"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently. " -- Warren Buffett
This isn't an opinion about how bad of a person LeBron James is. Or how he destroyed the hopes of a city or fled for the easy solution to enhancing his basketball legacy.
This is about irony over how his approach to free agency destroyed the thing he cared about the most: his brand.
Not just his image, but his brand.
Over the past seven-plus years, LeBron always spoke about his personal goals beyond basketball—a "global icon" who would use basketball as a springboard to create a business empire. His ideal narrative was "hometown boy from a hard-scrabble childhood had the savvy to rise to the top of the sports business world."
And he would do it by being the antithesis to Allen Iverson and Kobe Bryant. Where they gunned for individual stats, he would focus on involving his teammates.
Where they annihilated their peers on and off the court, he would preach unity in the court and strong friendships off of it. <...
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