Re: The all new 2012/13 Area 55, G2 Zone & PTO thread....
AREA 55 NEWS YOU CAN TAKE TO THE BANK!!!!!!!!
Salutations 55ers!
Tonight at 8:30 P.M. we confront Miami on our home floor. The game will be sold out, the crowd will likely be lively and liquored up, and I’m hoping the noise level will reach 125 decibels or more (125 being the threshold for pain to the ears). The Heat have been very quiet since we stole home court from them in Miami. They know that if the Pacers take the next two games here in Indy, their Playoff hole will likely be so deep that even their coddled star, LeBron “The King” James, will likely be unable to pull them out of it. The pressure on both teams – us to maintain, and them to regain, home court advantage will be intense.
Area 55 and G2Zone have to bring it as never before. The next two games in BLF are the culmination of everything that our twin fan sections exist for. Our noise has to be constant, loud, and telling. No lulls. No let-ups. No lapses.
Mark Boyle, the Pacers radio voice, mentioned in Game 2 that the Miami crowd always got quiet when the Heat were down. The Knicks crowd, in Madison Square Garden, occasionally booed the Knicks when they struggled and went down to us. It amazes me that this can happen in the context of the Playoffs. It amazes me that the Heat and the Knicks have fans like that.
We, by contrast, are different. We love our guys. And now, at long last, we have the opportunity to demonstrate to every basketball fan in America that will be watching tonight’s game just what a crowd from a rust-bucket, small-market town can bring for its team in our, by NBA standards, tiny little arena.
Many players and pundits have said that the noise level in the old Market Square Arena used to be the highest in the NBA. Some say that the noise heard now in BLF pales by comparison.
Let’s show the whole world tonight that they’re wrong. Let’s show them how much we love our team and just how much we want them to succeed and win.
Remember this tonight:
The Pacers carry our state’s name on their shirts. They represent our home city’s proud pro basketball tradition. But they are more than that.
They are guys that have worked in our food kitchens, autographed our kids’ jerseys, sponsored our blood drives, and put backpacks on our kids’ shoulders. They are good guys. They are like us. Diligent, hard-working, tough, resilient and strong.
Like us, they are built, not bought. They have done things the right way. They are humble, not arrogant. Quiet guys and not media gods. They are self-developed and not artificially created.
They have represented us well. They are very young, but they have come from basketball nowhere in a short three years to bring our city to the brink of an Eastern Conference Championship.
The Pacers mirror us. They have become a part of us. The Pacers are us.
Let’s make sure that we, as fans, let our guys know tonight that we know that. Let them know that we appreciate them. That we love them. That we treasure everything they’ve done for us. That we support them in their effort and in their quest to bring us, and themselves, even more.
MEET THE ENEMY! GENUFLECT BEFORE THE KING!!!!
A brief introduction to Rings and Things: http://tinyurl.com/6okowp9
LeBron James is perhaps Akron, Ohio’s most famous citizen (unless you want to count Harvey Firestone, the founder of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company or Art Fleming, the first emcee of the TV quiz show “Jeopardy!”).
As a tyke, LeBron grew up a basketball prodigy, happily dribbling the roundball, ingesting steroids from his mother’s mammaries, and when not doing television interviews, hating the city of Cleveland.
True, LeBron’s home town, Akron, is located a mere 40 miles from Cleveland -- but as most Buckeye Staters know, these two towns are worlds apart in terms of their level of sophistication and culture. As LeBron once said of Cleveland (while musing on the halcyon days of his royal youth):
“It’s not far, but it is far. And Clevelanders, because they were the bigger-city kids when we were growing up, looked down on us. … So we didn’t actually like Cleveland. We hated Cleveland growing up. There’s a lot of people in Cleveland we still hate to this day.”
And, I might interject here, many in Cleveland still hate LeBron.
