Sunday, August 1, 2010

Sportsman of the Month: July (not August. Duh.)


Sportsman of the Month: Kevin Durant

Pop quiz: Which organization allegedly received the financial benefits from LeBron James' one-hour ESPN special three weeks ago?

Quick! Which interviewer sat down with LeBron and asked him about 38 useless questions before asking him the only question that counted (where ya goin')?

Without hesitating, can you recite the exact words LeBron used to announce his Decision on where to play basketball for the next five years?

And one last pop quiz: what did Kevin Durant announce via Twitter on July 7, the day before LeBron's Decision?

Admit it. The answers to the first three questions sprung to mind automatically, in the same manner as "what is your birthday?" and "when's the last time the Cubs won the World Series?"

Admit this, too: you didn't immediately recognize that Kevin Durant signed a five-year extension with the Oklahoma City Thunder. That's because Durant's TV special took exactly 60 minutes less than Lebron's, ahem, one-hour circus.

Put it this way, folks: type "LeBron James signs" into a Google search. Then try "Kevin Durant signs". One of them yields 23.8 million results. The other gives you a smidge over 600,000. Guess which one's which.

Now, I'm not saying I like my athletes to be bland, boring, excessively married to the norm. I miss the days when athletes could say and do as they pleased without getting ripped for showing a little color.

But LeBron's Decision was Decisively stupid. There's not much left to say at this point, obviously, but the way he left Cleveland was shameful. And addressing himself multiple times in the third person that night? A pity to see a wondeful athlete and affable personality tear down his good-guy persona in just one night.

That only serves to make Kevin Durant look that much better. A man whose talent gap from James is smaller than you think, and a man who has won the same amount of NBA Finals games as James, showed humility and loyalty with "The Tweet".

So good for Kevin Durant. If Carmelo Anthony makes the hard Decision to leave Denver in 2011, and if I'm forced to make the impossible Decision of divorcing the Nuggets, I think I know which bandwagon I'm jumping on.

-AJ

3 comments:

  1. I couldn't agree more!

    db

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wouldn't this be the Sportsman for the month of July?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Huh. Yeah. I guess it would. Don't know what i was thinking there. I'll change it.

    ReplyDelete