This not-terribly-exciting video of LeBron James wandering up a high-dive at a Barcelona pool and not being able to dive for several minutes because people are watching him and expecting him to do well is making the rounds on the Internet, and yes, it is both a lesson in overcoming fear and an easy-to-explain example of King James failing in the clutch. It takes him like two minutes to do a weak cannonball, and he only does that when an announcer goads him on and plays a rap song about LeBron James. This is all well and good, but a lot of people are missing the point.

Why does it take LeBron so long to jump? It has nothing to do with fourth-quarter performance: He is Jonathan Brandis. In fact, it was his most Brandis-like excursion since that time he talked to Dolphins.

No, he didn’t kill himself.

In The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter, Brandis is a member of the swim team. He has to jump off the high-dive, but he’s got a fear of heights, so every time he goes up there he stalls and imagines he’s about to plummet to his death in Niagara Falls. He ends up running away to an old bookstore and finding The NeverEnding Story, and upon reading it is whisked away to the land of Fantasia where he must team up with a weird man-bird to defeat the evil sorceress Xayide and her magical army of mechanical giants. After a bunch of Wizard Of Oz and Star Wars-like things happen, Brandis conquers his fear of heights and dives off a cliff to return home.

My working theory here is that LeBron faced a similar experience, and took two minutes to jump because he was off somewhere in his imagination wishing Xayide (or “the media”) had a heart. It’s a nerdy reference, sure, but tell me he isn’t always hanging out with Chris Bosh (weird man-bird) and trying to defeat mechanical giants (Dirk Nowitzki). We don’t get to see what happens when he climbs back out of the pool, but I’m gonna guess that when he surfaced he was in Akron.

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We'd like to thank newly-anointed WL reader DoctorOctagon for this tip on some black-on-white crime that took place in his backyard. Well, it was in a gym. "Backyard" was a figure of speech. Anyway:

Mickey Shaffer of Poyen said he was coaching the Lady Wings from Central Arkansas as they competed in the seventh- and eighth-grade girls' division of the Challenge of Champions tournament in Little Rock when he questioned a referee's call, and the referee, whose name Shaffer did not know, called a technical foul on him. Shaffer said he sat down but continued objecting to the call, and the referee called a second technical foul on him and ejected him from the game. Shaffer said he was "getting my two cents in" on his way out when the referee grabbed him by the throat and choked him for a few seconds.

Shaffer said that the photo of the choke makes it look worse than it actually was. Like that's gonna keep anyone from getting pissed. Did we mention this happened in Arkansas?

The referee who choked Shaffer was removed from the game he had been officiating and swapped with a referee from a different game on another court, according to witnesses. "He way overreacted, and he did a malicious thing in front of a lot of kids," said [a] parent, who asked that her name not be used. "When you're in that kind of position, you're supposed to be about sportsmanship and all this, and if you don't have any more self-control than that, you just don't need to be in that position."

The coach, by the way, is not pressing charges. Could it be that the coach doesn't want to admit to what he might have said to the ref? Do they mic up coaches at the 7th-grade level?

[Arkansas News]