See, LeBron grew up a Basketball-Jonesy type of kid that, on finishing high school, decided to take his beloved momma’s advice (and that of his public relations guru, the world’s only ape possessed of a PhD) to eschew college and take his talents to the NBA in search of the big bucks. Unaware of his secret hatred for Cleveland, that city’s team, the Cavaliers, naively drafted him. Clevelanders embraced The Young Lord, anointing him as their “The King” and hoped in the depths of their depressed Midwestern hearts that he would take their squalid town - lowly, polluted, rust-bucket Cleveland - to the nether-reaches of NBA titledom.
LeBron, at first, seemed amenable to the deal. After getting drafted, he took the money Cleveland gave him and, for a time, buried his festering but still clandestine hatred of that city and its snobby, Akron-disdaining citizenry. He buried that hatred for six or seven NBA seasons – basically until his contract was about to expire. During that time period he even managed to take the lackluster Cavaliers to the Playoffs a couple of times. But, for all The King’s efforts and try as hard as he might, he was just never quite able to get that coveted Big Kahuna of all Kahunas - an NBA Championship Ring.
This troubled and frustrated “The King.” Sure, he was the king in Cleveland and the royal treasury was full. But without a Ring, in the NBA scheme of things, The King was really only minor royalty – an uppity nabob, a nattering princeling, a mere satrap, and not really, as James Brown might have said, “The King of ‘Em All, Y’All.”
LeBron looked at the Cavalier players around him – mediocrities like Mo Williams and Anderson Varajao – and concluded that it might take him quite a long while, if not forever, to make it to NBA nirvana-land and get a Ring.
Also, The King, himself, had developed a troubled personal history of going into a disappearing act during the 4th Quarters of Cleveland’s Playoff games. Crunch time was tough when everybody had to count just on him to pull a tight game out and the King had nobody else to throw the ball to. It's hard to get a Ring for a King when The King's got no help!
So, in 2010, The King’s time had come. His contract with the Cavs was about to expire and The King was about to become that most liberated of all NBA fauna – a “free agent!” In a flash, a burst of an idea stole into The King’s supple and chemically-enhanced brain: He needed help! Without “help,” he’d never, ever, be able to get a Ring anytime soon in Cleveland. No. For sadly, despite all his elite athletic prowess, The King wasn’t like a Shaquille O’Neal, a Tim Duncan, a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, or a Michael Jordan. He’d never be able to put a supporting cast as bad as Cleveland’s on his back and get himself that all-important Ring!
So The King realized he had to make a “Decision!”
See, there was this other guy out there called “D-Wade.” D-Wade played on another NBA team that was a lot like Cleveland. It was called the Miami Heat. D-Wade was a pretty good player too. And, just like The King, D-Wade had earned no Ring and was going nowhere Playoff-wise with Miami. D-Wade wanted a Ring too.
See, in Miami the favorite urban sport is sniffing cocaine and despite all D-Wade’s flair, basketball there is basically a sideshow -- something played in a big local arena but viewed only by white-suited drug lords who showed up (infrequently at that!), usually around 30 minutes after tip-offs, and generally only to admire one another’s suits and cut illegal drug deals.
And there was still another guy with The King’s problem. This one was a funny-looking guy, who was going nowhere with a team called the Toronto Raptors. His name was Chris “CB4” Bosh. Bosh was supposed to be a pretty good basketball player too, but his team, the Raptors, basically stunk. CB4 was unhappy in Toronto. He’d recently had his nose broken, was malingering a lot on the bench, and the fan base were growing impatient with him and calling him “soft.” Chris didn’t like the weather in snowy Canada either. And his prospects of getting a Ring in Toronto were almost as dim as that city’s wintry skies. But, like The King, Chris was a “free agent” too!
Now, thought The King, wouldn’t it be neat if he and D-Wade and CB4 all got together someplace – say Miami – and made all nice and played their basketball together. Why then they’d have a “Great Team!” Then the three of them could “help” each other and get lotsa Rings!
There were other factors to consider too, of course. Like “happiness.” Was LeBron really “happy” in Cleveland – a city that Akronites like him always inwardly despised and where one of his teammates, Delonte West, was rumored to then be having an affair with LeBron’s mom (the esteemed Queen Mother)?
