The King is dead, his replacement is in South Beach

Nobody can fault LeBron James for joining up with his pals Bosh and Wade in Miami to try and win an NBA championship. That’s why they play the games. Let’s be fair, he gave seven good years to Cleveland. He paid his hometown dues. He earned, as they say in big-time sports, his payday.
What we can and should fault LeBron for, though, is the manner in which he did it. Let’s put the best face on it and say it was a poorly-conceived marketing event gone badly awry. By endeavoring to make a grand gesture on a grand stage for a grand plan, and thus launch the new era of his career with huge positive fanfare, King James, in a stunning one-hour mock-event, came off looking more like King Henry VIII—mean, small, selfish, defensive and haughty. James dumped Cleveland much as Henry dumped Katherine of Aragon, in a glaring public spectacle, with dubious rationale, utter selfishness and needless over-the-top pageantry.
Not as tone deaf (and we should all hope not as prescient) as “Bad Newz Kennels,” this, “The Decision,” was similar in that its details were delegated to and orchestrated end-to-end by James’ closest lifelong cronies, guys from his childhood who glommed onto James at an early age and never bothered to learn the subtleties of the craft of public relations, so busy have they been at harvesting the superstar’s low-hanging fruit. They learned to throw his weight around, though, and that’s what “The Decision” looked like—James, throwing his weight around for all to see on national TV. “Look at me! I’m BIG; really BIG.” He almost salvaged some measure of grace by contributing all of the proceeds from “The Decision” to the Boys and Girls Clubs, but he blew it in the end when he ad-libbed, “maybe another LeBron James will come outta one of those clubs.” We can only hope . . .
“The Decision” and all the preliminaries leading up to it, in a single stroke, morphed James's image from the noble, dutiful, devoted scion of a struggling hometown, into LeBron James, the crass commercialist who speaks of himself in the third person, whose disdain for his adoring hometown fans is only exceeded by his desire for more loot and more luster. In that regard, even if none of the other aspects of it pan out, his decision to “take my talents to South Beach,” was right on pitch.