LeBron James and Bad Faith

I would consider myself an avid sports fan. Every morning while I’m eating breakfast, almost like clockwork, I watch a sports show. These shows aren’t complicated and, outside of sports fans, they aren’t very compelling, essentially just people arguing about their opinion about recent sports topics. So when a friend asks me, “What show are you currently watching?” or “Do you have any recommendations for shows?” I always spare them and try to answer in the most helpful way, which generally, isn’t a recommendation to watch a sports morning show.

A few months back, I finally discovered a show that was more than ‘people talking about their opinion on recent sports topics.’ So when asked for a recommendation for a new show, I would go on to describe LeBron James’s HBO show in glowing, superlative terms. If they hadn’t seen it, I would insist that we watch it. If they had already seen it, I would insist that we rewatch it. When I needed some comfort and entertainment, I would rewatch episodes, which is odd for me given how fast the news cycle moves these days. On the show, he invites notable entertainment figures, fellow professional athletes, rappers, and comics. They sit in the chairs of a slick barbershop. It’s a gimmick designed to generate the sense of intimacy that happens inside African-American barbershops. Seated in the barber chairs, wearing cover sheets to wick away loose hairs, these public figures are seemingly able to let their guards down and have genuine conversations about the issues that plague and delight them.

The other day I was scrolling Twitter and I found a video clip of Jason Whitlock, a host of one of my favorite sports shows, talking about LeBron’s show in a negative way. “These are all private plane people, these are all people that have barbers that come to their house once a week,” Whitlock said. “They haven’t been in barbershops, they’re pretending, that’s why the show reads inauthentic.” This critique of LeBron’s show is one that stuck with me for a while. The draw and excitement I felt toward his show was rooted in how authentic the conversations felt, and to have another intelligent figure question that openly gave me pause.

Authenticity is a notoriously difficult thing to define. While just about every philosopher and thinker has put forth their own concept of authenticity, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was particularly interested in this idea. I find his ideas to be amongst the most revealing on this subject. In Sartre’s book, “Being and Nothingness,” he describes his ideas about authenticity by boiling them to a phrase, mauvaise foi, literally translated to bad faith. Bad faith describes the phenomenon in which human beings, under pressure from social forces, adopt false values and disown their innate freedom. They are acting inauthentically. A primary example Sartre uses is a waiter. “He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. There is nothing there to surprise us.”

To behave in bad faith, or to act inauthentically, means one does what they think they are supposed to do, rather than just being themselves. This is what LeBron is most guilty of, both on and off the basketball court. It is also what Whitlock was alluding to in his minute-long tirade about LeBron’s show. You see someone who is performing the act of being the biggest sports celebrity, playing a part that creates a shield from displaying any kind of authenticity, preventing any of us from seeing who he is or what he’s all about. This approach that James takes is not new and is, by and large, the common course of action for most elite NBA players. However, LeBron has been acting in Bad Faith the longest and he is by far the most successful.

When LeBron James was a junior in high school, an article was published about him in Sports Illustrated. This article wasn’t buried in a small section; it was featured on the cover. The title of this article that came out February 18, 2002, was “The Chosen One, LeBron James, The High Schooler Being Compared to Michael Jordan.” Simply put, a sixteen year old LeBron James was being talked about by Sports Illustrated as Michael Jordan’s heir apparent. It is as if the host of the Tonys told the audience that an aspiring sixteen year old highschool playwright is the next Stephen Sondheim and then telling that highschool playwright to go sit down next to Lin Manuel Miranda for the rest of the show. This example seems insane, except that was LeBron’s reality. If the leading sports publication puts you on its cover and then claims you are “The Chosen One” people have this expectation ingrained in their head.

After that, every high school game LeBron played was sold out, national media attended every practice and every sportscaster held a magnifying glass up to his head. The person that he was compared to, Michael Jordan, didn’t have as much social pressure shaping him at such a young age. One could easily argue that no athlete has had that much social pressure to be a star so young. Social forces have defined who LeBron is since he was sixteen. He had to learn how to grow up trying to fill the humongous shoes the sports world gave him. There was no guideline on how to be the best basketball player in the world, no handbook or YouTube tutorial. No one asked him if he wanted to be a star, he thought he had to be. If the whole world is telling you to be something, it’s hard to brush that off. LeBron had to adopt false values, disown his innate freedom and act inauthentically.

