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Needing help lessens what James achieves

Commentary: Greg Jayne

The Columbian
Published: January 8, 2011, 12:00am

By the time they leave Portland on Sunday, the Miami Heat might have 20 wins in a span of 21 games.

They might be on their way to five or six or seven consecutive titles, like LeBron James declared prior to the season.

James might be zeroing in on his third straight MVP award, a streak that could stretch until LeBron James Jr. reaches the NBA.

And yet, in the big picture of LeBron’s career, it might not matter.

No, this isn’t another screed about the abomination that was The Decision. It isn’t another diatribe about the manner in which James firebombed the entire city of Cleveland.

Instead, it’s about the nature of competition and winning and the exalted way in which we view champions. And it’s about the fact that James has forfeited any opportunity to eventually be considered the greatest basketball player who ever lived.

Because in choosing to join Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami, James revealed the flaw that forever will separate him from the Michael Jordans and Bill Russels and Larry Birds of the world: He is more afraid of failure than he is driven to win.

James has attempted to replace growth and maturity and the learning process with a quick-fix solution, turning winning into a joyless proposition and demonstrating that he has no understanding of a quote attributed to Muhammad Ali: “Champions are made from something they have deep inside them — a desire, a dream, a vision.”

At the risk of sounding like Grumpy Old Sportswriter, perhaps it is a generational disconnect. Now 26 years old, James is the product of an era in which baseball players used steroids to set records, breast implants became epidemic, and a little pill could make “Bob” the big man in town (wink, wink; nudge, nudge).

James is the product of an age in which solutions can be artificial and superficial, with little regard for the emptiness they leave in the soul.

Because of that, it’s not surprising that LeBron is attempting the comparatively easy route to winning championships. He played for a team that had the best record in the league each of the past two years but flamed out in the playoffs, and then he told the world that it was just too hard.

And along the way, he ignored the timeless wisdom of the Tom Hanks character from “A League of Their Own:” “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”

That, from a historical perspective, will lead to the unravelling of James’ greatness. He’s trying to avoid the hard.

Anytime the Heat fail to win a championship in the next few years, it will be viewed as an abject failure. If they do win titles, it will come with an asterisk: “Yeah, but he couldn’t have done it without Wade.”

It’s a no-win situation for LeBron, regardless of how often he actually does win.

One of the great joys of NBA basketball is watching a team grow, seeing it come together, anticipating if it can take an additional step toward a championship year after year.

And in the end, because James opted for the security blanket provided by Wade, any championships or records or statistical milestones he might achieve will be devoid of that joy.

Where is the thrill? Where is the struggle? Where is the transcendent athlete overcoming whatever self-doubt he might have in order to reach the mountaintop?

Jordan, most famously, was conflicted with that.

As ESPN’s Bill Simmons writes, Jordan was “homicidally competitive,” and it took him years to harness that. Once he did, he became the greatest player the sport has ever seen.

But James? He has opted to circumvent his personal demons rather than confront them. And James — as well as NBA fans — are poorer for it.

Greg Jayne is Sports editor of The Columbian. He can be reached at 360-735-4531, or by e-mail at greg.jayne@columbian.com

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