Friday, July 10, 2009

LeBron James believes in censorship, unless it's a commercial

LeBron runs a skills camp for Nike, which includes some high school, college, and NBA players. This camp includes skill drills and a pickup game. Usually not big news.

This camp got interesting when Xavier's Jordan Crawford dunked on King James. While 2 cameras were filming the camp.

Why haven't you seen this dunk? If you ask Nike (who pays LeBron a lot of money and has a vested interest in preserving his reputation with millions of basketball fans) they say they have a policy of not allowing the media to record the pick up games at their camps, so they confiscated the tapes from the 2 cameras that were recording the event.

If you ask one of the cameramen, though, you get a slightly different version of events. He says that he had been filming the game for about 20 minutes when the dunk happened. Shortly afterwards, LeBron called over a Nike official, and a couple minutes later, the official confiscated the tapes.

At this point, James needs to ask himself what's more embarassing: The dunk being placed on YouTube for the world to see, or showing the public that LeBron's ego is so large that he cannot handle letting anyone get the better of him, especially not some college kid.

LeBron has been a very marketable player since he entered the league, and has frequently been held up in contrast with Kobe Bryant as a great player who's also a good person. Now, the last 2 images we have of LeBron are him refusing to shake hands with the victorious Orlando Magic after game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals, and stealing away all evdience of a college player's moment of glory at James' expense.

Chalk this up as example 78,945,329 of fans being disappointed when they learn more information about their sports heroes.

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