There Will Be 'Bron

By Chris Hanneke

Daniel Plainview has a lot of Michael Jordan in him (figuratively, of course).

“I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.”

The best movie of the ‘00s, and my personal favorite movie of all time, was There Will Be Blood. The film focuses on the life of Daniel Plainview, who goes from a simple mineral prospector to an oil tycoon over the course of the narrative. However, it is the way he gets there that is what makes it such a fascinating story. Just as the above quote, which he utters early on in the film, suggests, Plainview stops at nothing to get what he wants.

By the end of the film, 20 years have passed, and Plainview is alone in his lavish mansion. His competitive spirit has earned him everything he could ever need financially, but with no more land to acquire, he mostly sits around his house and gets drunk to pass the time. He belittles his deaf son, and in one of the greatest final scenes of any film ever, he settles his ongoing feud with the local pastor by (SPOILER ALERT!) beating him to death with a bowling pin.

It’s an unbelievable story, one which my brief synopsis doesn’t do nearly enough justice. But its message is clear: at some point, competitive spirit morphs into greed, and it is that greed that can dehumanize people and turn them into monsters. At its simplest, it is a critique of United States capitalism and what that system does to so many people who constantly yearn for more, no matter what the cost.

However, I can’t help but watch the 2011 NBA Finals, listen to all of the critics of Lebron James claim he will never be like Michael Jordan and not think of Plainview every time I hear the reasons why Jordan was the greatest basketball player who ever lived.

Just as a disclaimer, I’m not here to dispute that; Jordan is the greatest basketball player that has ever lived, and it looks like no one in the league right now will ever match (BIAS ALERT!), except maybe Kevin Durant.

How Jordan got to that point is what I find most fascinating. He got there mostly by possessing the same attitude toward basketball that Plainview had toward oil drilling. I could absolutely imagine Jordan uttering something along the lines of “I have a competition in me, I want no one else to succeed” if a reporter asked him why he wanted to win so bad. And yet, the qualities that make the audience despise Plainview by the end of the film are the same qualities that have made Jordan the staple for greatness in the NBA.

Jordan was relentless. Phil Jackson, Jordan’s former coach, talked with this blog’s hero, Bill Simmons, about “Michael's steadfast refusal to blow random, meaningless road games in Sacramento, Vancouver, Cleveland or wherever, how those were the nights that made him truly special, when his entire team was dragging, when the NBA schedule demanded a Chicago loss, yet Michael just couldn't allow it.” Quite simply, he wasn’t happy unless he won, and he tried to win by any means necessary.

Michael Jordan will always be defined by his rings.

These are the standards basketball fans expect their players to live up to now that Jordan’s time has passed. More specifically, those are the standards James is expected to live up to now that he is The Player That Is Most Expected To Be “The Next Jordan” Until The Next One Comes Along.

James is, almost undeniably, the most athletically gifted human being to ever strap on a pair of basketball sneakers. Athletically, he could run circles even around Jordan. If he possessed Jordan’s maniacal, “Plainview” attitude, we as basketball fans have to believe he could be the greatest to have ever played the game. But as these past two years have shown, James clearly doesn’t possess that attitude, and unless he makes some miraculous shift overnight, he will never get there. It is the fact that he COULD get there is what has everyone so frustrated. As fans that don’t have the actual talent to play in the league, we like to believe that if we were given the athletic gifts that James was given, we would absolutely use them to their maximum potential.

But would we really? Would we really just stand idly by in a situation like James was in in Cleveland, one where we knew that each and every night we not only had to be the best player on the court, but unless we did enough to get everyone else involved, we would have no chance of winning. After seven years of not having a single second option, how many of us would have truly stuck it out?

