A couple of months back, the LeBron James biography landed in the office. Experience says you don’t mess around when booty like that turns up in the sports department. You stash it in the bag before any of the normies from the serious pages stroll by it and decide they fancy it for their summer hols. We’re sniffy like wine connoisseurs when it comes to this kind of thing – you can’t be wasting the good stuff on hapless muckedy-mucks who won’t appreciate it.
And make no mistake, this is Chateau Lafite. It’s written by Jeff Benedict, who has 17 serious non-fiction books under his belt including deep dives on Tiger Woods and the New England Patriots just in the past five years alone. If you’ve ever come across Benedict’s work before, you’ll know what to expect – exhaustive sourcing, engaging structure, nothing flowery in the writing. The source notes and index run to 74 pages. That’s a weighty tome, on every level.
The life painted in it is, by any measure, an extraordinary one. LeBron comes out of it as a fascinating dude – smart, playful, intensely focused on leaving a one-of-one imprint on the world. From an early age, it wasn’t enough for him to be great at basketball. He wanted to parlay that into being an all-conquering businessman, an incomparable star, an iconic presence in American life and beyond. He did all this. He is doing it still.
But the thing that really jumped out at me was how little I actually knew about him. A lot of Irish people are into the NBA and plenty will read this book skipping past whole paragraphs of stuff they’re already familiar with. They’ll know all about his chaotic childhood, his absent father, the move to live with another family when he was nine years old that changed his life. His origin story, his trusted circle, his on-court magnificence – none of it will come as a big reveal to anyone who feeds on hoops.
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For whatever reason, that stuff passed me by over the years. You know how it is – you get wired into some sports, you let others float off on the wind. This column has always had a grá for the NFL and even went through a fairly keen baseball phase back in the mid-2000s for a while. But basketball has never stuck. I’ve definitely read more books about the sport than I’ve watched full games.
The LeBron book makes it clear that this has been a thoroughly moronic blind spot. This flavour of greatness doesn’t come around all that often – why would anyone who could witness it in real-time not do so? I mentioned this failing to Keith Duggan, late of this slot and himself an incorrigible hoopster, a while back and cited the fact that all the games were on in the middle of the night as my defence. He furrowed his brow and asked had I never heard of a DVR.
Greatness is always worth the effort. History says we don’t usually find ourselves in All-Ireland hurling final week with true greatness up for grabs but there’s no question it’s on the ballot this weekend. Limerick have the four-in-a-row dangling out there in front of them, so close it’s bopping them on the nose. Whatever happens against Kilkenny, it’s been a thrill to watch John Kiely’s team go after it.
This season will surely stand as their greatest All-Ireland if they manage it. Plenty of us have been dubious throughout the season. We tried to pick nits, week on week. We thought discipline might slow them down. It hasn’t yet – and you suspect John Keenan won’t be making a name for himself in the final either.
We noted they were wedded to a fairly defined line-up, all ageing together, and wondered how they’d survive a few key injuries. Well, they’ve lost their best defender in Seán Finn and their glue in Declan Hannon and still they’ve kept trucking.
We saw that everyone else was getting closer to them. That Clare and Tipp and Cork all seemed to be on an upswing. We figured that sport doesn’t usually brook much argument with this stuff – a team that’s been on the road for a long time only gets away with winning one-point and two-point games for so long before someone whips their chair out from under them. Yet here they are, into an All-Ireland final despite every game having been decided by a single puck of a ball.
They’re incredible. We don’t say it anywhere near enough. Certainly not in the way we said it when Kilkenny were on the verge of completing their own four-in-a-row or the Dublin footballers theirs. By this stage with both of those teams, their greatness had become wallpaper, hanging in the background of every championship conversation. Plenty of us had become bored with it, dying for someone to come along and put an end to it.
You don’t get that sense with Limerick, not to any great extent anyway. Maybe that’s down to them not being one of hurling’s big three and everyone assuming they’ll revert to the mean eventually. More likely, it’s because this season in particular has been such an epic survival quest for them. They keep staring into the abyss and the abyss keeps backing off, cowed at the sight of them. On a checklist of the things that define greatness, that durability has to be right up there.
At the ESPYs the week before last, 38-year-old LeBron James announced that he’d be sticking around and playing on for at least another season. Again, it wouldn’t have come as any huge surprise to those who pay attention to this stuff but it was delightful news in this small corner of the LeBroniverse. A chance to right a wrong, to revel in his greatness while it’s still a living, breathing thing.
We’ll spend a long time remembering how great John Kiely’s Limerick were. But today, here and now, the best thing about them is we don’t have to start reminiscing yet.
