LeBron, Dime #31

While Team USA goes for the gold in the Beijing Olympics, we’re digging into the Dime archives for a closer look at the players who will make it happen. For the duration of the Games, we’ll be re-running some of our best Dime Magazine feature stories on DimeMag.com. First up: LeBron James.

Reprinted from Dime #31, February 2007

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LeBron James‘ life is dictated by seconds. Almost everything he does comes down to ticks of a clock. How much time left in the possession? How long will the press conference be? How long will he be on-set? How long will the photo shoot last? Night and day, the ticking never stops; the finite seconds of his every day are divvied up between his primary job and everything else that goes along with being one of the world’s most ubiquitous sports stars.

His off-court commitments are more than that of any other NBA player and of much greater gravity than almost all but a few professional athletes in the world. Nike, Coca-Cola, Powerade, Bubbalicious, Upper Deck, and the most recent addition, Microsoft, are all in the business of LeBron and they’re all vying for the available seconds of his time not spent on a basketball court or in front of a camera.

LeBron is more than willing to fulfill his obligations, commitments and dates with all of his partnerships (he and his crew are mindful to refer to his sponsors as “partners,” to make sure it’s clear that it’s a collaboration and that he’s not there just to collect a check). He knows they’re all going to help him with the date that matters most to him — 08/08/08.

“That’s a very important date for me. Do you know what that is?” LeBron asks me after our photo shoot in a studio room in the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. “It’s the start of the Beijing Olympics.”

It’s that date, the opening ceremonies, that LeBron and his partners at his marketing company, LRMR Marketing, have identified as the deadline they have set for themselves to turn LeBron James into a true international icon. The plan is to make LeBron a global brand through a two-pronged attack of forming several partnerships with global Fortune 500 companies and grassroots community efforts on the ground in China (where LeBron has already built basketball courts in Beijing and Guangzhou).

“I want to expand. I don’t want to be known just in the U.S. That’s not enough for me,” LeBron explains. “I’m very focused on globalizing the LeBron James brand.”

“We’re working with all of our partners to have as much of an international presence as possible by that date,” says Maverick Carter, LRMR’s 24-year-old CEO and childhood friend of James. “The plan is to keep building LeBron’s brand, to stay authentic, to keep true to him and his personality and only work with companies that can identify with LeBron, so that he can keep reaching more and more people worldwide.”

It’s Maverick who is spearheading this global push, overseeing all of LeBron’s day-to-day operations and marketing efforts. There was plenty of criticism to go around from writers and talking heads nationwide when James announced in May of 2005 that he was leaving his representation, Aaron and Eric Goodwin, in order to hand over all of the deal-making responsibilities to Carter and two other childhood friends, Rich Paul and Randy Mihms [Editor's note: LRMR stands for "LeBron, Rich, Maverick and Randy"]. LeBron was skewered in the media for leaving the Goodwins after they had brokered an estimated $120 million in endorsement deals for James — leaving them so that he could place his future in the hands of a group of guys mocked in many media outlets as being nothing more than the NBA version of HBO’s “Entourage.”

But while everyone was waiting for Mav and the rest of ‘Bron’s group to screw up, Team LeBron has been the model of patience. Since the Goodwin break was first made almost two years ago, December’s announcement of the deal with Microsoft to promote their new Vista Windows operating system was the first major partnership brokered by Maverick and LRMR.

“Things moving toward 08/08/08 are fantastic,” Carter says. “We’ll be announcing two or three more global partnerships in the very near future and we have the new Vista ad campaign in place that will be featured in 30 countries, including China. We’re well on our way.”

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photo. Jonathan Mannion

I can remember the first time I met LeBron James. It was in the summer of 2000 at an AAU tournament in Oakland. LeBron was heading into his sophomore year of high school at St. Vincent-St. Mary’s in Akron, Ohio. He was coming off a freshman season where he led his Fighting Irish to a perfect 27-0 record and a state championship. At this tournament, I watched him play all five spots on the floor and lead his team to the tournament championship. In the final game, the young LeBron played the point against an older, future All-American in T.J. Ford, and LeBron absolutely destroyed him. “There have been some great players out of Akron who people don’t know about,” LeBron told me after the championship game. “My generation of 2003, we’re trying to make a statement, trying to put our city on the map. By the time I graduate, our players will get a lot more respect.”

