It was reality TV’s most painful breakup ever, as LeBron James told the city of Cleveland: it’s not you, it’s my desire for a championship ring. In a dramatic, drawn-out special that would have done ABC proud—it seemed as if James should have been interviewed by Chris Harrison, not Jim Gray—the free agent announced his decision to play basketball for the Miami Heat. TIME’s Sean Gregory has a write-up of The Decision:
[W]hen James finally announced, at 9:27 Eastern Daylight Time, that he was signing with the Miami Heat, it felt somewhat anticlimactic. Especially since media outlets like Newsday — and even ESPN itself — had been predicting this move since Wednesday evening. James even whispered his intentions to the Heat a few minutes beforehand, news that enabled Brian Windhorst of the Cleveland Plain Dealer to tweet the news about a minute before LeBron announced it. Heck, he set up all this drama and even kind of scooped himself.
Still, the small crowd gathered to watch the interview at the Boys and Girls Club of Greenwich, Conn., even audibly gasped, as if they had witnessed a wreck. It was just sad.
The special itself had all the subtlety of a flaming jersey, beginning with a James-Earl-Jones-as-Darth-Vader-esque voice intoning: “With breathless anticipation, the basketball world has been waiting… the courtship of a franchise-saving superstar has come to a close… at stake, the NBA’s balance of power. At last, the time has arrived. The most coveted free agent in the history of the game: LeBron James! His decision… next!”
The show was also proof, if we needed any, of the domination by sports stars of the media that cover them. James essentially let a journalistic organization build a kind of colossal televisual statue to his greatness, promising them an exclusive scoop (and plenty of eyeballs) in return. Which put ESPN throughout the day in possession of sports’ biggest secret, while at the same time having reporters trying to ferret out that secret—which, in turn, the network had a ratings motivation to keep concealed to the last moment. Picking up the tab for it all was Cleveland, which got to have its heart broken in slow-motion on national TV for James’ greater aggrandizement.
If there was anything redeeming for ESPN in this spectacle, I guess, it was that it did indeed report the earlier scuttlebutt that LeBron was going to South Beach—though if it hadn’t, it would have looked ridiculous as other outlets went to the story anyway. (Even as Chris Broussard reiterated, at the beginning of the special, his report that LeBron was Miami-bound, he emphasized the last-minute “twists and turns,” if there were in fact any, that could have James making a different choice. It was like watching sportcasters trying to wring suspense out of a 30-point blowout in the last few minutes, to keep viewers from changing the channel early.)
A massive round of breathless speculation led to a foregone conclusion and an anticlimactic finish. Congratulations, ESPN: you have mastered reality TV.