LeBoy Am I Sick of LeBron Name Puns, by Arthur Tebbel – Pop Art #132

June 14, 2011 Arthur Tebbel 0 Comments

Dear Art,
I have had a hell of a week.  When you last went to press my Miami Heat were up two games to one on the Dallas Mavericks.  They won three consecutive games and clinched the NBA Finals on Sunday.  I was the subject of a lot of scrutiny the last week.  My performance in every game was heavily scrutinized and my bad series turned into an indictment of me as a player and what my legacy will be.  Come on, I’m only 26 years old.  You and I were born in the same year; do you think it’s fair to judge my entire career on my life so far?  What can I do to overcome this media scrutiny?  Will I ever live down my media missteps during last year’s offseason?
-LeBron James, Small Forward, Miami Heat

LeBron,
I think you’re barking up the wrong tree asking me this question.  Putting aside the whole Knicks fan thing (you really should have played in New York) there’s the whole matter of you being born in the same year as me.  You are, without a doubt, the finest athlete to be produced from a human womb in 1984.  The sad thing is you seem to be struck with the same ennui as my entire generation.  You just don’t seem to care as much as those who came before.  If it weren’t for the hundreds of millions of dollars you’re earning you’re basically the same as all of my peers.  You live and work with your friends and you can’t accomplish anything of note.  It’s this bizarre confirmation that even if we were all fantastic athletes we’d still be nowhere.  That hurts a lot.

I want to see you succeed too.  A good friend of mine, stand-up comedian Hasan Minhaj, has this joke where he says he wishes Adolf Hitler could see you because you so completely destroy the idea that the Aryans are the master race.  You’re six foot eight 250 pounds, the body of a power forward with the game of a point guard.  When you drive to the basket you’re like a freight train.  I assure you the media is aware of this and they really want you to succeed.  Everyone loved watching Michael Jordan and it is becoming more and more apparent as time goes on that he was basically psychopathic when it came to psyching himself into competition.  Success will take all the scrutiny away.  I promise the media wants to make you an immortal saint; you just have to get to producing three miracles.

As for living down The Decision a good start would be admitting that you handled that in a profoundly fucked up way.  The most you’ve shown remorse for orchestrating a media circus to crush the fan base that supported you for seven years and potentially single-handedly destroying the Cleveland economy (not that that really took much doing) is an interview in which you said you might have done things “a little bit different” if you could do it over.  I understand sycophants have surrounded you since you were very young but your life won’t end if you go out and say, “Look I’m a young man and I handled myself poorly, it was stupid and it won’t happen again.”  Everyone would understand; we’ve all been young.  I promise you if I could do what you did I would have and I would have deserved just as much shit for it.

Maybe none of this is for you.  I do have another suggestion.  You could pocket all the money you’ve made so far and be the greatest Harlem Globetrotter ever.  You’d never lose another game.  No one would ever bother you about your clutch performances.  People would stop comparing you to Jordan and you would probably win most comparisons to Meadowlark Lemon.  How’s your comedic timing?

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Art Tebbel would really like to play for the Washington Generals.  Who can make that happen?