I can think of at least one major negative, even devastating, everyday reality for a teenage basketball prodigy. When you are a prodigy, people will attempt to put their dreams inside of you. Every person a generation ahead thinks,“If only I could combine my experience with your god given gifts. We could really make a difference.” They tell you how you should play and how you should be. “Support this charity, Lebron.” “Care only about winning, Lebron.” “Don’t make mistakes X, Y, and Z like I did.” Most of all, they insist that they truly love the real you. It doesn’t take a college education to intuit that really, they don’t.
(Former) Cleveland Cavaliers basketball star LeBron James scrapes paint from a window in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans on Feb. 15, 2008. NBA players in town for the All-Star Game took a day to work on community service projects to help with the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. (Bill Haber/Associated Press)
It’s not that the people (coaches, mentors, employers, public) don’t love you at all but the love they offer is totally conditional. They love you only if you become that person they want you to be. They love you only if you take on their dreams as your own. As any fan of Inception can tell you, this is impossible. Transferring dreams is like blowing smoke into a soap bubble. A love-starved prodigy will do whatever it takes to accommodate. He will walk it and talk it as best he can. He will constantly repeat words that reflect a coach’s or mentor’s life experience rather than his own. He will try to accommodate the dreams of an entire city, but inside his true self will long to fulfill the teenage dreams he has always been told to ignore. Every time he passes up an opportunity to get drunk or stupid in favor of cutting the ribbon at a youth center the rage will steadily begin to grow.
From the moment he changed from boy to adolescent, Lebron struggled to be the “man” Cleveland wanted him to be. None of us can imagine the pressure of being “chosen” to save a dying city. It is cruel to force someone into the role of messiah. There is no way that a 13-year-old Lebron chose to take on a challenge that the civic leadership was clearly failing to overcome. How could a 16-year-old Lebron know what was happening to him? How could 21-year-old Lebron explain he wasn’t basketball Jesus? Even if he did, (perhaps he tried) no one would have listened. He was now the living breathing embodiment of deeply held hopes and aspirations. They just kept blowing smoke and the walls of the bubble got thinner and thinner.
Lebron James Parties it up in D.C.
Eventually, the real Lebron could no longer take it. He had to end the charade. More than that, he needed to express his anger. He isn’t a messiah or a man-child. He is a 25-year-old kid that wants to get laid and party. He doesn’t have much in the way of genuine life experience. Maybe after he makes a few mistakes (he has gotten a good start) he can earn enough character to make a real difference in this world. Uplifting the industrial Midwest is not a realistic goal for an barely grown athlete. He has another 50 years to make his mark and define his legacy. Real sustainable social/cultural changes takes at least that long and it sure as hell has to come from the heart. Anyone can give $100k to charity, but it takes a real man to make sure that charity does permanent good. The only way Lebron could get Cleveland to understand was through a rude and childish act of passive aggression (the bubble had to burst). When you have been crowded into a corner of fake philanthropy perhaps the only way out is a spit filled fuck you. He is a kid and he doesn’t know shit… but he has to learn that on his own. Shallowness is his god given right. For greatness to be real, it must come from within.
The Dave Good Show 
