LeBron James, Michael Jordan, and the Next Act

LeBron James thinks he's William Holden. He returned to Cleveland as a man, continent-sized calluses on his hands, a father of three, as strong in reality as every five-year-old boy believes his dad to be. He's got—a world-weary sigh billows out of him here—responsibilities these days: to his teammates, to this city, to himself. He lapses into military metaphor here and there, projecting a casual-tuff aesthetic. Children play games; men engage in combat. LeBron is at the podium, purposefully explaining what leadership means to him. He's on the court, emasculating an opponent—strut-dribbling, smirking, preening. He's in the weight room, working on his body more fastidiously than anyone else, because it's important to set an example.

That most of this scans as highly affected bullshit is faintly reassuring. The thing that made Michael Jordan an aspirational figure was sociopathy, an utter comfort with the most wretched parts of himself. While that certitude made him a peerless athlete, it also made him what he is now: over 50, sour and unintrospective, clad in expensive and ugly suits, hectoring his buddies for just one more early morning poker hand, chasing the ghost of a high that never quite sated him in the first place. As a model of masculinity, Jordan is an abjectly discouraging one: a man is what he is, and he cannot change, even if he is unhappy.

LeBron has changed many times over. Through his numerous persona reboots, the only things that have remained consistently obvious are the joy he exudes playing basketball—luxuriating in the body he has, what it allows him to do on the court—and an uneasy manner of self-presentation that renders most of the things he says and does phony-seeming. Those circa 2006 Nike ads that depicted a family of LeBrons turned out more prescient than the copywriters at Wieden+Kennedy intended. LeBron has resembled, at various points of his career, an exuberant kid; a vain, arrogant status-humper; and a surly old man.

Some of those perceptional shifts can be chalked up to the lenses through which fans and the press have viewed him—the most loathsome example being how he suddenly became a Model Professional the moment he won a title—but LeBron has always been a vocal reader of his own text, trying to make us understand his story the way he wants us to. This has made him more legible in exactly one way: it has betrayed an inner restlessness, an anxiety about who he is, who we think he is, and who he wants to be. Millions of people have called Jordan as asshole, and he's unmoved by it. Millions of people have called LeBron an asshole, and he has thought am I?

There's a gulf of difference there. Jordan is a boulder: towering and immovable and made of the same stuff throughout. You find a way to accept him, not the other way around. LeBron has never been one thing for long. Framing his career as a quixotic quest for universal approbation is a stretch, but he demonstrably puts a lot of thought into how what he says and does might come off. This is cynical brand-guarding, but also just a thing people do. LeBron is authentically neurotic.

That's why William Holden LeBron, which had been pupating in Miami and has emerged fully formed in Cleveland, is adorably surreal. LeBron has, however unintentionally, shown too much of his humanity to believably play the role of unflappable, seen-it-all man's man. All the tics he's trotted out this season in an attempt to project self-assurance—the disappointed face scrunches at pressers, the haughty pronouncements, the effortful teammate mentoring—convey a desire to be seen as someone in complete control more than a genuine command of himself and others.

It's not all claptrap and empty machinations. LeBron is the Cavs' heartbeat and sensei; he's 30 and has grown up in some respects. But old world masculinity doesn't suit him. My friend's sister threw a faux-sophisticated Sex And The City party in her ratty Oswego, New York apartment once. No one there looked like an urbane Manhattanite, despite the rented tuxes and gowns on their backs and the candy-sweet cocktails they were sipping. Everyone would have had a better time slugging Bud heavies and listening to Dave Matthews. Instead, they chose to deprive themselves, for the sake of something fun only in theory.

This postseason has been the perfect canvas on which LeBron has displayed his put-on manliness. There is nothing so perfectly romantic as carrying a doomed, battered Cavs squad toward inevitable slaughter. It lets LeBron yoke himself to an ocean liner and pull it as far as he can; it lets him talk about giving everything for his teammates and persevering through great hardship with a stony resoluteness. He gets to die and live forever in this performance.

This isn't to say there's not something profound in what LeBron's doing. His game three against Atlanta was a visceral masterpiece, the Eddie Hazel solo from "Maggot Brain" in bullyball form. It scratched some perverse itch we possess to see other people very nearly collapse and then not. It was beautiful.

But with LeBron, there is always a price to experiencing this sort of thing, some half-lie you must suffer. Recently, it's been his characterizing everything he does as symptomatic of a newfound steely cool. He will do what needs doing, no matter how much it hurts. He will make a solemn face as he says this to you, like you had better believe him. This new costume fits about as well as his other ones. We'll see if it sticks. History tells us it won't; in two years' time, LeBron will be enamored with some other idea of himself. Perhaps his model of masculinity isn't much more encouraging that Jordan's: a man can change, but to what end? Contentment never arrives.