He can imagine, he says, playing for Cleveland again one day.
Did I hear him right? Cleveland?
"If there was an opportunity for me to return," he says, "and those fans welcome me back, that'd be a great story."
Cleveland…Ohio? Where fans at this very moment are burning his jerseys? Where fans are selling toilet paper made from his jerseys?
"Maybe the ones burning my jersey," he says, "were never LeBron fans anyway."
*****
So begins J.R. Moehringer's surprising, insightful, and compulsively readable journey into Camp LeBron during the days and hours leading up to the PR train wreck that was The Decision. At a time when James was being obsessively shielded from the world by his team of handlers, Moehringer had unprecedented inside access: a pair of face-to-face meetings shortly before The Decision and a follow-up phone call six days after the fact. During that postmortem interview, when Moehringer asked James what he'd change if he had a do-over, James replied, "Nothing at all." Bottom line: LeBron doesn't really care how it went down. He knows he made the right decision, Moehringer writes, and so do the people around him. "They're happy to see my happy. That's what they can see in my face. They say, 'It's been awhile since we've seen you look like that.' "
Other highlights:
• James on how a kid could from Akron, located only thirty minutes from Cleveland, could grow up rooting for Chicago and Jordan: "It's not far, but it is far. And Clevelanders, because they were the bigger-city kids when we were growing up, looked down on us.… So we didn't actually like Cleveland. We hated Cleveland growing up. There's a lot of people in Cleveland we still hate to this day."
• James on Cavs owner Dan Gilbert: "I don't think he ever cared about LeBron. My mother always told me: 'You will see the light of people when they hit adversity. You'll get a good sense of their character.' Me and my family have seen the character of that man." He went on to say that Gilbert's post-Decision screed "made me feel more comfortable that I made the right decision."
• James on Charles Barkley, who's been hyper-critical of James's decision to share the limelight—and the scoring burden—with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami: "Charles was probably trying to be funny. It wasn't funny to me."
For lots more inside dope—how much he's looking forward to playing the Cavs in Cleveland on December 2, his manager Maverick Carter's Malcolm Gladwell moment, and how badly those kids in the bleachers on The Decision had to pee (too much Vitaminwater)—pick up the September issue of GQ.
