The Other Fifteen

"Waaaah" He wants his binky.

So for those of you that haven’t heard, LeBron James got dunked on, badly, by a prep star at his basketball camp a couple days ago.  He then had Nike confiscate the video tapes and try to put it under wraps.  To catch up, read the story on Deadspin here, here, and here.  So what can we learn take from this?  LeBron James is a crybaby of epic proportions.

LeBron asking to have the tapes confiscated shows just how fragile his ego is.  You got beat, LeBron.  Let the kid have his moment.  It was in a scrimmage.  Nobody will think any less of you just because you’re getting posterized for once in your life instead of the other way around.  And trying to cover up the story just makes it more intriguing.  It went from “Hey, that kid had a great dunk on LeBron, good for him,”  to “How embarrassing was that dunk that LeBron is stealing the footage to make sure that nobody sees it?”  By being petty, LeBron just turned this dunk from noteworthy to legendary.

LeBron goes running to his mommy to save him from the mean mans.

Plus, unless they destroy the tapes, it will eventually surface on YouTube or elsewhere, which will bring the story back into prominence when it would have been forgotten about in a day or two had we just seen it in the first place.

The worst part of this is, the last time we saw LeBron was when he held a press conference a day after his loss to the Magic to explain why he is too much of a crybaby to shake the hands of the team that beat him in the playoffs, or to talk to the media about it after the game.  And his

explanation was, “That’s not being a poor sport.  If somebody beats you up, you’re not going to congratulate them for beating you up.”  Well, LeBron, let me correct you right quick.  That is THE DEFINITION of a poor sport.  You should be equally gracious as a winner and as a loser, no exceptions.  I don’t remember seeing him snub handshakes from his opponents when he wins.  And as for the “beating you up” analogy, it wasn’t a fight, it was a game.  And even in sports that are fights, like boxing, MMA, wrestling, etc., the combatants always congratulate each other even in cases when the loser just got the living shit beaten out of him in a very real

We Are All Witnesses, even when you don't want us to be. Deal with it.

sense.  So if you’re using that as your excuse, you’re even more wrong than you were originally.  Trying to justify poor sportsmanship in any way is way worse than just being a spoiled sport in the first place.

We all have to do things in our jobs that we wish we didn’t have to.  That’s part of being an adult.  You chose to be a professional athlete.  You can’t just ignore the “professional” part and expect people to be ok with it.  Part of your job description is to display good sportsmanship and to cooperate with the media.  Snubbing your opponents, refusing to talk to the media, and censoring anything that makes you look bad (even when it really just makes someone else good and isn’t a big deal) isn’t living up to the responsibilities that go along with the job.  Basically, you need to both grow the fuck up and grow a thicker skin, because you’re going to be faced with failure throughout your life.  You can either live up to your responsibilities and deal with adversity, or you can keep on pouting when things don’t go your way.  But as things currently stand, you, sir, are a punk bitch.