Stay tuned for more Beijing
coverage featuring Dara Torres and Allison Felix and Michael Phelps,
too. But this opening bit of MOLI Olympics coverage was too tough to
work up. I had to stick with what's tried and true. So, think back...
to those thrilling days of yesteryear.

The day that the NBA made available 18-year-old LeBron James' Cleveland Cavaliers jersey, I bought one from David Stern's flagship store in Manhattan. This was 2003, and after my first book's final version hit the world , I toured the nation, sporting that #23 jersey most everywhere I roamed.

Such
attire might sound silly for a grown-ass man. But, c'mon. This had to
be done. I rooted for the hapless Cavs back in the day of Bobby “Bingo” Smith back before the so-called Miracle of Richfield. How was I not gonna root for LeBron James?
 
But then BronBron went and showed himself to be human. Last fall when he wore that hat
at Jacobs Field, I was instantly like: Fuck that dude. It’s like I’m
down with Brooklyn as much as the next Buckeye cat. But that doesn’t
mean there’s no such thing as trying too hard. LeBron looked the fool.
And loyalty counts a lot for me. Perhaps naively I had assumed that
supporting the local baseball team mattered more than a prospective deal with the ROC. Whatever though. I was already kinda mad at dude for not signing then-Cavs journeyman Ira Newble’s Dufur protest petition, a few months earlier.

I’m over all that now. Ever since my Newble reporting for Only A Game I’ve come to get King James a lot better. After the negative PR that followed the star's denial of the scrub's request, LeBron learned about Africa and has come to take a number of smart-looking positions.

He’s definitely a guy with insanely large aspirations. And that makes sense, as he’s one of the most breathtaking ballplayers ever to stuff it into a jock. Swift, huge, mature and a horse in terms of conditioning, James has earned every bit of his fame.

Kobe Bryant is exponentially more popular in Asia  than he is in the states, but
James and Yao Ming are the worldwide face of Olympics basketball. Ball being ball,
the
The Chosen One and the giant's matched starpower doesn’t equate to
on-court team parity. Viewers who didn’t think James and the US
superior to Yao and China by the end of Sunday's national anthems know nothing about the game, be it backyard. college, NBA or International.

The U.S. team is bananas good, with nba superstars wholly devoting themselves to role play. Carlos Boozer, for example, got a DNP in the last pre-Games tune-up. Kobe Bryant’s position is something like Bruce Bowen. Like
the best Bruce Bowen ever. It’s a potentially overwhelming line-up, as evidenced by
the fact a nervous and somewhat a-kilter American crew still beat China by 31.

James told Craig Sager. it was a good win. Not great. And he’s right. Pity pour
Angola on Tuesday. Boozer should see some action.