In the game for too long, LeBron James is losing his lustre

This week, ESPN published a long piece about how the children of L.A. Lakers’ owner Jerry Buss turned on each other after his death.

Two things stuck out about it. First, how difficult it was to follow because all six kids have ‘J’ names. You try separating your Jesses from your Janies, Joeys and Johnnys.

The second was what a peripheral figure LeBron James cut in it. Formerly the star around which all things in the NBA orbited, James only appeared as the focus of a brief drive-by. Family matriarch Jeanie Buss reportedly considers her most famous employee an egomaniac and an ingrate.

A decade ago, the press release denying that part of the story would have been on the wire 10 minutes after the editors had hit ‘publish’. But James isn’t that guy any more. What he is now is an unfireable anchor.

It’s not that he’s not good. At 41, James is still better than most 25-year-olds in the league. It’s just that he’s not good enough to justify all the oxygen he consumes.

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Far more insulting than the insult was the fact that the Lakers didn’t bother to deny it was true. It was left to James to respond.

“I can care less about how somebody feels about me,” James said.

A good rule – if you feel the need to say you don’t care, then you do.

Buss’s only pedigree is that she’s related to the guy who lucked into Showtime, and has been running the team into the ground ever since she took it over. And yet somehow, James is coming off worse in a fight with her. How did he sink so low?

It’s an inability to accept that there are only two ways to go out – with a little grace, on your own terms; or sideways and backward, after getting nicked to death by a series of small indignities. Just like the rest of us.

We live in an increasingly post-retirement world. Real workers must retire, because no one’s tossing garbage or putting up drywall when they’re 70, but as long as someone wants whatever they’re shilling, creatives can go on forever.

At some point in the last few decades, professional athletes stopped thinking of themselves as manual labourers, and began to see their role more in line with artists.

What’s the first thing all of them want to do once they hit a certain level of accomplishment? Begin making things they have zero expertise, and more often than not zero talent, in making – films, books, clothes, music, etc. This convinces them that sports is their job, but their hobbies are their work.

They understand instinctively that the job and the work are linked. Unless your name is Michael Jordan, nobody wants to buy shoes from a guy who used to be in the NBA. Once you give up your job, your side hustles dry up. It now seems bizarre that Björn Borg left tennis at 26, or that John Elway hung ‘em up right after winning two Super Bowls. To voluntarily give up on that level of fame wouldn’t be applauded today. It would mark you out as a bit off. Because who doesn’t want to be as famous as possible for as long as possible?

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James is in the midst of proving the downside to this approach. The longer he goes on, the less impressive he seems. I’m not just talking what’s going on right now, playing third fiddle to Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves on a so-so Lakers team. I’m talking about everything he did.

If you remember James as the player who could win a playoff series on his own (something he did to the Raptors a couple of times), this diminished James is a frightful reminder of your own mortality.

To one extreme or another, all of the geriatric megastars of the last few years – Tom Brady, Roger Federer, Serena Williams – went out this way. Two, three years after they could have done it with total dignity.

It’s not just the loss of physical vitality. It’s the gradual fading out of your charisma. People once perked up when you had something to say. They feared to offend you. They wanted you to shine your light on them.

Now they wish you would stop talking so much. They’re angry because you fixed it so that your kid could get a job. They wonder why you’re getting twice as much as everyone else to put in half the performance you used to.

This starts out as a whisper, and then your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss is letting it leak out to ESPN and not bothering to call you about it to explain.

Michael Jordan went the same way. People still rate him, but not as much as they would if he hadn’t retired three times.

While Jordan the brand remains a cultural powerhouse, Jordan the person is a punch line. When people think of him now, it is to recall how cruel and detached he could be. If he’d actually retired the first time, aged 30, Jordan would be a cult hero as well as a commercial giant.

James has chosen the Jordan route – he will play until he becomes an embarrassment. In his mind, one assumes there are all sorts of good reasons to do this. That he’s still good, even if he’s not as good as he was. That he is the headwaters to all his other businesses, and all the friends who run them. That he’s growing his net worth so that one day he can become the next Jeanie Buss.

But this hustle-until-you-drop approach misses something – that regardless of what you’ve done, people remember you the way you were when you left.

If you go out on top, that’s what you’ll be forever. But if you end up getting muscled out off the premises after making a show of yourself, you’re just another one of those guys who didn’t really get it.

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