“Happiness,” after all, is important. A King needs to be happy! And Cleveland was just Cleveland. The King, despite the worshipful adulation of the city’s fans, really didn’t owe Cleveland or its fans anything. Kings never owe their realms anything. Kings owe nothing to anyone but themselves. That's just the way royalty works.
So all these factors began to percolate like festering farts in The King’s royal brain. The King pondered these factors. He “thought” about them. He consulted with The Queen Mother. He consulted with his public relations man, PhD Ape. He started consulting secretly with Pat Riley, the Miami Heat’s General Manager.
Rumors that The King was doing all this “thinking” and “consulting” got out to the newsies too. ESPN started talking about it. Pundits started talking about it. Cleveland started talking about it. Everybody started talking about it.
And the talking started using big, university-type words that The King, who never attended college, had never even heard before. Words like “synergy” and “osmosis” and “Triple Entente.” And all the talking and big words boiled down to the possibility that The King, D-Wade, and CB4 –might all just take a slight pay cut and use the thing called “free agency” to get together someplace -- someplace nicer than Cleveland and Toronto. Someplace like maybe New York or, even better, a nice warm place like Miami. That way, y’see, The King could get his “help” and, together with D-Wade and CB4, The King could win lotsa Rings and then he could be "happy!"
Of course, before making such a move, LeBron had to really think about it. A royal “Decision” always requires beaucoup royal thinking. It also requires somewhere appropriate to announce “The Decision” once it is made – a grand and noble venue, like in an hour-long nationally televised program. So LeBron set one up!.
But there was drama too! Ah, there was so much to consider: There were all those prior pronouncements and promises that The King had made to Cleveland’s management and its fan base. Stuff like:
"I got a goal, and it's a huge goal, and that's to bring an NBA championship here to Cleveland. And I won't stop until I get it."
Many philologists, grammarians, and other learned people that are tasked with interpreting the meaning of words had parsed prior statements like this from The King and concluded that they meant something. Many thought that these royal words meant that, despite The King’s “free agency,” His Noble Highness had actually promised to remain with his subjects in his royal Cleveland domain and labor on longer, at least for as long as it would take to bring Cleveland an NBA championship.
But The King knew his earlier royal pronouncements and promises to Cleveland were just one factor to consider. There were yet other more important ones. There was The King’s long-simmering, Akronite hatred of sophisticated, snobby Cleveland and its citizenry to remember. Such early slights still rankled The Anointed One The King had a great memory and he just couldn’t forget them.
And there were those nagging personal issues too. As mentioned, one of The King’s nobles, a Cleveland player named DeLonte West, and The King’s royal mom, The Queen Mother, had been getting it on. This bothered The King’s concentration and had caused a worsening in The Royal Shot, particularly in 4th Quarters. That, in turn, translated to even more lost Playoff games for The King. And, of course, there were also those elusive butterflies of an NBA Ring and The King’s general “Happiness” to consider too.
Anyway, when all was said and done, The King had to make up his mind!
So “The Decision” was made. And The King announced it. And guess what? Cleveland lost.
As The King put it:
“In this fall… this is very tough… in this fall I'm going to take my talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat.”
The King wasn’t really too worried about local Cleveland fan reaction to The Decision. He knew that his loving Cleveland-based subjects would sympathize and understand "The Decision." Their King, after all, had a need for True Happiness. Sure, The King’s royal coffers contained millions and his subjects adored him. But money and fan adoration aren't everything a King needs. A King needs Rings!
Yes, the King needed more! The King had an immediate and burning desire to start acquiring the many, many NBA championship Rings true Kings acquire! And getting "happy" and getting Rings was just not possible in Cleveland. True fans of The King would know this. True fans of His Highness would empathize. True fans of The King would simply say “Bon Voyage, O Mighty Anointed One!” and wish their beloved King their very best as he went elsewhere to quest for lotsa Rings!.