LeBron’s identity was formed by the social pressure of his childhood stardom. In that process, he signed a deal with Nike and Gatorade, parlaying his basketball achievements into endorsement deals. This process forced him to cultivate an image of himself that pleased the highest number of people. After landing on the cover of Sports Illustrated he became a brand, never an individual where you felt like you knew him or what mattered to him. Sartre’s concept of ‘mauvaise foi’ or ‘bad faith’ is defined as not being honest with ourselves and therefore, undermining our chances of fulfilment. Lebron’s loss of fulfilment isn’t his potential to become a great basketball player, but his potential to be authentic. At sixteen he could no longer be just a kid playing basketball, but he had to be “The Chosen One,” the heir apparent to the greatest basketball player of all time.

After high school LeBron was drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers with the first pick in the NBA draft at eighteen years old. As soon as he stepped on a professional basketball court, still a teenager, his talent set him apart from all of his contemporaries. For a variety of reasons, however, James was not universally popular during the first half of his career. Drafted to the Cavaliers, his childhood team and an organization notorious for their bad ownership and front office, LeBron wasn’t set up for success. His first few years were flashy but he just ended up with individual accolades and no team success. In most jobs, if your boss isn’t supportive and your coworkers are consistently underperforming, most people would recommend you find a new job. However, when LeBron decided to leave Cleveland, his status as a controversial figure reached its highest point. After a long seven seasons with the tumultuous Cavaliers he decided to become a free agent.

Generally a free agency move isn’t announced. It’s discovered by the media. Reporters and insiders constantly call all their contacts trying to get the scoop on where a certain player is deciding to go. Then the player’s agent will send out a statement that will get picked up by the networks and broadcast on TV. However, no player of James’s stature had changed teams as a free agent. As soon as the 2009–2010 season ended, all sports media could talk about was LeBron’s decision. That summer Sports Center, ESPN leading show, talked about LeBron’s free agency more than anything else; graphics about where LeBron might end up, deciphering his vacation locations. He wasn’t just the biggest prize in basketball but in all of American sports. Keep in mind that baseball season was in full effect. He was such a star that he pushed America’s third biggest sport to the c-block.

LeBron was doing something no one has seen before. Just like when he was sixteen on the cover of Sports Illustrated no one has ever had the hype and attention that LeBron garnered when deciding where his next team would be. So instead of a small press release that would imitate every free agency decision before him, he did something more. He made a sixty minute TV special about his new job. “The Decision,” was a made for television event where LeBron famously declared he would be leaving his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers and “taking his talents to South Beach.” LeBron adopted false values. “The Decision” was an answer to their hype. It was a spectacle, marketable and, I think a response to the news media constantly hyping this choice up into an unknown stratosphere. “The problem wasn’t just LeBron. The problem was us. As one Pittsburgh columnist put it: “The Decision merely was a by-product of a warped sporting culture that has been spiraling downward for decades. Media, fans, parents, teachers, coaches. We are all accomplices.” The next day, published on the front page of the New York Times, not in the sports section but on the front page was an article detailing LeBron’s decision. “It was an intensely anticipated moment and an emotional one for James. He first stumbled over his words before finally declaring. Marking one of the biggest moments in sports this decade.” Lebron couldn’t make this choice with his innate freedom, he was met with the huge social burden of being LeBron James.

On an old podcast of his, the author Bill Simmons makes a comment about LeBron that has always stuck with me. “LeBron has done a masterful job of just not saying much and presenting a certain angle of himself. I don’t feel like I really know LeBron that well, I don’t really know what makes him tick. He’s done a great job of being accessible yet guarded at the same time and usually doesn’t get into trouble. Would basketball be more fun if he was a little more honest? Yeah.” This comment is about an essential inauthenticity with LeBron. Simmons is describing the outcome of Lebron’s whole life under pressure from social and commercial forces; how he adopts false values and disowns his innate freedom. Sarte’s idea of bad faith is essential to our perception of LeBron. While the “The Chosen One” is always present in our minds and on our television sets through commercials and his on court play, we don’t feel like we know him. That inauthenticity, the face that James has created and puts out into the world, is an essential part of who he is and thus prevents us, from creating any kind of real connection with him. Lebron acts how he thinks the biggest basketball player in the world should act. Unfortunately for him, he has no one to tell him otherwise.