As it turned out, LeBron ended up doing much more than simply garner respect for his city or his class. He pioneered the paradigm of the business-conscious young NBA player. Whereas players who set the standard before him, like Michael Jordan, grew into their savvy business personas, James has been on it since before he ever sniffed an NBA court. A reported $120 million in marketing deals were wrapped up before LeBron played his first game with the Cavs. To quote Jalen Rose in his tribute to the Fab 5 in this issue: “You know when you’re LeBron James coming out in the 2000s, you already know how corporate America works. You want to own your own web site name, you want to copyright this and copyright that … We were just basketball players, you know? Instead of worrying about owning URLs, we were like, ‘What time is practice, Coach? What time is the game?’”

The undertaking that has gone into making the LeBron business run smoothly from Day One is massive; arguably more so than anything ever structured around Michael Jordan in his heyday. For example, just to handle the constant inundation of media requests, there are weekly conference calls for the three main entities needed to handle James’ PR efforts — the Cavs, Nike and his publicist, Keith Estabrook of The Estabrook Group in Manhattan.

“We were doing these calls for a few months before we realized that we needed something more,” says Rodney Knox, Nike’s director of communications for basketball. “Out of necessity, we had to make them formal Monday conference calls. Minutes are kept of our calls and then are distributed to those people outside the calls that need to be kept in the loop.

“Between the three of us, it’s crucial that we’re all on the same calendar. We go through everything that we believe is a viable request and then we make recommendations to Maverick and LeBron. And the ultimate say is definitely LeBron’s. He’s the engine and the pilot of this whole thing. And just think, this is solely for PR. We’re not even talking about his marketing. That’s a whole different story.”

A similar system is in place for the other divisions of LeBron James’ empire. To quote someone familiar with LeBron’s inner circle who declined to identified for this story, “It’s a machine — there’s a financial arm, a legal arm, a PR arm, a marketing arm…” Another source, who also declined to be quoted, consistently referred to the whole thing as a “well-oiled machine.”

“I would describe the whole system as having myself as the centerpiece, and then the branches off it that keep it moving every day,” LeBron says. “You have to have people around you that you can trust. You have to have people around you that know what they’re doing at their jobs. You have to have guys who you trust to handle it because I can’t have my hands and ears on it at all times. It’s great that I have people at Nike, I have people at Coca-Cola, and I have people at my two companies — King James [which runs LeBron's official web site] and LRMR — that I can trust to make the right decisions for me if I’m not there to make them.”

“I think history will show him as a great player, but it will also show him as the first person who understands his role as he’s doing it,” Nike’s Knox says. “He’s the first real superstar of the Internet generation. He understands that fully and doesn’t shy away from it and wants to be a part of it at the forefront.”

“LB is a rare case, man,” Kevin Garnett says. “He came in taking full advantage of the opportunity, and you never see his name in any B.S. or any shit, so he keeps his nose clean. You gotta have good armor, good surrounding, a solid foundation. Everything he’s earned. He hasn’t had anything given to him. I mean, hype is hype, but he’s made the so-called hype into a reality. He’s humble, that’s what I most appreciate about the young kid — he respects people that came before him. He’s created his own legacy, and in this age, that’s refreshing to see. He’s one of the rare people I enjoy watching on TV.”

“It’s true that in a way he’s the first of his kind,” Carter says. “You can’t really base his business model on other successful models like Tiger, Michael, Oprah or Jay-Z, just like you can’t compare those people to each other, really. LeBron’s brand is based on who he is — what he wears, what he says, how he says it. It’s not really my job to ‘market’ him. LeBron being just being himself will be enough.

“He has obvious authenticity. He’s likable. He has a great smile. His sport is growing so fast worldwide. The only thing that I can possibly foresee as being a potential obstacle to the ultimate goal would be his team not winning championships.”

