It Is basketball, and so logic dictates LeBron James was going to win his championship eventually. He is too good a player, too vast a force of nature. And basketball, a five-man game, affords the dominant player a chance to put far more of an imprint than any other team sport does.
After the fact, LeBron’s coronation feels the way Phil Mickelson’s did when he finally won that first Masters, when he finally removed from his shoulders the burden of being the best golfer to never win a major. There always will be a golfer to hold that title — it probably is Lee Westwood or Luke Donald now — but before Mickelson won it, you sensed he was too good, too much a forever player, to go his whole career without at least one, and afterward you knew it.
And in golf, it’s all on you.
There’s a reason why there are only five players — Allen Iverson, Steve Nash, Derrick Rose, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone — who won the NBA’s MVP award and never, or haven’t yet, won a championship. They are also explainable.
Iverson did just about everything he could do to will the Sixers to within three games of a title in 2001, but there was no way that supporting cast was going to prevent Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant from repeating. Nash probably would have won it if our friend Amar’e Stoudemire hadn’t wandered off the bench against the Spurs in 2007. Malone and Barkley had the misfortune of sharing an era with Michael Jordan. And Rose, well, if he hadn’t gone one way and his knee the other in the first playoff game of the spring, that list might only be four names long.
More than any other sport, basketball generally rewards greatness with hardware, because greatness necessarily means you’re going to be a lot better than you were before. The Bucks were the NBA’s ’62 Mets before Lew Alcindor joined them in 1969, and by Year 2 they were champions. Tim Duncan transformed the Spurs. Wilt Chamberlain transformed every team he ever played on. On and on.
You aren’t likely to ever have an NBA equivalent to Dan Marino or Ted Williams, forever players who played sports they only could dominate to a certain degree. Marino could throw 48 touchdown passes in a season, but if he couldn’t rely on a running back to get a yard on fourth-and-inches — or on his defense to prevent Ken O’Brien from playing pitch-and-catch with Wesley Walker — there was only going to be so much he could ever do.
And so there was only so much he ever did.
Baseball is even more immune to the impact of greatness in the overall, which is why Williams is only one member of the roster of terrific players who never sniffed champagne — see also Ken Griffey, Jimmie Foxx, Tony Gwynn, keep going. If anything, the most remarkable — and star-crossed — athlete of all time may well be Don Mattingly. Think of it: The Yankees were in five World Series and won two of them in the eight years before he finally showed up for good in 1983 — and had won 29 pennants and 20 World Series if you want to go back to 1921 — then won seven pennants and five championships in the first 13 years of his retirement. Yet Mattingly — borderline Hall of Famer and maybe the best player in the game for fully five years of his career — went 0-for-13.
So, yes, there may have been a swirl of people rooting hard against LeBron, hoping somehow that collective fervor could keep him title-free for as long as possible. Wasn’t going to happen. Not in basketball. Not as long as a player with that many gifts keeps getting after it.
And you know something? At some point everyone will realize this: The sport — all sport — is better off when the best players are also champions.
At some point.
Whack Back at Vac
Jim Behrle: No Dave Kingman on the All-Time Mets team? I am agog.
Vac: It probably is impossible for some to believe this, but Kingman actually was the most popular Met on two teams — 1975 and 1976 — that also still featured Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Jerry Grote, Jon Matlack and Buddy Harrelson. And it wasn’t close.
@nyyhater: Which was officiated more fairly? These NBA Finals or 1972 Olympics gold-medal game? These games are a throwback to the Iron Curtain days.
@MikeVacc: Would that make Pat Riley the modern Brezhnev? I could live with that.
George Plyway: Any Hall of Fame that will have Roger Clemens is a Hall of Fame whose doors I never again will darken. I don’t know if that matters to the voters or to the players, but that’s a promise I’ll keep.
Vac: Interesting split among fans on Roger. A lot feel this way. And a lot feel this way …
Thomas Hansen: Got any issues with either Willie Mays or Willie Stargell being in your hallowed Hall of Fame after it came out at the 1985 Pittsburgh drug trials that they took amphetamines? Any at all? No you don’t. You pious, holier-than-thou writers are a bunch of hypocrites. “Keep Clemens out! He cheated!” Gimme a break.
Vac: Actually, I do have a problem with that. And if I had a chance to vote for either Willie knowing what we know, I’d have weighed those facts, too. For the record.
Vac’s Whacks
Russell Westbrook was something to behold in the Finals, but all of those wrong-foot layups are going to single-handedly erase 70 years of fundamental CYO coaching.
* My final two cents on Davey Johnson beating out Gil Hodges for the Mets’ all-time manager: Maybe this shouldn’t matter, but the ’86 Mets, to a man, all still respect the hell out of Davey. But the ’69 Mets, to a man, all revere Hodges, and some 40 years after his passing they still speak of him as if he still is with them.
* So, Knicks fans: Can the notion of LeBron James and Chris Bosh getting championship rings really bug you as much as the idea of Eddy Curry and Rony Turiaf getting them?
* Has there ever been a day that doesn’t get exponentially better when you run into “Bull Durham” somewhere in the pay cable channels?