Benny Jay: I Love LeBron!

Get a call from a nice lady. Wants to know: “Do you really hate LeBron James and all those other players on the Heat like you say you do?”

Yes, yes, I tell her, I really, really do. Though it’s not hate in the conventional sense, like, you know, I hate Hitler, Stalin or someone really evil.

More like hate in the sporting sense as in — he’s really good and I want him to play for my team. Get it?

Yes, she says. Though I know she doesn’t cause when it comes to sports the world split into those who get it and those who don’t.

Let me try to explain….

For as long as I can remember, I’ve hated someone in basketball, as much as I love the sport. Indeed, it’s precisely because I love the sport that I also hate so many of its teams and players.

Until the Heat — with their dreaded leader, the diabolically smug Pat Riley – the team I hated most was the Lakers.

That’s cause they knocked my beloved Bulls out of the playoffs back in 1973 when I was young and impressionable and exceedingly vulnerable to such hurts.

Nearly forty years has passed but I still feel the pain. One minute left. Bulls up five. Bulls have the ball. All they have to do is run out the clock. But, no….

Ahhhhhh!

Next day I had to come to school and sit behind Tit – this kid in my German class whose real name was Cichowicz, which got turned into Chicken Tit, which eventually got shortened to Tit.

Tit loved the Lakers cause they had a guard named Goodrich who shot left-handed. Tit was also a lefty. That meant he and Goodrich had a bond. Look, no one said this shit is logical.

Gale Goodrich — Tit’s favorite player….

Anyway, on the day after the great collapse, Tit rode me like a horse.

Tit: Ha, ha – Bulls suck….

Me: Shut up….

Tit: Chokers, chokers….

Me: Suck my dick.

And so on….

Fourteen years later, I got into an intense debate with a black guy named Derrick in a bar in Lakeview while we were watching the Lakers play the Celtics. Derrick said he was rooting for the Lakers cause he hated the Celtics. Said they had too many white guys. Nothing against white guys – some of his best friends, and all that. But, it sickened him that so many white people loved the Celtics precisely cause they had so many white players so he felt obligated to despise them for the opposite reason.

I was following his logic until he took it one step too far. Said there was nothing special about Larry Bird, the greatest white player of all those whites on the Celtics. Said he knew at least twelve black guys playing on a playground somewhere on the west side who were as good or better than Bird.

I told him that there was no way that he knew twelve guys – black, white, green or gray — on the west side or anywhere else who was as good or better than Larry Bird. Cause Larry Bird – like him or not — was one of the greatest players in the NBA. So if those 12 guys were as good as Larry Bird they’d be playing in the NBA as opposed to, you know, a playground on the west side….

Well, we were going at it, as sports fans do, when who should walk into the bar? Larry Bird himself. Derrick did a 180. Started fawning all over him, saying: “Larry Bird, my man, let me buy you a beer….”

Okay, that last part didn’t really happen. But had Larry Bird really walked into that bar, Derrick would have done that 180 – I guarantee it.

The thing about sports fan is that they really don’t mean half the stuff they say. They’re just talking – cause that’s what you do when you’re watching sports. That and drinking.

I loved you Dennis, even when you played with these guys….

All these passions can switch in an instant. I know dozens of Bulls fans who hated Dennis Rodman to the core when he was a Piston. Then he gets traded to the Bulls and they love him to death.

So, you see, the good thing about this hating thing is that it’s not real. In fact, if LeBron were to wake up tomorrow and announce: My mistake. I don’t to play for the Heat. I want to play for the Bulls….

Well, let’s just say, I’d welcome him into the fold like this whole thing never happened.

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