And, when all was said and done, it wouldn’t really be “goodbye” to Cleveland. LeBron’s departure would really be more like an “Auf Wiedersehen!” See, as The King pointed out, his subjects could always watch His Royal Progress on their little TVs and, what's more, The King would continue to keep one of his royal palaces in Akron, just 40 miles away, so his subjects would know he always sort of remained close by. So it wouldn’t be like The King would be totally gone. All would not be lost! Clevelanders could still worship their beloved ruler whenever he happened to be visiting his Akron palace! The King put the prospects of future contacts with his Cleveland fan subjects better than I do here:
“You know, [the Cavs’ fans] can have mixed emotions, of course, but it's going to be a lot of emotions not understanding why. And then you're going to have the real friends who love me for who I am. For me being from Akron, Ohio, and loving Akron, Ohio, it's always home for me. I'm still going to live there, always be home. And Akron, Ohio is always home for me and that area.”
And as The King predicted, his true fans (the ones with his best interests at heart!) took his departure well:
http://tinyurl.com/292zf59
http://tinyurl.com/ny8ydzx
http://tinyurl.com/jwv2uc2
http://tinyurl.com/klj9jeq
http://tinyurl.com/l3c2r4r
http://tinyurl.com/m98tkcs
The Cavs’ management understood too, and despite his abdication, bade their departing King lachrymose best wishes and gave him a profound and heartfelt adieu.
http://tinyurl.com/24f3uw6
Well, you all know the rest of the story. The King DID take his act to Miami where he honed his skills and after an initial bump in the road (A Finals loss to Lord Dirk of Nowitzki), eventually flopped his way to an NBA championship in 2012.
Yes, The King now has a Ring! And Miami suddenly had a “Great Team!
And you know what? The King is still The King, only in South Beach and not Cleveland. And The King’s royal story has a happy ending!
The End!
Postscript: Strangely, there are some in Cleveland that are pulling for the Pacers tonight. I wonder why?
GO PACERS! GO AREA 55!
AREA 55 NEWS YOU CAN TAKE TO THE BANK!!!!!!!!
Salutations 55ers!
Tonight at 8:30 P.M. we confront Miami on our home floor. The game will be sold out, the crowd will likely be lively and liquored up, and I’m hoping the noise level will reach 125 decibels or more (125 being the threshold for pain to the ears). The Heat have been very quiet since we stole home court from them in Miami. They know that if the Pacers take the next two games here in Indy, their Playoff hole will likely be so deep that even their coddled star, LeBron “The King” James, will likely be unable to pull them out of it. The pressure on both teams – us to maintain, and them to regain, home court advantage will be intense.
Area 55 and G2Zone have to bring it as never before. The next two games in BLF are the culmination of everything that our twin fan sections exist for. Our noise has to be constant, loud, and telling. No lulls. No let-ups. No lapses.
Mark Boyle, the Pacers radio voice, mentioned in Game 2 that the Miami crowd always got quiet when the Heat were down. The Knicks crowd, in Madison Square Garden, occasionally booed the Knicks when they struggled and went down to us. It amazes me that this can happen in the context of the Playoffs. It amazes me that the Heat and the Knicks have fans like that.
We, by contrast, are different. We love our guys. And now, at long last, we have the opportunity to demonstrate to every basketball fan in America that will be watching tonight’s game just what a crowd from a rust-bucket, small-market town can bring for its team in our, by NBA standards, tiny little arena.
Many players and pundits have said that the noise level in the old Market Square Arena used to be the highest in the NBA. Some say that the noise heard now in BLF pales by comparison.
Let’s show the whole world tonight that they’re wrong. Let’s show them how much we love our team and just how much we want them to succeed and win.
Remember this tonight:
The Pacers carry our state’s name on their shirts. They represent our home city’s proud pro basketball tradition. But they are more than that.
