I live in Ohio, which made me a Dallas Mavericks fan during the recent NBA finals. Few people here can forgive Akron native and superstar LeBron James for leaving Cleveland for the glitz and glamour of Miami. Yet watching LeBron fizzle on the court and become gruff and cantankerous off the court made him somehow sympathetic and intriguing.
The experience of a guy who graduated from high school and moved straight into professional basketball isn’t something I can really understand. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. For the last few weeks, like a stalker unable to let go, I kept Googling him, trying to figure out what makes him tick, or, during his last few games, not tick. Finally, having made no progress, I decided to put his career into a context that I could understand: What if LeBron were an academic?
To make the comparison, first the career trajectory has to be adjusted. Athletes peak at different ages, and male basketball players seem at their best just before reaching 30. They seldom play longer than 20 years. That means that a basketball career moves twice as fast as the typical 40-year stint in the college classroom.
LeBron, at 18 when he entered the NBA, was like an assistant professor who somehow skipped graduate school. Perhaps he wrote a brilliant first novel and was hired on his accomplishments. But that comparison falls flat because LeBron had only three high-school titles to his name, and his talent, obviously great, was still raw and untested. So maybe his first few years with Cleveland were graduate school, and his $13-million three-year contract, his scholarship. No, make that assistantship. He did have to work for it.
After seven years in Cleveland, with the team poised to offer him the tenure of a long-term contract, LeBron announced that he was hitting the job market. Having made the NBA finals only once, and still without a title, he had the equivalent of a few articles, maybe an edited volume, but still no book—just a dusty dissertation with some promise, perhaps even an interested publisher or two, but nothing ready for the printing presses. Yet every team seemed to want him for his potential.
My wife and I rent a cottage in a different Northern Michigan location every summer. Part of the fun of moving into someone else’s space is snooping around looking for clues to the lives of former residents. This year’s cottage came with a few shelves of books, leftovers from three generations of professors who’ve enjoyed the place since the 1930s. One of the books was Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and I decided to reread it. Mr. Ramsay turned out to be exactly my age this time through—maybe that’s why he became the most vivid character for me. And somehow he took me back to LeBron.
Over the years, I’ve pursued various research agendas and other pastimes, but I always seem to get to a point where I can’t quite break through to the next level of skill or accomplishment. Typically, to my own recurring disappointment, I just quit and try something new. So I could relate to Mr. Ramsay’s frustration with being stuck at the letter Q on the intellectual journey he had alphabetically (and metaphorically) arranged. As I read about his determination to continue down the same path, not worrying about getting to Z and instead focusing on R, the next letter, I was struck again by my lack of fortitude, my endless starts and stops, my dilettantism. And the comment that Mr. Ramsay had produced his best work at 25, only to follow with “more or less amplification, repetition”? That didn’t apply to me. I’ve never taken anything past the letter F. Frustration.
But what about LeBron? By leaving Cleveland, was he pushing forward or giving up? Was he Mr. Ramsay or me? Neither, really. LeBron is still young, still in the first half of his career, still about to do his best work, to become a billion-dollar brand, as he told Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes. LeBron, it seems, is more like Charles Tansley, the young scholar in To the Lighthouse, who came to stay with the Ramsay family in their summer home for a few weeks, hoping to gain a bit of wisdom from his mentor before moving on.
For Tansley, everything seems clear and within reach. All he needs is a bit of direction from his mentor (his coach) to launch his career. But Mr. Ramsay, for reasons Tansley doesn’t understand, is holding back. Up close, the professor seems nothing like the man whose books he had studied. In their weeks together, Tansley sees only a man at the end of his career, a man whose concerns he cannot understand. Finally, he writes him off as an old fogy and leaves. It is an odd attraction that puts together young students with their aging mentors, each wanting something that the other is unable to give—the certainty needed by the young to propel them forward and the reassurance that nurtures the old through their declining years.
I remember once turning in a paper in college with a note to the professor asking him to tell me everything that needed improvement. His comments on my previous papers had seemed vague and left me unsure how to proceed. Before the semester ended, I wanted more guidance, probably thinking that the only thing that separated me from my professor was all of the stuff he knew but hadn’t yet told me. So I tried to speed him up a bit by asking for a larger portion. I was like LeBron at that age. Not realizing that the road ahead was long, I expected that everything I needed to know would be handed to me rather than learned through struggle.
LeBron, given millions of dollars in advertising contracts right out of high school, came away thinking that he had arrived before even beginning his professional career. All he needed was a coach and a few teammates to set the stage for his ascendancy. But without early success in Cleveland, he rejected the Cavaliers’ offer of another contract and tried to speed up the process by moving to Miami. He then declared himself a champion before even the first game, as if saying it made it so. But success comes from hard work, not from an image of yourself at the top. LeBron had forgotten about hard work.
I have no business writing that last sentence. How do I know how hard LeBron has been working? And the choices he made were, in fact, just what was expected of him. Everyone told him he was the best, and he acted as if he were the best. In that way, he’s like an ambitious undergraduate. Coddled, praised, and patronized, he became pouty and lethargic when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to succeed quickly.
What caught my attention in LeBron’s collapse, I now realize, was its familiarity. I’ve seen it in myself and sometimes in my students. Recently I have used the word “grace” when responding to students who ask for advice on how to approach a professor, administrator, or supervisor. It’s fine to express yourself, I say, and to challenge or reject what is put before you, but do it with grace and perhaps a bit of humility. If I were LeBron’s coach, that’s what I’d say to him: “Be gracious in victory and humble in defeat.” That adage still resonates—in the world of sports and in the academy.