LeBron James and Other Assorted Love Songs

When I was in AP Biology in high school, my fantastic teacher Mr. Backiel would occasionally favor us with what he termed a birdwalk. This basically meant an anecdote or story only tangentially related to what we were supposed to be studying. For example, a story about a whole family who died at Thanksgiving dinner when they ate three-bean salad that had been infected with a bacteria in the canning process. Obviously, these were the best class periods. What follows is a birdwalk of epic proportions*.

With the arrival of the playoffs and another chance at redemption-via-championship for LeBron James, the doubters and the cheerleaders are up in arms. With the Heat trailing as time wound down in Game 4 of the series against the Knicks, James wasnt the one with the ball in his hand. He didnt even touch the ball on the final play. For some, its just more evidence. Theyonly see him giving up the ball or not asserting himself and concluding that hes not the equal of Bryant or Michael Jordan. But what if hes the equal of Eric Clapton?

Seriously. Hear me out. Although not a high school phenom like James, Clapton joined the Yardbirds in 1963 at the age of 18 but after the Yardbirds scored a hit with For Your Love in 1965, they began pushing their sound more towards pop and Clapton left to join John Mayalls Bluesbreakers, with whom he recorded Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton. The album showcases Claptons prodigious guitar talent and contains several of what remain his finest guitar solos on tracks like Steppin Out and Have You Heard. As it was with LeBron James play for St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron, what became known as The Beano Album (because Clapton is reading a copy of the comic Beano on the cover) brought Clapton to national prominence. Some of James high school games were broadcast on national television, and it was difficult not to see what he could become, looking like a man among boys with tattoos covered up by decals. He seemed like the total package, in much the way that Clapton appeared ready to become and stay the best guitarist on the planet for some time.

Given his complete physical dominance of his high school competition, its possible that the notion of whether or not James had the killer instinct hes broadly felt to lack never really came up. It was perhaps just assumed. But Claptons greatest shortcoming was put on display midway through the second side of the Bluesbreakers debut when he took the mic from Mayall to perform Robert Johnsons Rambling On My Mind. Its not a terrible performance or anything; as people should remember when it comes to James, the average aspects of Claptons musical repertoire are far better than 95% of the populations. But in comparison to his muscular, ragged and often terrifying guitar work, his voice is tentative, polite.

When Clapton left the Bluesbreakers in 1966 to form Cream with drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Jack Bruce, his reputation as a world-class guitarist only grew. In 1967, a scrawled CLAPTON IS GOD infamously appeared on the wall of an Underground station in Islington. His reputation as a game-changer was written almost from the start. And so it went with LeBron James, who notched 25 points, 9 assists and 6 rebounds in his NBA debut. But while Creams star rose on the backs of the combined effort and virtuosity of Bruce, Baker and Clapton, James Cleveland Cavaliers endured two lackluster seasons, missing out on the playoffs twice before advancing to the Eastern Conference Semifinals in his third year and losing to the Detroit Pistons in seven games. During James first few years in Cleveland, there was little opportunity for anyone to question his heart simply because he wasnt in a position to make a difference to his team in the playoffs. Although Jack Bruce was undeniably the lead singer of Cream and a fabulously talented vocalist, Claptons confidence in his own voice improved with Cream and he stepped up to sing lead on many of Creams best-known songs, including Strange Brew, Badge, Crossroads and co-lead on the biggest hit, Sunshine of Your Love. Its telling that on the live version of Crossroads from Wheels of Fire that Bruce introduces Clapton at the end of the tune as Eric Clapton, lead vocals. That pause there says a lot about how Clapton was thought of at the time: a guitarist first, vocalist second.

By now it should be clear that theres more than one problem with the analogy Im working with. The most glaring one is that the goal in professional sports is very clear cut: a championship is what marks a player as great. Its a lot more muddy in the musical world. A Grammy? Cream didnt win a Grammy until 2006 and that was a Lifetime Achievement Award. Jimi Hendrix, Queen, Led Zeppelin, The Who and many, many others have never won a Grammy. Sales? Creams third album, Wheels of Fire, was the first double-album to go platinum. And yet Cream were only together a little over two years before they broke up at the height of their powers in 1968. A large part of it was the ongoing contentiousness between Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker (which stretched back to their time in Cream-precursor The Graham Bond Organisation), but Clapton was also growing tired of the giant expectations that were being inspired by the groups success and the fact that they barely listened to one another while playing live. To all outsiders, it must have looked like Cream had won whatever you could call the championship of music, but to Clapton remained musically dissatisfied and so the band called it quits in 1969.

Their loss in the NBA Finals to the champion San Antonio Spurs in 2006-07 inspired a similar rebuild by the Cleveland Cavaliers. At the trade deadline in 2008, the team shipped out players including Donyell Marshall, Shannon Brown, Drew Gooden, and Larry Hughes in exchange for Wally Szczerbiak, Delonte West, Joe Smith, and Ben Wallace. But neither this lineup, nor any of the ones that were tweaked for the two years after (which included bringing in players like Antawn Jamison and Shaquille ONeal), could climb the mountain and bring home the NBA Championship. It was over these three years, from the 2007-08 season to the 2009-10 season, that the rumbles about James inability to lead his team to a championship started. Even as his personal numbers grew to near-legendary levels, he continued to falter on the leagues biggest stagethe playoffsand the storm clouds of his departure began to loom.

In spite of his misgivings about the course that Creams career had taken, Clapton went from one supergroup to another in 1969. Hed long admired singer/keyboardist Steve Winwood and so he approached him about forming the group that would become Blind Faith. Winwood was, in a way, the Shaquille ONeal of this analogyan experienced player with his own success brought in as a counterweight. And as it went with the re-tooled Cavaliers, the expectations for Blind Faith were skyhigh immediately. When the group (with Ginger Baker once again on drums and Rick Grech on bass) made their concert debut in Hyde Park on June 7, 1969, it was in front of 100,000 people. As James discovered when Shaq came to the Cavs, its never as simple as just plugging people in. Blind Faith only had a handful of songs and the set devolved into lengthy jamsone of the things Clapton had wanted to leave behind with Creamand the crowd roared their approval. When the group embarked on a U.S. tour in the summer of 1969, there were riots, and Clapton found himself a victim of the same kind of success and pressures that had brought down Cream. He had sought to spread the responsibility out (as a singer, he had once again retreated, with Winwood handling all the vocals on the groups self-titled debut), but the expectations had only increased. In somewhat the same way, all the additions and mini-rebuilds in Cleveland had been undertaken for the purpose of building a supporting cast around James to help him share the burden, but every addition of a former All-Star or future Hall-of-Famer only made the teams failures in the playoffs more acute.

And so James left Cleveland in a very public and fairly brutal way, joining up with his friends Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade on the Miami Heat. Theres no end to the ways this has been dissected and discussed, but it seems the end of Blind Faith was altogether more of a whimper than a bang. During the groups only American tour, Clapton struck up a friendship with the opening act, Delaney & Bonnie. With the dissolution of the ill-fated supergroup, Clapton joined that group as a sideman, eventually using their rhythm sectionbassist Carl Radle, drummer Jim Gordon, and keyboardist/vocalist Bobby Whitlockto start Derek and the Dominos.

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LeBron James and Other Assorted Love Songs