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Behind The Scoreboard
By Claude Vinson Opinions on King James Many
thanks for all the comments received about last week’s column. It is
certainly enjoyable hearing all the different takes, be they pro or
con. I was surprised to find as I traveled to the state line last week
that the LeBron James saga had not abated by much. It seems that almost
everyone was more than willing to proffer an opinion. The fallout
amounted to a maelstrom of comments which hit upon the James decision
to the action taken by the NBA commissioner, David Stern. There
were many other things going on in the world of sports this past week
but did not seem to evoke as much emotion as the building of what has
already been perceived as the ultimate team machine in the NBA. The
fact that Tiger Woods was going down to his eighth consecutive defeat
after returning to the circuit only garnered a token amount of press. At
the beginning of the week it was reported that Stern had fined owner
Dan Gilbert a cool $100,000 for the remarks he publicly made concerning
the James deal. My question was – was that a fair and legitimate
decision by Gilbert and did it infringe his First Amendment rights? It
was a unanimous vote for the commish’s decision. Actually, league rules
prohibit such verbal castigations from any level. All comments were
that James had satisfied all points of his contract with Cleveland and
was well within his rights. The Reverend Jesse
Jackson had some strong words of rebuttal for the Cavaliers’ owner
(which will not be repeated here) and, as could be expected, was joined
by the Reverend Al Sharpton, whose verbiage was stinging but a bit more
tempered. Over the weekend, former NBA greats
such as Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley were sought out and both
offered comments. The former suggested that he and Magic (Johnson) and
Larry (Bird) would never have called each other up and said, “Hey,
let’s play on the same NBA team.” Mikie says that he was too interested
in competing against them! Chuck stated that he thinks LeBron will try
to run the Heat as he has the Cavaliers, but offers that it won’t work
because “the Heat is clearly (Dwayne) Wade’s team.” And
just how much will the “Super team’s” front men make? As well as this
reporter could decipher, James would rake in about $18.3M per year,
Wade at $18M and Chris Bosch at $17.7M. (And this just might be a
rumor, but it was reported on someone’s blog on early Monday that King
James had already purchased a $49M estate in Florida). According to the news coming across the big pond (Atlantic Ocean), he probably could have bought Buckingham Palace for that. P.S.
For what it means, Penny Hardaway has contacted the Heat and asked for
a spot on the team. Anfernee didn’t even mention terms. Penny was cut
from the squad in the ’07-’08 season after a dismal showing in eight
games.
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