Democratic partisans may not like this — West Virginians going to the polls in November to replace the recently deceased Robert Byrd in the U.S. Senate — but it is only fair to ask voters who they want sitting in the Senate. Governors should not get the chance to appoint Senators, even on a temporary basis. Special elections to fill vacancies should be the rule.
LeBron James is heading to Miami to create what Harvey Araton in The New York Times calls the Evil Empire in South Beach or Miami in pinstripes, a corporate-behemoth masquerading as a sports franchise (which, in reality, underplays the reality of sports as industry).
Who outside of South Florida wants to root for Miami after the way James walked out on Cleveland and his home territory of northern Ohio in a mercenary reach for championship rings? On the other hand, who won’t want to see the fledgling super team take a big fall?
Araton reminds us that James not only left Cleveland, his hometown team, and followed the easy money to title town (or, that’s how this grouping of expensive superstars is being portrayed so far), where he will play, as Dave Zirin points out, A-Rod to Dwayne Wade’s Jeter (the Heat will always be Wade’s team). In doing so, he forgoes the opportunity to create his own championship legacy (winning a title in Cleveland with long downtrodden Cavs — or even with the Knicks or historically lowly Nets — would have been truly Jordanesque). Instead, a Heat title will be greeted the same way a Laker title is, or a Yankee title, as expected, no big deal, etc.
Wade brought Miami a championship in 2003. Wade would have the ball in his hands for many of the offensive sets. Wade would on some nights be the best player on the court. This is Lebron hiding in Miami. It’s the act of someone who doesn’t think he can create his own legacy, but has to ride on someone else’s. Wade would be Jeter, and Lebron would be A-Rod. It’s the worst possible choice because it immediately puts a cap on James’s career and mind-bending potential.
That’s what James is missing here, I think, is that should the Heat fail to win or win often enough, he will be the guy to take the blame; if they win, it will be Wade’s victory or a team victory (see A-Rod in New York). It truly is a no-win situation from a basketball standpoint, both for James and for the fans.
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I should add something to yesterday’s post on the same subject regarding the NBA pantheon. I left Bill Russell of my list, an purposeful oversight, though not because I doubt his greatness. I just didn’t see him. He, and Bob Cousy and the Big O, and a few others, belong on any list of the the greatest of greats.
My point was that James, if he were to choose Miami, would be viewed as buying his title in a way that the other greats did not (Shaq chased the big payday; the title was never viewed as guaranteed as this still-to-be-won title already has been).
Here is a list of some of the other greats that I left off my list. Feel free to add yours in the comment section: Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Bob Pettite, Willis Reed and Walt Frazier, Elvin Hayes and Wes Unseld, Earl Monroe, Dr. J, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone and John Stockton, Hakeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing, Moses Malone, Bernard King, Bob Pettite, George Mikan.
Buried amid the hoopla surrounding that basketball player heading to Miami is this story, a court ruling overturning the federal Defense of Marriage Act:
In the case brought by Attorney General Martha Coakley, Judge Tauro found that the 1996 law, known as the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, compels Massachusetts to discriminate against its own citizens in order to receive federal money for certain programs.
The other case, brought by Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, focused more narrowly on equal protection as applied to a handful of federal benefits. In that case, Judge Tauro agreed that the federal law violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution by denying benefits to one class of married couples — gay men and lesbians — but not others.
Neither suit challenged a separate provision of the Defense of Marriage Act that says states do not have to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. But if the cases make their way to the Supreme Court and are upheld, gay and lesbian couples in states that recognize same-sex marriage will be eligible for federal benefits that are now granted only to heterosexual married couples.
“This court has determined that it is clearly within the authority of the commonwealth to recognize same-sex marriages among its residents, and to afford those individuals in same-sex marriages any benefits, rights and privileges to which they are entitled by virtue of their marital status,” Judge Tauro wrote in the case brought by Ms. Coakley. “The federal government, by enacting and enforcing DOMA, plainly encroaches upon the firmly entrenched province of the state.”
The court added:
In the Coakley case, the judge held that that federal restrictions on funding for states that recognize same-sex marriage violates the 10th Amendment, the part of the Constitution that declares that rights not explicitly granted to the federal government, or denied to the states, belong to the states.
