LeBron James's agent cannot fathom what GQ's editors were thinking. Who were they to bump his client from the magazine's cover for an Oscar-winning hunk?
"Russell Crowe, man — can you believe it?" lamented Aaron Goodwin, from Oakland, Calif. "I mean, Russell Crowe is big. I respect the man and his talents. But he's no LeBron."
To promote its 54th NBA All-Star Game, the league has pitted a youngster from the Eastern Conference against Tim Duncan, Kobe Bryant and the rest of the West's established supernovas.
"Believe the hype," James says in the NBA commercial, and as you review the numbers, the dollars and the sense of most keen basketball observers, there is no reason not to.
"They won't be asking in the future who the next Michael [Jordan] is," said Sonny Vaccaro, an Adidas representative and perhaps the first national talent evaluator to see James play as a teenager. "They'll be asking who the next LeBron is."
James's backers are hoping he can connect with a skeptical American public in his own way. Although he doesn't have Jordan's polish, James's quick and pithy responses to questions are as full as certainty as they are charisma. As Goodwin said, "People want edge nowadays, but they also want to see the wholesomeness — a guy you might grow up to be like."
'I Did It Myself'
James left high school less than two years ago and today arrives in Denver as the NBA's next icon-in-training. He is a 6 feet 8, thickly muscled man-child of just 20. He is a bona fide MVP candidate, among the league leaders in three separate categories — averaging 25.4 points, 7.7 rebounds and 7.1 assists.
If he continues to average more than 25 points, 7 rebounds and 7 assists, James will enter some hefty historical company, such as Jordan, Larry Bird, Oscar Robertson and John Havlicek, as the only players to average a comparable statistical line over a career.
Ambidextrous and affable, he earns $5 million from the Cleveland Cavaliers and roughly $34 million annually from corporate America.
Bubblicious named a gum flavor for him and gave him his own ad on Super Bowl Sunday. Nike has devoted a sneaker campaign to James. Indicative of how quickly marketing tastes change, James is close to signing a multiyear endorsement deal with McDonald's — which used to employ Bryant to move its products.
On Madison Avenue and most everywhere, it's a LeBron-in, Kobe-out world.
Unlike Bryant — and in an era of routinely tarnished athletic heroes ranging from juiced sluggers to violent, suspended NBA players — James remains unblemished by real controversy. In the NBA's forever-long quest to recapture the halcyon days of Michael Jordan, James may be as close as the league can come at this moment.
"What I've always liked about the kid is his willingness to listen to his elders," said Shaquille O'Neal, now in his 13th season. "He never had any of this, 'I'm going to do it my way.' Even when he was in high school, I remember him taking the time to find out what this world would be like for him. He was preparing himself."
"On the court, it was just being a student of the game, it was knowing the history of the game," James said of his lightning prep-to-pro adjustment. "Off the court, I just wanted to be myself. I didn't change who I was when I came to the NBA."
Nothing in his background portended such an easy transition. Nearly two years ago, a family friend drove a reporter past the subsidized housing James and his mother, Gloria James, lived in. It rested on a hill in west Akron, Ohio, yards from boarded-up drug houses. Gloria was 16 when she gave birth to LeBron. His biological father was never part of his life.
"I told her before it started, 'Gloria, they are going to be flying into Akron in parachutes,' " Vaccaro said. "In other words, everyone was going to be coming to get their piece. She shielded him. You want to know why he's stayed focused and avoided some of the pitfalls that got some of the others? It was Gloria."
James credits his mother's overprotective nature for much of his adjustment. He also took advantage of his celebrity early.
During his senior year at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron, James befriended and began speaking with many of the league's elite players. Eddie Jackson, James's surrogate father, had a relationship with former Chicago Bulls guard Ron Harper. Harper introduced James to O'Neal.
Before the 2003 draft, Michael Jordan and Gary Payton also spoke to him about the pressures and expectations that would come with the Cavaliers plucking him No. 1. Before his rookie of the year season ended, he had already embraced the life and turned around the fortunes of Cleveland's once dismal franchise.
