Becoming a Global Icon: What Not to Do

It’s been almost 5 days since I twittered about this—in internet time, that’s like 6 and a half weeks—but I wanted to mention the Lebron James fiasco. No, not the one where he holds his franchise and its fans hostage and forces them into a series of panicked personnel decisions. And not the one where he dresses like a dickhead not once, but twice. Not even the one where he comes off as a cheap bastard.

No no no. I mean the latest Lebron James fiasco. Where he and Nike conspired to rob us all of a YouTube clip that would have been entertaining for… maybe 15 seconds.

The backstory: Nike gathered together a collection of elite basketball players from the college and professional ranks, all in the name of celebrating the most elite of them all, Lebron James, at a basketball camp bearing his name. The Lebron James Skills Academy. Sounds simple enough, no?

Well, no. There were two cameramen filming the “skills academy” action, which included scrimmages. This became a problem when James, who had apparently been struggling all day, went full extension defensively to challenge a dunk attempt by Jordan Crawford, a sophomore from Xavier. Well… (gasp) he failed.

And that’s how Lebron JamesTM got dunked on.

What’s ensued has been nothing short of a modern day marketing cluster fuck. James’ immediate impulse was to (apparently) alert the Nike personnel on site that there had been cameras filming his embarrassing moment. I don’t know whether he directly told them to confiscate the footage or whether the Nike people inferred as much, but minutes later, 22 year-old freelance photographer Ryan Miller’s tape of the game had been confiscated.

Miller, perhaps out of frustration, perhaps sensing a golden opportunity, and probably some combination therein, took to the airwaves to tell his story. Cue the avalanche of twittering, blog posts, and sarcastic attempts at grassroots uprising. Suddenly, a fluke play in a throwaway scrimmage has been transformed into a full-fledged firestorm, and Lebron’s insecurity is a top story among the sports world.
Which is why I love the Internet.

There’s a lot to hate about the new world we live in—where news that breaks at 12:30 has been digested and discarded by 5:15, where Twitter and Facebook and blogs and YouTube have given everyone terrible ADD, and where people like Soulja Boy and Perez Hilton are lauded as “visionary.” And those problems don’t even scratch the surface. The internet’s ubiquity is changing our culture in ways that we can’t even fully comprehend yet, and not all of that change is for the better. That much is a certainty.

But here’s one thing I like: you can’t hide anymore.

If someone’s an asshole, eventually, the internet will expose them as just that to the entire world. Between YouTube and Facebook and the countless bloggers walking anonymously among the masses, there are a million ways for someone to get caught acting like an idiot these days.
And then, thanks to Viral Everything on the internet, the story will spread like wildfire.

This is new. And I swear, it’s a good thing. The only way for people to successfully cultivate an image for themselves is to actually live as they’d like to be perceived. If not, one way or another, we’re going to find out about the hypocrisy.

Lebron James is really the perfect example. He’s the best basketball player in the world, he’s marketed by the most prominent sports apparel company in the world, and between publicists shaping his every word and NBA marketing campaigns spinning his every success or failure, there are a lot of people with considerable clout that are interested in making him the most popular athlete on the planet.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way anymore. Today it takes more than marketing and on-court success to make someone an icon—you have to be authentic.
If you walk around in shirts touting your own accomplishments or confiscate evidence of a tape that might make you look the slightest bit vulnerable, we’re going to know about it. Or, if you’re like Steve Nash, and you generally enjoy talking to people and are willing to take a picture with just about anyone, we’ll know that, too. Nash isn’t pretending to be funny and good-natured.

Lebron’s not quite there yet. He’s talented on the court, and he’s displayed impressive savvy off it, but he’s still the type of person who needs us to think he’s the best basketball player in the world. His insecurity is obvious, and inconsistent with the invincible images put forth by Nike and the NBA. So that despite the enormous investment in Lebron JamesTM, Lebron the 24 year-old is still navigating between the icon he’s supposed to be, and the person he really is.

That’s doesn’t make him a bad person, but it's evocative of a cynicism about the game that has colored his career thus far. Getting dunked on is as much a part of basketball as dunking on someone. It's all in good fun. If someone embarrasses you with a crossover in a pickup game (I know this feeling well), you laugh, smile, and pledge to one-up them on the other end. It's part of competition, and part of what makes the game fun.

For Lebron, it's never been a game. Basketball is a business. A vehicle to world dominance. Asked a few years ago to some up his career aspirations, Lebron didn't mention chamionships, MVPs, or the Hall of Fame. He answered, "Two words: Global Icon."

But in his quest to reach that plateau, incidents like this tape fiasco are in stark contrast to the ways in which he and his handlers would like him perceived. Unfortunately for Nike, and fortunately for us, it’s not up to them anymore. The internet has created a landscape where transparency reigns, and the ones who get rewarded with rabid fans are the ones who are naturally cool, and comfortable in their own skin.

If you’re the type of person to get embarrassed by an average player and laugh about it, we’ll love you. If you’re the type of person to get dunked on and then seek the hands of corporate power to confiscate the evidence, we’ll know about that, too. There are just too many ways for us to find out.

This new landscape doesn’t mean stars have to be perfect. Sometimes, it’s almost cooler to be imperfect and able to laugh about it (Charles Barkley, Gilbert Arenas) than it is for someone to try to appear invincible (Michael Jordan, Lebron James). People make mistakes, say stupid things, wear stupid things, etc. But what garners the most respect, I think, is the ability of a superstar to laugh off failure on the road to more successes. Invincible or not, the ones people gravitate toward—in life, not just from some theoretical over-wrought marketing crap—are the ones who can make mistakes, but remain confident that in the long run, they’ll be just fine.

People can occupy outsized personas, but it the end, the internet tends to reveal a simple, obvious truth: everybody’s human.