J.R. Smith Thinks LeBron James' Hairline Is the Price of 'Having Everything'
December 17, 2015
Cleveland Cavaliers superstar LeBron James will go down as one of the greatest basketball players to ever live and will wind up having more money than he knows what to do with.
Yet despite all of his fame and fortune, there is really nothing he can do about his hairline. That's just the price of being King James, if you ask Cavaliers guard J.R. Smith.
Smith is the subject of a recent GQ feature by Devin Friedman. While there's plenty of interesting stuff in the feature, perhaps the most entertaining part comes when Smith talks about his teammate's hair: "I tell him you can't have everything. I tell him all the time: You can't have it all! You have to give up one thing, and it just so happened it's your hair. If someone told me I'm gonna give you $600 million but I'm going to take your hair? Take my hair!"
Everything, including success, has its price. A crazy amount of money and unbelievable talent/athleticism for a receding hairline? For you, me and J.R., that seems like a pretty good tradeoff. Only James can make the call for himself.
Of course, Smith is able to pick on James because they've been teammates since a trade in January that sent the guard from the Knicks to the Cavaliers. Smith had previously said that the lack of nightlife in Cleveland had helped his game, and he expanded on that theme in the GQ feature, saying Cleveland and Utah were about the last places that he thought he'd want to play. Friedman wrote:
As we drove here, I asked J.R. what he thought when he was traded. Were you, I said, like, “Oh man, I have to live in Cleveland?”
“Honestly?” he said, piloting his German spacecar through a desolate web of interstates. “I was petrified. Seriously. I didn't know what to expect. I thought: The weather is gonna be horrible. There's going to be nowhere to go out to eat. There's going to be nowhere to party.”
Fortunately for Smith, he has settled in quite nicely in Cleveland. In fact, he had a chance to leave this past offseason as a free agent but chose to re-sign. Playing alongside James and being on a title contender certainly are perks.
Be sure to give Friedman's feature a read. While these were just some of the highlights, there is plenty of good stuff throughout the piece.
[GQ]