LeBron James has been in the NBA for over two decades. During that amazingly long career, he’s had his fair share of embarrassing moments. A few of those have come on the court, from his 2011 Finals collapse to his sudden penchant for wearing Wendell Carter Jr.’s sports goggles, but many more have been off the court.
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James is often known to carry a book as a prop through the tunnel. However, as many fans have noted over the years, he has rarely read any further than a few pages in. One day, he brought in the autobiography of Malcolm X, the American civil rights leader and one of the most important men in American history.
When asked about the most pertinent moments in the reading, though, LeBron struggled to answer the question. In what became an awful attempt at saving himself from a hole he just dug, James started saying random things, hoping one of them would stick.
“I kind of just started a couple of days ago…” muscled out James, “and a lot of notes over the last couple of years…it’s the first time I’m actually reading this… very smart man.”
The tentative, unsteady response was not one many would’ve expected from him, but it did spark even more memes about Bron’s book club, much to the delight of one of his best friends, Dwyane Wade.
When asked about LeBron’s reading habits, Wade could not contain his laughter. It took nearly a full minute for him to get his emotions in order to answer the question. “You know what I love? I love when someone can make fun of themselves,” Wade joked. “I love the fact that LeBron and his team has now marketed him as someone who reads [just] the first page.”
James has managed to turn the viral meme, by all accounts a slight at him, into a marketing opportunity. In an ad for the mobile game, Royal Kingdom, LeBron was found hiding a phone in his book, playing the aforementioned game instead of actually reading.
The Candy Crush-like game did a whole fake conspiracy around James’ reading habits, focusing on the supposed glow of the screen emanating from the pages, or the hollowed-out book from his childhood library in Akron, Ohio, only to end on clip after clip of James swiping away on his phone.
Now, while the character in the ad calls LeBron a fake, he has the same response for all of his various trolls all over the internet. When asked about what James saw in Dalton Knecht, possibly alluding to James’ other viral meme of him predicting the future, James smiled and said “I don’t know. Same s*** I said last year, and everybody on the internet called me a liar all the time.”
LeBron is arguably the greatest player of all time, but he has played through the whole internet era. What was once a journalistic landscape of educated and thought-out opinions has now given way to the world of NBA Twitter.
While Jordan had to deal with large-scale scandals around his character, James has had to deal with memes and posts making fun of him. It’s simply a result of the times. But, considering how quick he is to turn a joke at his expense into an ad campaign, I think he’s pretty happy with the jokes coming his way.
