How LeBron James, the world’s best basketball player, became a political force for racial justice.
LeBron James is quite possibly the best basketball player who’s ever lived.
I am, of course, hardly an objective party. I have rooted for LeBron James since I was 15 years old, when he first joined the Cleveland Cavaliers.
But even for those who haven’t, James has compiled a résumé that rivals any player in the history of the NBA — up to and including Michael Jordan, widely regarded as the greatest player in the sport’s history.
James has won three championships and four most valuable player awards, for starters, in his 15-year career. In 2018, he surpassed Jordan for the longest streak of games with at least 10 points scored. During this year’s playoffs, when James hit a game-winning three-point jumper to beat the Indiana Pacers, it was instantly compared to one of Jordan’s iconic shots.
But the 33-year-old James is much more than a living sports legend. He is an actor, a media mogul, and a cultural icon. He rose to the top of his sport at the same time that America was forced to confront its systematic violence against black people, especially young black men, and James has taken up that cause as one of the most famous young black men in the nation. He is perhaps the most socially and politically influential athlete since Muhammad Ali.
When Fox News host Laura Ingraham told James to “shut up and dribble,” it became a national news story. When James called President Donald Trump a “bum” on Twitter, defending players who bucked the tradition of championship teams coming to the White House, it was a headline on the front page of the New York Times. He held a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.
The 2018 summer reminded us of LeBron’s gravitational force. He signed with the Los Angeles Lakers, the NBA’s biggest franchise, and rebalanced the league. He opened a new public school in his hometown of Akron. Then that very same week, the president insulted this young successful black man’s intelligence on Twitter.
James — LBJ, Bron, the King — has used the platform afforded him as the best player in the NBA at a time of unprecedented popularity for the league to speak out about racial injustice and other political issues. SB Nation’s Tom Ziller wrote that we were living in “the decade of LeBron James.” ESPN ranked him the most famous American athlete (the second most famous in the world) and called him “the most powerful voice in his profession.”
So even if you’ve never watched a single second of a professional basketball game, LeBron James is an unavoidable presence in American life. Given his ambitions to build a lasting media empire and the budding speculation that he might someday pursue public office, he will likely stay there for years to come. James is still at the height of his powers whenever he steps onto the basketball court — but his career long ago became a story much bigger than sports.
James was born in Akron, Ohio, to a single mother who was forced at times to move herself and her son to different beds on a regular basis. From an early age, it was clear he had a gift. James was the subject of unprecedented hype while he was still in high school. He was the star of his team at St. Vincent-St. Mary, and their games were shown on ESPN. Sports Illustrated dubbed him “the Chosen One.”
James was selected by the Cleveland Cavaliers with the No. 1 pick in the 2003 NBA draft. He was 18 years old.
Over the course of his 15-year professional career, this is what he has accomplished:
Heading into the 2018 season, James was still considered the best player in the league. He could very well end up as the top scorer in league history before he retires, as the Ringer’s Zach Kram detailed, and he’s also on track to finish in the top five in assists — meaning he has proven equally excellent at scoring points himself and setting up his teammates to score.
As Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky memorably put it, James is someone “for whom everyone predicted historic greatness” and he then went on to achieve “the even greater greatness displayed by fulfilling every prediction.”
The main blemish on James’s NBA career came in 2010, when he held a much-maligned television special to announce he would leave Cleveland and join the Miami Heat. But he then won two titles with Miami and returned to Cleveland, where he broke the city’s 50-year sports curse by winning the 2016 NBA Finals with a historic comeback against the Golden State Warriors, which had won a league-record 73 games that year.
