LeBron James, Dime #43

While Team USA goes for the gold at the Beijing Olympics, we’ve been digging into the Dime archives for a closer look at the players who will make it happen. For the duration of the Games, we’ve re-run some of our best Dime Magazine feature stories on DimeMag.com.

But today we’re rolling out the first of some brand-new content: excerpts from Dime #43, our Olympic Issue, which is on sale now in stores and on newsstands nationwide.

Reprinted from Dime #43, August 2008

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I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting from LeBron James, but certainly not this.

It’s June 30, midday, and LeBron has already been up since 6 a.m. The U.S. national basketball team arrived in New York City on a flight from Las Vegas at the time of night when nothing’s open but legs and liquor stores, and after maybe two hours of sleep, everyone got an early wakeup call for the beginning of a hectic schedule of talk-show tapings and other media responsibilities. At the Rockefeller Plaza ice rink in the middle of Manhattan — which has been converted into a red, white and blue basketball court for the day — the team just arrived for a meet-and-greet with a few hundred kids, where they’ll be presented with their new Team USA uniforms.

As the MC introduces the players one-by-one, me and my so-far limited time spent around LeBron is expecting the standard tired/grumpy athlete entrance: quick wave of acknowledgment to the fans, lazy stroll to where he needs to be for the photo op, then mentally checking out until he’s pointed toward the next stop. But what I get — to the soundtrack of little-girl squeals and little boys trying not to squeal for arguably the game’s most popular man — is an energetic LeBron virtually bursting into view, throwing up the Roc symbol (of course) and skipping over to his young admirers, letting himself drown in the wave of adoration, soaking up the scene with a huge smile on his face. Not even Dwight Howard, the baby of Team USA, can match LeBron’s exuberance right now.

In this business, where every good story you hear about a superstar is tempered by one or two bad ones, I was expecting Surly LeBron. Instead, I got Super-Nice LeBron. And once again, as he’s been doing ever since he entered the public scope as a 16-year-old, LeBron James has exceeded expectations.

“LeBron might look like the granddad of the team, but he’s still one of the youngest,” jokes Dwyane Wade. “He’s the biggest character on the team, no question about it.”

On a global scale, perhaps no sports personality will be on display more than LeBron, 23, will be this summer. With the Beijing Olympics doubling as miles of ad space and hours of promo time for Nike, the company’s most visible athlete will be everywhere. These Olympics will be his for the taking.

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Every step of the way — from the moment the 2004 U.S. Olympic team ended up with bronze medals in Athens and USA Basketball looked forward to rebuilding for 2008 — LeBron’s spot on the national roster has been a no-brainer.

The ironic part is that — every step of the way — LeBron has embodied a lot of what critics say has gone wrong with Team USA. He isn’t a great outside shooter. He’s not known as a great defender. He thrives in one-on-one situations where he can bully or shake his way into the lane. He relies (some say too much) on his natural talent and physical gifts. Plus he’s a must-have product endorser, whose name alone gives the U.S. squad an unparalleled star power.

Still, there’s no way a team that is supposed to represent the best of American basketball can rightfully exist without LeBron. If he isn’t already the best player on the planet, he’s no lower than third on the list. This past season he led the NBA in scoring at 30.0 points per game — not even his career high in that department — adding 7.9 rebounds, 7.2 assists and 1.8 steals to the mix. For most of the season LeBron threatened to become the third player in NBA history to post 30-8-8 averages in a single season after Oscar Robertson (who did it four times) and Michael Jordan. Instead, LeBron had to settle for being the third player to go for 30-7-7, behind MJ and Oscar (who did that five times).