There are scholars — including some who support same-sex marriage — who think the ruling will be overturned when it hits the Supreme Court and not because the court has moved to the right.
“What an amazing set of opinions,” said Jack M. Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School. “No chance they’ll be held up on appeal.”
Professor Balkin, who supports the right to same-sex marriage, said the opinions ignored the federal government’s longstanding involvement in marriage issues in areas like welfare, tax policy, health care, Social Security and more. The opinion in the advocacy group’s case applies the Constitution to marriage rights, he said, undercutting the notion that the marriage is not a federal concern.
“These two opinions are at war with themselves,” he said.
The arguments concerning the 10th Amendment and the spending clause, if upheld, would “take down a wide swath of programs — you can’t even list the number of programs that would be affected,” he said.
By citing the 10th Amendment and making what is essentially a states’ rights argument, Professor Balkin said Judge Tauro was “attempting to hoist conservatives by their own petard, by saying: ‘You like the 10th Amendment? I’ll give you the 10th Amendment! I’ll strike down DOMA!’ ”
I hope he’s wrong. But in the meantime, the ruling may have created an opening through which same-sex marriage supporters can slide to win the day.
http://espn.go.com/videohub/player/embed.swf
Professional sports reporting makes the televised pundit class look like the paragons of journalist professionalism. The kind of loosely sourced stories that pass for reporting on sports sites just would not fly at a reputable paper.
That said, ESPN is reporting that LeBron is heading to the Heat — a sorry conclusion to a free-agent summer that looked so promising.
I say this not as a Knicks fan, but as a basketball fan and as an admirer of King James. James in a Knicks’ uniform has always been my preference, even though I knew the chances that he’d end up in the Garden were far slimmer than any of us would admit.
The issue here is legacy. Which team offers James the best chance to create a legacy that rises to the level of Michael Jordan or even Kobe Bryant? Putting the question that way, of course, implies the answer: Jordan was drafted by the Bulls and was responsible for carrying the team across the finish line to six titles. Jordan had his wingman — Scottie Pippen — and a cast of solid role players. He was a Bull, through and through.
Kobe is in that rarified air now, with five titles with the only team he’s played for. His supporting cast, like Jordan’s, has included a hall-of-famer (Shaq) and a few top-notch talents (Pau Gasol, Lamar Odom, etc.). Kobe was the 1A player on the first set of titles and has been A no. 1 during the last two — bu the key is that Kobe did not leave LA in search of an all-star squad on which to play.
James, if he signs with Miami, will look like little more than a mercenary (in a way that signing with the Bulls or Knicks would not), because it seem he took the path of least resistance to a title. There is not a team in the Eastern Conference with the same level of talent — Miami would have the top shooting guard and small forward in the conference and one of the two or three best power forwards. The team would become the prohibitive favorite to win the conference and probably the favorite to unseat the Lakers.
This brings me to the second part of the James legacy. Aside from the mercenary label he’d be forced to wear, James would move into Patrick Ewing territory. James, ultimately, will be judged based on the number of titles he wins — as Ewing has been, which is why many people rate him behind David Robinson, though Ewing was the better center. A James-Wade-Bosh troika, however, would raise the bar beyond needing a handful of titles to Bill Russell’s Celtics territory — a trio of relatively young stars in their prime would be expected to run off a long string of titles, to dominate in a way that only a couple of teams have in the league’s history.
Expectations, therefore, would determine his legacy to a greater degree than they do now, creating built-in disappointment. (To understand this, by the way, consider the reaction to his mediocre play against the Celtics in the conference finals this year; square that criticism and it doesn’t begin to approach what he’ll be subjected to.)
If he were to win a couple of titles in Cleveland, his legacy would solidified his placement among the true pantheon of super greats (Jordan, Magic, Bird, Chamberlain, Jabbar, Shaq, Kobe, Tim Duncan).
I’d still ove to see him in a Knicks’ uniform (yes, hypocrisy), but Cleveland is where he belongs.
Ann Sisko, my former sixth-grade teacher, passes along an important essay from Rethinking Schools magazine that follows up on some of the themes I touched on a few weeks ago in my Dispatches column, i.e., that the school reform movement is pushing public education off a cliff, that public schools and public school teachers have been devalued and that the accountability movement is taking us back to a less effective time of rote learning.
