About halfway through The Whore of Akron, Scott Raab’s 300-page “search for the soul of LeBron James” (Harper Collins), Raab refers to the NBA superstar’s infamous televised “Decision” to leave his (and Raab’s) hometown Cleveland Cavaliers to play for the Miami Heat as “nothing but fodder produced by and for benighted fools capable of grasping only the simplest narrative.” It’s good timing, because halfway through Raab’s book, the reader should well be wondering about both “fools” and “benightedness.”
Also “beknightedness” with a “k,” which might accurately describe a long distance Cleveland sports fan with a longtime gig writing glossy celebrity profiles from the East Coast having been dubbed by a major publisher to sell a sensationally-titled book “about LeBron” that’s mainly an autobiography. The fools are just the folks who think they’ll come away from The Whore of Akron with any new insight into the most compelling athlete free agency in modern history, or the underlying conditions and choices that gave rise to the execution of the Decision that even LeBron himself has admitted to be a failure.
Credit Raab and the publisher for a measure of self-awareness here, at least. The book begins with a reminder from Bernard Malamud that, “[a]ll men are Jews, except they don’t know it.” And the accompanying promotional packet is headlined by author Stefan Fatsis, who explains: “The Whore of Akron is about a basketball player the way Moby Dick is about a whale.”
So why package Raab as Ahab to LeBron’s big fish?
For starters, because Raab has to be the most readily marketable writer who actually witnessed live the last time a Cleveland team won a major championship – in 1964, when the Browns beat the heavily favored Baltimore Colts for the NFL title in old Municipal Stadium. Raab still has his ticket stub, and carries it with him wherever he goes, including in the pages of Whore, where he presents it to the reader something like a baby-faced 19-year-old would a fake I.D. to a bartender.
Which only barely conceals the open secret of what really makes The Whore of Akron go; because just like his target audience of 18 to 34 year-old white men in Northeast Ohio then beyond, Raab really really hates LeBron James (the author established as much with a yearlong profanity-laced Twitter tantrum that resulted in the Heat barring him from receiving press credentials – access apparently much less important than the marketing here). Or at least Raab really really wants to sell books to a demographic that doesn’t want to think at all about how a bad decision by a twenty-five-year old — who grew up fatherless and went from living in his homeless crack-addicted mother’s car to become an instant hundred millionaire and global celebrity at the age of 18 — might also be a failure of society in some meaningful way. So he puts every last bit of it on the “megalomaniacal shitheel,” a “stunted soul-dead bumpkin” whose former fans “should have torched [their LeBron jerseys] with [LeBron and his] sycophant posse wearing them.”
The author does no better with the more micro elements at play, paying little more than lip service to how the star’s decision might have been impacted by seven years of undiluted obsequiousness on the part of the Cavaliers front office, the press that covered the team, and everyone else at the periphery of that “posse of sychophants.” High-powered Cleveland attorney Fred Nance, counsel to LeBron and his family since James’s high school days, isn’t mentioned at all in the book. And most impressively, Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert — the home mortgage billionaire and the driving force behind Cleveland’s now-under-construction casinos who bought the NBA franchise after it hit the LeBron lottery in ‘03 (once described as a man who “sells illusions for a living”) – entirely escapes scrutiny in the pages of Whore.
Gilbert, who unsurprisingly granted Raab extraordinary access for this project, is just one of the good guys here; “a power lifter, a no-necked, thick-chested, thin-lipped brick of a billionaire, who builds business after business.” Also “a house of fire,” and “[Raab’s] kind of guy,” because he “once got into a fistfight at a friend’s bar mitzvah.” Nevermind why a grown-up would make himself the center of attention at a kid’s party in this way. And nevermind Gilbert’s (also infamous) reaction to LeBron’s decision, an ad hominem riddled “open letter” to Cavs fans containing an as of yet unfulfilled promise “to open the book on events of the recent past,” and a declaration that “people have covered up for [James] for way too long.” Nevermind what the fatherless superstar’s decision to leave Gilbert’s employ might have reflected of a desire to work under leadership that’s different from the kind that alternates between “covering up” and whistleblowing (think of a parent who’d respond to his child having been diagnosed with diabetes by threatening to tell everyone who’ll listen about how many candy bars he allowed the kid to eat), because Raab doesn’t want to talk about it at all.
