The Cavaliers should not retire LeBron James' number. It would be an insult to players who took pride in the uniform and honored the city.
Tyler Gast, 8, left, and brother Carter, 6, would seem to agree that the Cavaliers should not honor LeBron James by retiring his No. 23 jersey.Before the Cavaliers retire LeBron James' number 23, they will win that championship owner Dan Gilbert promised would arrive before James' first one in Miami.
The number 23 will never hang in the rafters on Gilbert's watch. It is entirely appropriate that it never hangs there at all.
Certainly, there will be a national media claque that will fall in love with what is obviously a loaded Miami team, to which James skittered as a free agent.
ESPN's suck-up brigades will be out in force in that event, accusing Cleveland of eating its young by vowing not to retire James' number. They will say we let 28 minutes of that dreadful, self-serving "The Decision" show, courtesy of the Lapdog Network, erase seven years of excellence.
It seems harsh, admittedly. But that is the way of sports.
The shorthand for every player's name in the list below is a moment of failure:
Bill Buckner? Groundball through the wickets.
Chris Webber? Timeout.
Brian Sipe? Red Right 88.
Jose Mesa? Game 7.
Craig Ehlo? The Shot.
Earnest Byner? The Fumble.
Most of these men made physical mistakes. People are human. Mistakes happen in sports.
Webber's error was mental, but it was a heat-of-the-moment error, nothing premeditated.
The four Cleveland players on the list deserve special commentary.
Ehlo was beaten by the best basketball player ever, Michael Jordan. There is disappointment, but no shame there.
Sipe was the mainspring for an entire, giddy "Kardiac Kids" season. He provided many more thrills than his one gargantuan mistake.
The Browns were never in the conference championship game after the 1987 season without Byner.
Mesa was different. His was a failure of nerve in refusing to throw his best pitch, the fastball. You might remember that, dominant as Mesa often was, he never called himself "The Chosen One" and never dubbed himself the "King." He proved too frail a vessel into which to pour so many hopes.
He certainly did not quit, however.
James would have been excused his defection on the grounds of his body of work had he left in a less mean-spirited way. He was the most visible symbol of the Cavaliers and nearly of the entire NBA for seven years. It took a lot to turn such gold into lead, but he managed it.
James ran away from his struggles. We may never know all the reasons why he quit in Game 5 against the Celtics, but he was such a megalomaniac it could hardly have been a crisis of confidence, as with Mesa.
While some Cavs fans had fun destroying LeBron James' jerseys, the Akron native's departure cut deep into the heart of sports fans in Northeast Ohio.It hardly sprang from a single instance of panic in a critical moment of the game, as with Webber. It was by all indications a deliberate pattern of passivity and lack of urgency throughout the second half as the season began to go gurgling down the drain.
Their mistakes ate away at the other players. James sloughed them off, making the monumentally stupid observation that he spoiled the fans and then adding that he felt bad for himself.
People make a big thing of first impressions, but often it is the last one that endures.
Will we remember the giddiness of Lottery Night and the 25 points James scored in Sacramento in his NBA debut? Or will we remember his self-diminution in the Boston series and his deliberate attempt to humiliate us in "The Decision"?
Will we remember Byner's fumble after Denver's Jeremiah Castille ripped the ball loose? Or will we remember that he led the only victory after the Browns' move to Baltimore was announced? Will we remember that he took a "victory lap" after the last home game of the original Browns, shaking hands with the fans he had disappointed years earlier, the same fans who had forgiven him?
I believe we will want to remember the final game by Byner, not the championship game.
I believe we will want to remember the six good players (Austin Carr, Bingo Smith, Nate Thurmond, Mark Price, Brad Daugherty, Larry Nance) whose numbers hang in the rafters, not the indisputably great player who left in a manner designed to inflict the most emotional pain on the fans and do the most harm to the franchise.
James simply does not belong with men who took pride in the jersey and played to honor the city and its fans.