LeBron, Reality TV, and What It Means To You

I still remember the first time I watched the show. It was the second season, and after the furor of its first year I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I was with Jim, already an avid fan, who explained the rules to me as we sat on my living room couch.

"Every week someone gets voted off the island. They form two teams, and they're given tasks, and they have a competition every three days. The winning team gets immunity, and someone from the losing team goes home, unless they win the individual challenge."

"That's it?" I said. "THAT'S the show?"

He nodded eagerly.

"Oh yeah, but it's SO much more. People trick one another, they form alliances and break them, they betray one another, lie to one another. And the winner gets a million bucks."

We watched the show in relative silence, although from time to time Jim would make a comment. He'd already picked his favourite. The show was well produced, and though I hated to admit it, well conceived. The competitions each week were the spine of the show, but its heart was the side interviews and the inevitable human drama. It was like watching war or politics, but on a micro level. It was absorbing and disturbing. The show – or competition – seemed to bring out the worst in people and hold it up like a shiny light. More than honour or humility or compassion, what people loved the most, was a winner. However it happened. Easier to rewrite tales of philanthropy once you'd achieved that status, than try to do things the "right" way.

The show, of course, was Survivor, and the year was 2001. Despite the backlash from the writing community, and those who considered it a passing phenomenon, Survivor would serve as the leaping point to something we hadn't seen before. Reality television exploded, with some copycats more successful (The Amazing Race) than others (Temptation Island). Along with the sweeping changes in technology, the millennium would usher in something new to our culture, especially in how we defined ourselves. It was a new narrative. It wasn't the words that had changed so much, but the book itself. The ramifications would be enormous.

***
I sat in the library staring silently at the screen before glancing over at the girl next to me. She was Indian, and with an MCAT study guide in front of her, looked to be about twenty four.

"How's the studying going?" I asked, needing a break.

"It's tiring." She said, smiling.

"My wife wrote it in her second year. I can't imagine." I said.

"What are you working on?" She asked, leaning past her cubicle.

"I'm working on a piece about LeBron James. His decision. The whole one hour special he did." She looked at me as if I was speaking Greek.

"You know, last week. Le Bron James, the NBA's biggest star, decided to leave his hometown and move to another city…" I let my voice trail at the sight of her face. She looked apologetic.

"No, I'm sorry. I don't know what you're talking about."

It was amazing how easily you could become enraptured by your own world, I thought. Of course she hadn't heard of LeBron. She was studying to go to medical school. What did she care about basketball? What difference did LeBron's decision, mean to her?

We chatted for a while longer and I turned back to my screen. Did the whole LeBron scenario really warrant any attention from people outside the sports world? What, in fact, did it mean at all?

***

Most of us don't see or feel the pull of culture. It flows in first one direction, and then another, like a winding stream. Some people try to fight it, and decide that they will swim upstream their entire lives. These are the traditionalists, the ones who believe everything was better thirty years ago, that all change is terrible, and that we should fight the stream to the bitter end while denouncing others who don't along the way. There are some who would prefer to leave the stream. To them, culture is nothing more than the winding waterway to destruction. More cities. More forests cut down. More corporations. More starving people. Like Rousseau, they view civilized culture as a construct against the purity of wholeness and organic life. They view indigenous tribes as living one with nature, and modern culture as living against nature. And they do everything they can to leave the current.

But culture is inescapable. You can't jam or contradict or walk against the stream, because eventually it catches up to you. Most of those traditionalists wading against the stream use a cell phone or a blackberry. The new ecotypes for whom the earth is to be gently shared use twitter and Facebook to organize their rallies for more organic food. It isn't hypocrisy, because the sincerity in both groups is welcome over the apathy in most. And what else is there? If we don't fight for something, why do we live?