They are guys that have worked in our food kitchens, autographed our kids’ jerseys, sponsored our blood drives, and put backpacks on our kids’ shoulders. They are good guys. They are like us. Diligent, hard-working, tough, resilient and strong.
Like us, they are built, not bought. They have done things the right way. They are humble, not arrogant. Quiet guys and not media gods. They are self-developed and not artificially created.
They have represented us well. They are very young, but they have come from basketball nowhere in a short three years to bring our city to the brink of an Eastern Conference Championship.
The Pacers mirror us. They have become a part of us. The Pacers are us.
Let’s make sure that we, as fans, let our guys know tonight that we know that. Let them know that we appreciate them. That we love them. That we treasure everything they’ve done for us. That we support them in their effort and in their quest to bring us, and themselves, even more.
MEET THE ENEMY! GENUFLECT BEFORE THE KING!!!!
A brief introduction to Rings and Things: http://tinyurl.com/6okowp9
LeBron James is perhaps Akron, Ohio’s most famous citizen (unless you want to count Harvey Firestone, the founder of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company or Art Fleming, the first emcee of the TV quiz show “Jeopardy!”).
As a tyke, LeBron grew up a basketball prodigy, happily dribbling the roundball, ingesting steroids from his mother’s mammaries, and when not doing television interviews, hating the city of Cleveland.
True, LeBron’s home town, Akron, is located a mere 40 miles from Cleveland -- but as most Buckeye Staters know, these two towns are worlds apart in terms of their level of sophistication and culture. As LeBron once said of Cleveland (while musing on the halcyon days of his royal youth):
“It’s not far, but it is far. And Clevelanders, because they were the bigger-city kids when we were growing up, looked down on us. … So we didn’t actually like Cleveland. We hated Cleveland growing up. There’s a lot of people in Cleveland we still hate to this day.”
And, I might interject here, many in Cleveland still hate LeBron.
See, LeBron grew up a Basketball-Jonesy type of kid that, on finishing high school, decided to take his beloved momma’s advice (and that of his public relations guru, the world’s only ape possessed of a PhD) to eschew college and take his talents to the NBA in search of the big bucks. Unaware of his secret hatred for Cleveland, that city’s team, the Cavaliers, naively drafted him. Clevelanders embraced The Young Lord, anointing him as their “The King” and hoped in the depths of their depressed Midwestern hearts that he would take their squalid town - lowly, polluted, rust-bucket Cleveland - to the nether-reaches of NBA titledom.
LeBron, at first, seemed amenable to the deal. After getting drafted, he took the money Cleveland gave him and, for a time, buried his festering but still clandestine hatred of that city and its snobby, Akron-disdaining citizenry. He buried that hatred for six or seven NBA seasons – basically until his contract was about to expire. During that time period he even managed to take the lackluster Cavaliers to the Playoffs a couple of times. But, for all The King’s efforts and try as hard as he might, he was just never quite able to get that coveted Big Kahuna of all Kahunas - an NBA Championship Ring.
This troubled and frustrated “The King.” Sure, he was the king in Cleveland and the royal treasury was full. But without a Ring, in the NBA scheme of things, The King was really only minor royalty – an uppity nabob, a nattering princeling, a mere satrap, and not really, as James Brown might have said, “The King of ‘Em All, Y’All.”
LeBron looked at the Cavalier players around him – mediocrities like Mo Williams and Anderson Varajao – and concluded that it might take him quite a long while, if not forever, to make it to NBA nirvana-land and get a Ring.
Also, The King, himself, had developed a troubled personal history of going into a disappearing act during the 4th Quarters of Cleveland’s Playoff games. Crunch time was tough when everybody had to count just on him to pull a tight game out and the King had nobody else to throw the ball to. It's hard to get a Ring for a King when The King's got no help!
