Well, That Was Anti-Climactic

So, I finally got around to seeing the LeBron James dunk video. For those of you who haven't heard about it, here's the quick back story: LeBron was hosting a summer camp a couple weeks ago for some college kids. During the camp a sophomore playing for Xavier named Jordan Crawford went down the lane, elevated and dunked on LeBron. Not a big deal, happened to the best of us. But, then LeBron had the Nike representative who were at the camp go to the two kids filming the game and the Nike people took away their tapes. Apparently, LeBron didn't want the world to know he could get dunked on.

Everyone assumed this meant that the tape had to contain the worse case of a man being dunked on in the history of the world. People's imaginations are always worse than the real thing, so after a couple days this kid had brought the rim down on James' head. If LeBron was this embarrassed about the tape then this dunk had to be better than Vince Carter in the Olympics and Starks on Grant and Jordan combined. But, this is the age of YouTube and camera phones, so you had to know eventually the tapes would get out and yesterday, they did. What was revealed was a pretty pedestrian dunk on a less-than-stellar defensive effort by James, which is about what you would expect from a guy hosting a camp in the off season. The gym didn't even react that much. If this was in a dunk contest, Jordan wouldn't even have made it out of the first round.

The problem is in trying to hide the tape, James made it a bigger deal than it needed to be. Had he simply played it off as a kid having a once in a lifetime experience it would have been forgotten in a day. People would have covered for James, saying (rightfully) that he wasn't playing all that hard. Hell, Nike could have gotten a great commercial out of it. Instead this story has become about James and Nike trying to protect his ego, lived on for two weeks and now people have started to question the sensitivity level of James (MJ never hid the video of him losing a game of H-O-R-S-E at his camp). You know, for a guy who wants to be a global icon, you'd think he'd have someone working for him who had taken a PR class along the way.

Like I said, I'm not very impressed, but you can check it out for yourself.