The importance of an event like the LeBron "Decision" is that it signals a change in the narrative of our culture. Today, stars and celebrities still bemoan their lack of privacy, but they do so from their twitter accounts while they're at lunch somewhere. Technology and this new idea of "reality television" have extended far beyond the one hour shows ten years ago. It is the king not only reaching to the masses, but to each individual in those masses. It is new, it is powerful, and what it will mean for us as a culture is yet to be determined.

What's important is that it is noted. We need to recognize the changing of the stream and move with it, because it will change everything. It some ways, it already has. For parents, it certainly changes our kids' view of the world, doesn't it? They can get ideas directly from the twitter accounts of their favourite celebrities. Information floods our world. Anyone (in many countries, excepting China) can know anything at any time. Think about that. All I need is a computer and I can find out whatever I want to know… about anything. Who would have believed that fifty or even thirty years ago. This cultural shift changes everything from the way we relate to one another to the way our brain processes new information. And it certainly changes our narrative.

Years ago, my dad told me stories about his favourite players growing up. Now, he doesn't need to. I can logon and find out for myself. These days we have the ability to choose our narrative, as LeBron did. As we do, with blogs like this one. More and more, the emphasis is on the individual to choose their story and the stories they will follow. So the question remains. What story do you follow? And what story do you wish to create? More than ever before, we craft our own tales. My only prayer is that the story we choose to write, will be one that remembers why we're here in the first place. And that story, so far as I'm aware, is not about us.

-Steve

LeBron: The Story behind the Story (Part I)

The sun had not yet sunk to the horizon as I headed south down Highway 6. Every fifty kilometers or so I drove through another sleepy town, and with the windows down, listened to the summer hum of insects. This was the night LeBron made his decision. Alone on the highway, I tuned the radio to WGR out of Buffalo, listened to it cackle and then catch. I wasn't sure what to expect, but if I'd been betting, my money was that he would stay in Cleveland. I hoped not. Whether it was the Bulls or the Heat, it would give me something to look forward to in the upcoming season, seeing as how our star, Chris Bosh, had already twittered his way to Miami.

The land north of Guelph consisted mostly of farms, and in the last of the fading light I could see the dark shapes of horses and cows grazing along the rolling hills, the land's gentle syncopation a startling contrast from the hue and cry of Toronto. It was a welcome break. The ESPN announcers were still waiting for LeBron to make his appearance twenty minutes later as I approached Guelph. The station cackled with static and broke off just as LeBron started to make his announcement. I grimaced in frustration. I'm missing the moment! About three minutes later the station broke back just as LeBron said "I'll be taking my talents to South Beach." I pounded my steering wheel in jubilation, and hollered at nobody out the window. LeBron. Dwayne Wade. Chris Bosh. Now THAT would be a fun troika to watch. Maybe it would give the league something to celebrate aside than the Celtics and Lakers. What intrigued me even more than the decision, which in my mind had played out as a great drama, were two things. The first, of course, was what story were the sportswriters going to write. The second was what it meant for the general public. Many people didn't realize it, but both questions had implications for the culture, including the non-basketball/non-sports fan. LeBron was more than an athlete, he was a celebrity capable of rippling the culture. It was the ripples that interested me.

***

The Story Behind the Story

"I'm cheering for my story."

Ask most sports writers who they're cheering for when it comes to covering players and teams, and that's the response you'll get. As someone who has spent more time writing fiction than non-fiction, I can tell you that sports writing uses more narrative than any other part of the newspaper, and most of the best work has its roots in myth making. One need only look at baseball, the relationship between it and one of its prevalent themes of father and son. (Explored beautifully in Field of Dreams) More than mere accounts of games played between adults, sportswriting offers a peek into a different world, a world that is often more fantasy than reality, a world created to offer us help and hope in our everyday lives. (And yes, my cynical friends, to get our money) When we understand it this way, we realize that basketball is not merely a game, which is why LeBron's decision wasn't – according to the sportswriters – a basketball decision. Although he spoke of playing (which means working) with his friends, Wade and Bosh, and winning championships, which is the ultimate goal for his type of employment, nobody believed him. Why would they? Reading a cross section of literally hundreds of reactions throughout North America from sports writers across the country, the unfailing tone of the articles was disappointment. Disappointment with how LeBron handled the situation, disappointment with his apparent ego, disappointment that he had chosen "the easy way", disappointment that a two time MVP switched teams to "create an all-star team". The only place where the disappointment made any real sense was for Cleveland fans, some of whom were seen soon after burning his jersey in effigy.