“I’ve been amazed at his quarterbacking skills,” says Team USA assistant and New York Knicks head coach Mike D’Antoni. “Offense or defense, LeBron is always quarterbacking. I think people don’t realize that he has a point guard’s mentality. He really sees the whole floor.”

photo. Nike

In the postseason, LeBron quarterbacked a(nother) seriously flawed Cleveland Cavaliers team to within one game of the Eastern Conference Finals, putting up 28-7-7 digits in the playoffs, including a memorable 45-point effort in Cleveland’s season-ending Game Seven loss in Boston. While the mainstream media overly focused on the silly LeBron/DeShawn Stevenson/Jay-Z/Soulja Boy quasi-beef, No. 23 was dispatching of a Wizards team whose Jordan Rules 2K8 tactics proved futile in roughing up Cleveland’s superstar. (LeBron’s response after Game One: “I’m built for this. I’m not 6-9, 260 pounds just to be shooting jumpers all night.”) In the next round he almost single-handedly toppled the eventual champion Celtics despite shooting 25 percent from the field in the series’ first four games. His dunk over Kevin Garnett, the dagger in the Cavs’ Game Four win, was one of the plays of the season and the latest in a string of LeBron moments that live in online immortality.

As is always the case with LeBron, his off-the-court story is just as important to his overall story as what he does between the lines. Partially because we’ve watched him grow up, partially because he’s just that big of a celebrity, his moves away from basketball garner the same attention as what he does within the sport.

This past year has seen LeBron make the cover of Fortune magazine (subhead: “The building of the billion-dollar athlete”), the cover of TIME, and become the first Black man to ever make the cover of Vogue, sparking a mild controversy in the process over his cover shot with supermodel Gisele Bundchen. He hosted the ESPY Awards and “Saturday Night Live.” Fortune put LeBron’s estimated endorsement earnings—from Nike, Sprite, Powerade, Upper Deck and others—at $25 million in 2007.

And maybe the dominant LeBron James storyline of 2007-08, and one that will only grow over the next two years, is that of his possible free agency in 2010. At press time, in the early stages of the ’08 free-agent signing period, teams like the New York Knicks and New Jersey Nets (Brooklyn Nets by 2010) were feverishly trying to cut all salary ties to the 2010-11 season, aiming to clear as much space as possible to have a chance to sign LeBron to what will undoubtedly be the biggest player contract in NBA history, if not pro sports history.

For now, though, LeBron swears his focus is only on basketball and only on Team USA. For the fourth of his five NBA summers, he is extending his season longer than usual to play in international competition. After playing 95 games this past season, including pre- and postseason, he’ll keep it going at the world’s most famous basketball tournament. On a platform that numerous NBA stars have avoided over the years in order to preserve their bodies for their high-paying day jobs, LeBron is all about doing some volunteer work.

Tim Grover, basketball’s preeminent personal trainer whose star client was Michael Jordan, observed LeBron during the early parts of the summer while he was working with Dwyane Wade at the A.T.T.A.C.K. Athletics gym in Chicago.

“He looked like LeBron. He’s always ready,” Grover said. “LeBron is at the level where he’s at because of the commitment and sacrifices he makes—that’s what all superstars do. You could tell it was not his first time on the basketball court (in the offseason).”

On a U.S. squad that doesn’t have a lot of true big men, LeBron will probably end up logging some minutes at power forward, giving Team USA a threat who can play four positions on the court and who has a physical advantage over any single opponent in the Olympic field. The last time he played on this kind of stage, LeBron was capping the 2007 FIBA Americas tournament by giving Argentina 31 points and eight three-pointers in the gold-medal game, and earlier in the tournament went 11-for-11 from the field against Uruguay, scoring 26 points in only 14 minutes on a variety of inside and outside shots. When he wants to be, LeBron has proven to be unstoppable in the international game.

“It’s a crazy mismatch if you put him at the four,” says U.S. teammate Carlos Boozer. “Him being so versatile gives us a plethora of lineups to throw at teams.”

In the weeks leading up to the Olympics, LeBron talked about the road he’s taken to get to this point, both on and off the court …

** To read the rest of this story, pick up Dime #43 in stores and on newsstands now.**