Now, James is in a situation where he doesn’t have to be that guy night in and night out. But still, we know he has the gifts to carry a team, and that is why it is so frustrating to see him so happily defer to his fellow superstar teammate, Dwyane Wade. In many ways, Wade has come out of these playoffs the undisputed better basketball player, historically, than James. In fact, James has restricted his skills so much that during Game 5, a good friend of this blog, Albert Samaha, tweeted “Is Jason Kidd paying Lebron James not to take him off the dribble?” It was a fair question, because, let’s face it, the biggest athletic freak in the league should have no trouble blowing past a 38-year old point guard that once did this.

For this reason, and the fact that his team, a Goliath of sorts that could only live up to their hype by winning the title, is a game away from elimination, the narrative surrounding James is that he will never be Jordan. The issue I have with that is, so what?

That’s the catch here. For Jordan, establishing his legacy meant putting basketball above all else in life. It may sound good on paper to only value winning; as fans, what more could you want from a player? But athletes aren’t robots. Many of them are smart to recognize that they have been blessed with an opportunity to play a game with a bunch of equally blessed individuals. They get to play the game they love with their closest friends and make more money than you or I could ever dream of making by doing so. It’s not that they don’t care about winning, it’s just that in the grand scheme of things, is winning one, two or six championships really worth pissing off everyone around you so much so that when it’s all said and done, none of your teammates want to hang out with you anymore?

James has always come across as someone who cared more about his brand than championship rings. Fans want it to be the other way around because of everything I have just mentioned. But why should James be blamed for caring more about entertaining than winning (which, by the way, is probably not even the case, but I'm trying to make a point). Has any player drawn this much attention, this many polarizing viewpoints, since Jordan? Hell, he’s the reason I was so anxious to get this blog started. I wanted to give my opinion on the man that just about anyone that likes sports has an opinion on. He may never even get to Kobe Bryant levels of success on the court, but he has, in many ways, already surpassed him in terms of just how important he is to the game.

"The Decision" may have been an awful idea, but it was nevertheless a testament to just how popular Lebron James truly is.

Daniel Day-Lewis won the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of Plainview. But as is typical with just about every actor, in his many interviews discussing the award, he never once claimed that he was aiming to win it. That’s because actors aren’t expected to care about winning anything. They are expected to give the generic answer of “I just want to entertain, and hopefully this award means I’ve succeeded in doing that.”

Basketball, and sports in general, does not work that way. At its heart, sports is merely entertainment, just like movies. We are just as entertained by movies that end in tragedy and those that end in triumph. As long as the end result matches the rest of the action, we leave satisfied. So why have we reached a point where we can’t be satisfied with the sheer entertainment sports provides us? It’s not enough that James has generated more interest in the league than there has been since the mid-‘90s; he’s supposed to play his career out the way we want, he’s supposed to do everything in his power to win as many championships as possible, he’s supposed to be the next Jordan, dammit!

Maybe James knows what it takes to be the next Jordan, maybe James knows he has what he takes to be the next Jordan and maybe James (gasp!) doesn’t want to do what it takes to be the next Jordan because he knows if he goes that route, he may end up isolated in his lavish mansion settling petty feuds long after his prime has passed.

If Dallas wins the series, James will be skewered for weeks following. But the labor dispute will heat up and the criticism will subside a bit, only until basketball gets rolling again (hopefully, sooner, rather than later, a la NFL) when the entire tale of James not being Jordan will start all over.

If Miami comes back and wins the next two games, unless James gives heroic performances in both, he will still be questioned and the critics won't stop until he wins another.

Win or lose, James will never please his critics. But if there is one thing we have learned about him this year, it is that he does not care what his critics think. As his famous Nike Ad poignantly asked, "Should I be who you want me to be?"

You want him to be hyper-competitive. You want him to win at whatever cost. You want him to beat his rivals over the head with a bowling pin. But James isn't like that.

That doesn't mean Lebron James doesn't have a competition in him, it just means that his competition doesn't match that of a Jordan or a Plainview. But is that so bad? Is it so bad if he wants, or at least doesn’t mind if, someone else succeeds as well?

I’m finished.