Out of AmericaThe first question you might want to ask is why LeBron James needed a car at all, since he seems to spend most of his time on airplanes.
LeBron is a 6ft 7in senior at St Vincent-St Mary High School in Akron, Ohio, and the most gifted schoolboy basketball player on the planet. Come June, shortly after he graduates, if he graduates, he will also be the richest. LeBron is so certain to be the first draft choice of whichever team wins the NBA lottery that he will never spend a day in college, so there is no particularly good reason he should concern himself with earning his high school diploma.
As soon as James plays his last game as a schoolboy, he can drive off to the beach in his new Hummer H2, and the good clergymen who operate St Vincent-St Mary can spend the rest of the spring counting the money.
Any pretence that LeBron James was going to experience anything resembling a normal adolescence disappeared long ago. LeBron's well-chronicled basketball prowess has produced a perverse feeding frenzy. NBA scouts are in attendance at each of his games. NBA stars, Shaquille O'Neal included, have travelled to watch him play. When he broke his wrist last summer, LeBron was treated by Michael Jordan's personal physicians.
Certain that a nationwide audience would also clamour for the chance to see him in action, ESPN signed a lucrative deal with St Vincent-St Mary to televise some of his high school's games, and even organised a previously nonexistent pre-holiday "tournament" to showcase him.
The "Fighting Irish" (honest!), who had heretofore played a conventional schedule against other Ohio schoolboy teams, now find themselves flying all around the country to play hastily (and lucratively) arranged games against other prep superpowers for up to $15,000 a night. Courtside tickets for some St Vincent-St Mary games have been priced a Laker-like $75 a seat.
Since his school, and not James himself, was the immediate beneficiary of these windfalls, no one seemed particularly disturbed by any of this, until last week, when LeBron showed up in the school car park driving a new Hummer H2. This sporty vehicle would retail for almost $50,000 even before the customised accoutrements, which in this case included three television sets as well as a console hook-up for LeBron's PlayStation.
Leaving aside the wisdom of an 18-year-old kid fooling around the streets simultaneously watching three different telecasts while playing Grand Theft Auto, the matter raised some uncomfortable questions about LeBron's compromised amateur status.
It's all well and good for ESPN to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at the Fighting Irish, and for St Vincent-St Mary to line their coffers by gouging the spectators, but the suggestion that the kid himself might be getting some of the loot has produced shudders throughout the land.
Since agents have been circling like vultures around the James household since he was 14, and the sneaker companies have been queuing up to sign him for nearly that long, there was immediate speculation that one of them might have sprung for the Hummer.
Hey, no problem, said LeBron's mother, Gloria, who explained she had purchased the vehicle as a present for her son's 18th birthday. The only trouble with this explanation was that Gloria James is a single mother with no visible means of support who not long ago was complaining that St Vincent-St Mary were charging her son $40 a year for parking in the school lot.
Were James a college player, the National Collegiate Athletic Association would be all over the case, but since he isn't, NCAA regulations don't apply. Ohio High School Athletic Association president Clair Muscaro has promised to investigate, and if it is determined that the vehicle in question was given to James as a result of his basketball accomplishments, he could be stripped of his amateur status and his school ordered to forfeit any games subsequent to the "gift".
Don't expect that to happen. If you or I walked into a Hummer dealership and tried to drive away with a new car, we'd be subjected to all manner of arcane credit checks, but LeBron's mother, as the parent of a future millionaire, was probably cut some slack for the same reason ESPN and the hastily-formed St Vincent-St Mary Travel Department got into the act.
The bottom line is that the day after the NBA draft James will be worth a contract of at least $12 or $13 million. The day he plays his last schoolboy game he will be eligible to sign a shoe contract, which could bring in $20 million more. That would seem to make him (or at least make Gloria) a pretty solid credit risk, and from the Hummer dealers' standpoint, it's probably a sound business decision.
Odds are, nobody's going to go to jail over this, and LeBron's amateur status won't even be imperilled. Still, it's not something I'd want on my conscience.