Instead, the author just lets off a few conclusory shots at the guys who aren’t around anymore. Former Cavs GM Danny Ferry is dubbed “the world’s only 6’10” midget,” and “a man in charge of nothing.” Ex-Cavaliers head coach Mike Brown is the “pear-shaped,” “sunny” dope; a glorified “video assistant.” And all without a word of wonder as to any constraints that might have been placed on Brown and Ferry by their boss, or why Gilbert would let these supposed incompetents keep or have such important jobs in the first place.
In fact, one of the book’s more remarkable revelations comes when Raab explains to Gilbert that he’s “tired of hearing [Coach Brown] say how honored he is to coach LeBron.” Gilbert simply agrees, “I don’t like hearing that either.” Which is the end of it, because if you want to be perfectly clear about who the Whore is, the man in the best position to have meaningfully addressed any problems between LeBron and his coach has to have been as powerless as the author and the rest of the “real Clevelanders” who are all just the Whore’s victims. The megalomaniacal soul-dead shitheel Whore, who should be burned alive.
Here we can at least appreciate Raab’s demonstration of gratitude to Gilbert for creating and fueling the self-serving dichotomy to which this book owes so much. From his post-Decision letter, to slashing prices on LeBron-related merchandise to $17.41 (the year of Benedict Arnold’s birth), to selling the 2010-11 Cavaliers (19-61) as a playoff team in the preseason (to follow up on the absurd “guarantee” in his letter that the Cavaliers will win a championship before LeBron’s Heat), to setting a new low in owner/player discourse by taking to his Twitter account to call LeBron an “A-Hole,” the marketing strategy is unmistakable: It’s Dan Gilbert and “Real Clevelanders” over here, megalomaniacal soul-dead shitheel Whores over there, and absolutely nothing in between. In this way, Raab is just along for the ride.
Which is disappointing for a lot of reasons, including that there might be a worthwhile meditation on manhood and fanhood to be extracted from the Gilbert-brand reductionism here; an otherwise honest and compelling memoir about an author and Clevelander who’s overcome addiction and his own rough upbringing to become a decent husband and father. But such an extraction would be much easier if not for the severity and import of the reduction, and had we not been sold a “search for [LeBron’s] soul,” an “[examination of] the people who influenced him.” (Raab himself thinks Whore is an important enough statement on James to have hand-delivered a copy to the star’s house, and the book’s latest marketing video teases the book’s insight into “the giant royal cock of King James.”)
So since LeBron isn’t likely to make it all the way to page 299 for the book’s most direct message to him (and in case he hasn’t already seen Vanilla Sky), I’ll lay it out here:
“Do you finally understand that it’s not easy?,” Raab admonishes. “Hard is the only thing that makes it mean anything, the only thing that makes losing or winning worth the pain of suffering.”
It’s true, you really can’t appreciate the sunny days if you don’t have the cloudy ones (it’s a big part of what makes Cleveland so great).
Raab continues: “You had no father to teach you that a man doesn’t give up and walk away, doesn’t point his finger anywhere but at himself.”
Right. Going from poverty and crack-addled mothering to instant hundred millionaire global superstar probably tends to complicate the uptake on these important lessons about finger-pointing, too.
And finally: “You had nobody honest or smart enough to tell you that you can take your talents to South Beach, but that those innumerable talents don’t travel alone … .”
Yes yes yes, of course. But why? Why wasn’t there anybody honest or smart enough to make LeBron see any of this?
We’re only left to hope there’s somebody else out there with a ticket stub to that 1964 NFL Championship Game, and enough “LeBron Book” deals to go around so that we might start to figure some of this out. Or else that Whore ends up serving as cathartic enough for Raab that he gets to it one day himself.
In the meantime, if LeBron does pick up the copy that Raab left at his house, his most likely reaction will be to shrug his shoulders and say, “white people.” Or if we’re lucky, just, “Clevelanders.” Either of which would be as fair as the “examination” he’s subject to in The Whore of Akron. And either way a chasm widened. Cleveland still, as much as ever, a “city of losers,” LeBron in Miami, and Scott Raab in Jersey, doing just fine; Gilbert’s Cleveland casinos opening soon.
