The LeBron James Spectacle: Can 10 Million Viewers Be Wrong?

For all those in poor, benighted Cleveland, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth in a manner to do the book of Lamentations proud, they are not the first team to lose a bona fide basketball prodigy to a team better equipped to win the NBA championship.

That would be Orlando, o ye of little memory.

Shaquille O'Neal's free agency team switch during the summer of 1996 was every bit as balance-of-power-shifting as LeBron James' recent change of address, and yet I don't recall seeing The Big Aristotle's jerseys being burned when he signed a seven-year, $121 million dollar deal to become the Lakers' last great big man.

In fact, it barely made the top of the sports page anywhere but Orlando and Los Angeles.

However, all of us watched with breathless anticipation as LeBron James prepared to enter his free agent summer not less than two years ago. That's right, it wasn't even his walk year and we (and I mean all of us) already had The King on the clock.

But that's not what I came here to talk to you about.

Perhaps no one in recent memory has crashed and burned more spectacularly than one Eldrick "Tiger" Woods has. In the light of racy allegations of serial philandering, his wife, his sponsors, and his game have all deserted him. At the recent AT&T National, Tiger Woods failed to break par in four rounds of golf. No one's memory is so good that they can recall the last time that happened.

Yet Woods' did not cheat on golf, but on his wife.

I see you shouting back there, Joe Sixpack, and yes, Elin Nordgren is waaay hot, and yes, how could he cheat on a woman as waaay hot as Elin Nordgren?

Those of us of an age will recall that Joe DiMaggio had the (base)balls to cheat on Marilyn Monroe. Apparently, word around the campfire was that the only guy in Hollywood with a bat bigger than the Clipper's was none other than ol' Uncle Miltie himself, Milton "Who Knew" Berle...and apparently DiMaggio was at the plate as often as Berle was, if not more often. The following story is so telling, I include it in its brief entirety, from Mike Wise of the Washington Post:

"Joe DiMaggio, pushing 60, once tucked a phone number of a 20ish flight attendant in his pocket, smiling at the sportswriter seated next to him in first class. "Joe, she's somebody's daughter," protested Ron Bergman, then covering the Oakland A's. Replied DiMaggio, matter-of-factly: "They're all somebody's daughter." "

What's the difference between Woods and DiMaggio?

One of them got caught.

But that's not what I came here to talk to you about.

Okay, you might ask: what was the point of those radically-disparate stories?

The point is that we do not live in the information age as much as we live in the information vacuum. Instant access to the news has created a 24/7 monster with a blinking cursor demanding to be fed, always demanding more. There are no scoops anymore; within seconds of an event occurring, the story has been reported to minute detail and inspired the kind of bloviation usually reserved for filibusters.

It used to be that we reported the scores of an event, with descriptions of the action therein. When a golfer made a dramatic putt, it was news. Once in a while, we would get a "human interest" story, where we saw the golfer somewhere other than on a golf course; naturally, it was weird, like seeing your teacher in the grocery store or (gasp!) on a date.

Now, we have access to information the likes of which George Orwell could not imagine. There is no Big Brother (unless one were to count the tawdry "reality" program), but there are several hundred million Little Brothers and Sisters, at our terminals, or surfing the 'net through our 4G WiFi Something-That-Might-Still-Contain-A-Telephone devices.

Our insatiable demand for news about our sporting heroes has created an impossible culture for athletes to live in. Joe DiMaggio's indiscretions have only recently come to light, none of them verified by anything as damning as a text message or, worse, a sex tape, another unfortunate offspring of the information vacuum (amazingly, with as much free porn as there actually is on the internet, some people feel the need to add to the total available, somewhat like taking a glass of water and pouring it into the Pacific, but I digress...).

When Shaq left Orlando for Los Angeles, it was news, and perhaps even worth a raised eyebrow and an interested grunt from the casual fan ("Shaq to the Lakers, eh? Hmmph...")

When LeBron James finally decided to announce that he was leaving Cleveland for Miami, 10 million viewers (!!)* tuned in to watch.

By comparison, only 8.28 million people** tuned in to watch the last game of the Stanley Cup Finals.

An actual championship being decided drew fewer viewers than watching Jim Gray give away every last shred of his dignity while fawning before a 25-year-old suffering from a terminal case of rectal/cranial inversion.

By the way, let me hear nothing from anyone who dares suggest that increased ticket prices increase our "right" to invade the privacy of our athletes. First of all, it's a ticket, not a receipt of ownership. Second, you don't have to go to the games if you don't like the prices; it's what I like to call 'voluntary.'

When an athlete breaks the law, that's a matter for public concern because laws are put in place to ensure public peace. Yes, I want to know if an athlete is caught driving drunk, just as much as I want to know if my neighbor or my wife was caught doing the same, because that's just dangerous and stupid and it can cost someone their life (see: Stallworth, Donte; Little, Leonard).

It doesn't really matter how many women Tiger Woods cheated with, the point is that there is only one wounded party: Elin Nordgren. Seriously, ask yourself: as worked up as we all seemed to be last November, how angry, hurt, distraught, possibly suicidal are any of you right now over the whole thing? What's that? You're not suffering from any of those symptoms? Well, it's probably because you aren't his wife, you weren't in love with him, you didn't have promises broken that have shattered your life and made you the butt of jokes around the world.

I don't care how much money she gets if she divorces Tiger, Elin Woods will never, ever forget the shame of being publicly humiliated in every major newspaper in the world, on every major network in the world, and on every major and minor website in captivity. Not all the dollars of Woods' fortune will ever make it better, not though Woods were richer than Croesus himself.

We are all witnesses...but we didn't have to be. Our obsession for all things sports all the time has made the casual sports fan an endangered species. It's not enough to know that Manchester United won last night, or that Park Ji-Sung scored the gamer, but that Park also blah blah blah after the game. Why should I care what he did after the game, or who he might have done it with?

Why did the English tabloids run an article on the WAGS (Wives and Girlfriends, for the uninitiated...all two of you) of the World Cup? Last I checked, the World Cup was about action on the field.

We have all this technology and all this reporting and all this stuff, and in the end we create the kind of atmosphere that allows LeBron James take an hour on national television to do what should have taken less than a minute to do. (Next on SportsCenter: LeBron Clears His Throat!)

We have basically turned things in sport on their heads. Our constant craving for information has created a situation where we can no longer distinguish between the major and the minor, the important and the trivial. Tiger Woods cheating on his wife didn't change the fate of any golf championships, but Luis Suarez' blatant handball to prevent a goal changed Ghana's fate in the knockout round of the World Cup. Ah, but what am I thinking? The latter only occurred in a pretty important soccer match to some few around the world; El Tigre was boning a porn star (say, what was that link with all her videos?)...

By the way, if anyone thinks I'm just ranting against technology without reference to history, let me introduce one Henry David Thoreau: "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."

History repeats itself...if we are paying attention.

Sources:

Wikipedia.org
Mike Wise - Washington Post
Henry David Thoreau - Walden, Book 1, 84
New Zealand Herald
*USA Today
**Yahoo! Sports