"Nobody eased me into this league, I did it myself," James said on Friday afternoon in Denver, where a cadre of maybe 50 reporters encircled him. "I didn't have anybody to baby me. My attitude was, 'Let me fall first before someone helps me.' "
He has already dwarfed most of his peers in popularity. In less than a year, James's star power has far eclipsed his good friend Carmelo Anthony, whose outstanding rookie season with the Denver Nuggets was tarnished by off-court controversy last summer, the most recent being Anthony's appearance on a DVD that features men smoking marijuana and making violent threats against police informants. Anthony was home visiting friends in Baltimore for the summer, saying he didn't realize that he would be appearing on a widely distributed video.
As All-Star Weekend approached in his own arena, Anthony was not among the top 24 players in the league.
"I'm glad for him," Anthony said of James in a recent interview. "The things that have happened to me, I'm glad in a way because I'm learning my lessons now. I'm getting them out of the way.
"Adversity comes for us all. Nobody can avoid it forever. This was just my time to go through it."
Anthony was not the first young player to suffer a pitfall after his initial stardom. Would-be Jordans found they couldn't live up to his legacy, and their shortcomings became more evident.
When Bryant came to New York for the 1998 All-Star Game during his second year in the league, he received universal praise from peers and fans. Multilingual, multitalented, with a maturity belying his 19 years, Bryant was already being hailed as having the requisite gifts to one day supplant Jordan.
His ascendance came at a time when potential heirs Grant Hill, Jerry Stackhouse and Penny Hardaway, because of either injury or controversy, had all struggled to move forward in their careers. While even Jordan cautioned against putting too much pressure on the teenager, Bryant himself welcomed the comparisons.
But the sheen of the Lakers' superstar disappeared in a Colorado hotel room in July 2003. His encounter with a front-desk clerk led to an admission of adultery and a year-long battle to clear his name of charges of sexual assault. The case was eventually dropped, but it irrevocably stained Bryant's reputation. He wasn't the fun-loving player with the high-wattage smile in commercials anymore.
'I Never Think About Failure'
James has done his best to pick up the baton while avoiding making his own mistakes.
He has a 4-month-old son with his girlfriend, and he describes himself as a homebody who eschews the NBA nightlife. Of course, at 20 he cannot legally enter most nightclubs. He is asked how he has managed to steer clear of the trouble befalling other NBA players.
"I never think about failure," James said. "Not ever. It's just something I don't do. If I believe something, I can do it. I just don't think about failure."
James has help navigating around potential problems. During the season, Marvin Cross, a former police sergeant and the Cavaliers' head of security, often hires local policemen on the road to help with security for James. Randy Mims, James's personal manager, travels everywhere with him, making sure James keeps track of all appearances and signings. In the offseason, James employs two security people.
The ruckus around James is expected to grow in size and volume this weekend. In a league still suffering the fallout from a brawl during a game in suburban Detroit, still coping with some of its biggest stars losing their luster, James has become a welcome anomaly: a supremely talented, likable NBA millionaire without any baggage.
With many of the more profitable and popular players' careers winding down, such as O'Neal, James may soon be in a league of his own. "The deals on the table keep piling up," Goodwin said. "We've asked LeBron, 'How big do you really want to be?' He's still figuring that out. He wants to be a basketball player first, though. He told us that's his priority. The rest will work itself out."
Goodwin and others saw this coming. In James's first major public appearance two years ago, he was scheduled to go on stage as a presenter at ESPN's annual award show, the ESPYs. James would be partnered with Julius Erving, one of the league's most regal former players.
"He had this hip-hop look going, with the baggy jeans and sweaters," Goodwin said of James. "We didn't tell him what to wear, but we made it clear this was a big deal, his first appearance on national TV. He said, 'I'll take care of it.' " James met Goodwin and his party in the hotel lobby downstairs, decked out in a brilliant gray suit he had purchased for the occasion. Two weeks later during a meeting with Coke representatives, the soft-drink giant revealed their marketing plan for James. It featured a blown-up picture James in the gray suit at the ESPYs.
"They tell him, 'We want a kid who can wear jeans one day and wear a suit on a billboard the next,' " Goodwin said. "We just smiled. It's like he did their work for them.
"Whatever it is, the kid's got it," Goodwin said. "It's moxie. It's savvy. It's understanding you can keep your street credibility while integrating yourself in mainstream America."
