Photo: Jamie Schwaberow
Jason Whitlock: “LeBron James has diminished the game of basketball. That should be being discussed on ESPN and TNT because that’s his real legacy. That’s what disqualifies him from the whole Michael Jordan conversation. He did not elevate the game. He did this attempt to elevate himself to Mohammad Ali’s status and say he’s ‘MORE THAN AN ATHLETE’… This is stupid. The whole I’m More Than An Athlete, ‘oh, I guess this other thing I do is stupid…’ And there’s some truth to that but LeBron James as an athlete shouldn’t be selling that message. The reason so many people paid attention to Hank Aaron pursuing Babe Ruth or Tiger Woods going after Jack Nicklaus is because Tiger Woods felt like [golf] was the most important thing on the planet, and Hank Aaron thought [baseball] was the most important thing on the planet. They weren’t trying to be ‘More Than An Athlete’. They wanted you to celebrate them as athletes and we did. Even Mohammad Ali wanted to be celebrated as the greatest boxer of all time, and that would cement his legacy and allow him to have a platform to do whatever he wanted post-career. LeBron has demanded that we focus on things he’s not very good at. The guy is great at dunking the basketball, have us focus on that. Talking? Making articulate arguments? Producing money and TV shows? He’s in the bottom 10% of all those things, but he wants us to focus on that rather than the one thing that he and only three or four other people on the planet have ever been able to reach. That’s why I’ve said he’s undermined the game and undermined all these athletes. They have us thinking about things that they’re not very good at… My problem with LeBron as an activist, particularly as it relates to Mohammad Ali… LeBron likes to ‘shadow box.’ Ali went out and actually ‘sparred’ with his critics. Ali went to hostile environments and confronted people who disagreed with him and sparred with them. LeBron shadow boxes. He’ll go sit down in front of Don Lemon or some other fluffer interviewer that will basically co-sign anything that he says, and won’t push back in any real way. The questions are agreed upon and nobody will ever challenge him. It’s shadowboxing. It’s one of the safest things you can do and it’s great exercise, but you never get hit in the mouth, you never get challenged, and you never get any stronger. When you see somebody who calls themselves a ‘boxer’ and all they do is shadowbox, eventually you’re going to go ‘this dude is afraid to fight, he’s a coward.’ In the intellectual arena, LeBron is a coward. That is part of why he’s diminishing himself by trying to be ‘More Than an Athlete.’ His shows are absolute garbage and if we lived in a different time he could be criticized no different than the way Magic Johnson was for the ‘Magic Hour’ TV show. LeBron is a great basketball player, but some of these other guys like Grant Hill and Isiah Thomas, they’re actually smart, let them carry the ‘smart’ basketball torch.” (Full Segment Above)
Watch Jason Whitlock explain why he thinks LeBron James has ‘diminished’ the game of basketball with his bogus ‘More Than An Athlete’ façade, as Whitlock says LeBron’s ‘intellectual shortcomings’ as a phony social commentator have discredited the voices of athletes in the minds of fans.
Check out the segment above as Whitlock details why he believes the hysteria surrounding LeBron’s chase to break Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time NBA scoring record is going to be greatly diluted by disillusioned former NBA diehard fans who were tired of being lectured by Lebron on polarizing topics that had nothing to do with basketball.
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