01.13.09 LEBRON JAMES IN GQ

Come to think of it, yes. Yes I would like a hug.

LeBron James is on the cover of the new issue of GQ, and it goes without saying that GQ is comprised of effete pseudo-men in skinny jeans, but they still manage to put together a pretty interesting read (and they have good taste in sports blogs).  The cover story may come off as too fawning for some, but I suppose that’s the result of driving to Cleveland to play basketball with a 24-year-old multi-millionaire who is probably the best player in the world at his sport.

I recommend reading the whole article, but here are some choice quotes from the pick-up game the five GQ staffers played with Bron. Plenty of trash talk and high-resolution scans below.

After a stretch of truly embarrassing ugliness, the points start piling up on our side. Turns out LeBron James is a very good passer and sees things on the court that the rest of us don’t see. He threads some very pretty passes to Adam and me, and we manage to hit the layups, and soon we’re up 12–2. “They don’t play no D,” he says. “They don’t play no D. New York Knicks.” [...]

LeBron gets the ball back under the hoop and leaves from his flat feet and throws down a vicious dunk.

Will says, “Did that go in?”

“Yeah, it went in,” LeBron says. “You got dunked on. That’s how I do. I show no mercy.”

From the post-game Q and A:

Would you have taken it inside against us [if it were five-against-one]?

Well, that’s my game. When we get to crunch time, I go inside.

We were ready to take the charge, though.

You would not be sitting here right now if you’d taken the charge on me. You’d be in the Cleveland Clinic.

And, lastly, not relevant to this blog post but enjoyable because it talks about how much Cleveland sucks:

You know what else makes you question things? Waking up in Cleveland, Ohio, and looking north out the window of your Marriott hotel room and realizing that there’s a barely discernible line out there in the distance, and that that line separates the gray lake from the slightly less gray air; then going down to breakfast and watching out the window as two men carrying stacks of overstuffed binders walk straight into the teeth of the wind screaming off Lake Erie, their faces being savaged by tiny airborne razor blades; then going back up to your room and looking out your window again and observing that, while the gray slab of day has lightened a little, the contrast between lake and sky is still imperceptible; and then finally realizing that the people of Cleveland live a large portion of their lives inside a howling, subfreezing, youth-repelling, job-vanishing, anti-light box.

In other words, only slightly better than Pittsburgh.