World-beaters can’t take themselves seriously in the 21st century.
Shaquille O’Neal is an aging conqueror. He’s also an eternal clown. After 18 NBA seasons, LeBron’s oldest teammate still has a young man’s funny bone—which makes him a most opportune role model for the maturing King James.
Wisdom means seeing your sins through a glass darkly.
Wit, on the other hand, means sensing your grace by simply lightening up.
It’s not that LeBron is incapable of humor. Those puppet commercials were a riot, and he darned near has me sold on a State Farm life insurance policy. But no one does contemporary comedy quite like Shaq. In a league where Sternness is literally next to godliness, only a cutting-edge cutup could lampoon the Lord and live to laugh another day.
The imitator bestows the sincerest form of flattery.
The joker betrays the trendiest form of sincerity.
If LeBron really wants to honor his Big Elder, all he has to do is get with the times.
Basketball fans of the 1900s expected severity from their heroes. Bill Russell, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan—they were zealous champions, adherents of a creed that equated victory with virtue. The catch, of course, is that our ambivalent era demands an ambivalent orientation towards excellence. Cynics will argue that Shaq’s lighthearted frivolity is symptomatic of civilizational decline. I’d counter that LeBron’s generation has seen too much evil to cast an unwinking eye on the good.
It’s bad to lose your physical ability.
It’s worse to lose your psychological balance.
Shaq’s best years are certainly behind him, but at least he has enough poise to go down grinning.
Greatness burdens those who believe in it unequivocally. To be incomparably dominant is both a blessing and a curse; to be ironically detached is the single proven remedy. Shaquille O’Neal should teach LeBron James how to win without wallowing in it, because there’s no more important lesson for a postmodern megastar. Earnest triumphalism has been passé since the last day of the Cold War. What that means for the superpowers of tomorrow is a punch line satirists and social scientists will have to write on their own.
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David Foster Wallace didn't have much of a post game, but he did know a thing or two about pleasing a jaded audience:
The scholars and Foundations and disseminators never saw that his most serious wish was: to entertain.
Which is the first and final calling for an elite performer in the third millennium A.D.
Because there's no room for reverence in a culture grown old, and any idol who claims otherwise is either jesting at his own expense or only just saying, is all...
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