Much ado about LeBron James, Haruki Murakami, free agency, and home.
Will LeBron James continue to toss talcum if he leaves the Cleveland Cavaliers? James’ signature pregame powder ritual—stylized and set to music in this hypnotic Nike commercial—seems somehow linked to his on-court wizardry. I mean no one should be able to throw a soft whitish mineral up in the air and expect an audience to cheer and scream in anticipation. Yet that’s what happens when LeBron stands in front of Cavs fans, lifts his arms and calls forth that chalky puff of dust. It’s such a lame trick that it’s not even a trick: we watch him pour the stuff into his palm; he broadcasts what he’s about to do before he throws up his hands; the dust disperses above him just as we’d expect it to. Absolutely nothing magical about it. Except that it’s goofily beautiful: LeBron James, a (very) young man clowning like a mischievous uncle, taking the time to have a little fun with us before he goes out onto the court to do his real job. And he does his real job so well that the powdery antics are tinged with grace.
James grew up in Akron, 30 miles away from Cleveland. The area has been the stage for his youth, his young adulthood, his professional superstardom and many, many talcum tosses. But now he might leave Cleveland behind, even though the city needs him. He is the biggest prize in a dreamy 2010 free agent market that includes his friends Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh. If LeBron chooses to leave the Cavaliers, he might end up with the Miami Heat, the New Jersey (soon to be Brooklyn) Nets or the Chicago Bulls. Experts mostly seem to think the Bulls will be the lucky winners of the LeBron lottery. But there are many possibilities, which ESPN.com has handily mapped out with this Free Agent Slot Machine.
LeBron’s tenure with the Cavs has already been a mostly feel-good story of local boy making good and giving back, or that’s how I (perhaps naively) see it, anyway. It would be silly now to begrudge James the chance to go to a bigger market team that’s better positioned to win a championship. But there’s no denying the impact he has on Cleveland’s spirit and economy. One professor from Kent State estimated that LeBron and the Cavs bring about $140 million per year to the area. LeBron must be aware of this, and he must understand it as a kind of mitzvah. Not to mention, as the Cleveland Plains Dealer reporter Brian Windhorst recently said, “I think [LeBron] will give a lot of people in other cities hope, but I think, ultimately, he stays home, because it is home.”
What is home, though? I’m most of the way through Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle now, and it has been making me think a lot about how we literally and figuratively try to construct homes. That’s not what the book is explicitly about—on the surface, it’s all lost cats and vanishing spouses and Japan’s involvement in World War II—but I’m realizing that throughout the novel, Murakami is posing a subversive vision of the meaning of home, suggesting that where we come from is not as consequential as we’d like to think. We can’t count on parents or family to make a home for us. We can marry for love, buy and keep a house, but even that won’t guarantee a lasting home (houses in Murakami’s novel are uncomfortable, unlucky, and often in close proximity to deep, dangerous wells). But this rootlessness, this lack of a loving in-place network, makes many characters in Murakami’s book miserable and remarkably isolated.
Free agency and pro sports in general also push against our more sentimental notions of the very possibility of home. Pro athletes follow the money, wherever it leads them. Sometimes they follow more than money: the German national soccer team that’s been mowing down the competition in the World Cup, for instance, is full of not-entirely-German players who could have worn the uniform of Poland or Turkey. The durable and still dangerous Polish-born striker Miroslav Klose has played for Germany all these years not for money but because Germany’s a better team than Poland, more likely to win. Klose wants to share in the German team’s glory.
Theoretically, LeBron James might sign with the Chicago Bulls (or any team aside from the Cavaliers) for the same reason: even if Cleveland is his home, it’s not perceived as a place for winners. In other words, home, in the end, cannot and should not contain us. But at this point LeBron James has a chance to be a regional resource, renewing the place he’s called home his whole life. When the Cavaliers made their franchise pitch to keep him in Cleveland the other day, a group of Cavs fans were waiting outside the building with a special tribute meant to appeal to James’ inner Ohioan. The hopeful fans stood there waiting for their hero, outfitted with their own supply of talcum powder. When they saw LeBron leave the building, they knew what to do with it.