So, in 2010, The King’s time had come. His contract with the Cavs was about to expire and The King was about to become that most liberated of all NBA fauna – a “free agent!” In a flash, a burst of an idea stole into The King’s supple and chemically-enhanced brain: He needed help! Without “help,” he’d never, ever, be able to get a Ring anytime soon in Cleveland. No. For sadly, despite all his elite athletic prowess, The King wasn’t like a Shaquille O’Neal, a Tim Duncan, a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, or a Michael Jordan. He’d never be able to put a supporting cast as bad as Cleveland’s on his back and get himself that all-important Ring!
So The King realized he had to make a “Decision!”
See, there was this other guy out there called “D-Wade.” D-Wade played on another NBA team that was a lot like Cleveland. It was called the Miami Heat. D-Wade was a pretty good player too. And, just like The King, D-Wade had earned no Ring and was going nowhere Playoff-wise with Miami. D-Wade wanted a Ring too.
See, in Miami the favorite urban sport is sniffing cocaine and despite all D-Wade’s flair, basketball there is basically a sideshow -- something played in a big local arena but viewed only by white-suited drug lords who showed up (infrequently at that!), usually around 30 minutes after tip-offs, and generally only to admire one another’s suits and cut illegal drug deals.
And there was still another guy with The King’s problem. This one was a funny-looking guy, who was going nowhere with a team called the Toronto Raptors. His name was Chris “CB4” Bosh. Bosh was supposed to be a pretty good basketball player too, but his team, the Raptors, basically stunk. CB4 was unhappy in Toronto. He’d recently had his nose broken, was malingering a lot on the bench, and the fan base were growing impatient with him and calling him “soft.” Chris didn’t like the weather in snowy Canada either. And his prospects of getting a Ring in Toronto were almost as dim as that city’s wintry skies. But, like The King, Chris was a “free agent” too!
Now, thought The King, wouldn’t it be neat if he and D-Wade and CB4 all got together someplace – say Miami – and made all nice and played their basketball together. Why then they’d have a “Great Team!” Then the three of them could “help” each other and get lotsa Rings!
There were other factors to consider too, of course. Like “happiness.” Was LeBron really “happy” in Cleveland – a city that Akronites like him always inwardly despised and where one of his teammates, Delonte West, was rumored to then be having an affair with LeBron’s mom (the esteemed Queen Mother)?
“Happiness,” after all, is important. A King needs to be happy! And Cleveland was just Cleveland. The King, despite the worshipful adulation of the city’s fans, really didn’t owe Cleveland or its fans anything. Kings never owe their realms anything. Kings owe nothing to anyone but themselves. That's just the way royalty works.
So all these factors began to percolate like festering farts in The King’s royal brain. The King pondered these factors. He “thought” about them. He consulted with The Queen Mother. He consulted with his public relations man, PhD Ape. He started consulting secretly with Pat Riley, the Miami Heat’s General Manager.
Rumors that The King was doing all this “thinking” and “consulting” got out to the newsies too. ESPN started talking about it. Pundits started talking about it. Cleveland started talking about it. Everybody started talking about it.
And the talking started using big, university-type words that The King, who never attended college, had never even heard before. Words like “synergy” and “osmosis” and “Triple Entente.” And all the talking and big words boiled down to the possibility that The King, D-Wade, and CB4 –might all just take a slight pay cut and use the thing called “free agency” to get together someplace -- someplace nicer than Cleveland and Toronto. Someplace like maybe New York or, even better, a nice warm place like Miami. That way, y’see, The King could get his “help” and, together with D-Wade and CB4, The King could win lotsa Rings and then he could be "happy!"
Of course, before making such a move, LeBron had to really think about it. A royal “Decision” always requires beaucoup royal thinking. It also requires somewhere appropriate to announce “The Decision” once it is made – a grand and noble venue, like in an hour-long nationally televised program. So LeBron set one up!.
But there was drama too! Ah, there was so much to consider: There were all those prior pronouncements and promises that The King had made to Cleveland’s management and its fan base. Stuff like:
"I got a goal, and it's a huge goal, and that's to bring an NBA championship here to Cleveland. And I won't stop until I get it."