From a 'realism' standpoint, the response to LeBron's decision (and everything it included, like the hour long special to announce it) is ridiculous. That people would burn an athlete's jersey reveals just how well the sports writers have done their job the past hundred years in creating a mythological narrative to encase athletes. Their exploits are told and retold, as it was surely done in civilizations past, as a story around a fire. The myth story behind LeBron -- hometown kid from a poor home, perhaps the greatest of all time, leading his beleaguered, working class city to its first championship in nearly forty years -- was a powerful one. For seven years LeBron worked to bring that myth to its telling finale, but fell short. Instead of buying into his own myth however, LeBron changed the rules, and opted out of the narrative to play with his friends for a better shot at a championship.

"Not a leader." "Cowardly." "LeBron blew it!"

Those were the headlines the next day, and it seemed to me that most of the sports writers had made their decision. LeBron had gone from the hero to the villain, the greedy (though he took less money) and arrogant (his own show!) young superstar who preferred the rich, flashy night life of Miami to the good, hard working people of Cleveland. I understood their perspective. What choice did they have? They'd framed the story of the hometown hero for so long, spent so many years building a heroic narrative, there wasn't much else they could write, could they? It shocked me a bit how people accepted this verbatim, but sports have long since served as more than mere games in our culture. I remember the stories my dad used to tell me about the grace of Willie Mays and watching Mickey Mantle hit. Or how Roger Staubach would lead his Cowboys back from certain defeat. I remember how eagerly I read books and stories about my favourite athletes as a kid, how I'd get together with my friends and we'd all take turns being Ozzie Smith or Walter Payton or Larry Bird. In the shadow of these great narratives, of growing up and learning about life, the posters on my wall were about something bigger than the game or even my favourite player. They weren't true, necessarily, not in the strictest sense. But that didn't make them any less real or affecting, especially to a kid growing up in Welland, a small blue collar town just north of the American border.

So while I understand the "disappointment", most of it seems disingenuous to me. Sportswriters understand myth and story, and they do their jobs much the way anyone does their job. There's no mystique for them in the people they write about, although occasionally there is admiration. They're too close, for one thing. They see the humanity of the players, their selfishness and arrogance, their usual human foibles, on a regular basis. It's hard to hold someone up on a pedestal when you realize that they're a lot like you.

And yet, only a few mentioned, for example, that four years ago Kobe Bryant lost nearly all of his sponsors when he was accused of rape (later settling with his accuser) and lost in the first round of the playoffs to Phoenix. That narrative has long since changed again (aided mostly when Jerry West stole Pau Gasol and gave Bryant another stud to play with. Not that you'll hear anything about that, because Kobe "stayed" in L.A.) This season, the writers went with the "Kobe finds a way" narrative, including game seven when Bryant was nearly invisible for most of the fourth quarter.

While I still enjoy sports narrative and the occasional dabbling into myth (go John Feinstein) we need to realize that LeBron is not a villain. For an NBA superstar, he is remarkably well grounded and an unselfish player who puts his team first. Yes, he has an ego. So did Jordan. (As did Bird, Magic, Shaq, and Kobe) If Miami wins multiple championships, the LeBron narrative will change again, as it did for Bryant. As it always does. What it does however, is serve as a stark reminder to be careful in how we create our lives and build our own stories. Myth making is not merely for celebrities, but for us too. How we interpret the events of our culture are just as important as the events themselves. Does the LeBron decision truly impact our culture that much? Even for people who don't follow sports? I think it does, but I'll leave that for you to decide.

Stay tuned for Part II…

-Steve