has skills unmatched by his peers. The problem, though entirely in his head, is very real.

I remember attending a Cooperstown traveling show, a little mini-version of the Cooperstown Hall of Fame museum being exhibited at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. The most interesting baseball object was the thick spiral notebook compiled by baseball uber-agent Scott Boras on behalf of Alex Rodriguez, the notebook that may have closed the deal on the $252 million dollar contract. Boras compiled three entire sections of the notebook to a comparison of Alex Rodriguez's statistics to the other American League shortstops-- 1) Alex Rodriguez vs. Nomar Garciaparra, 2) Alex Rodriguez vs. Derek Jeter and 3) Alex Rodriguez vs. all other Shortstops. A-Rod, no doubt, dwarfed all the others in terms of numbers, but numbers do not tell the whole story.

Hopefully there is a happy conclusion to the enigma that is A-Rod. He may have arrived on the American baseball scene at the worst possible time-- a perfect storm of obscene money, horrible drugs and a society too focused on results. The golden years of modern Yankees history- the Fifties and Sixties with Mantle, Maris, Berra, Whitey Ford, culminating in 1961, occurred at the birth of television way before the ESPN era of sports fetishism. A-Rod maybe would have struggled with success in 1961. The Yankees had Tony Kubek at shortsop, surely no A-Rod, but he got the job done. Maybe A-Rod would have been better with an Ernie Banks career, a fantastic personal record played on the fringes of the spotlight. He could still be respected and admired, even if under-represented in World Series history. Under the present circumstances he has a Sisyphus-like struggle trying to roll a massive baseball uphill against the squawking of social media, lame-stream media and whatever psychological pressures are self-implosed. Maybe he will find a way back to a smaller pond and play another five years of a game he likely once enjoyed.