Many philologists, grammarians, and other learned people that are tasked with interpreting the meaning of words had parsed prior statements like this from The King and concluded that they meant something. Many thought that these royal words meant that, despite The King’s “free agency,” His Noble Highness had actually promised to remain with his subjects in his royal Cleveland domain and labor on longer, at least for as long as it would take to bring Cleveland an NBA championship.
But The King knew his earlier royal pronouncements and promises to Cleveland were just one factor to consider. There were yet other more important ones. There was The King’s long-simmering, Akronite hatred of sophisticated, snobby Cleveland and its citizenry to remember. Such early slights still rankled The Anointed One The King had a great memory and he just couldn’t forget them.
And there were those nagging personal issues too. As mentioned, one of The King’s nobles, a Cleveland player named DeLonte West, and The King’s royal mom, The Queen Mother, had been getting it on. This bothered The King’s concentration and had caused a worsening in The Royal Shot, particularly in 4th Quarters. That, in turn, translated to even more lost Playoff games for The King. And, of course, there were also those elusive butterflies of an NBA Ring and The King’s general “Happiness” to consider too.
Anyway, when all was said and done, The King had to make up his mind!
So “The Decision” was made. And The King announced it. And guess what? Cleveland lost.
As The King put it:
“In this fall… this is very tough… in this fall I'm going to take my talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat.”
The King wasn’t really too worried about local Cleveland fan reaction to The Decision. He knew that his loving Cleveland-based subjects would sympathize and understand "The Decision." Their King, after all, had a need for True Happiness. Sure, The King’s royal coffers contained millions and his subjects adored him. But money and fan adoration aren't everything a King needs. A King needs Rings!
Yes, the King needed more! The King had an immediate and burning desire to start acquiring the many, many NBA championship Rings true Kings acquire! And getting "happy" and getting Rings was just not possible in Cleveland. True fans of The King would know this. True fans of His Highness would empathize. True fans of The King would simply say “Bon Voyage, O Mighty Anointed One!” and wish their beloved King their very best as he went elsewhere to quest for lotsa Rings!.
And, when all was said and done, it wouldn’t really be “goodbye” to Cleveland. LeBron’s departure would really be more like an “Auf Wiedersehen!” See, as The King pointed out, his subjects could always watch His Royal Progress on their little TVs and, what's more, The King would continue to keep one of his royal palaces in Akron, just 40 miles away, so his subjects would know he always sort of remained close by. So it wouldn’t be like The King would be totally gone. All would not be lost! Clevelanders could still worship their beloved ruler whenever he happened to be visiting his Akron palace! The King put the prospects of future contacts with his Cleveland fan subjects better than I do here:
“You know, [the Cavs’ fans] can have mixed emotions, of course, but it's going to be a lot of emotions not understanding why. And then you're going to have the real friends who love me for who I am. For me being from Akron, Ohio, and loving Akron, Ohio, it's always home for me. I'm still going to live there, always be home. And Akron, Ohio is always home for me and that area.”
And as The King predicted, his true fans (the ones with his best interests at heart!) took his departure well:
http://tinyurl.com/292zf59
http://tinyurl.com/ny8ydzx
http://tinyurl.com/jwv2uc2
http://tinyurl.com/klj9jeq
http://tinyurl.com/l3c2r4r
http://tinyurl.com/m98tkcs
The Cavs’ management understood too, and despite his abdication, bade their departing King lachrymose best wishes and gave him a profound and heartfelt adieu.
http://tinyurl.com/24f3uw6
Well, you all know the rest of the story. The King DID take his act to Miami where he honed his skills and after an initial bump in the road (A Finals loss to Lord Dirk of Nowitzki), eventually flopped his way to an NBA championship in 2012.
Yes, The King now has a Ring! And Miami suddenly had a “Great Team!
And you know what? The King is still The King, only in South Beach and not Cleveland. And The King’s royal story has a happy ending!
The End!
Postscript: Strangely, there are some in Cleveland that are pulling for the Pacers tonight. I wonder why?
GO PACERS! GO AREA 55!
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