Obviously, no matter how dominant LeBron is on the court (or in the marketplace), winning a chip is easier said than done. His current Cavs squad, as of press time, does not seem any closer to making a serious run at an NBA title than it did a year ago when they were eliminated in seven games by the Detroit Pistons in the second round of the playoffs. He almost vaulted his team past the Pistons all by himself, with averages of close to 27 points, seven assists and nine rebounds per game in the series. And while it’s conceivable that LeBron could mount that kind of a one-man run again this year (his current averages of 27, six dimes and almost seven boards a night are all close to his career numbers), the Cavs are rarely, if ever, discussed as a legitimate contender. In fact, measured against previous years, the all-out media hype on the LeBron front has been comparatively quiet, despite the fact that the Cavs are several games above .500 and neck-and-neck with Detroit for first place in the Central Division. An easy answer is that there have been other story lines snatching the headlines, such as the blockbuster Allen Iverson trade or the December Knicks/Nuggets brawl .

LeBron, though, has a different theory. “I don’t think people look for me to make as many mistakes or fail like they used to early in my career,” he says. “I think early on they were looking to see if I was going to live up to the hype. Now that I’ve exceeded everybody’s expectations, they don’t know what to write, they don’t know how to turn it into more hoopla. I’ve just quieted noise by playing well.”

Will the hype ratchet back up to “LeBron-levels” as the playoffs draw closer?

“Definitely.”

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photo. Jonathan Mannion

It’s funny, in a way, that LeBron and Maverick are so focused on making LeBron a global brand. You can argue that he’s already there. His jersey, consistently a top-10 seller since he came into the League more than three years ago, according to the NBA, is currently third overall in sales behind only Kobe Bryant and Dwyane Wade. In late December, Bloomberg Television reported that Nike’s profit had jumped eight percent in the last quarter, specifically citing strong sales of James’ $150 signature shoe, the LeBron IV, as a major reason for the increase.

When we started this magazine five years ago and we’d ask a high school player what NBA player he thought he played like, the first answer was seemingly always “T-Mac.” It was a marked transition from the norm of every player identifying with MJ in the years prior. These days, though, we’re consistently getting a new name.

For example, when we asked Lincoln High School (Brooklyn, N.Y.) sophomore sensation Lance Stephenson what NBA player he’d compare himself to, he told us: “Everybody says I play like T-Mac, but I wanna play like LeBron. He uses his strength out there, and I like playing in the post. I’d rather play like LeBron.”

Beyond our shores, basketball has never had more international appeal than it does right now; it’s the fastest-growing team sport in the world. In the relatively short time since Michael Jordan retired, pathways to new, burgeoning markets (China being the prime example) that were never really options for NBA players in the past have opened up. And rumors abound in the industry that LeBron’s Nike line — which already sells well overseas — will separate and become it’s own entity in the marketplace in the very near future. The door is wide open for the LeBron James brand to step right in and dominate the market with sneakers and soda and everything in between.

If and when everything falls into place for LeBron, his level of celebrity could be like nothing any American athlete has ever enjoyed. He’s already at the point where he’s arguably one of three athletes in the U.S. who can’t leave his house without causing some sort of riot — the other two being Tiger Woods and MJ.

“I don’t let it stop me,” LeBron says. “I love going to the movies. I don’t need to go to the mall. It’s not really a hassle to me. I’m young, man. I’m trying to enjoy life.”

“You can’t shy away from the public — you gotta live your life, you gotta enjoy it,” Tracy McGrady told us when we asked him about LeBron’s celebrity status. “One thing you don’t wanna do is shy away from the public and have them take away your fun, take away what you wanna do.”

“That’s just part of the business of basketball,” says Ray Allen. “We all have stuff, meetings to go to and people to deal with. But you choose to have your off-court stuff; you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.

“What he’s doing helps players,” Ray continues. “Everyone in the League makes money off him, like with Michael Jordan. He grows the pot for all of us.”

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Eight is a lucky number in Chinese culture; it is thought to bring wealth and prosperity. It’s the main reason why the opening ceremonies don’t just start on the 8th of August; they’re set to kick off at exactly 8:08:08 p.m. And LeBron James will be there, his seconds until 08/08/08 finally having ticked away to zero. You can be sure that he’ll be ready. Rumor has it that he’s been taking lessons and can already speak a little Mandarin.

If things keep going they way they have been and the partnerships keep forming, the Beijing Olympics will be more of a coronation than anything else.