LeBron James: Achilles, Heel

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,200 years ago, the consensus best warrior alive took issue with his compensation when his boss rolled back the promised bonus package to his own obvious advantage. (Achilles, the warrior, had taken a slave girl as a trophy, and Agamemnon, the high boss, had then expropriated her.) Furious and in year nine of the war, Achilles took his martial talents back to his tent on the beach and let his Greek allies duke it out with their Trojan nemeses. Without him, the war went on much as before: the Greeks suffered greatly without his prowess, but, come on—it was nine years in, it wasn't like they were on the cusp of victory even before Achilles took his spears and decided to sit out for a while. Eventually, Achilles got more pissed off at the Trojans than he was at Agamemnon, and he rejoined the affray, slew his greatest enemy, and proceeded to creep everybody the fuck out with his enthusiastic desecration of the man's corpse. He was given a choice between a short career (indeed a short life) and "unfading glory" or returning to home, with a long but unknown life.

Obviously, there are parallels with the current condition of one LeBron James. James, the consensus best basketball player alive, is seeking a new contract, and is currently aligned with no team, and has absented himself from the day-to-day roil of the offseason. (He might prefer a more aggressively Achilliean formulation: he is, or anyway his services are, currently the property of no team.) By thus stepping aside, he seems to have made himself more central even than he was during the Finals a couple weeks ago. In response, everybody's turning Homer, spinning tales about one or another powerful man or god chopping away each other while the great man's off-stage. Homer had Diomedes and Odysseus, and an ever-proliferating cast of others, where we have…Pau Gasol. There are, after all, obvious parallels, but the limitations of those parallels are equally obvious.

The key is that Achilles comes back at the end, and it seems safe to assume that James will as well, though there's a slim chance he'll do so under the aegis of a different side than the last time we saw him. When he comes back, we'll all know: the lines will be clear, and the teams will be achingly well-defined and exhaustively examined. It's all so very exciting and significant.

Or maybe not. The Iliad is, after all, a foundational text of Western Civilization. New translations attract attention; bad movies are made; large swaths of current novels are still devoted to, drenched in, and dwarfed by it; the tides and oceanic endlessness of war still force us to turn and return to it for guidance. This particular moment of James-fixation is, by contrast, a pretty simple deal, involving one man deciding where next to go to work, with whom, and under what conditions. The stories being pulled forth on the topic are unlikely to last three-plus millennia, and the scenario is, moreover, a rerun. One would love to high-falute this into some kind of interesting point about the eternally recurrent nature of history, or about tragedy and farce, but it seems more likely that mundane shit is ubiquitous, and that we are seeing LeBron James look for a good job again because, hey: who here isn't interested in a better gig? Time passes, after all, and things change, and the whims of the gods are unpredictable, capricious, and cruel; hard to blame a dude for insisting on his due when the getting's good, particularly when the promise of a short but glorious career seems all but inevitable.

An important thing to remember is that the Iliad is not the story of the Trojan War. As is often pointed out, the poem doesn't include the cause of the war, a bickering among goddesses that results in a shepherd kidnapping a king's wife; nor does it contain the Trojan Horse, which augers the end of the war, and the end of Troy itself. It doesn't even include Achilles' famous heel. Its focus is narrower—a few weeks of intense action towards the end, one hero's wrath, stuff like that. Similarly, the end of LeBron James's Indecision won't decide the outcome of the next season, nor, probably, will it even mark the end of the offseason. It's just one man, and his withdrawal, and its far-reaching, (so far) bloodless repercussions. Like the Iliad, it's one story. It may even be a powerful and interesting story—though there are some who don't find it so—but it isn't the whole story or the only story. Unlike the Iliad, it's probably one you can skip. When James suits up again, you'll know. The effects will be obvious. And the story will take up a long, long time before it ends.